I’m proud to say I’ve got quite an eclectic mix of books for the reading list this month! But I’m less to proud to say that most of the books are from mainstream political and academic figures.
What can I say? With an election coming up, I’ve had the desire to do a bit of reading in mainstream politics and society. Maybe I can pick up some reasons why people do the things they do?
I’ll certainly take understanding over imitation.
Tim Alberta – The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
Alberta is an evangelical journalist interested in how his fellow evangelicals fell for hardcore Trumpism, vaccine denial, conspiracy theory, and outright idolatry in the way they promote a far right-wing U.S.
That’s quite a mission. And it’s one that might already confused some readers. Isn’t this just normal evangelicalism? Haven’t they always been this way?
Alberta argues not. He sees evangelicalism as a movement to purify the Christian church. And he situates the subject of Christianity as the kingdom in heaven rather than one on earth.
On Alberta’s view, evangelicalism corrupted itself by turning to politics. We see this first with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, as well as his earlier founding of Liberty University. This built the infrastructure of Trumpism. It also gave people the taste of winning at all cost.
Alberta extensively interviews evangelicals about both the process and the result. I found most striking about these interviews the ease with which evangelicals turn on one another. They even turn on people they’ve known for decades. Parishoners abandon beloved pastors, and they threaten their neighbors and friends. And they do these things over Donald Trump, of all people.
Will we ever get used to that?
Scott Barry Kaufman – Ungifted
I first heard about Kaufman’s book on the Hidden Brain podcast. On the podcast, he told a compelling personal story about how his school put him in a lower-tier program due to a bad IQ test result. He went on to describe a career as a psychologist who wants to expand our notion of ‘smart.’
He tells in this book a much deeper version of that story. The book tours both Kaufman’s personal life and his professional quest.
And it’s a quite informative book. Kaufman presents the vast psychological literature on intelligence in a straightforward way most people can understand. He tells the story without bashing either traditional notions of intelligence or the standardized testing that assesses it.
In the end, Kaufman persuasively argues that we should broaden the concept. But he’s a bit less successful in his formal definition in the final chapter. Indeed, he broadens ‘intelligence’ so much that we might question its value.
Jerry Z. Muller – The Tyranny of Metrics
Muller takes a critical look at performance metrics in the modern world of work. He especially focuses on their tendency to drift from their natural home in the business world and into the non-profit and academic worlds. Muller is none too impressed.
He argues that performance metrics are quite useful in identifying low performers. We can also use them for rote, easily measured work.
But it goes downhill quickly from there. Muller carefully documents how metrics fail for job evaluation or less tangible work. They provide people with perverse incentives to manipulate the data. And they easily slide into a system of managerial control. Moreover, workers waste many hours tracking their own work.
I found Muller’s book at its most helpful when he situated the struggle over metrics within basic class struggle, i.e., between business owners and managers and workers. Metrics provide owners with a took to assert their will. This often comes at the expense of both workers and their direct managers. This leads to worse outcomes, especially in fields like education and medicine.
The book is rather broadly applicable. I’d recommend it to just about anyone who works for a company and has a boss.
Nancy Pelosi – The Art of Power
Pelosi delivers an election year memoir, despite denying it’s a memoir. In it, she focuses on some of her major moments in politics. She covers everything from her early work on HIV to the Affordable Care Act to attacks on the nation and her husband.
For the most part, the book is fine. But I should admit it fell short of my expectations. Given the title, I thought we might get some insights into the nature of power. After all, Pelosi is one of our nation’s most effective wielders of power.
But that’s not what’s happening here. Readers hoping for that should give this one a pass.
Marc Siegel – COVID
Siegel is a doctor who writes regularly about fear and public health. For obvious reasons, the Covid pandemic stood out as a great subject for him. He published this one in October 2020, meaning he wrote it early in the pandemic, well before the release of the vaccines. He even wrote it before the massive fall 2020 wave of deaths.
Helpfully, Siegel summarizes his case in the intro. He thinks just about everyone in the U.S. – from liberal Covid hawks to right-wing Covid denialists – indulge in unscientific thinking and irrational fear mongering. He thinks they do so largely in reaction to one another. They thereby harm society in their conflicts.
In one sense, that’s fine. In another sense, I started this book from a place of skepticism. Siegel is a Fox New contributor who leans toward Trump. Tucker Carlson endorsed this book. These things don’t lead Siegel to say anything especially wild, at least here. They might even benefit him in his discussion of school closures in the fall of 2020. But it’s worth noting that he tends to excessively ‘both sides’ every problem, even when the right-wingers were clearly the bigger problem (e.g., on wearing masks in 2020).
Finally, I should warn the reader that this book has a lot of typos. It strongly needs an editor. I normally don’t mention this in reviews, but it became a major distraction to me while I was reading the last few chapters of this one.
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