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536. Humankind: A Hopeful History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Rutger Bregman

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Public Policy

462 pages, published June 2, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

In Humankind, author Rutger Bregman rejects the widely accepted idea that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested and instead presents and supports his thesis that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the key factor to their success.  After giving the reader a 200,000 year history, Bregman demonstrates that we are evolutionarily adapted for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.  He also debunks commonly believed understandings of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, the Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” and shows that a real life shipwreck of boys on a remote island resulted in cooperation and teamwork rather than a Lord of the Flies style degeneration.

Quotes 

“So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”

 

“Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization’……That drug is the news.”

 

“Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.”

 

“An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’

 

“Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.”

 

“It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.”

 

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”

 

“If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.’ George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)”

 

“Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.”

 

“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

 

 “For centuries, even millennia, generals and governors, artists and poets had taken it for granted that soldiers fight. That if there’s one thing that brings out the hunter in us, it’s war. War is when we humans get to do what we’re so good at. War is when we shoot to kill. But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.14 The situation on Makin that night had been do-or-die, when you would expect everyone to fight for their lives. But in his battalion of more than three hundred soldiers, Marshall could identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger. Was it a lack of experience? Nope. There didn’t seem to be any difference between new recruits and experienced pros when it came to willingness to shoot. And many of the men who didn’t fire had been crack shots in training. Maybe they just chickened out? Hardly. Soldiers who didn’t fire stayed at their posts, which meant they ran as much of a risk. To a man, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades. And yet, when it came down to it, they shirked their duty. They failed to shoot.”

 

 “To understand where things went wrong, we have to go back 15,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Up until then, the planet had been sparsely populated and people banded together to stave off the cold. Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.22 Then the climate changed, turning the area between the Nile in the west and the Tigris in the east into a land of milk and honey. Here, survival no longer depended on banding together against the elements. With food in such plentiful supply, it made sense to stay put.  Huts and temples were built, towns and villages took shape and the population grew.  More importantly, people’s possessions grew. What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong. It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into play, the gap between rich and poor opened wide.”

 

“Reading through the 1300 pages of interviews … it’s patently obvious that Eichman was no brainless bureaucrat, He was a fanatic. He acted not out of indifference, but out of conviction. Like [Stanley] Milgram’s experimental subjects, he did evil because he believed he was doing good.”

 

“The emergence of the first large settlements triggered a seismic shift in religious life. Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done. A whole clerical class was put in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry. Had we eaten something forbidden? Said something wrong? Had an illicit thought?37 For the first time in history, we developed a notion of sin. And we began looking to priests to prescribe how we should do penance. Sometimes it was enough to pray or complete a strict set of rituals, but often we had to sacrifice cherished possessions–food or animals or even people.”

 

 “In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’  He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.  And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her. ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”

 

 

 “One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.”

 

My Take

In the same vein as Factfulness, Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks, I found the optimism of author Rutger Bregman in Humankind to be a hopeful and encouraging look at human nature and our future together on this planet.  A nice antidote to all the doomsayers out there.

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522. The Person You Mean to Be

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Dolly Chugh

Genre:   Non Fiction, Public Policy, Sociology

325 pages, published September 4, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In The Person You Mean to Be, social psychologist Dolly Chugh discusses her approach to confronting difficult issues including sexism, racism, inequality, and injustice in an attempt to make the world (and yourself) better. Dolly also discusses the causes of inequality and her research findings in unconscious bias.

Quotes 

“Equality says we treat everyone the same, regardless of headwinds or tailwinds. Equity says we give people what they need to have the same access and opportunities as others, taking into account the headwinds they face, which may mean differential treatment for some groups.”

 

 “Challenge yourself to hear their experience without questioning its expression. Avoid being the tone police.”

 

 “We redefine what it means to be a good person as someone who is trying to be better, as opposed to someone who is allowing themselves to believe in the illusion that they are always a good person.”

 

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, “I was wrong.” —

 

“If you are in the sun and I am in the rain, why is it divisive for me to point out this difference? What is really divisive is telling someone who is standing in the rain that it is not raining.”

 

“Antiracist educator and author Debby Irving uses an often-cited headwinds and tailwinds metaphor to explain the invisibility of these systemic, group-level differences. Headwinds are the challenges — some big, some small, some visible, some invisible — that make life harder for some people, but not for all people. When you run against a headwind, your speed slows down and you have to push harder. You can feel the headwind. When you have a tailwind pushing you, it is a force that propels you forward. It is consequential but easily unnoticed or forgotten. In fact, if you are like me when I jog with a tailwind, you may glow with pride at your great running time that day, as if it were your own athletic prowess. When you have the tailwind, you will not notice that some runners are running into headwinds. They may be running as hard as, or even harder than, you, but they will appear lazier and slower to you. When some of them grow tired and stop trying, they will appear self-destructive to you.”

 

 “Loving America is the most American of things to do. Why does loving America preclude an honest understanding of our history and its influence in our lives?”

 

 “When we feel sorry for someone, we inadvertently put ourselves in the high-power position.”

 

 “The more we care about something, the more likely we are to willfully ignore negative relevant information about it. The more we care about something, the less we want to know.”

 

My Take

A lot of woke perspective in this book.  The author makes some good points, but applying “equity of result” rather than “equality of opportunity” is likely to have a lot of unintended, negative consequences.

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506. The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Michael McCullough

Genre:  Non Fiction, Psychology, Sociology, Public Policy

368 pages, published May 12, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael McCullough explores the issue of why human beings are altruistic.  He first looks at this question through an evolutionary lens and then traces the development of increasing altruism and help to our fellow man throughout human history.

Quotes 

“Natural selection is a penny pincher.  People tend to actively avoid feeling empathy for strangers.”

 

“Reason is the slave of the passions.” David Hume

 

 “Modern humans’ concern for the welfare of perfect strangers has no analog in the rest of the animal kingdom or even in our own history as a species. It’s a true one-off.”

 

“Our stone-age ancestors didn’t care very much at all about the well-being of true strangers.”

 

“The 21st-century explosion of social media revolutionized philanthropy, allowing instant appeals and massive responses from “bathrobe humanitarians” sitting at their computers.”

 

My Take

The Kindness of Strangers and its exploration of the reasons why human beings are altruistic and seek to help their fellow man is a fascinating read.  I was especially interested in the section discussing how altruism is the result of natural selection. Cooperation and tamping down selfish instincts often led to greater survivability.  Worth a look.

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470. So You Want to Talk about Race

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Darla Schueth, Sue Deans

Author:   Ijeoma Oluo

Genre:   Non Fiction, Politics, Sociology, Cultural, Public Policy

248 pages, published January 16, 2018

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo offers her take on the racial landscape in America, addressing issues including privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word.

Quotes 

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.”

 

“If you live in this system of white supremacy, you are either fighting the system of you are complicit. There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice, it is not something you can just opt out of.”

 

“To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.”

 

“1. It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race. 2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color. 3. It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.”

 

“You are racist because you were born and bred in a racist, white supremacist society. White Supremacy is, as I’ve said earlier, insidious by design. The racism required to uphold White Supremacy is woven into every area of our lives. There is no way you can inherit white privilege from birth, learn racist white supremacist history in schools, consume racist and white supremacist movies and films, work in a racist and white supremacist workforce, and vote for racist and white supremacist governments and not be racist.”

 

“Systemic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces.”

 

“And if you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist. If you are able-bodied, you are ableist. If you are anything above poverty in a capitalist society, you are classist. You can sometimes be all of these things at once.”

 

My Take

I read So You Want to Talk About Race as part of my Boulder Rotary Club book group.  While the women who assigned it were well meaning, I found it to be a very offensive, counterproductive book.  It’s hard to take Ijeoma Oluo too seriously when she spends a chapter talking about how soft her hair is and how much she resents people asking to touch it.  Really?  My bigger issue with this polemical book is her basic premise that America is systemically racist.  This is the big lie being perpetrated in 2020.  If you disagree with this viewpoint, read Heather MacDonald’s comprehensive article on the subject (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice).  The police make approximately 10 million arrests a year.  For the last five years, the police have fatally shot about 1,000 civilians annually, the vast majority of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous.  In 2019, the police shot 14 unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims, 0.2% of the total.  This hardly constitutes an epidemic of police brutality.  Moreover, defunding the police will only worsen conditions in minority areas.

Tellingly, Oluo, whose mother is white and whose father is from Nigeria, routinely criticizes her mother who struggled as a single mother to raise Oluo and her brother after being abandoned by her black husband when Oluo was a toddler, while having nothing negative to say about her absentee father who provided her with zero support as she grew up.  Indeed, I believe that absent fathers is the real crisis in the black community which has a shockingly high 77% out of wedlock childbirth rate.  Children raised in single parent households face myriad obstacles that negatively impact their life prospects.  I (and many others) assert that this is the primary cause of black underperformance rather than systemic white supremacy argued by Oluo.  Today, the only law on the books which discriminates on the basis of race is affirmative action.  Accusing Americans of being white supremacists may make Oluo and others like her feel better, but it will do little to improve the lives of other black Americans.  To do that, the black community needs to take a cold-eyed look at their culture and advocate changes to it that will actually make a difference.

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466. The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ross Douthat

Genre:   Non Fiction, Sociology, Cultural, Economics, Politics, History, Philosophy

272 pages, published February 25, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Decadent Society, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores his thesis that the Western world is facing a crisis of decadence.  Douthat describes how the combination of wealth and technological advancement combines with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline create a kind of “sustainable decadence,” i.e. a civilizational malaise and drift.

Quotes 

 

My Take

While Douthat posits some interesting ideas in The Decadent Society, the sum is less than its parts.  He stretches hard with various anecdotes and data to validate his theme that we are in the midst of societal decline and decadence.  A few weeks after finishing, there is little memorable that I took away from this book.

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458. White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Scot Reader

Author:   Shelby Steele

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Politics, Sociology, Public Policy

208 pages, published May 29, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In 1955 the killers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted because they were white. Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. The age of white supremacy has given way to an age of “white guilt” and neither has been good for black Americans.  In this deeply thought analysis and personal recollections, acclaimed scholar Shelby Steele examines how liberal in the United States has undermined the black community by absolving them of personal responsibility thereby debilitating their ability to lift themselves up as equal members of American society.

Quotes 

“It was the first truly profound strategic mistake we made in our long struggle for complete equality. It made us a “contingent people” whose fate depended on what others did for us.”

“Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic “truth” that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism’s greatest source of power. It is also liberalism’s most fundamental corruption.”

 

“despite all he had endured as a black in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, he taught the boys that America was rich in opportunities for blacks if they were willing to work.”

 

“One of the delights of Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of superiority they grant.”

 

My Take

I found White Guilt to be a compelling read, especially in light of the “moment” our country is having with protests and rioting.  Shelby Steele offers a counter narrative to the one projected in the media and advanced by the woke Left, i.e. that America is irredeemably racist and it is impossible for blacks to get ahead in the face of so much discrimination.  Rather than accept this defeatism, Steele posits that the only way forward for black Americans is to embrace a culture of personal responsibility and empowerment.  The guilt of whites has made that harder to achieve as they have low expectations of blacks and seek to make allowances for them that actually serve to depress their initiative.  A “must read” for anyone interested in race relations.

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404. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans

Author:  Alex Kotlowitz

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Sociology

304 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Alex Kotlowitz, the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here, embeds himself in Chicago’s most turbulent neighborhoods during one summer to give a report from the inside.  The violence is staggering.  Over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire.  An American Summer paints a bleak portrait of despair and violence in America.

Quotes 

“. . .you can’t talk about death without celebrating life. How amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that’s slumping around them. How despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back. How in death there is love.”

 

“There are so many . . . who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us.”

 

“In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony…”

 

“Do you directly target the violence because it so discourages any kind of economic development? Or do you bring in jobs and rehab homes, knowing that with a sense of opportunity the violence will diminish?”

 

“The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.”

 

“I’m going to share something I learned since I been here and that is us as people when we have difficulty on our journey of life we tend to focus on what we need at the moment that we forget what we already have…”

 

“People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter.”

 

“You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city’s gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world.”

 

“The shooting doesn’t end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way.”

 

My Take

Man, this was a depressing book.  While Alex Kotlowitz does a good job of vividly describing the heartbreaking violence and hopelessness in the gang infested parts of Chicago, he offers no solutions.  We discussed this book at my Rotary book club and also were disheartened.  There are no easy answers.

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402. In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Joel Stein

Genre:    Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Humor, Economics

336 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Defense of Elitism is former TIME columnist Joel Stein’s take on America’s political culture war and a defense of the elite to which he proudly claims membership.

The night Donald Trump won the presidency, Joel Stein knew the main reason wasn’t economic anxiety or racism but that Trump was anti-elitist.  Hillary Clinton represented Wall Street, academics, policy papers, Davos, international treaties and the people who think they’re better than you. People like Joel Stein.  Trump represented something far more appealing, which was beating up people like Joel Stein.  To find out how this shift happened and what can be done, Stein spends a week in Roberts County, Texas, which had the highest percentage of Trump voters in the country. He also goes to the home of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams who predicted Trump’s win.

Quotes 

“More than 90 percent of whites with postgraduate degrees who voted for Hillary Clinton believe it’s “racist for a white person to want less immigration to help maintain the white share of the population,” while only 45 percent of minority voters feel that way. More than 80 percent of white people who voted for Hillary Clinton think diversity makes America stronger, while only 54 percent of black voters agree.”

 

My Take

In Defense of Elitism was an entertaining read.  Joel Stein is a witty writer and I found myself chuckling throughout this book.  Also, to his credit, Stein does not look down on the Trump supporters he meets in Roberts County, Texas.  To the contrary, he seems genuinely touched by their good will and continued prayers for him.

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383. The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Daniel Markovits

Genre:   Nonfiction, Education, Sociology, Economics, Public Policy

448 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The thesis of The Meritocracy Trap by Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits is that our current meritocratic society is ill serving both the winners and losers.  The losers who inhabit the bottom half (or maybe even more than that) of our country have seen their jobs exported or eliminated, see a worse future for their children, and are struggling to survive.  Their once nice towns are turning shabby as their kids move to urban centers or become addicted to opioids.  The winners, those who inhabit the top rungs of society, no longer pass down wealth in the manner of previous generation’s aristocracies.  Instead, they invest mightily in their children from birth through graduate school to become part of the hypercompetitive professional class in a winner take all game.  Having so much invested in their own human capital, modern day meritocratic winners willingly step onto a grueling treadmill of work and competition as this is the only way to maximize their return on investment.  They are left with lots of wealth, but at a steep, soul sucking cost.

Quotes 

“The traditional way of thinking about the conflict between the rich and the rest—as a battle between capital and labor—no longer captures what is really going on.”

 

“The overwhelmingly greater part of the recent increase in the top 1 percent’s aggregate income share is attributable not to a shift of overall income away from labor and in favor of capital, but rather to a shift within labor income, away from the middle class and in favor of elite workers.”

 

My Take

The Meritocracy Trap is one of the most interesting books that I have read in a long time.  Before reading it, I would have reflexively stated that meritocracy is an unalloyed good that brings efficiency and wealth to societies that embrace it.  After reading this book, I’m not so sure.  While my husband and I (both lawyers from an elite law school who are early retirees) escaped the punishing aspects of work described in the book, I do not want my children to pursue careers where they are putative “winners,” but miss out on the things that make life purposeful and meaningful.  I also have a lot of empathy for the “losers” in our country who struggle to keep the American Dream alive and have little chance of entering the top rung.  Markovits made me think about these ideas for a long time after I finished this book; the hallmark of a great read.

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381. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Malcolm Gladwell

Genre:    Nonfiction, Psychology, Sociology, Science

400 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? Talking to Strangers is all about what happens when we encounter people we don’t know, why it often goes awry, and what it says about us.

How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to ‘get’ other people?

Quotes 

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception – is worse.”

 

“The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet… The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

 

“Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.”

 

“The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.”

 

“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.”

 

My Take

Like all Malcolm Gladwell books, Talking to Strangers is a fascinating read.  I always learn something new and unexpected from him.  In this book, my main takeaway is that while trusting others and giving strangers the benefit of the doubt can occasionally lead to an unfortunate result, it is the price that we all have to pay to live in a society that works.

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