Some of the most interesting segments on The Daily Show are those involving authors and books that I had never heard of before. In this segment, Jon Stewart interviews Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, author of A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons. A review of the book can be read here.

The main thesis of Steven Pinker's latest book is that violence has declined dramatically over time and that we are now living in the most peaceful time in history, and to suggest reasons for this. The decline has not been uniformly steady but has a saw-tooth pattern of periodic upticks of violence followed by steeper drops leading to an overall decline over time. This is not a proposition that is obvious since many people despair of the state of the world now with wars between nations, civil wars, genocides, and the brutal suppression of dissent seemingly taking place all over the globe. It is in order to counter this perception that Pinker has to write such a long book (running to nearly 700 pages even without the endnotes and citations), amassing the data and evidence and arguments necessary whenever one is making a counter-intuitive case. So the book is heavy with numbers and graphs that could easily become tedious except that Pinker has a deft writing style that lifts the reader whenever the going gets tough. The book has sparked considerable interest and on his website Pinker has responded to some of the reactions and criticisms. Pinker looks at all manner of violence from all kinds of conflicts, from wars, homicides, slavery, genocides, rapes, rebellions, and others as a percentage of the population at the time they occurred. In other words, he is using as his measure of violence not the actual number of casualties but the probability that an individual living at that particular time was likely to suffer violence and death at the hands of another. Of the many charts, graphs, and tables in the book, the centerpiece is undoubtedly the table on page 195 that ranks the twenty one worst conflicts in history in terms of the absolute number of deaths and also in terms of its population-adjusted rank. While World War II had a death toll of 55 million that is the largest ever for a single identifiable conflict, when calculated as a fraction of the global population, it barely makes it into the list of the top ten worst conflicts of all time, being just number 9. The eight that rank above it involve some events that most people likely have never heard of, at least in the west. The An Lushan revolt and civil war that took place in China in the 8th century is the worst. The deaths caused by the Middle East and Atlantic slave trades are at #3 and #8 respectively while the annihilation of Native Americans is #7. World War I with its 15 million dead comes in at #16. The reason for this distorted perception is that people tend to magnify events that they or their immediate ancestors have personal experience with, and discount others. So for us, relatively recent conflicts such as World War II, Vietnam, Iraq, the Rwandan genocide, the Stalin purges, etc. seem to dominate history when, when looked at in terms of the number of deaths as a ratio of population, some of them don't even register as significant sources of casualties. People point to the two World Wars of the twentieth century with their terrible loss of life and ask how it can be that the twentieth century is not the worst century in history for violence. Pinker points out that although World Wars I and II were bad, they both occurred in the first half of the century and that the second half had no major conflicts, so the century average was lowered. In seeking explanations for the decline in violence, Pinker, echoing Peter Singer in his classic work The Expanding Circle, invokes various revolutions that have led to an expansion in our circle of sympathy, so that we now view more categories of people to be like us instead of as the 'other', and now view as deplorable acts done to them that might have been acceptable in the past. The Age of Reason in the 17th century, followed by the Enlightenment towards the end of the 18th, leading to a humanitarian revolution in the 19th, followed by the various rights revolutions of the 20th century (civil, women's, children's, gay, animal) all led to a rise in the value attached to life and steps being taken to curb violence towards those formerly marginalized groups. While the improvement has been uneven, the overall trend is clear. These measures, combined with the increased state monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the increase in commerce between nations, greater cosmopolitanism, the rise in the status and role of women, and the increased application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs have been major factors in the reduction in the use of violence to resolve conflicts. So why is it that so many still persist in thinking that things are really bad now and yearn for the 'good old days'? The decline in violence can have the perverse effect of making things seem to be bad now when in fact they have objectively got better. For example, we are now rightly outraged about the harsher prison sentences that African Americans get when compared with white people who commit the same crimes. And while this injustice needs to be corrected, we should not overlook the fact that not so long ago African Americans would have experienced summary and often lethal 'justice' at the hands of a mob for the most trivial of offenses and few would have spoken out in protest. So we have come a long way even as we have yet some ways to go. While Pinker's analysis of the data showing a decline in violence and his arguments as to the reasons are persuasive, the book's main weakness weakness lies in his political analysis. The Canadian-born writer, who is a professor of psychology at Harvard, tends to view politics through a western prism and accepts much of conventional wisdom about political developments. While he does not spare the US and colonial powers for their historical contribution to violence, when he reaches for graphic recent examples to illustrate his points, he tends to pick on Nazis and Communism and other convetional villains and overlook similar examples that are closer to home. For example, when looking at the role of ideology in making leaders pursue policies that result in the deaths of thousands of people, his examples are of Stalin and Mao. But he could well ask the same question of president Truman and his decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Lyndon Johnson's decision to carpet bomb Vietnam with conventional and chemical weapons that resulted in massive deaths and destruction and long—term harm to subsequent generations. As another example, when trying to understand what might make a soldier gun down a group of defenseless innocent people, his example is of a Nazi soldier massacring a group of Jews during the Holocaust. He does not mention My Lai, though that would also be apropos and is more recent. It is easy for those who care about the state of the world and what we are bequeathing to future generations to succumb to a sense of despair and think that violence and cruelty are indelible features of our existence that have always existed and will always exist and may be getting even worse as our capacity to harm others increases with the development of more sophisticated weaponry. What this book argues is that while serious problems and conflicts still exist and we are by no means living in a utopia, such deep pessimism is unwarranted. Things are better now than they have ever been and can be yet better in the future as long as we continue to expand the circle of concern to include more and more people within its ambit. Pinker is careful not to make predictions for the future since who knows what might happen but argues the future can be bright. This book's main virtue is that it provides hope that is not based on wishful thinking but on data. In a TED talk on this topic, delivered in 2007, Pinker outlines the main theses that were later developed in the book. Although long, this is a book that is definitely worth reading and having on your shelf because of the wealth of data that it gathers together between its covers. It is an encyclopedia of the history of violence and thus, at the very least, will be a useful reference work.

This is an infuriating book. There were many times during last weekend when I was reading it that I wanted to hurl it against the wall though I am not by nature prone to such dramatic displays of emotion. The reason is not the usual one, which is that one hates the book. It is because the story that Greenwald tells, in his typically direct and lawyerly style, about how the US has steadily deteriorated to become a nation to which the labels 'oligarchy', 'plutocracy', and 'banana republic' have become so apropos, was so infuriating. I am old enough and follow politics closely enough that almost all of the individual cases that Greenwald talks about are familiar to me, at least in general terms. But to see it all carefully laid out end to end, to see the steady and deliberate and knowing erosion of the rule of law, to see the corruption and hypocrisy that is at the core of the government-business-media oligarchy that runs the US, to see the cheerleading for this process by the establishment media all the while relentlessly preening themselves on being watchdogs, is to realize how terrible is the current state of affairs. The subtitle of the book How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful pretty much says it all. He points out that equality before the law is one of the bedrock principles upon which the US was built, and indeed is seen as the basis for any just society, but that ideal has been dramatically undermined in the last four decades. This does not mean that there is, or has ever been, perfect equality in the past. As he writes:

Wealth and power have always conferred substantial advantages, and it is thus unsurprising that throughout history the rich and well-connected have enjoyed superior treatment under the law. In the past, those advantages were broadly seen as failures of justice and ruefully acknowledged as shortcomings of the legal system. Today, however, in a radical and momentous shift, the American political class and its media increasingly repudiate the principle that the law must be equally applied to all. To hear our politicians and our press tell it, the conclusion is inescapable: we're far better off when political and financial elites-and they alone-are shielded from criminal accountability. It has become a virtual consensus among the elites that their members are so indispensable to the running of American society that vesting them with immunity from prosecution-even for the most egregious crimes-is not only in their interest but in our interest, too. Prosecutions, courtrooms, and prisons, it's hinted-and sometimes even explicitly stated-are for the rabble, like the street-side drug peddlers we occasionally glimpse from our car windows, not for the political and financial leaders who manage our nation and fuel our prosperity. (p. 15)

He starts his story with the pardoning of Richard Nixon in 1974, where the novel idea was put forward that 'for the good of the country' the president should not be subjected to prosecution for his crimes and that 'he had suffered enough' merely because he had to resign and had his reputation damaged. At that time, some of Nixon's close aides were prosecuted and in fact served jail time. But the circle of immunity was expanded during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration when even other officials who committed crimes were pardoned. The pattern of each president not prosecuting the crimes of its predecessor has accelerated right through to Obama and for good reason: that tacit expectation of immunity from their successor gives each president license to break the law as and when they see fit. The next major erosion of the rule of law occurred in the past decade with the expansion of immunity to the private sector, by the granting of retroactive immunity from prosecution to the giant telecommunications companies for their collusion with the government in the illegal wiretapping of Americans. We recently saw elite immunity under the Obama administration on full display as his administration has engaged in a systematic avoidance of prosecutions in the case of the financial crisis of 2008 and the foreclosure frauds of 2010 (still continuing) where, as Jeff Connaughton describes, not a single senior executive has gone to jail or even been criminally indicted, the only punishments consisting of the occasional levying of fines to companies (without even requiring an admission of wrongdoing) that are trivial to these giant institutions and can simply be written off as the cost of doing business. Greenwald says that the US has become the very sort of nation that its founders thought that they had escaped.

To be sure, this dynamic has prevailed in imperial capitals for centuries. And it is what explains much of official Washington. The crux of political power (the White House) is the royal court, the most powerful leader (the American president) is the monarch, and his highest and most trusted aides are the gatekeepers. Those who are graced with admission and access to the royal court-including "journalists"-are grateful to those who grant them that privilege. They are equally grateful to the political culture on which their special status, privileges, and wealth depend. Naturally, the journalists' impulse is to protect those who bestowed such favors on them and to promote the culture that sustains them, even as they sentimentally invoke their supposed role as watchdogs over the powerful-a role that they long ago ceased to perform. (p. 47)

Greenwald says that the revolving door between the government and elite sectors of the private economy ensures that there is continuity in the corruption.

It's vital to understand how this process truly works. People like [Director of National Intelligence] Mike McConnell don't really move from public office to the private sector and back again; that implies more separation than actually exists. Rather, the U.S. government and industry interests essentially form one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity-with a public division and a private one. When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it's more like an intracorporate reassignment than it is like changing employers. When McConnell serves as DNI he's simply in one division of this entity, and when he's at Booz Allen he is in another. It's precisely the same way that Goldman Sachs officials endlessly move in and out of the Treasury Department and other government positions with financial authority, or the way that health care and oil executives move in and out of government agencies charged with regulating those fields. (p. 75) … Just think about how this cycle works. People like Rubin, Summers, Patterson, and Gensler shuffle back and forth between the public and private sectors, taking turns as needed with their GOP counterparts. When in government, they ensure that laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall Street firms, abolishing most regulatory safeguards that keep those behemoths in check. When the electoral tide turns against them, they return to those very firms and collect millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented (or failed to implement) when they were in charge. Then, when their party returns to power, back they go into government, where they use their influence to ensure that the cycle keeps going. (p. 117-118)

The only people who are punished with jail are those who are stupid enough to swindle those of their same class or are more powerful than them (Rod Blagojevich, Bernie Madoff) or those celebrities who can be made an example of (Martha Stewart). It will be interesting to see what happens to Jon Corzine who has an impeccable elite pedigree (former Democratic US Senator and governor of New Jersey and, most importantly, former head of Goldman Sachs, the firm that pretty much controls US financial policy) for his role in the MF Global debacle. Will we be told that he has 'suffered enough' and should be free of prosecution or will he be made into a sacrificial lamb, in order to patch up the crumbling facade that no one is above the law? We have now reached the stage where a small but powerful elite class now feels immune from prosecution for crimes, while at the same time the screws are being increasingly tightened on everyone else with more and more punitive laws stringently applied to those who are not of the elite. It is no accident that increased elite immunity from crimes has run parallel to the rapid growth of incarceration of the powerless. The rest of us are increasingly enmeshed in so many laws that we are all likely felons whether we knowingly commit crimes or not, and thus in danger of a vindictive prosecution if we should step out of line. Prosecuting and jailing the people who merely protest or commit low-level crimes has been a boon for the private prison industry, which has been booming in these hard times.

As Kozinski and Tseytlin note, anyone who has ever misfiled their taxes (even inadvertently), or consumed any illegal drugs (including marijuana), or bet on a sporting event with a bookie, or lied to a government bureaucrat, or even just performed their job poorly (if it's an occupation regulated by the federal government) has committed a federal offense for which they could be sent to prison-and for which many of their fellow citizens are now actually imprisoned. Similarly, the criminologists Beckett and Sasson report that "in 2000, police arrested more than 2 million individuals for such 'consensual' or 'victimless' crimes as curfew violations, prostitution, gambling, drug possession, vagrancy, and public drunkenness. Fewer than one in five of all arrests in that year involved people accused of the more serious 'index' crimes" such as assault, larceny, rape, or homicide. It should hardly be controversial that a system of criminal law that theoretically renders a substantial portion-if not an outright majority-of the citizenry subject to long prison terms is both excessive and unjust. (p. 234-235)

Observe how zealously the government aids the music and film industry in the prosecution of 'internet piracy'. Note how the loaded word 'piracy' is freely used when dealing with the kinds of people who do this kind of thing on a retail basis while much more benign terms are used to describe the wholesale criminal actions of the elite. Where, in all this, are our erstwhile watchdogs of democracy, the media? They have long been coopted and are now the running dogs of the oligarchy, faithfully serving their interests in return for the scraps that fall their way. Their role is to provide distraction and entertainment, not news.

In this world, it is perfectly fine to say that a president is inept or even somewhat corrupt. A titillating, tawdry sex scandal, such as the Bill Clinton brouhaha, can be fun, even desirable as a way of keeping entertainment levels high. Such revelations are all just part of the political cycle. But to acknowledge that our highest political officials are felons (which is what people are, by definition, who break our laws) or war criminals (which is what people are, by definition, who violate the laws of war) is to threaten the system of power, and that is unthinkable. Above all else, media figures are desperate to maintain the current power structure, as it is their role within it that provides them with prominence, wealth, and self-esteem. Their prime mandate then becomes protecting and defending Washington, which means attacking anyone who would dare suggest that the government has been criminal at its core. The members of the political and media establishment do not join forces against the investigations and prosecutions because they believe that nothing bad was done. On the contrary, they resist accountability precisely because they know there was serious wrongdoing-and they know they bear part of the culpability for it. (p. 220-221)

Greenwald shows how people like Joe Klein of Time and Richard Cohen and David Broder of The Washington Post all excuse high-level criminality and vociferously denounce any efforts to apply the law to their friends in high places while simultaneously righteously demanding that justice be strictly applied to ordinary people for petty crimes. And these people are 'liberal' journalists, supposedly on the side of the downtrodden. Greenwald (correctly, in my opinion) focuses on the collusion of Democrats in this corruption, thus disabusing us of the notion that it is only the Republicans and conservatives who are the servants of the oligarchy. It is only when people realize that the rot is deep and bipartisan, that the labels that politicians and business leaders and mainstream media pin on each other are meaningless, that we can expect to see real pressure for reform. How is it that people allow such things to happen? The pattern is always the same:

Indeed, those who abuse state power virtually always follow the same playbook. By initially targeting new abuses at groups that are sufficiently demonized, they guarantee that few will object. But abuses of power rarely, if ever, remain confined to these demonized groups. Rather, degraded principles of justice, once embraced in limited circumstances, in time inevitably come to be applied more broadly. (p. 267)

This kind of oligarchic takeover of a country inevitably leads to greater and greater inequality and injustice and at some point even a passive population like that in the US will be stirred to anger and revolt. A hard reckoning awaits us. My one quibble with the book is that Greenwald does not provide sources and citations for his information, which is surprising since his blog posts conscientiously link to source material. Providing such citations is a tedious chore for an author but valuable to the reader and if the book goes through another edition I hope he adds them. This is a book that will make you angry and should make you angry. But it is also a book that must be read widely for the valuable information it provides. I urge you to buy it and read it and encourage others to do so.

The always readable Steven Pinker has a new book out titled THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined arguing that there has been a steady drop in violence over time. The equally readable Peter Singer has a very positive review of the book, of which the following is an excerpt.

Against the background of Europe's relatively peaceful period after 1815, the first half of the 20th century seems like a sharp drop into an unprecedented moral abyss. But in the 13th century, the brutal Mongol conquests caused the deaths of an estimated 40 million people — not so far from the 55 million who died in the Second World War — in a world with only one-seventh the population of the mid-20th century. The Mongols rounded up and massacred their victims in cold blood, just as the Nazis did, though they had only battle-axes instead of guns and gas chambers. A longer perspective enables us to see that the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, sadly, less novel than we thought. Since 1945, we have seen a new phenomenon known as the "long peace": for 66 years now, the great powers, and developed nations in general, have not fought wars against one another. More recently, since the end of the cold war, a broader "new peace" appears to have taken hold. It is not, of course, an absolute peace, but there has been a decline in all kinds of organized conflicts, including civil wars, genocides, repression and terrorism. Pinker admits that followers of our news media will have particular difficulty in believing this, but as always, he produces statistics to back up his assertions. The final trend Pinker discusses is the "rights revolution," the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this "the worst thing I have ever done." In 1975 it wasn't uncommon.)

A new book Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith explains the basis of religious belief and the mechanisms that go into creating religious belief structures. I have not read it yet but it looks interesting and I will get to it soon.

Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith -- Dr. Andy Thomson from Kurt Volkan on Vimeo.

(Via onegoodmove.)

Long time readers may recall that I really liked the 2006 film V for Vendetta (if you haven't seen it, you really should). V's inspiration is Edmond Dantes, the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo and he repeatedly watches the 1934 black and white film with Robert Donat in the title role. You can see that scene here and it made me want to read the book and see that film. I recently read the book since it was on the iPad that was loaned to me. The novel by Alexandre Dumas, creator of The Three Musketeers, is a classic adventure story centered on the themes of love and revenge. Set in France in the period just after Napoleon had been deposed from power for the first time and is plotting his comeback, Edmond Dantes is a worthy young sailor of humble origins whose merits are recognized by his employer and promoted to captain of his ship at a very early age. He is also betrothed to the beautiful but poor orphan Mercedes. On the eve of their wedding in his hometown of Marseilles, the apolitical Dantes is framed as being a Bonapartist conspirator by Mercedes' cousin Mondego, who is Dantes' rival for her affections, and Danglars, Dantes' second-in-command of the ship, who is jealous of his promotion over him. These two send an anonymous letter implicating Dantes to the ambitious local magistrate Villefort. The 'evidence' against Dantes also implicates Villefort's father so, in order to protect himself and further his own career, Villefort summarily consigns Dantes without even a trial to solitary confinement in the prison dungeon at the Chateau d'If. (When reading this I thought of places like Guantanamo and the treatment of Bradley Manning. It is depressing how little has changed.) The bewildered Dantes has no idea why he is being treated this way and becomes increasingly despondent and bitter as the days in his damp and dark dungeon stretch into months and years. After eight years he makes contact with Abbe Faria, a highly educated monk, who is in another dungeon cell and whose attempts to tunnel out take him by mistake to Dantes's cell. They become friends and for the next six years they try to tunnel out together while the Abbe tutors him so that he receives a much better education than what even a nobleman would receive. More crucially, the Abbe is able to figure out and tell the naïve Dantes who the people are who are responsible for his plight and their motives. But then the old Abbe dies but before he does so reveals to Dantes the location of a great fortune that has been hidden on the rocky island of Monte Cristo in the Mediterranean. Dantes uses the Abbe's death to carry out a daring escape and find the treasure and becomes an extraordinarily wealthy man. He creates a luxurious home on the island and acquires the title of the Count of Monte Cristo. In the intervening years all three of Dantes's enemies had prospered and moved to Paris. Mondego had married Mercedes and become a count, Danglars had become a wealthy banker, and Villefort had risen to the post of the king's attorney. All of them moved in the same high social circles. Dantes, as the Count of Monte Cristo, decides to use his newfound wealth and power to plot revenge on his enemies. He also moves to Paris and his great wealth and personal magnetism take the city's elites by storm. Physically changed by the harshness of his long captivity, this mysterious newcomer is not recognized by his enemies. Only Mercedes recognizes him but does not reveal her knowledge even to Dantes. The playing out of his plan constitutes the major part of the book. The book is a great read in the old-fashioned storytelling sense and is a page-turner. As soon as you encounter them, you know if a character is good or bad so one has no doubt about whom to root for. The plot is Dickensian in that it is full of surprises and consists of different story threads that intertwine. There are many improbable coincidences and characters who briefly appear early on suddenly reappear later, and relationships suddenly emerge between characters whom one thought were unrelated. Such a complicated plot has to necessarily be trimmed to become a film. A lot of characters and sub-plots and story threads are eliminated, several characters are combined into one, and some relationships are altered. There have been many film adaptations, two of them in English. The 1934 version, which I saw after reading the book, is praised as being the most faithful adaptation but even there they take what seem to me to be unnecessary liberties. I did not see, but did read the plot of, the 2002 remake and they seem to have changed the story even more. You can see the entire 1934 film on YouTube, part 1 of which is below. In making these adaptations, the film loses much of the richness and complexity of the book. What bothers me are those changes that are made not to simplify the complicated story (which I can sympathize with) but also to eliminate some of the darker elements of the book and to replace the book's bittersweet ending with a more formulaic one. Part of the book's message that is lost in the film version is that some injustices cannot be avenged, some things are irretrievably lost, some things cannot be made whole, and that Dantes's' single minded focus on revenge and his remorseless quest to destroy his enemies can result in incidental cruelty to others. I can't think of when I have seen a film adaption of a great book that was as good as the book. The closest that comes to mind is David Lean's 1946 version of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations with those two wonderful actors John Mills and Alec Guinness. Maybe I should just stop comparing them.

My book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has now been released in paperback.

The title of this book is taken from a quote by British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey at the dawn of the twentieth century who said that "The Arab question is a regular quicksand" and that, along with the subtitle America's pursuit of power in the Middle East, tells you pretty much what this new book is about. In its 610 pages, Wawro, a professor of military history at the University of North Texas, tries to provide a comprehensive overview of that region, with its complex interplay of tribal and religious conflicts, overlaid with superpower geopolitical meddling because of its oil and other strategic values. The period covered by the book starts at the end of World War I and the declaration by the then British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour that seemed to promise a "Jewish national home" in what was then Turkish Palestine. That set in motion a complex train of events involving many countries that Wawro tries to weave together into a comprehensive and yet coherent story. He goes into great detail on some aspects and necessarily glosses over others but in the process provides a useful single reference work for those trying to understand what is going on the region. The first half of the book takes us up to around 1970 and devotes entire chapters to the history of Egypt and Nasser, the Suez crisis, Iran, the creation of Israel, the emergence of oil as valuable energy source and a political weapon, and the Six Day war, leading up to the Nixon era and the 'Nixon Doctrine'. The second half takes us right up to the present and has chapters on the first Gulf war, the history of Iraq and the rise of Saddam Hussein as a US protégé and ally, the rise of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the second Gulf war against Iraq. Interweaving through all this is Israel's role in the region and its relationship to the US. The book is, frankly, depressing. One sees the same meddling being done over and over again by the great powers in the region, first Britain, then Russia, and finally the US; one sees feckless rulers of Arab countries imposing authoritarian rule and harsh conditions on their people even as they live in luxury. The worst hit are the Palestinian and Afghan people, whose conditions and prospects steadily worsen over time as they are used as pawns serving other people's agendas. A central feature of the book is the cynical and cruel policies of Israel as it constantly seeks to expand its territory by force and then drive out the indigenous Palestinian people using terror, oppression, and coercion, a process that continues to this day with its deliberate building of settlements in the occupied territories even as it keeps stalling on negotiations. From the time of President Truman onwards, Israel used its lobbying power in the US to get vast amounts of military and civilian aid and thwart any attempt at establishing a viable Palestinian state. The book documents the amazement of Israeli leaders at how easy it is to get US presidents and other US leaders to take actions that are in the interests of Israel and not that of the US. Even recently, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu was caught on tape saying with contempt how easy it is to manipulate US policy and that repression of Palestinians is a deliberate policy of Israel. Even he thinks that the kind of support Israel receives in the US is 'absurd'. Netanyahu is quoted as saying:

In the film, Mr Netanyahu says Israel must inflict "blows [on the Palestinians] that are so painful the price will be too heavy to be borne … A broad attack on the Palestinian Authority, to bring them to the point of being afraid that everything is collapsing". When asked if the US will object, he responds: "America is something that can be easily moved. Moved to the right direction … They won't get in our way … Eighty per cent of the Americans support us. It's absurd."

Just this week Netanyahu let the moratorium on settlement building in the occupied territories expire, a direct slap in the face of president Obama and Hillary Clinton who had asked for a continuation, and all they could say in response was to give a limp statement that they were 'disappointed'. Of course, the entire 'peace process' is a façade designed to stall for time while Israel continues to steadily annex Palestinian lands. The fact that Netanyahu's brazen contempt for the US government and its people made hardly a ripple in the news here is indicative of the protection Israel receives in the US because of the Israel lobby. For more details on who makes up the Israel lobby and how they operate, the book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt constitutes essential reading. I wrote a review of this book some time ago: part 1, part 2, and part 3. The long-standing and cynical exploitation of the Afghan people is another crime of colossal proportions. The US, smarting from its defeat in Vietnam in 1975, helped lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan in order to bog them down in their own unwinnable war in a country that is notorious for destroying its enemies and invaders by attrition. If any country deserves to be labeled as 'quicksand' it is Afghanistan. The USSR took the bait and in 1979, like the US in 2001, invaded the country and imposed a puppet government that in addition to serving the superpower's geostrategic goals, sought to at least partially modernize the country by reducing the influence of religion and introducing some reforms and advancing secular and modern ways of thinking such equal rights for women, more freedom of the press, etc. But the USSR soon became found itself waging a guerrilla war in which they were confronted by the nationalist mujahadeens and the Taliban, al Qaeda, other religious groups, and assorted warlords and murderous thugs, all of whom were heavily supported by the US who provided them with money and sophisticated weaponry and expertise. When the USSR realized that Afghanistan was a hopeless cause and they had to leave, it tried to warn the US that it had created a monster in that country that would later turn against its patrons. Wawro writes that Gorbachev offered to make a deal with the US in which USSR would leave Afghanistan but together with the US they would try to put in place a government that would retain at least some of the reforms and not be a threat to the West. But the US was more interested in having the USSR humiliated and ignored the offer. The end result was an Afghanistan that ended up being ruled by the Taliban who provided a refuge for bin Laden and al Qaeda. We all know where that led. Political cartoonist Ted Rall, just back from a visit to Afghanistan, says that there have been some definite improvements in that country since the US invasion of 2001, just as there was when the Soviets were there. (Rall's cartoon log of his trip can be seen here in slideshow format as well.) Despite the staggering corruption of the US-backed Karzai government, there are more schools, clinics, and medical services, better roads and communications, some relaxing of restrictions on speech and the press, and more freedoms for women. But what will happen when the US leaves? The history of that country, especially the example of Taliban rule after the USSR left, does not encourage optimism. It will likely revert to a period of ghastly repression because the Taliban now is even worse than the Taliban then. Quicksand is well written and an easy read, despite its length. As I said before, it is a good reference book to have for a comprehensive summary of the history of a region that is the source of much of the world's conflicts. It is also a chronicle of the cynicism and duplicity of political leaders willing to sacrifice the lives of vast numbers of real people for short-term political gain and to enrich the pockets of the few.

In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this review, I reviewed the physics in the book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. In this last part I want to look at the book's implications for religion. The book seeks to address three questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? These are, of course, big questions. Many people will recognize these questions as those on which sophisticated religious apologists have pinned their hopes as being the last remaining mysteries which science cannot answer and for which god is the only answer. What the book argues is that this hope, like similar hopes before it, has been dashed, and that what is called M-theory and the no boundary condition have eliminated any need for god. It is important to realize that M-theory was not invented in order to eliminate god from the universe, any more than Darwin and Wallace's theory of natural selection was deliberately created to eliminate god from the creation of species. Questions of god's existence play no part in the normal workings of scientists. Despite what some religious people think, scientists do not spend their time trying to find ways to make religious people sad. Scientific theories rise and fall on the basis of how good they are in relation to empirical evidence and data, and their implications for theology are at best an incidental by-product or afterthought. As Hawking says, the "multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine-tuning. It is a consequence of the no-boundary condition as well as many other theories of modern cosmology." (p. 164) In his books, Hawking refers to god a lot. I suspect that this is partly a publicity ploy. He knows how to market himself by pushing people's buttons and whenever an eminent scientist talks of god, people listen and buy their books. The very last sentence of his A Brief History of Time was, "If we find the answer to [why it is that we and the universe exist], it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God." This sentence has been widely quoted and led to hope among religious people that the world's most famous living scientist was religious, though those who know him said that he was not a believer and that his use of the word god is in the same sense as Einstein used it, as a label for the laws of nature, not in any sense the way that religious people use the term as some kind of entity that actually exists and can do things. In reading that earlier book, it was not clear to me whether he believed in the existence of a god-like entity or not. I got the sense that he was using the word god in both real and metaphorical senses but tellingly, God was not listed in the index, the way that other people mentioned in the book were. What his latest book does is definitely eliminate any hope that Hawking believes in god. As the authors say, "Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way… We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings." (p. 172) This probably explains why this time around, religious dignitaries have been quick to dismiss him. Woo master Deepak Chopra, who has made a career out of mixing quantum physics with religious ideas to create a ghastly mess of confusion that religious people like because they think that god is hidden somewhere in his fog of words, is of course disappointed with Hawking's conclusion. Cosmologist Sean Carroll has a nice three-minute video that I've shown before that summarizes some of the points made in this review. Of course, theologians and philosophers will rightly claim that Hawking has not proved that god does not exist. But that is a cheap point since science can never prove the non-existence of anything, whether it be god or Santa Claus or unicorns. What science has shown (even before Hawkng's book) is that god is an unnecessary concept. As Steven Weinberg says, "One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious." I would actually put it in a shorter and stronger form than Weinberg. Science can never prove that there is no god but it has shown that there is no need for god. Disbelief in god is far more intellectually coherent than belief and thus should be the natural choice for any thinking person. Although I said that there would be only four parts to the review, I have some final thoughts on the book and Hawking's views that I will add as a coda tomorrow.

In part 1 of this review I discussed the main issues raised by the book and in part 2 I said that the book by Hawking and Mlodinow argued that M-theory and the no boundary condition can provide answers to the three big questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? To understand what lies at the basis of M-theory, we need to appreciate a key difference between classical physics (which describes the large-scale structure of the everyday world we live in and from which we draw our intuitions about how the world works) and quantum mechanics (which describes the microscopic atomic and subatomic world). What classical physics says is that if we release an object at some point A, it will subsequently wander off on some trajectory (or path) that depends on its initial state of motion and the forces that act on it. This is what enables good football quarterbacks to throw passes to receivers with such accuracy. If the ball is poorly thrown on a windy day and/or we stop observing the ball, we may not know or be able to predict which path the ball will take or where it will land but our classical intuition tells us that it will go along some specific path that is determined by the initial throw and the wind conditions. But quantum mechanics has this counter-intuitive idea that once we stop observing the object, the object takes every conceivable path simultaneously. This means that there is no unique location for the object at any given time, that it is everywhere at the same time and could eventually end up anywhere at all. Another way to say it is that an object has many different histories. This is what boggles most people's (including scientists') minds about quantum theory but we have to learn to live and work with it (i.e., develop 'quantum intuition', so to speak) because this theory is phenomenally successful and there seems to be no getting around it at this time. Some people are working on developing alternative theories that do not have its strange features but have not had much success so far. Now if we detect the object at some later time to be at some point B, this eliminates some of the potential paths we started with because they would not have resulted in the object ending up where we detected it. So the act of detection picks out a subset of the initial set of possible histories, limiting the ones of interest to those that began at point A at the specified time and ended at B at the later time, which still includes an infinite number of paths or histories. An elaborate mathematical machinery (called the 'sum over histories' or more technically 'path integrals') has been created to add up all the possible paths the particle could have taken in going from A to B. The calculated results correctly predict the empirical observations, which is why scientists have confidence in quantum theory despite its counter-intuitive features. What M-theory does is take this key idea of quantum mechanics and apply the 'sum over histories' approach to the universe as a whole. Building on the idea of the inflationary universe (see part 9 and part 13 of my series Big Bang for Beginners for more details), since the net energy of the universe is zero, there is no restriction on the number of new universes that can 'pinch' off from previously existing universes. Since the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you can never have truly empty and inert space (p. 113) but that space constantly has particles coming into existence and disappearing again, any one of those fluctuations in space could form the seed of a quantum fluctuation that triggers the birth of a new universe. So universes are being created all the time and there are a vast number of possible histories of the universe, of the order of 10 ⁵⁰⁰. They each have their own forms of matter and their own laws. According to the 'sum over histories' in quantum mechanics, all these universes exist simultaneously, giving rise to the name 'multiverse theory'. When we observe our universe, we are picking out just those histories that could produce the present state we see. As Hawking and Mlodinow state:

Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. (p. 82) … We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not determined by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and forms in different universes. (p. 143)

Given the staggeringly large number of possible histories, it was almost inevitable that one of those universes would have the properties that ours has. It is like rain. If you pick a point on the ground, the probability of it being hit by a raindrop is infinitesimally small. But in a rainstorm, there is such a huge number of drops that it is inevitable that at least one will hit the ground there. Hawking and Mlodinow's book does not shy away from making strong claims, such as that the theory they describe has to be the right one. "M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe… M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find." (p. 181, emphasis in original.) That seems hubristic to me. If the history of science teaches us anything it is that theories, however successful at any given time, tend to be later replaced by other theories as the questions that need to be addressed change. However obviously important they may seem, is usually a mistake to think that the questions that concern us now will be the same questions that future generations care about. Also the theory of supersymmetry, which is central to M-theory though not necessarily to the idea of multiverses, has been around since 1970 or so, with none of the exotic partner particles it predicts having been detected as yet. The theory's supporters are pinning their hopes on the Large Hadron Collider that has just started operations, hoping that its energies will be sufficient to produce these particles. In the last part of this review, I will look at the implications of M-theory for religion and give some of my reactions to other features of the book.

In part 1 of this review, I argued that the lack of a unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics is what has stymied scientists in their attempt to understand the origins of our universe and even what came 'before', assuming that the question even makes sense. M-theory and the no boundary condition is what Hawking proposes as the candidate for a unified theory that can address the physics of the early universe. M-theory is not an elegant theory expressed in a single equation (like Newton's law of gravity) or even a few equations (like Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism) but instead consists of a patchwork of theories, each with its domain of application, and overlapping with other theories so that the whole space of nature is covered. Hawking argues that this patchwork feature may not be due to our lack of imagination or inventiveness but intrinsic to the nature of the laws of science. It is like the way we create accurate but flat maps of the Earth's surface. Because the Earth's surface is curved, no single flat map can ever do the entire job for us. Instead we are forced to take small portions of the globe and map each region separately. As long as the boundaries match up correctly, we effectively have a global flat map, although such a collection is not as elegant as having a single flat map. The versions of M-theory in each domain are referred to as 'effective' theories and are supposedly as real as those theories can get. One big problem with dealing with the origins of the universe is how to deal with the so-called 'singularity' problem, in which the gravitational fields are so large due to the compression of the universe into a tiny space that space becomes so warped that the laws of physics we have (which were designed for flat spaces) break down. Hawking suggests that there is a way to overcome this hurdle, which he calls the 'no boundary' condition. He says that, "once we add the effects of quantum theory to the theory or relativity, in extreme cases warpage can occur to such a great extent that time behaves like another dimension of space." (p. 134) This is because of a technical maneuver in which time is treated as an imaginary quantity. ('Imaginary' in the scientific sense has a very precise mathematical meaning and does not have the everyday meaning of existing only in one's head.) "The realization that time behaves like space… removes the age-old objection to the universe having a beginning, but also means that that the beginning of the universe was governed by the laws of science and doesn't need to be set in motion by some god." (p. 135) (In chapter 8 of his earlier book A Brief History of Time Hawking describes the no boundary proposal in more detail and says that its predictions have been borne out.) The amalgamation of M-theory with the no boundary condition is the central feature of Hawking's argument. M-theory itself is a combination of string theory (in which elementary particles are assumed to be not point-like but like bits of vibrating string, either open or closed in loops) and supergravity (which itself is a combination of the theory of gravity and a theory of particle physics known as supersymmetry, one feature of which is that every particle we are familiar with has to have a partner particle with specific properties.) M-theory requires eleven space-time dimensions. We cannot directly determine (at least as yet) the form of the laws of science in the eleven-dimensional space. Since we appear to exist in four space-time dimensions (three space and one time), the absence of those other dimensions need to be explained. The unobservable seven dimensions are assumed to be curled up to be so tiny that we cannot detect them at the present time with our present technology, giving us the illusion that we live in just four dimensions. The way the seven extra dimensions curl up is not uniquely determined and how they do so determines the nature of the laws we perceive in our reduced four-dimensional space. The number of ways in which they can be curled up, and hence the resulting number of potential universes each with its own laws and matter and parameters, can be as high as 10 ⁵⁰⁰! This is a staggeringly high number that is hard to even wrap our minds around but, as I will discuss in the next part of this review, it plays an important role in answering the questions raised in the book.

This new book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow has generated some publicity and so I thought I'd check it out. The first part of my review will explain the basic questions that are being addressed by the book, the second will describe the physics behind the solutions that the authors propose, the third part will provide some of the more basic physics background that lies behind those ideas, and the last part will discuss the religious implications of the book, which have received the most attention, and some of my own reactions. I should warn readers that cosmology and general relativity are not my fields of study, although I am a theoretical physicist and thus familiar with the basic theories of modern physics. So my knowledge of the book's subject matter is likely to be not that much greater than that of an informed layperson. If you want a really authoritative reaction, you will need to ask your friendly neighborhood cosmologist or read reviews by them such as the one by Sean Carroll in the Wall Street Journal. The book seeks to address three questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? These are, of course, big questions that have long been the province of philosophers and theologians. But modern science has wrestled such questions away from them and made them into empirical questions to be addressed the same way that science addresses any questions about the physical world, making purely philosophical and theological speculations about them superfluous. Needless to say, philosophers and theologians are not happy about this development and are trying to assert that they still have a contribution to make and it is this that largely constitutes the modern science-religion debate. To begin, we live in a universe that has three space dimensions and one time dimension, which we think of as distinct from the space dimensions. We are comfortable with the idea that there is no 'beginning' to space but with the conventional big bang theory there is the sense that there is a beginning to time, which naturally raises the question of what existed before that time or what triggered the start of the universe. One answer could well be that the universe began as a quantum fluctuation and that there was no such thing as time before the universe began. The laws of science came into being with the universe and there is no mystery of why they happened to be such as to produce life like ours because if they hadn't been, we would not be here to ponder such questions. The laws had to take some form and the very fact of our existence means that that laws happened to be such as to produce us. Such as answer is sufficient for many people. But the authors seek answers that go beyond that, hence the book. At present, our understanding of the physical world is spanned by theories of gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces, each successfully working in a specific domain of application. There has been some success in straddling the boundaries of the domains, especially those areas in which quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces overlap. Gravity has been the tough nut, the outlier, resisting strongly all attempts at combining it with other theories, and its unification with quantum mechanics has been the major challenge. Gravity is important in dealing with massive objects like planets, stars, and galaxies, while quantum mechanics deals with the very small. We use the theories of gravity to explain the large-scale structure of the universe and quantum mechanics to explain the sub-atomic world. For most things, the two domains do not overlap. But the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics becomes important in dealing with cosmological questions because when we speak of the beginning of the universe, we are talking about the entire universe being compressed into a tiny region of space and so we need a theory that combines the two domains if we are to make sense of that early state. The main difficulty that has stumped scientists for so long is that space and time are not distinct but are intertwined due to the warping of space by gravity. At low speeds and in the presence of weak gravitational fields, the mixing is so slight as to be not noticeable which is why we perceive them as independent. The highly successful theory of quantum mechanics was developed for use in space that is 'flat', i.e., not warped by gravitational effects. But when we are dealing with the origins of the universe at very early times, the density of matter is extremely high. Consequently the gravitational fields are so large and the warping of space so great that the laws of physics, which were developed for use in flat spaces, appear to break down, depriving us of the only tools we have to study the world. As a result, we could not say what happened at times very close to zero or before. This has been a big barrier to progress. The search for a quantum theory of gravity was the search for a theory that would work even under conditions of the extreme curvature of space that constituted the beginning of our universe. The original hope of Einstein and his successors in the search for such a unified theory was that it would be simple and elegant. But many have failed in this search and that goal has proved to be frustratingly elusive. This book outlines a solution to this problem that is currently in vogue among cosmologists. It is based on what is known as M-theory and the 'no boundary' condition. The book lays this out in chapter 5, which is the heart of the book. (No one seems to know who coined the name M-theory or even what M stands for. I suspect that it was tossed out casually at a physics conference and became adopted by word of mouth.) Next: M-theory and the no boundary condition.

This book is the story of Lenny, the 39-year old son on Russian Jewish immigrants to the US, who falls in love with Eunice, the 24-year old daughter of Korean Christian immigrants, though neither of them are religious. On one level this is the familiar story of cross-cultural tensions: between parents brought up in the traditional cultures of their country of origin and their children who have grown up in the US, and the difficulty for Lenny and Eunice to overcome the cultural baggage of different immigrant backgrounds and ages. ( Fresh Air recently had an interview with Shteyngart which is where I heard about the book and was interested enough to read it.) What fascinated me about the book is the background in which this relationship takes place. The time is a decade or two in the future and the state of the US that Shteyngart describes is what I have been gloomily predicting in my political analyses here. What he has done is take the trends that I have been writing about and extrapolated them to the extreme, resulting in a dystopian vision of what to expect if the US does not change course. In fact, the similarities between his vision and mine were so startling that this could have been a novel that I authored if I knew how to write a novel. In a way, this is a weakness of the author's imagination. He simply extrapolated all the current trends much as I might have done. There was no inspired bit of futurism of the kind that one finds in (say) Kurt Vonnegut's books, like the latter's invention of the concept of ice-nine in Cat's Cradle. What the book portrays is an America that has collapsed from within. The manufacturing sector has disappeared and all that remains is the credit and retail shopping economy. The country is split between a small group of rich (referred to as High Net Worth Individuals) and many poor (Low Net Worth Individuals), some of the latter living in tent cities in public parks. The country is a one-party state ruled by a corrupt Bipartisan Party that monitors people closely, with checkpoints at all the major intersections with armed security personnel who check your identity and look for any warning signs of deviant behavior. The immigrants who fled poverty and oppressive governments to come to the US as the land of opportunity decades ago now find that the US has the same kind of poverty and oppressive government they thought they had left behind, while their former home countries are prosperous and much freer. As a result, the more successful immigrants have abandoned the US and gone back to their home countries. The dollar has sunk to such low values that it is no longer the reserve currency of the world and has been replaced by the Chinese yuan. The Europeans have also decoupled their economies from the US, seeing it as a basket case spiraling into oblivion. The most powerful person in the world is the governor of the Chinese Central Bank. China, Korea, Arab Middle East countries, Western Europe, and other nations are rich and powerful and modern, while the US is decaying everywhere, with crumbling roads and infrastructure and rotten public services, and police, National Guard and other protective services privatized to security contractors. The US has declined so much that it can no longer win its wars and its latest conflict (with Venezuela) is going badly, with troops returning home injured and finding that there is no health care or jobs for them and becoming homeless. Privacy has disappeared. The intimate details of everyone's personal life, down to one's income, credit rating, and even medical history can be retrieved by anyone on an iPhone-like device called an apparat that everyone carries around with them and is constantly looking at and communicating with as it streams information at them. People are obsessed with the trivial, such as shopping and monitoring the details of other people's lives and rating themselves and each other constantly using their devices. For example, in addition to giving others your personal history including the most intimate details, the devices can immediately rate your attractiveness, informing everyone nearby both your absolute score as well as your ranking in a room full of people, which is not good for the balding, paunchy Lenny who usually finds himself near the bottom in any group while Eunice is near the top. Programming on the apparat is provided by ordinary people (like today's video bloggers) who go around showing what they see live and providing running commentary, and the only major content providers are variants of Fox News, with station names like FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra. Newspaper reporters have ceased to exist. Books are no longer published. This book has been described as a black comedy. Shteyngart does a good job of trying to interweave the personal story of two people with the broader political message. I found the latter aspect more interesting but the book was an enjoyable read. I probably would have found the book funnier if it seemed like a total fantasy and did not so accurately reinforce my own sense of foreboding about where the US is headed. I have expressed before my puzzlement that the general public does not share my sense of alarm at the seriously wrong direction in which the US is headed. Most Americans seem to be complacent that everything is just fine and that AMERICA IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD BECAUSE IT HAS BEEN CHOSEN BY GOD TO BE HIS SPECIAL NATION, even as their oligarchy pursues policies that are driving it into the ditch. Coming across this book was a relief in a way, to find that someone else shared my sense of concern and that I am not totally nuts. Shteyngart is, like me, an immigrant, the child of Russian Jews who came to the US when he was seven. It made me wonder if there was something about being an immigrant that makes us look more globally and long term, and be more alert to dangerous political trends.