Book Review: “The Narrow Corridor” by Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson

I’m back from quarantine with another book review. Daron Acemoglu & Jame Robinson’s best-known book, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty” was a highly influential and persuasive defence of democracy, that I certainly found useful and informative in doing the research for my first book (“Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder.”) Now they’re back with a follow-up, “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty”, a 500-page behemoth that aims to perform the same service for liberalism. I regret to inform everyone, however, that “The Narrow Corridor” does not reach the same heights of the original, and in fact is a genuine slog to get through. Despite my genuine admiration for Acemoglu & Robinson’s academic work, I can’t recommend this book, and this blog will tell you why.

Acemoglu & Robinson’s central thesis is that the long-run success of states depends on the balance of power between the ‘state’ and ‘society’. If states are too strong, you end up with a Despotic Leviathan that is good for short-term growth but is brittle and unstable. If society is too strong, Leviathan is Absent and societies suffer under a pre-modern war of all against all. The ideal place to be, according to Acemoglu & Robinson, is the ‘narrow corridor’ where state and society are balanced, producing a ‘Shackled Leviathan’ that is able to grow state capacity and individual liberty simultaneously. The trick is to navigate into and stay in the narrow corridor (which one clever twitter user has already dubbed the ‘birth canal of liberalism’) against the centripetal forces pulling this delicate balance apart.

To their credit, Acemoglu & Robinson support their thin thesis with an extensive, and one might say exhaustive, set of case studies. And this is where the problems start. Although the authors’ selection of studies is broad and includes many non-Western cultures, the vast bulk of the book is little better than a potted history of civilisation, a tendency that gets worse in the second half where the authors cover so many unrelated topics (e.g. racial politics in the US, #metoo, the origins of Al Qaeda and the War on Terror, globalization, automation and the rise of the Nazis) that it covers none of them well. It falls into the trap of so much mediocre writing of mistaking description for analysis. So while their history of the world might be of interest to a first-year political science or economics student, it does not stand up as a serious work of scholarship.

Liberalism for dummies

From the reviews I’ve seen online, “The Narrow Corridor” is popular with neoliberals, even though the text itself ostensibly defends some version of a social democratic welfare state. The reason, I suspect, is its simplistic definition of what liberalism is and how it operate, and its almost Fukuyama-esque assumption that there is only a single stable evolutionary pathway that societies can take in the long-run. Acemoglu & Robinson are stuck in the tired dichotomy of Hobbes and Locke. In other words, the State is a despotic Leviathan that is necessary to provide order and prevent a war of all against all. The only way to constrain the state’s despotic tendencies is through individual rights, and some soft notion of ‘civil society’ that is never fully explained or developed.

Acemoglu & Robinson valorise the idea of Liberty, but their definition of it is deeply constrained. Throughout ‘The Narrow Corridor’, liberty is to be understood solely as ‘negative freedom’: restraints on what the state can and cannot do with regard to individuals and their property. The authors are curiously uninterested in the development of the individual, or the pursuit of happiness, in a way that might lead to demands for positive liberty. Instead, rights are a constraint on the despotic tendencies of the State, and individuals benefit from the growth in state capacity (so long as it does not become overmighty). One can easily see how such a worldview (“capitalism lifts people out of poverty”) may be sympathetic to neoliberalism’s core claim to rule.

But this is more than just an ideological objection. In “The Narrow Corridor” it is not individuals but the State which is the primary ontological entity. But what is the state, and where does it come from? Acemoglu & Robinson have a unfortunate and deliberate tendency to label everyone living outside a modern, Weberian nation-state as ‘stateless’, without any consideration of how governance emerges slowly and organically from within pre-existing structures. A State has police and bureaucrats, we are told: there is either the modern state form, fully formed and rational-legal in its orientation, or there is despotism. No other form of governance is worth consideration. As a result, Acemoglu & Robinson ignore the many forms of social organisation in history that were not states, and claims a great many things to be states which were not. Italian city-states which were legally part of the Holy Roman Empire and Muhammad’s early Islamic ummah are States; but the Islamic Caliphates and post-colonial governments in Africa and Latin America are not.

A dash of chauvinism

Acemoglu & Robinson rightly critique narrow works of history that focus solely on structural factors to explain the rise of civilization (looking at you, Jared Diamond), and prefer history that is messy and path-dependent. They claim this resurrects the role of ‘agency’ in history. But this is not the agency of individuals - there is no methodological individualism in “The Narrow Corridor”. The people who matter, the people with agency, are ‘state-builders’: law-givers, prophets and conquerers who stand astride world history as heroes. Despite their central thesis being one of constant tension between state and society, Acemoglu & Robinson specify almost no dynamic mechanisms in their theory: no classes, no divergence of interests, no means of production. States evolve over time, allegedly, yet in their cosmology they also emerge fully-formed from the hands of Great Men. After that, all that matters is that coalitions and inclusiveness are good and polarisation and social conflict are bad. Neoliberals in suits with technocratic cabinets are the ideal way to govern a state, forever.

Like all liberals, therefore, Acemoglu & Robinson propose a universalistic and trans-historical ideal of what constitutes a good state. The challenge they, and all liberals face, is to explain why this apparently successful social equilibrium is so difficult to achieve. It’s unclear what actually determines the balance of power between state and society: is it ideology, religion, economics, geography, or culture? At one point or another, all of these factors are thrown into the mix, but it’s hard to escape the impression that the authors have fallen into the trap of relying heavily on ‘cultural’ explanations for the success and failure of states.

In “The Narrow Corridor”, the archetypes of a successful Shackled Leviathan are ancient Athens, Italian city-states and the United States. What constrains the growth of state power, we are told, is the formation of society on the basis of free, smallholding peasant farmers. It’s an argument, I suppose. But while in some societies landowners are the fountainhead of liberty, in other societies are different times landowners are the chief centres of reaction and despotism. ‘Labour coercion’, we are told, undermines the growth of liberty, yet both ancient Athens and the United States were slave-holding societies. Privatisation is good until it isn’t. The lack of consistency is an inevitable result of the sheer number of stories being told and the lack of a coherent framework linking them together.

The other twinge of cultural chauvinism in “The Narrow Corridor” is that Acemoglu & Robinson really, really don’t like pre-modern forms of social organisation. In this book, any form of social governance which is not a Weberian rational-legal nation-state is by definition part of the ‘cage of norms’ which holds societies back, explains their failure to build states and undermines their economy. Peoples aren’t allowed to develop their own forms of self-governance based on kin networks, reciprocity, religion and custom - all that must be swept aside in the name of progress, most likely by some conquerer or law-giver with the public’s best interests at heart. Non-liberal cultures, we are told, oppress people and keep them impoverished. Better for everyone if social interactions are anonymised and conducted solely on the basis of self-interest.

In the final analysis, Acemoglu & Robinson’s account of the rise of Shackled Leviathans in the West is so simplistic it could come out of a Ben Shapiro book. Only in the West, we are told, did societies inherit the twin boons of Roman law and the ‘Germanic’ proto-democratic practice of tribal assemblies. It’s as if two millennia of war, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism and the Cold War never happened. Western political and economic institutions had a complex evolutionary history, and yet modern liberal States have the same cultural toolkit as the fifth century Franks (in much the same way, it must be said, that the Chinese Communist Party is ascribed the same cultural toolkit as the Qin Empire, 2500 years earlier). The glaring and obvious errors in many if their takes on European history makes the reader suspect that they’re picking and choosing their lessons from other parts of the world as well.

Bad Economists

Acemoglu & Robinson struggle the hardest, as most liberals do, when it comes to explaining the rise of China. They often come across as admiring and envious of the economic usefulness of the Despotic Leviathan and its capacity to organise short-term economic growth - although they are typically silent on the reasons for this (land redistribution, the suppression of labour and the concentration of capital might be among them). But they argue, weakly, that this is unsustainable and that China, under the rule of the Communist Party, can never pose a long-term challenge to the cultural West. Moreover, their unwillingness to theorise about civil society and social movements mean they have no prescriptions for the Chinese people to get out of this perceived trap.

Innovation, we are told, requires creativity and creativity requires liberty. That’s a hell of a claim, but it constitutes the sum total of their argument for the inferiority of despotism. At various points, we are told that government regulation of any kind is no different from despotism, and that free markets are the only road out of poverty. No form of social organisation that is not universal liberalism can deliver sustainable improvements in quality of life. But this is, empirically not true. Any even in the liberal West, States had a long history of despotic growth behind them before they became philosophically modern.

Conclusion

“The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty” is a book by liberals for liberals. It won’t convince anyone else of its central claims, and the longer the book goes on the more unfocused and self-defeating it becomes. Acemoglu & Robinson wanted to write a book about everything and ended up writing a book about nothing. No matter how extensively sourced or research, the authors offers no guidance to the future or wisdom about the past that one could not pick up from reading newspaper columns. A pity.

Book Reviews: “The Dream of Reason” & “The Dream of Enlightenment” by Anthony Gottlieb

Having finished writing my second book (tentatively title “Evolutionary Politics” and due to be published later this year, stay tuned), I’ve shifted my reading habits away from theoretical biology and radical theory to lighter and more mainstream pastures. So while in self-isolation this last few weeks (hello, Disaster Socialism), I’ve had the pleasure to read the first two volumes in Anthony Gottlieb’s history of Western Philosophy, “The Dream of Reason” (first published in 2000) & “The Dream of Enlightenment” (first published in 2016). Gottlieb, a former editor of The Economist, is a superb writer and his prose is light, economical and easy to parse. For anyone looking for a high-quality introduction to the field, I can highly recommend these books.

They are, however, very much histories of Western philosophy of the ‘dead white man’ variety. Gottleib apes Hegel (who devoted 800 pages to the ancient Greeks in his history of philosophy and 400 pages to the moderns) in his choice of subjects. The first volume, “The Dream of Reason” is less a history of philosophy up ‘to the Renaissance’ as advertised and more an introduction to Greek thought, with the majority of its time spent on the giants of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The second, “The Dream of Enlightenment” covers the pre-modern philosophers from Descartes to Hume, and a third volume covering Kant and beyond is reportedly on its way. Gottlieb combines brief biographical sketches of each thinker, to put them in their social context, with an in-depth discussion of two or three of their main philosophical arguments. Each subject is well-described, but the total absence of women or any thinker from outside Western Europe is glaring.

That said, Gottlieb is on the whole a fair and impartial biographer. He has little to say about the preservation and development of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought by early Christian and Muslim philosophers, but at least the key figures are name-checked. Gottlieb is definitely a little too fond of Plato and Leibniz (both of whom he describes as geniuses despite their odd beliefs), and too critical of the Greek Heraclitus, and the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau. He prosecutes some of the ingrained prejudices of a liberal philosophical education, notably an rejection of moral relativism, a defense of free will and scepticism of a probabilistic universe, but these are generally minor digressions from the flow of his story-telling and easily forgivable.

A bunch of WEIRD-os.

Gottlieb’s biographical sketches demonstrate a point that perhaps the publishers who selected his book titles might like to disguise: very few of the heroes of the Western canon had a firm grasp on what Reason or the Enlightenment even were. The degree to which these founders of Western philosophy constituted a collections of weirdos, prophets and sages cannot be underestimated. Very few participated in formal education or empirical research, and most spent their time focused on questions of what we might think of today as theology and mysticism. Gottlieb notes how much of later Christian thought is infused with the mysticism of earlier Greek thinkers such as the numerology of the Pythagoreans, the Orphic belief in souls and Plato’s music of the spheres.

Descartes and Leibniz were also very much of this mould. Descartes, of course, is largely responsible for the metaphysical tendency in Western thinking that sees the mind and body as separate entities; two centuries later, Leibniz constructed an elaborate system of ‘monads’ in which material entities are merely imperfect reflections of abstracted pure entities. For these thinkers, Ideas were not only real entities but in some way more real than the material world which could be observed, sensed and experienced. Reason was not merely a tool, but a fragment of divinity that provided the only source of True knowledge, including about moral and ethical subjects. In these terms, many of Gottlieb’s subjects were effectively panpsychics - an equivalently absurd modern revival of such beliefs. In contrast, empiricists such as Democritus, Epicurus and Hume come across as eminently sensible.

Never go full Euclid

Gottlieb’s heroes are not the pragmatists who looked at human society with a sceptical eye, but proto-scientists such as Euclid, Galileo and Newton, and to a lesser extent Aristotle - whose system of syllogistic logic and biological investigations get a generous treatment. Gottlieb often comes across in awe of the power of the scientific method to produce knowledge that is both true and useful. But unlike many modern rationalists (“With a Capital-R”), he is cautious - or sensible - enough to recognise that a full embrace of scepticism would make some of the cultural and ethnical assumptions of Western philosophy untenable. Even though Descartes “I think, therefore I am” forms part of a system of mystical nonsense that is no longer explicit, we still rely on it to know anything at all.

Many of Gottlieb’s pre-modern subjects were obsessed with geometry, logic and the potential of the new ‘mechanical’ sciences (in much that same way of some modern analytic philosophers) - and he is fond of calling out the flaws of treating all knowledge this way. The ‘great’ philosophers tend to be such committed synthesisers of ideas that they embraced conclusions that appear absurd, monstrous or unintelligible. This includes Hobbes and Locke, two figures whom modern students of social science are most likely to know from their political philosophy. Hobbes was so committed to materialism that he believed, like the ancient Greeks Democritus and Epicurus, in a material God. And as anyone who has read Locke knows, his prose is so dense with definitions and exceptions that his work is less theory and more encyclopaedia. Despite their later reputation as the originators of modern liberalism and the social contract, both men were thoroughgoing authoritarians - as many men who think think highly of their own abilities tend to be.

The philosopher I personally enjoyed reading about the most was the thinker I had previously known the least - Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s reputation as a mystic is well deserved, but he was certainly less conventionally devout than Hobbes, Leibniz or Newton. It is a mistake, says Spinoza, to think of laws of nature - be their divine, philosophical or mathematical - in the same way as human laws. To note patterns in nature is not to infer a patriarchal law-giver, but this is just what modern psychologists would label an agency bias. Natural laws cannot be otherwise than as they are - they are descriptive, not prescriptive. Nothing, therefore, could be considered good or evil, sacred or profane other than in the human mind.

Spinoza was a European Jew, and one of the few uncritical supporters of liberal democracy in pre-nineteenth century philosophy. Positive traits and behaviours tended to increase the happiness of individuals and societies, but they are merely guideposts, not divine commands. For Spinoza, the mind and the body were one, and the body was subject to natural laws of cause and effect. Human beings are free to the extent that they can sometimes - but not always - understand the constraints imposed on them by natural laws. Spinoza was therefore something of a modern Stoic, resigned to the study of a world that was difficult, if not impossible to change.

Conclusion

For all our modern sophistication, much of modern Western philosophy is built upon a foundation that was first fixed in place more than 2500 years ago. What is remarkable in reading Gottlieb, quite frankly, is how little the pre-Enlightenment philosophers added to the diversity of opinions held by the ancient Greeks. For all their modernity, they were human beings just the same and ran up against the same limits to their imagination. The value of intellectual histories such as these therefore lies not in parsing how the ancients answered the big questions, but the way in which they highlight that some questions can never have satisfactory answers at all.

Book Review: "Darwin's Unfinished Symphony" by Kevin Laland

Biologist Kevin Laland has a gift for clear, evocative writing and clever titles. An "unfinished symphony" is a powerful metaphor, hinting at the lost works of departed geniuses. Perhaps no post-Enlightenment figure has had as profound impact on how humanity sees itself than Charles Darwin, and the chance to extend the modern evolutionary synthesis to incorporate an account of the origins of human culture and intelligence creates possibilities that will be euphoric for some readers and terrifying for others. Laland's book contributes to an emerging corpus of recent literature aiming to close the enormous gap that has opened up between the biological and social sciences.

Laland is not a historian, and those looking for a compelling account of Darwin's research on the origins of humanity should look elsewhere. "On the Origin of the Species" is famously silent on the question of human origins, and Darwin's later works on the subject ("The Descent of Man" and "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals") are less well known and more heavily weighed upon by the passage of time. For Laland, Darwin's 'unfinished symphony' was the task of explaining humanity's unique mental, cultural and moral capabilities in light of evolution, and the subtitle of his book ("How Culture Made the Human Mind") gives the game away in terms of where Laland suggests the answers will be found. This is also the story of a thirty year effort by Laland and his team to find those answers: an ode to grad students and published research most of the public have never heard of. 

The boundary between biological and social evolution is fiercely patrolled on both sides, with many biologists stressing that evolution only applies to genetically-encoded behaviours (c.f. Dawkins) and many sociologists epistemologically wedded to the unnatural uniqueness of human culture. We can perhaps refer, as Laland does, to cultural evolutionary studies pioneered by Boyd & Richerson among others, which has been a remarkably successful effort to apply evolutionary tools to the study of culture. Laland, however, goes beyond that to write a book focused on gene-culture coevolution. That is, a study of how genes have influenced culture and culture, in turn, has influenced our genes. Evolutionary psychologists and behavioural economists have made strides (often flawed) into measuring biological influences on human behaviour, in the process contributing to a resurgence of naturalist ethical ideologies. Laland's position is more nuanced: our biological intuitions and mental capabilities have developed in a feedback loop to meet the needs of humanity's complex learning behaviours. 

Innovating and Copying

As a mechanism which develops and spreads new traits through a population, culture relies on the innovation of new behaviours (beyond what is encoded in a creature's genes) and the copying of that behaviour by others (which allows it to spread faster than biological transmission alone would allow). Social learning is innate and ubiquitous among humans and - it turns out - not entirely unknown amongst animals. Crucially, Laland is able to demonstrate through both mathematical models and empirical studies that what matters to the cultural capacity to accumulate fitness-enhancing improvements over time is not just copying but copying efficiently, faithfully and strategically. Learning heuristics such as imitating successful individuals or conforming with the behaviour of the majority ensure that useful information is retained over generations, and it's this capacity for strategic or contingent learning that Laland argues lies at the root of the divergence between humanity and other animals. 

Laland combines agent-based computational models of social learning with empirical studies of social learning in animals, most amusingly fish. Throughout the early chapters of the book, he builds a compelling case for why social learning is not ubiquitous in nature, noting that vulnerability to predation and the demands of reproduction make some species (and some individuals within species) more reliant on social learning than others. In Laland's observations, it's often lower-status individuals, females and children that benefit most from openness to new experiences and social learning. A certain conservative Canadian psychologist has recently invited derision by looking for the origins of social hierarchies amongst lobsters. Laland's fish studies are different because his team has gone to the effort of first proving that social learning is a mathematical solution to a general category of problem: humans are 'like fish', in this sense, because both evolved similar strategies to solve analogous problems, not because we share some biochemistry. A more sophisticated version of Jordan Peterson might be able to do the modelling to show that hierarchies are a valid solution to the problem of cooperation - but unlike Laland, Peterson simply hasn't done his homework. 

More than just the evolution of intelligence

Unlike other pop science authors, Laland's descriptions of his statistical methods and techniques are always clear and precise - we always know how much confidence we should have in Laland's conclusions and how they're derived. Where that raised an eyebrow, however, was when Laland moved away from discussing social learning to the evolution of intelligence. Laland relies on a variant of factor analysis to argue for the existence of what he calls the "primate g", a measure of the general intelligence of primates which he argues has increased alongside the demands for increasing social learning. In this way, Laland aligns himself with the view that intelligence is an all-purpose tool that has continually improved throughout human evolution, rather than an agglomeration of modules and capabilities which arose at different points in our species' history in response to different environmental and social requirements. 

Ultimately, Laland's efforts to downplay the 'social brain' hypothesis are unconvincing and I would recommend Robin Dunbar on these topics. Is a 3cm long fish that finds a novel solution to a food maze really 'innovating', or it merely following instincts that drive hungry individuals to take greater risks? It's likely that general intelligence is a poor tool for solving most social games among humans, at least,  (cf. the ultimatum game) and IQ is a poorer predictor of social status than modular personality traits. The role of emotion and motivated action is missing from Laland's account, an omission that's curious given that Darwin himself intuited that the evolutionary function of emotions was crucial to understanding the origins of man. If culture made the human mind, as Laland argues, then perhaps we should also explore the role of emotions, biases and irrationality in cultural evolution - and not just intelligence. 

In later chapters of the book, Laland offers some unsupported hypotheses in an effort to bridge the gap between primate intelligence and human symbolic expression. In his otherwise friendly review of the book, cultural evolutionary scholar Joe Henrich worries that Laland overplays the role of teaching and language in the co-evolution of culture. Laland argues that teaching is the only explanation that can account for not only the increasing fidelity of cultural transmission in humans but also the (somewhat self-imposed) requirement that proto-languages evolved transmit information faithfully and without deception. We'd have to do the modelling to find out which account is more plausible, but given the robust evidence from behavioural economics that deception and public self-justification plays a crucial role in social games the 'social brain' hypothesis remains for me the persuasive position. 

What really disappointed me about these later chapters is Laland's seeming lack of engagement with the paleoanthropological record: he never specifies where in the human family tree he thinks these capabilities first evolved; he doesn't engage with the robust debate on the physiological limitations on the language capabilities of our near-relatives; nor with the fact that symbolic culture and exponential cultural progress has only really been a feature of our species on the timescale of tens of thousands of years or so. Teaching, language, rationality and the arts are all highly important to modern human societies, but an account of how these capabilities evolved needs to bootstrap them on to other functions that plausibly existed in earlier members of our lineage that definitively lacked them. 

Enter the debate

"Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind" is exactly the sort of book we should embrace as part of a second wave of pop science explainers of gene-culture evolution. Laland takes the extended evolutionary synthesis and cultural evolution as a given, and uses those theories to motivate and explain his own perspectives on debates within the field. Like Darwin himself, Laland may ultimately be proven right on some points and wrong on others: what's important is that readers are exposed to these issues in ways that normalise the language and perspectives of gene-culture coevolution. Laland's earlier work focused on the phenomenon of niche construction, in which a species influences its environment and thereby changes the selection pressures acting upon it. As a social species, the social environment is undoubtedly the niche that humans have created for our own evolution - and it's that control over our own environment that frees us from biological determinism like that espoused by Peterson, Dawkins and Pinker. It opens minds to the possibility that we - as a species - are not done with our social evolution just yet. 

Book Review: "Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism"

Steve Silberman's award-winning 2015 book "Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently" is well worth your time, even if its 520 pages are nearly as dense and unwieldly as its mammoth title. Neurotribes is a comprehensive history of the emergence of the modern understanding of autism spectrum disorders. Silberman is an excellent storyteller, and this well written book is filled to the brim with compelling individual narratives with an enviable capacity to suck the reader in. 

Despite its marketing as a pop science book, the strength of Neurotribes lies not in its presentation of the science of autism (which is disappointingly superficial), but by placing the discovery of the autism spectrum in its historic and social context. Through the lens of autistic individuals and their families, we witness the trials and tribulations of the psychiatric profession over the twentieth century; watch with horror as the Nazis rise to power in Europe, and read about the disturbing links between fascist and liberal eugenic beliefs; we see the origins of science fiction as popular literature, the heady early days of the internet, as well as the origins of gay conversion therapy. Neurotribes, in this sense, joins the genre of 'hidden history' now common in the queer community, in which well-known history is re-interpreted and re-experienced through the lives of minorities we now recognise were there in the shadows all along. 

For those unfamiliar with autism, Silberman's main aim is to walk the reader away from popular misconceptions about the disorder rooted in the initial scientific description (a single syndrome, causing unique and devastating impairment in early childhood, that is relatively rare) to the modern consensus. The new understanding is embodied by the clinical description of autism as a spectrum of diverse conditions, which appears in the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Silberman attempts to resurrect figures unknown to the general public who were ahead of their time in advocating the spectrum concept, such as Soviet psychologist Grunya Sukharaeva, German pediatrician Han Asperger and British psychiatrist Lorna Wing. Given widespread panic over the modern prevalence of autism and its cause, Silberman's history is a necessary and laudatory corrective. 

The author, though, is not a disinterested chronicler and his biases slip into the writing throughout the book. Silberman is writing a story, and he's clear who his heroes and villains are. He valorises certain characters in questionable circumstances and demonises others unfairly; the venom in his prose sometimes detracts from the broader analytic point he's trying to make. The truth is, all real humans are flawed heroes whose individual prejudices reflect the broader historical patterns at play in their time and who cannot be judged sensibly by the standards of a different time - a trap Silberman repeatedly falls into. 

Why a spectrum?

Ultimately, the concept of variance as a spectrum is vastly more useful than the formerly dominant scientific (and neo-Platonist) tendency in which every category is represented by an single ideal type. What's the scientific value in defining separate historical species of human when we know they coexisted and interbred with one another? What's the utility of a binary categorisation of sex when we know that even biological sex characteristics are multifaceted and rarely perfectly correlate with one another? And now that we understand that autism is a cluster of interrelated developmental variations, with potentially hundreds of possible genetic loci and scores of possible environmental triggers, the spectrum model helps us see the similarities beyond the superficial differences: more of the signal and less of the noise. 

Autism is characterised by both positive and negative traits, but these traits should be seen as part of the psychological whole of an individual, whose life outcomes will depend on whether or not they receive the material support and social environment they need to flourish. From an evolutionary perspective, autism and autism-like cognition are precisely the sort of neurological variance we might expect to see persist in a population, and which highlights the inherent flaw in seeing our biological legacy as perfectly adapted. Autism-related polymorphisms might convey enough of an advantage to some individuals to offset the fitness loss caused by its more extreme manifestations. As might have been predicted by Dual Inheritance Theory, cultures which are 'pre-adapted' to recognising and employing the skills of the neuro-diverse may be better off in the long run than those (horrifically catalogued in Silberman's book) that treat the disabled or different as a burden to eliminated.

Manufacturing Normality

Autism, alongside other mental disorders once considered nearly fatal diseases, is increasingly being recognised as a diagnosis that is socially disabling only for a given social context. No one should downplay the immense challenges that serious mental disorders confer on those diagnosed and their families. And yet, Silberman's book argues persuasively that both the long-term prognosis of those affected and the severity of their symptoms is in large part a function of the understanding and support offered by their carers. There is some truth to the observation that institutions create madness, especially when used by society as an instrument to control those it can't - or won't - otherwise accommodate.

Silberman is particularly astute on the issue of toxic parenting, and its roots in the way society positions parents as the "middle managers" in a vast authoritarian enterprise aimed at producing 'standardised' or 'normal' children. The social pressure place on parents to do their duty in producing perfectly conformist consumers manifests itself as a laundry list of detrimental practices, not least is the vulnerability of parents to fraudsters who promise a quick fix to problems parents don't have the resources or understanding to cope with. Silberman rightly skewers Andrew Wakefield (the promotor of the myth that vaccines cause autism), the anti-vaxxer movement and those peddling 'cures' for autism ranging from homeopathic placebos to potentially tortuous regimens. But he makes the point that the real blame lies with a culture that places unrealistic and impossible duties on parents without providing them the necessary time or resources to perform them.

I hate to sound like a social constructivist unnecessarily, but the boundary between disease and merely odd or unusual observations is often socially constructed: what some parents or doctors will fret over, others will shrug off as normal variation. There is a definite risk that that spectrum model of autism could lead to the medicalising of otherwise benign variance, much as the increase in screening for breast cancer in healthy individuals has led to an increase in medically unnecessary and occasionally risky surgeries.

However, given the current model of funding for social services, Silberman gives voice to the many parents and practitioners that support maintaining the disorder as the only way to ensure continued funding for autism healthcare. In this way, autism appears in the same awkward positions as gender dysphoria: it probably can't be completed demedicalised in the same way homosexuality was in the 1960s. Like trans-identified individuals, people with autism need special assistance and adjustments to manage what might otherwise become crippling social disabilities. Analogies between autism and gender dysphoria litter Neurotribes and in fact support one of its key messages: societies tend to behave as if it's easier to (coercively) change the individual to fit society than expect the whole of society to adapt around them. 

The geek disease

Silberman gestures repeatedly towards the aphorism that autism is more than just the 'geek disease', but as a tech journalist he's a tad too indulgent towards Silicon Valley and more than a little in love with the supposed genius of his chosen subjects. The book is overly prone to performing remote diagnosis of historical figures in science and technology  - a dicey proposition at best - and he obscures the stories of those diagnosed with true autism by mixing them rather freely with the narratives of "(male) engineers with autistic traits." It is generally recognised today that autism does not discriminate: that it affects the gifted and ungifted in equal measure. But the connection between autism and genius is a sexy story, and Silberman is perhaps more of a good story-teller than he is a journalist of science. 

Neurotribes is at its best when the author simply lets people with autism tell their stories in their own words. Situating the autism rights movement and the argument for greater recognition of neurodiversity in the context of earlier reforms opening society up to greater racial, sexual and gender diversity is the right approach. While I would have appreciated a greater emphasis on actual research into the causes of autism, it's true that we don't need to understand the biological roots of variance in order to adjust our societies to it (see also: gender identity). Intersectionality means, as I have mentioned before, letting minorities tell us what changes they need from society in their own voice: in giving voice to perhaps one of the largest minorities in the world, "Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism" thus performs a valuable service. 

Book Review: "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell

I am generally sceptical of the myth of meritocracy. That myth is largely how our current Western social institutions legitimise the inequality they produce, and is deployed in even fiercer forms to resist social policies to eliminate poverty. It is thus with some chagrin to report that I have only belatedly read Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 "Outliers: The Story of Success". First, the good news. "Outliers" is extraordinarily well written, compulsive to read, and crafts compelling anecdotes about the true nature of success. It challenges deeply help myths about the supposed genius of our culture's sporting, legal, and entrepreneurial heroes. 

Gladwell sets out to establish three core premises through which he wants to re-write the classical liberal narrative of success as the result of individual genius or talent:

• First, that success is more a matter of opportunity than talent, and opportunities are structured by social forces that are often hidden or obtuse in ways that are unintuitive or coincidental. 
• Secondly, that talent is largely a matter of having opportunities to practice (see #1). Gladwell popularised the so-called "10,000 hour" rule, which posits that extensive practice, not innate talent, distinguishes society's great artists, scientists and musicians from the rest of us. 
• Finally, Gladwell dives into the social and cultural factors that drive people to succeed, and argues that cultures which encourage "hard work" (see #2) produce more success.

For me, Gladwell fails to pull these arguments together into a cohesive whole. He proves his first point, but fails to establish a convincing factual or moral case for the second and third. 

Luck and Evolution

Gladwell is first and foremost a story-teller, and the strength of his arguments rests largely on the persuasiveness of his anecdotes. Fortunately, he leads with his best material. By exhaustively examining the relationship between coincidences such as birthdate and sporting success, Gladwell establishes a prima facie case that the artificial constraints imposed by society (in this instance, grouping players by birth year) create a selective pressure that advantages those born earliest in the selection period. It's not that those born earlier in the year are always going be slightly stronger, slightly taller and slightly faster than those born later in the year. Rather it's that the selection environment takes those minor, random differences and signal-boosts them, offering early opportunities for additional training and practice that mean that by the time these biological or developmental differences cease to matter, they've been supplanted by robust skill-based gradations.

Although Gladwell himself doesn't use evolutionary metaphors, the examples he provides offer compelling example after compelling example about how environment, rather than talent, shapes who succeeds. In Gladwell's narrative, the masters of Silicon Valley rose to prominence not because they're geniuses (most were talented, yes, but not academic standouts), but because they had the good fortune to be born in a time and place where they had opportunities to be ahead of the curve in practicing with a technology that would soon re-shape the entire economy. Gladwell's narrative history of the New York M&A legal scene is similar: the [predominantly Jewish] firms that became titans of Wall Street prevailed not because they were smarter, or better able to judge the financial markets, but because the prevailing cultural norms prevented more established WASP firms from gaining the skills and experience they would need to survive in the new neoliberal order. 

At times, Gladwell seems in awe of the talented individuals (both successful and unsuccessful) he interviewed for the book; but rather than hero worship, he accurately points out there is far more to individual success than general intelligence. Sociability and emotion intelligence matter too; as do the contacts, self-confidence and experience provided by some socio-economic backgrounds over others.  

Uneasy Bedfellows

Gladwell's alternative explanation for the success of these individuals is that practice and experience drive success. The distribution of opportunities to practice (for "10,000 hours") determines who are the standouts in a particular field. Unfortunately, the anecdote-driven nature of this claim undermines its persuasiveness. Gladwell cites a single study of musicians to grant his claim scientific weight, and it's worth noting that subsequent meta-analyses have failed to replicate the result outside the musical profession. 

The lack of a cohesive argumentative throughline becomes a particular problem in the second half of the book. It is here that Gladwell offers his case on what drives people to work hard on a task for the requisite 10,000 hours practice in the first place. Gladwell begins well by introducing the idea of cultural influences on behaviour through the often-cited work on Southerners in the US (Nisbett & Cohen) and the role of culture in airline crashes. But he then argues that some cultures are better equipped than other to produce individual behaviours that reliably produce success. My core problem is that, like so many others working in this space, Gladwell shifts the locus of success from biological to cultural factors without changing the essence of the story being told about why some groups succeed and others don't. 

Gladwell's chapter on "why Asians are good at math" is particularly egregious. Crafting a tale of pre-modern China as a capitalist, entrepreneurial idyll, he argues Chinese culture is supposedly adapted to reproduce behaviours of self-reliance, hard work and risk-taking. Even ignoring the atrocious lumping together of all of Asian economic and cultural history, his claim is also wrong on its historical face. While small-peasant landholding may have been the ideal during some periods in Chinese history, there were equally periods characterised by feudal, despotic or [in the later period, especially] market-dominated land-ownership. A more sophisticated version of Gladwell's argument could point to the emphasis on civil service exams in Confucian governance; the high population densities in the region; or the role of the immigrant experience in pushing parents to over-invest in their child's education. Instead, we get the laziest sort of innate cultural, 'just so' explanations.

Worse, perhaps, is the second-to-last chapter where Gladwell sketches a narrative of how we might equalise success. Like many boosters of charter (for non-American, read: private) schools, Gladwell believes that longer hours, more homework and stricter discipline can create a 'hard work' culture that lifts people out of poverty. While I'm amenable to arguments about extending the school day, by this point it's well understood that private schools are highly selective in taking students who are already gifted and/or driven, poorly serve those who aren't, and perpeutate a two-tiered system of education without actually improving outcomes (an issue addressed in Chapter X of my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age").

The Takeaways

While I would recommend "Outliers" as a reading experience, I would caution about overuse of its lessons. Gladwell chooses his anecdotes well, but they are ultimately just stories. While Gladwell focuses on understanding success, his book also (unintentionally or not) holds up a mirror to the origins of inequality. So while I while I applaud efforts to shift away from narratives of success rooted in individual merit, I would caution strongly against replacing them with either biological or cultural determinism. Culture is powerful, certainly, but no group is a monolith and every variation has both positive and negative attributes, depending on the skills demanded by society in a given historical moment. The question should not be how to create self-reliant strivers, but why we would want to structure our society so that only strivers succeed in the first place.