Matt Ridley: The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge (2015)

Edition: Harper Collins, 2015
Review number: 1513

While there are many interesting ideas, points and quotes in this book, I found it frustrating and unconvincing. While it is apparently about how evolution works in a number of settings, essentially those of complex emergent systems, much of it uses that as the basis for an attack on any form of control or management of these systems - it's a libertarian manifesto in all but name.

I have a fair number of issues with the book. First, and fundamentally, I don't think it makes a case for the word "evolution" being applied consistently to all the subjects. It starts, naturally enough, with one of the best known and best understood subjects, the evolution of life. Here, there is a sound mathematical foundation, a set of statistical rules which can predict many things (such as, for instance, the ways in which altruism can bestow an evolutionary advantage despite the immediate appearance that it shouldn't). While there are mathematical models for some of the other concepts, such as the economy, there isn't the same broad agreement on the most acceptable model. In some cases (education, for instance) it is hard to even see what a model would be like, and here it feels more as though something is evolutionary because it is complex and changes over time.

Second, the shortness of the treatments of the different topics makes it appear that Ridley makes his points through selective quotation. Some of the discussions do talk about other ideas in the field, but I think they are not given even the appearance of a fair hearing. Some authors are quoted repeatedly, which makes selective quoting seem more obvious. I don't think that this appearance was Ridley's intention, but it does reduce the impact of the book.

Thirdly, the book seems to me to avoid talking about some of the ethical issues involved in taking the libertarian approach. While he talks approvingly of unregulated private enterprise, and even makes it seem that this will improve the lot of everyone, the problem is that even in today's heavily regulated world, unethical individuals abuse positions of power over others: there have always been companies run as sweat shops, and we still see prosecutions for slavery and exploitation on a regular basis (especially, it seems, in those underground industries which are less regulated because of their essentially criminal nature, such as prostitution). It often seems that those who put forward libertarianism do so because they expect that they would be among the winners, and they don't really think about what this means for the losers. This isn't to say that live isn't going to be grim for the losers in the world as it is today, or hasn't been miserable in the past, and Ridley does cite several examples, including some from the worst moments of British colonialism.

Overall, there is much said which is interesting, but I found the book more frustrating than convincing. My rating: 5/10.

John O'Farrell: Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter 1979-1997 (1998)

Edition: Black Swan, 1999
Review number: 1098

Many tragic events can seem comic in retrospect, and in this book the depression accompanying being a Labour Part supporter in Thatcher's Britain is made very funny indeed. As someone mildly left wing (rabidly so by the standards of the place where I grew up, where even the Conservatives are too left wing to be voted onto the local council), I shared many of the disappointments felt by John O'Farrell, albeit in a less committed way partly dictated by being seven or eight years younger as well as by my own apathy. (I have only once been to a demonstration, against the Tiananmen Square massacre, and even that only involved a forty second walk.)

What Things Can Only Get Better consistently reminded me of was the series of Adrian Mole diaries; I liked this better because all the embarrassing social ineptitude which made me cringe with Sue Townsend's creation is missing. As a memoir of a time which I lived through from a point of view close to my own, it brought back a lot of memories. Of course, it is not altogether a tragic black comedy; all those who read it are likely to know that it will have a happy ending (at least for readers who share O'Farrell's viewpoint). And the story of the Labour victory in 1997 is told in an ecstatic, cathartic way, so the reader relives the triumphal feelings of 1 May over again. This is partly because Things Can Only Get Better was written before the euphoria wore off - after five years, many people are much more cynical about Blair's government. (It is noticeable how little the Conservatives have learnt from the internal difficulties experienced by the Labour party after Thatcher's victory in 1979 - history repeats itself with a vengeance.) I am not entirely sure what I think myself about them now, other than pleasure that the clip of Michael Portillo losing his seat is likely to appear in every TV compilation about nineties politics until the end of time. Any detailed analysis I could come up with would just be a dull catalogue of "on the other hand"s (and there is more than enough prevarication in my writing already).

Most people who are likely to enjoy this book probably already know about it (I've heard it serialised on the radio, for example). But if you have any interest in British politics recounted in an amusing way, particularly if you yourself were a Labour sympathiser in the eighties and nineties, I would urge you to read Things Can Only Get Better.

Michael Moorcock: The Opium General and Other Stories (1984)

Edition: Grafton, 1986 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 861

The immediately obvious strange fact about this collection is that three quarters of it is made up of a (short) novel length Jerry Cornelius story, and that The Alchemist's Question doesn't even provide the title. This comes from one of the other seven pieces, and is about a drug addict living in a dream world, and reads something like a bridge between the Jerry Cornelius stories and the novel Moorcock wrote a short while later celebrating the English capital, Mother London.

The other fiction consists of three below standard stories from the point of view of a Russian agent caught up in a future war; more interesting are the three political essays which round off the collection. The most substantial of these is a discussion of right wing politics in science fiction and fantasy, genres in which some of the most famous writers are in Moorcock's (anarchist, left wing) view extremists - Heinlein and Rand, for example, and, more unusually, Tolkien. I am not convinced that these writers are as pernicious as Moorcock makes out, partly because I don't think my politics have been changed by reading them, no matter how insidiously their views are promoted in their fiction.

One of the other essays is about censorship, and the kind of hypocrisy that destroys those who disagrees while pretending to tolerate disagreement (prosecutions of anarchist bookshops for obscenity), and that is part of the distaste Moorcock felt about Thatcher's Britain which is important in The Alchemist's Question, which is the last Jerry Cornelius story.

The story also draws upon the idea of the battle between Law and Chaos which is important in several of Moorcock's fantasy series, notably those involving Corum. Miss Brunner, who appears throughout the Cornelius chronicles, represents Law, rigidity and authoritarianism - to the extent that the desires to bring on a nuclear winter and make the world more uniform. She has become a figure not at all unlike an exaggeration of Margaret Thatcher. It looks as though the free spirited friends of Jerry Cornelius are about to be defeated, especially as Jerry himself is living in a semi-catatonic state. The ability to move between alternate universes is denied them, and they are trapped into trying a desperate alchemical ritual.

The story is much more pessimistic in tone than the earlier Jerry Cornelius novels; this has a great deal to do with the early eighties and how depressing Moorcock found Britain at that time. It is a savage attack on the pressure to conform, much stronger even then than fifteen years earlier when the quartet of novels was written. It ends up being less successful than its predecessors, mainly because Jerry, though always present, is rendered so ineffectual, so hopeless.

Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince (1514)

Translation: George Bull, 1961
Edition: Penguin, 1977
Review number: 368

There are a few books whose fame is based more on a distorted picture of their contents than on those contents themselves. Examples include the abstraction of the "unities" from The Poetics, and, more recently, the relationship between the writings of Stanislavsky and the dogma of "method acting". The Prince has perhaps suffered more than these two from its reputation, for that reputation accuses Machiavelli of advising princes to act in a hardly honourable way. Machiavelli was so strongly disapproved of that he was frequently equated with the devil during the sixteenth century. This is thought to be the reason for the popularity of the name "Old Nick" in England at this time, for example, though it seems to pre-date Machiavelli in origin. He appears in various Elizabethan plays in this character, notably Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (under a punning version of his name, Make-Evil).

The reason for this disapproval was based around Machiavelli's abandonment of the ideal man of virtue for the man who wishes to succeed in the real world. He explicitly denies that he is writing about the idealised states beloved by ancient philosophers (Plato's Republic is probably the most famous); he is writing about things the way they are. "The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation."

This is the seed on which Machiavelli's reputation as a demon was built. For it amounts to a rejection of the teachings of the Christian church, and of the chivalric ideals of the later Middle Ages. The church told men that God would protect and bring honour to the virtuous; chivalry that virtue was the duty of the true knight his burden being to accept what his conduct brought upon him. (I am using the male gender because the idea of a successful female ruler was alien to Western culture for many years to come; England's Elizabeth I succeeded by being as manlike as she could manage.) Such high standards were never maintained; many rulers went beyond Machiavelli's teachings in cynicism and opportunistic behaviour (Philip IV of France is a good example). Machiavelli openly states that this sort of thing is the way to behave in advice aimed at rulers; this is what is shocking about The Prince.

The reason that Machiavelli states this so openly is because of the underlying assumptions he makes. To him, the aims of a ruler are, first and foremost, to retain posession of a kingdom - The Prince deals only with monarchial forms of government - and secondly to enhance his own standing as a ruler. His advice about morality is derived from these ideas. This presupposition is in contrast to the earlier idea that the aims of the ruler should be to honour God, to set an example of obedience to the church, to act as the fount of chivalry for his people, and so on.

Having seen how Machiavelli breaks with the past, the question that follows is how relevant is is writing to the present day, almost five centuries later. The way that nations work and rulers relate to them was already changing in the early sixteenth century; in some ways, the type of states that Machiavelli was writing about already belonged in the past. He still retained unquestioned the idea that the principal function of the prince is to lead the nation in war. Virtually nothing that does not ultimately pertain to warfare is given any attention. But as the modern economic structure developed, this swiftly changed so that finance and trade came to be the dominant factors. Today, too, we in the West live in a culture in which government is far more intrusive into our everyday lives. Custom and tradition are less important and more easily manipulated (principally through the popular media).

But although Machiavelli's understanding of the function of a ruler is today out of date, and with it much of the detail of The Prince (for example, the need to become an excellent hunter to practise skills needed in fifteenth century warfare), his cynical and pragmatic view of life has not. Indeed, it is perhaps the dominant philosophy of our age and is the natural consequence of accepting the idea that we do not answer to any "higher power" for the actions we perform. The methodology adopted by Machiavelli could be applied to almost any situation: first, decide what is to count as success; then look at various ways in which it is possible to act in terms only of whether they will increase chances of success. The word "only" is important; Machiavelli would have us ignore the conventions of morality except to remember that they will influence the way that others think of us, which itself may be an element of the criteria for success.

Michael Dobbs: The Buddha of Brewer Street (1998)

Edition: HarperCollins, 1998
Review number: 165 

The Buddha of Brewer Street is the second of Michael Dobbs' new series about politics, featuring Thomas Goodfellowe, MP (whose name formed the title of the first book). Clearly disenchanted with the biting satire of his first political series, the House of Cards trilogy, Dobbs has embarked on something far gentler in that respect with the Goodfellowe novels. A word of warning, though: The Buddha of Brewer Street contains some explicit and extremely unpleasant torture scenes, making the book not one for the squeamish.

The plot concerns Goodfellowe's involvement with the Tibetan Dalai Lama, in the last few weeks he spends as a Foreign Office minister before resigning to attend to family affairs. When the Dalai Lama dies as the result of a terrorist attack, his closest followers begin the search for his reincarnated successor. (The treatment that they, another Tibetan monks, receive at the hands of the Chinese is what forms the unpleasant side of the book, mentioned above.) When they realise that the portents say the child has been born in Britain, Goodfellowe becomes involved.

As in the earlier book, the character of Goodfellowe is the mainstay of The Buddha of Brewer Street. The other people gain in realism the closer they are to him and the more they are involved in the chaotic private life which is so important in the portrayal of his character. (This is by no means an uncommon device, because it mirrors the way in which each person knows and understands more about those who are closest to them.) Dobbs writes well, and understands Westminster thoroughly, a combination which has produced much success for him and which ensures that many will continue to read his books in the future.