Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, The Undercover Economist, and Born to Run
The volunteer who lived at this site before me left his library here when he went back to the United States. He seems like a nice enough fella, but his tastes in literature are pretty questionable.
All of the books he left here fail in one way or another, from the mediocre and overrated (look even Aldous Huxley says he thinks its flawed), to the drippy and hollow (a dozen POV characters, one narrative voice, and absolutely zero things of value to say), to the flat-out bizarre (the Sermon on the Mount was really about how you need to meditate, and also all major religious figures agree with my New Age-y position as long as the only major religious figures are Jesus and Buddha). However, I want to talk about three books in particular, and one thing that I’ve kind of been thinking about.
Reading the Bible Again, for the First Time, by Marcus J. Borg
I’m cheating including this book here, since I actually enjoyed it for the most part. Borg is a Christian Socialist, passionate about his subject matter, and writes a smooth breezy narrative. There’s a heavy historical component, which is pretty interesting, and Borg seems to know his stuff. But this one thing kept bothering me.
I don’t want to start an argument, so I’m going to try to tackle this with as light a touch as possible and avoid the “speaking as a…” disclaimer. I think most people agree that the Bible has problematic passages in it. These appear predominately in the lists of Laws in the Old Testament, and in Paul’s letters in the New. There is stuff that’s sexist, homophobic, anti-sex, and generally vindictive and scary; and there are many lines that have been used by hateful and intolerant people to promote their hateful, intolerant agendas. Common ways of dealing with these passages (by Christians) include, taking them at face value, ignoring them and focusing on the positive, dismissing them as human error and products of their time period, or considering them invalid by virtue of other contradictory passages.
Another way of dealing with them, and the one the author of the book chooses, is to play the semantics game until you get them to mean something less controversial. This holds the most true in the section about Paul’s epistles, where Borg claims that all the squeamish stuff was the result of only having one side of the conversation (Paul’s letters are responses to questions asked by members of his churches) and, oh look! if you turn this passage around and stand it on its head and add in some quotation marks, he’s not REALLY saying that women don’t belong in positions of authority.
Borg is obviously a big fan of Paul, and he does a pretty good job conveying that this was a brilliant charismatic person. It’s a little annoying that he also needs to apologize (apaulogize?) for anything less than progressive that Paul might have said almost a thousand years ago, especially when the theme of the whole book is about how you shouldn’t take everything in the Bible at face value.
Oh, and he also does this really irritating thing where he’s like, sure I can believe in faith healings and even things like levitation, but turning water into wine and raising the dead has to be metaphorical because that could never happen. I am really trying to not be obtuse here, but that seems like a completely arbitrary distinction to me.
The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford
This book is rambling, sloppy, and rushed in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of that Freakenomics book. It’s also a big slobbery free-market blowjob. Seriously, this guy and the free market need to get a room or something. If he loves the free market so much, why doesn't he marry it? It is embarrassing to watch.
After starting out with like a billion interminable chapters about how supply and demand works, Harford gets around to his real thesis which is that, if left to its own devices, the Market will sort out, not just itself, but EVERYTHING. Environmental concerns, worker wages, and the developing world will all be magically fixed by benevolent market-gods who will see that everything works out okay in the end. This is disingenuous, stupid, and disgusting of him.
Harford actually has the balls to claim that sweatshops in poor countries are a good thing, because if the sweatshops weren’t there then everyone would be ragpickers and prostitutes, as if these are the only two options that could ever possibly be available to them and to hell with human dignity and decent treatment. He seriously actually said exactly that, and I am not exaggerating for effect or paraphrasing. In fact, I’ll quote it so you can’t accuse me of being a being a drama queen.
Jonah Peretti and his sympathizers have rightly drawn attention to the fact that in developing countries workers endure terrible working conditions. Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means - hard as it is to believe - that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing a reeking landfill…” (pg 225)
I’ll ignore all that crappy writing and tortured syntax and get right to the point.
We’ve now reached a point that slacktivist arrives at a lot, where we have to ask ourselves if this guy is evil, or just colossally stupid. Is he stupid because he really earnestly thinks that these are the only two alternatives for the developing world and that anyone who talks about poor working conditions in sweatshops obviously just wants them all shut down and the workers thrown out? Or is he evil because he knows that there are other options (improving conditions, paying workers more, treating them with basic human dignity) and he just ignores them?
Eventually, he gives all the socially conscious people who might be reading a pat on the head and assures them that conditions will eventually improve themselves like magically or something, because that’s what happened during the American Industrial Revolution. Maybe in a few generations or whatever. Which I’m sure comes as a great comfort to all those kids in China who spend 15 hours every day sewing elastic into his underwear.
He also dismisses environmental concerns with a wave of his hand, saying that third world factories only produce clothes and toys and other such consumer goods, and heavily pollutant factories that produce chemicals and industrial waste exist primarily in developed countries. This ignores not only obvious counter-examples like the Union Carbide plant in India, but also entire industries like mining, logging, and fishing. By defining foreign interests in the developing world along the artificially narrow lines of “manufacturing” he gets to win his little environmental argument against his little strawman, but it’s a pretty hollow victory.
Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall
Christopher McDougall is a charlatan and a piece of shit.
This is story of a pack of literally mentally ill alcoholics who go down into Copper Canyon in Mexico to organize a marathon with some members of a Native tribe famous for their long distance runners. McDougall is the journalist assigned to cover the event, and boy does this dude have Opinions.
He has Opinions on Native rights, Imperialism, shoe companies, veganism, women, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. All of his opinions are very poorly informed and thought out, and that’s why he’s a charlatan. All his opinions also come from the most privileged, arrogant point of view imaginable, and that’s why he’s a piece of shit.
Maybe I’m a little oversensitive. Some of the themes addressed in this book have been on my mind a lot lately, since I’m currently living and working in a rural corner of Central Asia. The semi-nomadic people I encounter every day remind me in a lot of ways of the Tarahumara that McDougall writes about, and they’re facing similar issues of rapid industrialization and the modern world reaching even the most remote and forgotten corners of their country.
Obviously, problems arise when this happens. People bringing in new goods and services don’t have the best intentions of the native people at heart, and it’s easy for obesity to become epidemic when cheap junk food becomes available, or alcoholism to become a problem when hard liquor replaces the low alcohol content traditional beverages. Good things happen too, though. Modernization provides schools, hospitals, and opportunities. And even something like cell phone service can mean a lot to families living alone in the countryside with their herds.
However, McDougall seems to think that everything from tequila to schoolbooks to Burger King to vaccines is ultimately going to end in tragedy for the poor innocent Tarahumara. He goes off on long tengents about how the encroaching Western culture is ruining their traditional ways, and seems to be of the opinion that we ought to do nothing for the Natives, save shut them up in a human terrarium and treat them like some kind of theme park where tourists can go to ride a donkey or something.
Not once does he ask a Tarahumara what they think of the new developments (I guarantee you, he or she would be ecstatic about at least some of them), though he does tip his hand once near the end. He mentions a paved road that’s just been built as a “tragedy”. Why is it a tragedy? Because the Tarahumara in the town no longer practice their long distance running; they just take cars everywhere. Apparently it did not occur to him that no one is forcing people to take cars, and that the Tarahumara are just as free to run as they ever were, but obviously they prefer the new transportation.
I don’t want to make it sound like this isn’t a complex issue, or that the Tarahumara’s situation is exactly equivalent to the situation of the people I work with. But for all his hymns to the noble traditional way of life, he seems to only want the Tarahumara to preserve their traditional ways so that he, a citizen of the developed world, can benefit from them. Whether it’s picking the Tarehumara mind for running and dietary tips, enjoying the breathtaking and unspoiled view from the rim of Copper Canyon, or just feeling a little less bad about all the ways he’s benefitted from centuries of Colonial oppression, it’s pretty obvious that the question always in the back of McDougall’s mind is, what can these people do for me?
While helping coordinate the race between Tarahumara and Americans, McDougall chips in a few bags of corn to go to the winners and then seems to consider his humanitarian work done. Born to Run doesn’t even work as an awareness-raising campaign, since he can’t stop going on and on about how happy and carefree and simple the Tarahumara are, and how they don’t need or want anything from the outside world.
Oh, he’s also totally weird and gross about women. Every female he encounters in the whole book, regardless of her age (10-year-olds, Dude), accomplishments, or relationship to McDougall earns the epithet “beautiful”, which I think he thinks is a compliment and not totally creepy. Also, an early chapter describes a time some Tarahumara competed in an American marathon where the expected winner was a woman. Near the end of the race, the woman is out in front, and a member of McDougall’s mentally ill alcoholic posse shouts out to the Tarahumara, “She’s a witch. You must run her down like a deer!”
Instead of quoting this once and then dismissing it as the crazy ranting that it is, McDougall is so struck by the poetry here that he has to keep using it. It’s like a recurring metaphor throughout the whole rest of the book, and he seems totally unconcerned that it basically sounds like instructions to rape.
Scattered throughout are many outright lies and exaggerations. McDougall says that the Tarahumara always dress in their traditional clothing, practice some kind of Pagan Shamanistic religion, and get hella drunk on potent homebrewed beer. This article, written around the same time, by a reporter who was even in some of the same places, says that many men wear jeans and cowboy boots, the native religion is mystical Christianity, and the beer has very low alcohol content. Whoever shall I believe? The reporter for the respected periodical with over 100 years of history? Or the charlatan and piece of shit?
Then there are his anthropological theories, that seem to be little more than fanciful wishful thinking. Prehistoric people didn’t suffer from depression! There was perfect equality between the genders! Which, uh, I guess those things are technically possible but like you might want to provide some evidence for them before you start shootin from the hip. (No, Clan of the Cave Bear is not evidence)
Conclusion
So, why group these books together? Except for Born to Run, they aren’t even all THAT bad. But I’ve noticed a common theme amongst them that’s far more fail than any instance of bad characterization, clunky writing, or poor plotting. These books have fail of the soul.
These are ostensibly progressive books with radical, free thinking world views. They present new theories and talk about idealism and virtue, but at the same time they do nothing that even hints at criticizing the existant status quo. Don’t worry about troubling messages in the Bible; they didn’t really mean it that way, so there’s no need to question your belief system. Sweatshops in the developing world? Really a huge benefit for everyone over there, and also, coincidentally enough, a huge benefit for those of us who get cheap goods. Remember those Native Americans your ancestors wiped out in order to steal their land? Well, it turns out that they’re just as happy as can be living on their Reservations and their crushing poverty can even benefit you.
These are books for people who were handed a good lot in life simply by virtue of their birth (middleclass, Western, white, male, heterosexual, etc.). They recognize that many of the good things they enjoy are at the expense of people elsewhere in the world, and that every day they benefit indirectly from horrible crimes committed by their ancestors. Such is the nature of living in the developed world, and awareness of this fact is a good thing, I think.
People deal with this knowledge in different ways. Some try to give back, some despair, some ignore it, some try to rationalize it. Some just read a bunch of books that tell them to relax, because they live in the best of all possible worlds. Watching these authors jump through hoops to reinforce the dominant paradigm and stroke their readers’ poor fragile egos was insulting and sad. The moral of all these stories is that there’s injustice in the world, but it’s not OUR fault. It’s not OUR responsibility. We’ve done all we can to fix it. Who the implied “we” is here is more than obvious.
All of the books he left here fail in one way or another, from the mediocre and overrated (look even Aldous Huxley says he thinks its flawed), to the drippy and hollow (a dozen POV characters, one narrative voice, and absolutely zero things of value to say), to the flat-out bizarre (the Sermon on the Mount was really about how you need to meditate, and also all major religious figures agree with my New Age-y position as long as the only major religious figures are Jesus and Buddha). However, I want to talk about three books in particular, and one thing that I’ve kind of been thinking about.
Reading the Bible Again, for the First Time, by Marcus J. Borg
I’m cheating including this book here, since I actually enjoyed it for the most part. Borg is a Christian Socialist, passionate about his subject matter, and writes a smooth breezy narrative. There’s a heavy historical component, which is pretty interesting, and Borg seems to know his stuff. But this one thing kept bothering me.
I don’t want to start an argument, so I’m going to try to tackle this with as light a touch as possible and avoid the “speaking as a…” disclaimer. I think most people agree that the Bible has problematic passages in it. These appear predominately in the lists of Laws in the Old Testament, and in Paul’s letters in the New. There is stuff that’s sexist, homophobic, anti-sex, and generally vindictive and scary; and there are many lines that have been used by hateful and intolerant people to promote their hateful, intolerant agendas. Common ways of dealing with these passages (by Christians) include, taking them at face value, ignoring them and focusing on the positive, dismissing them as human error and products of their time period, or considering them invalid by virtue of other contradictory passages.
Another way of dealing with them, and the one the author of the book chooses, is to play the semantics game until you get them to mean something less controversial. This holds the most true in the section about Paul’s epistles, where Borg claims that all the squeamish stuff was the result of only having one side of the conversation (Paul’s letters are responses to questions asked by members of his churches) and, oh look! if you turn this passage around and stand it on its head and add in some quotation marks, he’s not REALLY saying that women don’t belong in positions of authority.
Borg is obviously a big fan of Paul, and he does a pretty good job conveying that this was a brilliant charismatic person. It’s a little annoying that he also needs to apologize (apaulogize?) for anything less than progressive that Paul might have said almost a thousand years ago, especially when the theme of the whole book is about how you shouldn’t take everything in the Bible at face value.
Oh, and he also does this really irritating thing where he’s like, sure I can believe in faith healings and even things like levitation, but turning water into wine and raising the dead has to be metaphorical because that could never happen. I am really trying to not be obtuse here, but that seems like a completely arbitrary distinction to me.
The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford
This book is rambling, sloppy, and rushed in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of that Freakenomics book. It’s also a big slobbery free-market blowjob. Seriously, this guy and the free market need to get a room or something. If he loves the free market so much, why doesn't he marry it? It is embarrassing to watch.
After starting out with like a billion interminable chapters about how supply and demand works, Harford gets around to his real thesis which is that, if left to its own devices, the Market will sort out, not just itself, but EVERYTHING. Environmental concerns, worker wages, and the developing world will all be magically fixed by benevolent market-gods who will see that everything works out okay in the end. This is disingenuous, stupid, and disgusting of him.
Harford actually has the balls to claim that sweatshops in poor countries are a good thing, because if the sweatshops weren’t there then everyone would be ragpickers and prostitutes, as if these are the only two options that could ever possibly be available to them and to hell with human dignity and decent treatment. He seriously actually said exactly that, and I am not exaggerating for effect or paraphrasing. In fact, I’ll quote it so you can’t accuse me of being a being a drama queen.
Jonah Peretti and his sympathizers have rightly drawn attention to the fact that in developing countries workers endure terrible working conditions. Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means - hard as it is to believe - that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing a reeking landfill…” (pg 225)
I’ll ignore all that crappy writing and tortured syntax and get right to the point.
We’ve now reached a point that slacktivist arrives at a lot, where we have to ask ourselves if this guy is evil, or just colossally stupid. Is he stupid because he really earnestly thinks that these are the only two alternatives for the developing world and that anyone who talks about poor working conditions in sweatshops obviously just wants them all shut down and the workers thrown out? Or is he evil because he knows that there are other options (improving conditions, paying workers more, treating them with basic human dignity) and he just ignores them?
Eventually, he gives all the socially conscious people who might be reading a pat on the head and assures them that conditions will eventually improve themselves like magically or something, because that’s what happened during the American Industrial Revolution. Maybe in a few generations or whatever. Which I’m sure comes as a great comfort to all those kids in China who spend 15 hours every day sewing elastic into his underwear.
He also dismisses environmental concerns with a wave of his hand, saying that third world factories only produce clothes and toys and other such consumer goods, and heavily pollutant factories that produce chemicals and industrial waste exist primarily in developed countries. This ignores not only obvious counter-examples like the Union Carbide plant in India, but also entire industries like mining, logging, and fishing. By defining foreign interests in the developing world along the artificially narrow lines of “manufacturing” he gets to win his little environmental argument against his little strawman, but it’s a pretty hollow victory.
Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall
Christopher McDougall is a charlatan and a piece of shit.
This is story of a pack of literally mentally ill alcoholics who go down into Copper Canyon in Mexico to organize a marathon with some members of a Native tribe famous for their long distance runners. McDougall is the journalist assigned to cover the event, and boy does this dude have Opinions.
He has Opinions on Native rights, Imperialism, shoe companies, veganism, women, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. All of his opinions are very poorly informed and thought out, and that’s why he’s a charlatan. All his opinions also come from the most privileged, arrogant point of view imaginable, and that’s why he’s a piece of shit.
Maybe I’m a little oversensitive. Some of the themes addressed in this book have been on my mind a lot lately, since I’m currently living and working in a rural corner of Central Asia. The semi-nomadic people I encounter every day remind me in a lot of ways of the Tarahumara that McDougall writes about, and they’re facing similar issues of rapid industrialization and the modern world reaching even the most remote and forgotten corners of their country.
Obviously, problems arise when this happens. People bringing in new goods and services don’t have the best intentions of the native people at heart, and it’s easy for obesity to become epidemic when cheap junk food becomes available, or alcoholism to become a problem when hard liquor replaces the low alcohol content traditional beverages. Good things happen too, though. Modernization provides schools, hospitals, and opportunities. And even something like cell phone service can mean a lot to families living alone in the countryside with their herds.
However, McDougall seems to think that everything from tequila to schoolbooks to Burger King to vaccines is ultimately going to end in tragedy for the poor innocent Tarahumara. He goes off on long tengents about how the encroaching Western culture is ruining their traditional ways, and seems to be of the opinion that we ought to do nothing for the Natives, save shut them up in a human terrarium and treat them like some kind of theme park where tourists can go to ride a donkey or something.
Not once does he ask a Tarahumara what they think of the new developments (I guarantee you, he or she would be ecstatic about at least some of them), though he does tip his hand once near the end. He mentions a paved road that’s just been built as a “tragedy”. Why is it a tragedy? Because the Tarahumara in the town no longer practice their long distance running; they just take cars everywhere. Apparently it did not occur to him that no one is forcing people to take cars, and that the Tarahumara are just as free to run as they ever were, but obviously they prefer the new transportation.
I don’t want to make it sound like this isn’t a complex issue, or that the Tarahumara’s situation is exactly equivalent to the situation of the people I work with. But for all his hymns to the noble traditional way of life, he seems to only want the Tarahumara to preserve their traditional ways so that he, a citizen of the developed world, can benefit from them. Whether it’s picking the Tarehumara mind for running and dietary tips, enjoying the breathtaking and unspoiled view from the rim of Copper Canyon, or just feeling a little less bad about all the ways he’s benefitted from centuries of Colonial oppression, it’s pretty obvious that the question always in the back of McDougall’s mind is, what can these people do for me?
While helping coordinate the race between Tarahumara and Americans, McDougall chips in a few bags of corn to go to the winners and then seems to consider his humanitarian work done. Born to Run doesn’t even work as an awareness-raising campaign, since he can’t stop going on and on about how happy and carefree and simple the Tarahumara are, and how they don’t need or want anything from the outside world.
Oh, he’s also totally weird and gross about women. Every female he encounters in the whole book, regardless of her age (10-year-olds, Dude), accomplishments, or relationship to McDougall earns the epithet “beautiful”, which I think he thinks is a compliment and not totally creepy. Also, an early chapter describes a time some Tarahumara competed in an American marathon where the expected winner was a woman. Near the end of the race, the woman is out in front, and a member of McDougall’s mentally ill alcoholic posse shouts out to the Tarahumara, “She’s a witch. You must run her down like a deer!”
Instead of quoting this once and then dismissing it as the crazy ranting that it is, McDougall is so struck by the poetry here that he has to keep using it. It’s like a recurring metaphor throughout the whole rest of the book, and he seems totally unconcerned that it basically sounds like instructions to rape.
Scattered throughout are many outright lies and exaggerations. McDougall says that the Tarahumara always dress in their traditional clothing, practice some kind of Pagan Shamanistic religion, and get hella drunk on potent homebrewed beer. This article, written around the same time, by a reporter who was even in some of the same places, says that many men wear jeans and cowboy boots, the native religion is mystical Christianity, and the beer has very low alcohol content. Whoever shall I believe? The reporter for the respected periodical with over 100 years of history? Or the charlatan and piece of shit?
Then there are his anthropological theories, that seem to be little more than fanciful wishful thinking. Prehistoric people didn’t suffer from depression! There was perfect equality between the genders! Which, uh, I guess those things are technically possible but like you might want to provide some evidence for them before you start shootin from the hip. (No, Clan of the Cave Bear is not evidence)
Conclusion
So, why group these books together? Except for Born to Run, they aren’t even all THAT bad. But I’ve noticed a common theme amongst them that’s far more fail than any instance of bad characterization, clunky writing, or poor plotting. These books have fail of the soul.
These are ostensibly progressive books with radical, free thinking world views. They present new theories and talk about idealism and virtue, but at the same time they do nothing that even hints at criticizing the existant status quo. Don’t worry about troubling messages in the Bible; they didn’t really mean it that way, so there’s no need to question your belief system. Sweatshops in the developing world? Really a huge benefit for everyone over there, and also, coincidentally enough, a huge benefit for those of us who get cheap goods. Remember those Native Americans your ancestors wiped out in order to steal their land? Well, it turns out that they’re just as happy as can be living on their Reservations and their crushing poverty can even benefit you.
These are books for people who were handed a good lot in life simply by virtue of their birth (middleclass, Western, white, male, heterosexual, etc.). They recognize that many of the good things they enjoy are at the expense of people elsewhere in the world, and that every day they benefit indirectly from horrible crimes committed by their ancestors. Such is the nature of living in the developed world, and awareness of this fact is a good thing, I think.
People deal with this knowledge in different ways. Some try to give back, some despair, some ignore it, some try to rationalize it. Some just read a bunch of books that tell them to relax, because they live in the best of all possible worlds. Watching these authors jump through hoops to reinforce the dominant paradigm and stroke their readers’ poor fragile egos was insulting and sad. The moral of all these stories is that there’s injustice in the world, but it’s not OUR fault. It’s not OUR responsibility. We’ve done all we can to fix it. Who the implied “we” is here is more than obvious.