武夷山

 

    我在“缺无之发现与发现之缺无” （http://www.sciencenet.cn/m/user_content.aspx?id=382542）一文中说：“Nassim Nicholas Taleb的著作《黑天鹅》（The Black Swan）被《泰晤士报》誉为二战以来最有影响的十二本著作之一”。那么，另外11本书是什么呢？下面附上报纸原文，并加入少量中文说明。该文作者是英国著名记者兼作家，十二本书是他个人选定的。

 

From The Sunday Times （星期日泰晤士报）

July 19, 2009

Books that helped to change the world

Big ideas from Vance Packard, Edward de Bono, Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking altered modern thinking

Bryan Appleyard

There’s a hunger for the big one — the idea that will make sense of the world. In the absence of religion, culture or national purpose, people seize on consoling stories, grand simplifications providing opinions, perspectives, a feeling that their life is not entirely without meaning.

The big idea might be anything — a way to live or work, a crusade or a new theory of the underlying truth of things. But it must, first, be a book. Books are still, in spite of all the competing technologies, the most persuasive and authoritative medium. Second, it must be big enough to fill the mind with wonder or determination. Thus, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point offers a way of understanding the manner in which successful ideas are disseminated and Richard Daw­kins’s The God Delusion provides the tools with which to turn secularism into a cause.

There have always been big-ideas books, though they became much more common in the 20th century. Several forces were at work — full democracy giving people a stake in great issues, more or less universal literacy, the decline of deference and the relentless leakage of authority from the church.

HG Wells was probably the age’s first great intellectual populariser. For much of the first half of the 20th century, he was Britain’s semi-official painter of the big picture. In resonantly titled books such as The Fate of Man and The Outline of History, he brought the new orthodoxy of scientific secularism to the masses. He effectively created the genre.

The post-war period was defined first by the confrontation between communism and capitalism, two utterly opposed big ideas, and second by the collapse of that confron­tation and its replacement by a bewil­dering multiplicity of possibilities, theories, causes and conflicts. Add to that the internet explosion of global connectivity and you have a big-ideas hothouse from which emerges a tropical profusion of grand summations.

Now, every week, big-ideas books pour from the presses. I get sent most of them, giving me not an intellectual problem, but a troublesome storage issue. Grand panjandrums of the big idea have emerged — Gladwell, Chris Anderson (The Long Tail and Free), Dawkins — and, dazed by the money to be made, academics queue up to package their ideas for the mass market.

Making any kind of sense of this paper blizzard is impossible, but the blizzard itself proves that the genre is the message. The very fact that we want such books is a sign of what we have lost, primarily a coherent base from which to assess the world. In addition, the blizzard demonstrates the difficulty, if not plain absurdity, of thinking there is such a thing as a universally applicable big idea.

If, said Chekhov, there are many cures for a disease, then there is no cure.

The list that follows is my compilation of the 12 most effective big-ideas books of the post-war period. “Effective” means successful in moulding the minds of large numbers of people. This is not, of course, the same as “true”, or “good” — though a few are one or both of these things.

And the list does not necessarily include the most important or lasting ideas books of the period. Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, James Lovelock’s Gaia and Mari­lynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam are not included simply because, crucial though they may be, they were not big popular successes. My list is, therefore, a pop chart, but one that tells us much about who we are.

The Power of Positive Thinking （正面思考的力量）

Norman Vincent Peale, 1952

 

This is the great precursor of all self-help books. Full of boundless American optimism, it offered a way through, as Bill Clinton said after Peale’s death, “the antagonisms and complexities of modern life”. Though Peale was a preacher, his book’s importance lies in its very secular belief in a therapeutic system that would lead to success and in its burdening of the individual, rather than an institution, with executing a demanding programme for his own salvation.

The Hidden Persuaders （隐藏的劝诱者）

Vance Packard, 1957

The date is important. This was when the anxieties that lay behind post-war affluence began to emerge. Packard exposed the conspiracy beneath the good life of 1950s suburbia by showing how advertisers mani­pulated consumers with quasi-scientific methods derived from psychology and sociology. It’s obvious now; it wasn’t then. The current television series Mad Men, set in the New York advertising world of the early 1960s, derives its power from the conflict, defined by Packard, between the innocence of the public and the cynicism of the admen.

Silent Spring （中译本：寂静的春天，吉林人民出版社，1997）

Rachel Carson, 1962

From what seemed to be a small technical insight — that the pesticide DDT caused thinning of the shells of birds’ eggs — Carson’s book launched modern environmentalism. The fate of the birds, symbolised by the ­possibility of a “silent spring”, dramatised the interconnectedness of nature that is at the heart of all greenery. DDT had been thought to be present in such small quantities that it would do no harm, but the food chain focused and intensified its effects. Some say this book cost millions of lives because it led directly to the banning of DDT. Used judiciously, it could have wiped out malaria in Africa.

The Use of Lateral Thinking （中译本：水平思考法，山西人民出版社，2008）

Edward de Bono, 1967

（博主：我发表过介绍博诺思想的多篇博文，如《词力》，见http://www.sciencenet.cn/m/user_content.aspx?id=34781；《乱谈失败》，见http://www.sciencenet.cn/m/user_content.aspx?id=48690）

The idea that we are not using our innate capacities to the full is a central feature of contemporary paranoia. People commonly feel there must be some trick to getting more out of life. De Bono brilliantly provided one answer in a phrase — “lateral thinking” — that has become a cliché. Best summarised by the current term “thinking out of the box”, his idea was simply to come at problems from unexpected angles. It bridged the gap between the self-help genre and the business book.

The Female Eunuch （中译本：被阉割的女性，江苏人民出版社，1990）

Germaine Greer, 1970

 

A scholarly polemic that remains the best of the primary feminist texts. Rude and raucous, it redefined womanhood as aggressive, self-determining, sexually potent and outspoken. It was a crusading work, a call to arms. It sprang from the “alternative society” of the late 1960s and it was, perhaps, the most effective subverter of the mores of postwar affluence. After Greer, no husband could reasonably expect to cry “Honey, I’m home” and find dinner on the table.

In Search of Excellence （中译本：追求卓越，中央编译出版社，2003）

Tom Peters and Robert H ­Waterman Jr, 1982

Management theory is like Marxism in the last years of the Soviet Union — nobody believes it, but everybody must pretend that they do. As a result, it has been an incubator for a series of more or less mandatory bestsellers. This book, coming at the beginning of the right-wing Reagan-Thatcher resurgence, is the primary specimen of the genre. It codified the idea that there is a single transmissible method of business success. Quaint.

The Closing of the American Mind （中译本：走向封闭的美国精神，中国社会科学出版社，1994）

Allan Bloom, 1987

This is another primary right-wing text of the 1980s. Here, however, the politics is cultural conservatism rather than the hard capitalist right-wingery of management and economic theorising. Bloom attacked American uni­versities for abandoning western culture in favour of various destructive ideologies that destroyed critical judgment. Though this was unarguable at the time, the book had the unintended consequence of firing neoconservatives with the gross delusion that this must mean violently imposing western culture on the rest of the world.

A Brief History of Time （中译本：时间简史，湖南科学技术出版社，2001）

Stephen Hawking, 1988

Usually either bought but unread or read in total incomprehension, this book tried to explain the state of contemporary physics to the common reader. Its huge success inspired a wave of popular-science writing. At its heart was the assumption — in the event, wrong — that physicists were on the verge of a theory of everything that would account for the entire history of matter. Its scientific triumphalism led directly to the antireligious tirades of books such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

The End of History and the Last Man （中译本：历史的终结及最后之人，中国社会科学出版社，2003）

Francis Fukuyama, 1992

Fukuyama’s neoconservative text was a direct product of the collapse of communism. The West having triumphed, he argued that this represented the end of all ideological conflict. Liberal, democratic capitalism was the end of history. This no longer seems credible. Not only has history restarted in countless other ways, it is also clear that

the system Fukuyama defined is only really an American version of politics. Yet he inspired the neoconservatives in the Bush administration — though he broke with them over Iraq — and he ignited a global debate about whether there was any credible alternative to the American way. The answer was always yes.

The Tipping Point （中译本：引爆流行，中信出版社，2002）

Malcolm Gladwell, 2000

The book is more important than the ideas it contains. It made Gladwell the supreme modern big-ideas merchant. A brilliant story­teller, he became an auditorium-filling speaker, able to dramatise ideas previously inaccessibly academic. Neither The Tipping Point nor his subsequent books, Blink and Outliers, are intellectually remarkable. But Gladwell’s role as an ideas entrepreneur is the clearest demonstration of the contemporary hunger for the grand, explanatory narrative.

The God Delusion （中译本：上帝的迷思，海南出版社，2010）

Richard Dawkins, 2006

Dawkins could also have been in this list for The Selfish Gene (1976), a brilliant popularisation of one interpretation of Darwinism, but Hawking’s A Brief History is a better example of science as the faith of our age. The God Delusion is the flip side of that

faith — a savage assault on religion. Thanks primarily to Dawkins, militant atheism is now the noisiest cult of our time. It was inspired by the mounting influence of two fundamentalisms — Christian in America and Islamic across the Muslim world. Neither defines the mainstream faith and, as a result, the targets of the militant atheists appear rather narrow and specialised.

The Black Swan （中译本：黑天鹅――如何应对不可知的未来，中信出版社，2008）

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007

This is the book that forecast the banking meltdown. It is unique in this list in that it promotes an anti-idea. All our big ideas are wrong, argues Taleb, because all are subject to the workings of uncontrollable chance. The banks crumbled because they used demonstrably false mathematics as a way of controlling the future. We crumble when we apply our always deficient theories to the unending sea of randomness on which we sail. But the book has a message — rise above it all, adopt a classical composure in the face of defeat. If you are to be executed, remember to shave.

The Black Swan could be a valedictory to the idea of the big idea, to the folly of hoping we can be made well, better, more successful or more wise by the next bestseller, But I fear not. Another fat book has just arrived — The Evolution of God by Robert Wright — to tell me there is a “hidden pattern within the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam”. I’m sure there is, but I’m afraid I have this thing that prevents me finding out what it is. I call it a life.

bryanappleyard.com

 

 

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