NON-FICTION
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
By Bill Bishop
Commentators have been sharing their worries over the state of the community in American society for at least 150 years.
In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America predicted that Americans would struggle to balance the needs of the community with the individualistic American character.
In the 1950s, David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd traced the evolution of dominant American personality types from tradition-directeds to modern-day outer-directeds who define themselves as a function of the way others live, work, think about politics and play.
In the 1980s Robert Bellah wrote Habits of the Heart, contending that our preoccupation with our own pursuits was often detrimental to our common interest. And in 2000, Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone used a raft of data on American life to postulate the collapse and potential revival of the American community.
Now Bill Bishop, a former newspaper reporter living in Austin, Texas, offers a new analysis of the American community in his book The Big Sort, published in May 2008. He has scoured many sources of data-voting records, IRS income patterns, patent filings, and poll numbers from advertising firms to craft a picture of Americans sorting themselves in the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities—not at the regional level, or the red state/blue state level but at the micro level of the city and neighborhood.
He begins by quoting the late playwright Arthur Miller on the 2004 election: "How can the polls be neck and neck and I don't know one Bush supporter?" He then visits tiny Wauconda, Washington, outside Spokane, and describes political segregation, the politics of migration and the psychology of the tribe.
Bishop relies heavily on election data. Even though (until the last general election) most recent presidential elections have been exceedingly close, much of the country has actually been polarized into blocks with landslides for one or the other candidate. As a result, national and state governments increasingly have had to reconcile the demands of communities that have less and less in common with each other. In this setting of political segregation, the "us" versus "the fringe" is often based on geography. All the Nebraskans agree, "Those people in California are really weird."
In this consistently readable text, Bishop offers an intriguing discussion of the politics of "people like us."
We have built a country, Bishop writes, where everyone can choose their neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with their lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation: pockets of like-minded citizens have become so ideologically inbred that they don't know and can't understand "those people" who live just a few miles away.
Here's how he describes Democrats: "[They] want to live by their own rules. They hang out with friends at parks and think that politics and religion should not mix. They watch Sunday morning talking heads and late-night television. They listen to NPR, read music and lifestyle publications and watch network television. They are more likely to own cats."
In contrast, "Republicans go to church, spend more time with family and get their news from Fox News or the radio. They own guns, read sports and home magazines and talk politics at church. They believe that people should take more personal responsibility for their lives, and that overwhelming force is the way to deal with terrorists. They are more likely than Democrats to own dogs."
Does this balkanization matter? Bishop contends that it does. Mixed company moderates, like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.
We have cleansed our personal spaces of any messy diversity, and removed all the give and take that fosters democracy. This division might not be so complete if people of differing views at least lived within shouting distance, or encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But many of us have chosen our neighborhoods because the people are just like us and hence comfortable.
Bishop draws on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create a compelling account of the way we live now. I am sure there will be some follow-up since our recent election. It will be interesting to see whether new data and analysis reflect simply overwhelming frustration with our current state of affairs or some revival of more widespread appreciation for common values and purpose.
Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason
By Russell Shorto
If you are like me, the most you can remember about Descartes is the phrase, "cogito ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am." That's from the "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences" published in 1637, in case you've forgotten.
Descartes was born in France, but spent most of his adult life in the Dutch republic. One of the most influential and controversial thinkers of his time, he died of pneumonia in Stockholm in 1650. He was buried there, until his remains were unearthed some 16 years later by the French Ambassador Hugues De Terlon. Or were they???
De Terlon, who believed that Descartes had penetrated to the mystical heart of nature, took a finger bone as a religious relic, a holy object meant to bridge the gap between the material and the eternal.
It turns out that Descartes' body was buried and reburied at least twice and at some point, his head (skull) was separated from the rest of his body. Surely, this is irony you could not make up. De Terlon had the bones interred with honor at the Church of St. Genevieve in Paris and then, more than a century later, they were rescued from mindless mobs during the French Revolution and unearthed again. They ultimately landed at the Museum of Man in Paris.
Russell Short takes the reader on a compelling journey through 350 years of history in search of the true final resting place of the physical remains of the man ostensibly responsible for the advent of rational thought and modern scientific inquiry.
In an age of faith, what Descartes proposed—that one could find truth in facts that could be proved, and not in reliance on tradition and the teaching of the Church—seemed like heresy.
After his death Descartes' physical remains decomposed, but his philosophical outlook grew and spread. Like-minded thinkers around Europe passionately embraced his book, and "the method" was applied to medicine, nature, politics and society.
But this is more than a historical travelogue. Shorto recounts how the life and work of Descartes have been interpreted through the centuries, how his ideas not only directed the journey of his physical remains but shaped the fabric of Western civilization.
Shorto writes, "But my point in pursuing the trail of Descartes bones has been metaphorical: uncannily, they seem to form a spine, if you will pardon the expression, of modernity itself.
"By the time of the French Revolution, the [mathematician] Condorcet and his compatriots looked on the bones in the mirror opposite way: as relics of secularism, symbols of the force that reoriented people and society toward the here and now and gave rise to the principles of individual liberty, equality, and democracy.
"For Berzelius, Cuvier, and other nineteenth century scientists, the skull was a talisman of science. Descartes' bones-or rather, the meanings people have attached to them—are really about who we were and are, including the convictions and confusions and confrontations that divide us."
The controversy Descartes ignited continues to our day. The parallel to religious fundamentalism here and abroad is obvious. Scientists write best sellers about atheism, and in medicine, we struggle to define best practice based on evidence, not tradition. Shorto is spot-on with regard to the enduring aspects of Descartes thought. In the epilogue, he notes:
"We are all philosophers because our condition demands it. We live every moment in a universe of seemingly eternal thoughts and ideas, yet simultaneously in the constantly churning and decaying world of our bodies and their humble situations.... The result is a nagging need to find meaning."
This is a smart and entertaining look that presents a series of real events as a detective story to structure a review of history and the evolution of rational thought.
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