Introduction
While many of my book reviews have been longer essays published on my blog or episodes of my podcast, Red Reviews, I also write shorter book reviews for social media. These appear mostly on Instagram, as it is the social media platform I primarily use and it has a longer character limit for captions than, say, Threads or Twitter. Instagram’s 2,200 character limit for captions requires you to be concise and clear, and I enjoy the challenge to keep my posts within that character limit. It’s actually a lot of fun to write a quick review that is informative as well as indicative of my opinion. This blog post will be the first in a series of blog posts where I will share a few reviews that are connected by a common theme, along with photographs of the books as they appeared on Instagram.
This first set of reviews are tied together under the theme of “science and society,” which highlights books that employ science and/or philosophy to expound on social issues. From Bertrand Russell’s argument for a four-hour workday to Christopher Lasch’s conception of a “minimal self,” each of these books provide provocative insights into the human condition.
In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1935)
In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1935) is one of the most insightful and enduring works of his long career as a philosopher and social critic. In this collection of essays, Russell opined on topics as wide-ranging as education, public housing, the roots of Fascism, and the origin of the human soul. However, his views about work and leisure are the most enduring aspects of this book.
His central idea is that people work far too much, something that has kept pace since the 1930s. As he writes in the title essay, “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”
Russell’s specific policy solution to get us towards the leisure-oriented society he envisions is a radical one, one that’s still radical today: the four hour workday! In the future Russell envisions, technology and modern management methods would require the majority of workers to labor only a few hours every day. This would also solve the problem of unemployment, since the work would be more evenly distributed among society. As he writes, “if the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment— assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization.” Russell is aware of how revolutionary his proposals are, noting, “this idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure.” Russell thinks this is pure nonsense; as we improve our organization of the economy and investments in public education, most people, regardless of class, will fulfill their talents and passions in the leisure-oriented society.
He writes with precision, humor, and grace, which makes for excellent reading. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading Bertrand Russell or thinking about ideas of a world beyond work.
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm (1956)
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm (1956) is the psychologist’s magnum opus on the subject of love, distilling insights from a lifetime of considering it in all its forms— romantic, familial, religious, and humanistic. All of these types of love come from three essential components: theory, practice, and what he calls “ultimate concern.” Theory and practice are easily understood; much like painting or sculpture, one must learn from the great theorists and practitioners of love from the past to glean the requisite knowledge to carry out love in the present. Finally, the art of love is predicated on “ultimate concern,” a belief that “there is nothing else in the world more important than the art.”
Additionally, Fromm identifies four essential elements to the art of love: discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern. Discipline in an art, whether it be painting, writing, or love, is indispensable. Without discipline, Fromm believed that “life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks concentration.” That takes us to the second component, concentration. “Concentration is rare in our culture,” Fromm writes, since “our culture leads to an unconcentrated and diffused mode of life” which engenders “difficulty in being alone with ourselves.” Our discomfort in boredom leads us to constantly checking our phones for the latest email or social media notification. This incessant din of electronic noise can destroy our ability to concentrate on anything, from work responsibilities to conversations with a loved one.
Most importantly, a person must have a supreme concern for the art one seeks to master, whether it be visual art or the art of love. It should be of utmost importance to you, with a precision-like attentiveness towards achieving mastery. For Fromm, this commitment separates “masters” of an art from “dilettantes,” or those who dabble but are never dedicated. Love thrives on dedication; if you give everything of yourself towards a meaningful connection with another person, that connection will enrich both of you. This is a vital book for anyone interested in learning how to give love more fully and to receive love more meaningfully.
The Minimal Self by Christopher Lasch (1984)
The Minimal Self by Christopher Lasch (1984) is a prescient work of cultural theory that anticipated our culture of survival by decades, exploring how and why our culture has devolved the way it has. When survival is the only watchword of our lives, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of ourselves as agents of social transformation. As Lasch wrote in the preface, “under siege, the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity.” This “defensive core” is the basis for narcissism, which he defined as “seek[ing] both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation: opposite aspects of the same archaic experience of oneness with the world.” Narcissism, to Lasch, was a poor replacement for a real experience of selfhood. “Selfhood is the painful awareness,” he wrote, “of the tension between our unlimited aspirations and our limited understanding, between our original intimations of immortality and our fallen state, between oneness and separation.” A meaningful and positive understanding of the self, both individually and socially, resides in a dialectical relationship between our bounded material existence and our unbounded subjective experience.
Lasch also advocated for a politics where “the choice of means has to be governed by their conformity to standards of excellence designed to extend human capacities for self-understanding and self-mastery.” In other words, organizing society with deliberate moral aims at the outset. This can be achieved only when we acknowledge a healthy understanding of the self, which is rooted in “the critical awareness of man’s divided nature. Selfhood expresses itself in the form of a guilty conscience, the painful awareness of the gulf between human aspirations and human limitations.” Human beings are a product of material conditions, and we ignore these conditions at our peril. Lasch believed, despite its own shortcomings, a blending of moral purpose, technological development, and a communitarian spirit is the only path that might work.
The Minimal Self is an important, if overlooked, work in the canon of his thought; it articulated more directly his concerns and offered a clearer alternative than his more celebrated books.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985)
Perhaps other than the atomic bomb, the television was the most influential invention of the twentieth century. It connected people and events in a novel way, removing barriers to entertainment and information in a way not unlike the printing press. While many lives have been enriched by the television, both in the production of programming and in the consumption of it by audiences, television has also had a more pernicious effect on society that many might not realize.
Neil Postman, a professor of media studies who introduced the disciple of “media ecology” to both academics and the general public, long harbored such critiques of television and its effect on the broader public. In one of his most celebrated works, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman argued that with the advent of television, society was moving away from an “age of print,” manifested in a highly literature culture that consumed newspapers and books, to an “age of show business,” where literacy declined and democracy became hollowed out.
To him, television flattened or even obliterated intelligent public discourse, shortening the public’s attention spans and engaging them with salacious programming not meant to inform or to educate, but to titillate and pacify. This pacification and nullification of critical thinking will have us “amusing ourselves to death,” as depicted decades ago in Aldous Huxley’s prescient novel, Brave New World, where drugs, sex, and entertainment slowly disintegrated society.
In the nearly forty years since Postman published this book, his pronouncements have become in many respects prosaic, as television has given way to social media and the success of video apps like TikTok, where an even shorter format might be shortening our culture’s capacity for rational discourse.
Democracy depends upon the informed and active consent of a public, which the broader information ecosphere of today has degraded to such a degree that we see the rise of authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism. Postman’s writings scream out for a radical rethinking of how we should become enlightened citizens, and his warnings on the “age of show business” should be seriously considered.
Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA by Richard C. Lewontin (1991)
If there was one idea that geneticist Richard C. Lewontin wanted to get across in his book, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), it would be this: genes don’t account for everything, and acting as if they do is problematic, to say the least. This book, a collection of his Massey Lectures, provides readers with a clear introduction to the against-the-grain thinking of one of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists.
Lewontin argues that the overemphasis on genes as the central component of the diversity of life leaves much out, to the detriment of science and to society. In particular, he is critical of the multi-billion dollar, years-long Human Genome Project, which purports to map every single genetic marker of a human being so as to treat underlying congenital illnesses or defects. Instead of, say, creating a better society via social democratic policy or universal public services, the purported promises of the Human Genome Project would allow us to ignore the environmental and historical influences that brought us to our unequal and unjust world by fixing everything via tweaks of DNA.
As a geneticist himself, Lewontin understood that the complexity of life on Earth is more than mere genetic code. In another work, he actually argues for a “triple helix” theory of life, where genes, organisms, and environments are interrelated. Thinking that genes are the be-all, end-all of understanding life is what Lewontin calls “biological determinism,” and it's this kind of ideology that brought about eugenics, scientific racism, forced sterilization, and the Holocaust. Life isn’t just the mere sequence of bases in DNA; it is the culmination of genetic influences, an organism’s choices and relationships, and the broader environment they both live in and transform.
Lewontin is a passionate writer who understands the role of history in life, especially for humanity. He defends a social theory of science, which recognizes the role that collectives play in the wide plethora of influences on individuals and the development of complex ideas. Biology as Ideology is foundational reading for combatting the pernicious influence of biological determinism.