Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Happy Vernal Equinox, dear readers, a few days late. The equinox happened on March 20th — that is, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. Here, it marks the official beginning of spring. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, March 20th was the Autumnal Equinox, and it marked the beginning of autumn. I love that about the Earth; the yin and yang of spring in half the world and fall in the other.
Here on the San Francisco Peninsula, signs of spring are everywhere. The acacia trees bloomed weeks ago. Their bright yellow blossoms are a lovely, sunlit kiss of color, usually at the very end of February when the weather is still chilly and gray. The acacias always surprise me somehow, and they never fail to delight. Then, in the first week of March, the grassy hillsides turn Day-Glo green. I’m not kidding; practically florescent. Not long after, California poppies and lupines light up the grass with their own colorful songs of spring. My daffodils bloom, and — if the slugs spare them — my crocuses.
In mid-March, I dust off my seed-starting trays and begin the careful nurturing of tomato and pepper seeds, two kinds of cabbage, and sometimes a cannabis plant or two. Traditional cabbage for the very best sauerkraut, and Napa cabbage because I love it. Cannabis to make salve with, great for aches and pains. This year, I’m trying two varieties of heirloom tomatoes, and Basque txorixero peppers, all difficult to find even in farmer’s markets. One of the many joys of growing your own food is the jubilee of new flavors and textures. When you find something you really like, save the seeds and grow them again next year. It is a kind of independence. And yet, one of the greatest satisfactions is sharing these discoveries with others.
And now for tonight’s main topic, which I’ve been mulling over for the past couple of weeks. I’ve been reading and annotating two books that I think shed some light on how we’ve arrived at the current tumultuous moment in our history. The first is The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, co-authored by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. I had never heard of either author before, but one day I overheard someone listening to a podcast I respect, and Karp was the interviewee. He was saying such interesting things that I looked him up, and discovered this book. Karp is a co-founder and the current CEO of Palantir Technologies. Palantir, I can tell you, has a somewhat creepy reputation around Silicon Valley. Part of that is probably because the company does a lot of business with the U.S. Department of Defense. But also, they are secretive. Some of this opacity is no doubt due to the nature of their contracts with foreign and domestic government agencies dealing with matters of security, defense, and policing. Some of it no doubt has to do with the fact that it’s very hard for most people to understand exactly what they do. As far as I can tell, they use elaborate software and artificial intelligence to sift through data (the kind that is collected on battlefields, or during pandemics, for example) and make it into useful information for people who have to make complicated decisions in a hurry.
So…what kind of things was Karp saying? And what does he say in the book? First, he’s an unusual guy. He practices Tai Chi as a martial art. He’s very good with a 9mm pistol. And he’s impossible to pigeon-hole politically. He thinks America’s biggest problem is that we have lost the shared vision of what it means to be an American, what we stand for, and what we ought to be doing. I agree about that. He thinks our education system is partly to blame for that, and so do I. Shared culture, language, and lore are the things that make us feel part of a larger community. Americans come from everywhere, and we have brought the different cultures of those places with us to these shores. But we also have the overarching culture of America — the great and generous democracy, founded by rowdy rebels, on the principles of equality and fairness for all, on reverence for the truth, and on the idea that no one is above the law. Somehow, we’ve forgotten all that, which made it impossible to pass that culture down to our children. Identity politics made it worse by dividing us into smaller and smaller tribes, making it seem that our differences are far more important than the things we have in common. Karp is a weird guy, no doubt about that. But he’s clearly thought about all this a lot, and some of it makes very good sense.
It’s funny how often I stumble across two books from unrelated sources that, nonetheless, turn out to dovetail neatly with each other. Is it just me, or does this happen to you, too? The other book I’ve been reading is Hope for Cynics: the Surprising Science of Human Goodness, by Jamil Zaki. Zaki is a Stanford psychology professor, and he was profiled (along with his new book) in a recent issue of The Stanford Report, which I get daily in my inbox. The book is about our current widespread distrust of everything and everybody, how we got here, and how best to return to a more realistic view of each other.
This distrust is more neatly known as “cynicism.” Apparently the first cynics were a bunch of homeless guys in ancient Athens, named after their leader, Diogenes of Sinope. Diogenes was, as Zaki says, kind of a counterculture stunt man, who slept in a big ceramic jar, did a lot of uncouth things in public, and claimed to be searching for “just one honest man.” The ancient cynics were rude and tactless (to put it mildly). But underneath all that, they believed in hope. They believed human beings were naturally capable of honesty and virtue, and of living meaningful lives. But societies are structured to make us preoccupied with status and comparative wealth; and those preoccupations are a sort of poison that makes us jealous and distrustful of each other.
Zoom up to the modern era, and we find a society that deliberately glorifies cynicism and tells us hope and trust are for suckers. In modern America, we learn three myths about cynicism. First, we learn that it’s smart to be distrustful and that optimism sets us up for betrayal. Second, we learn that cynicism is safer than trust; it’s how you behave if you want to cleverly hedge your bets. Third, we learn that hope and optimism are immoral, because only the privileged can afford to indulge in them.
The trouble is, all of these myths are just that. They are fictions fed to us by people who understand how easy it is to manipulate a depressed and broken-hearted populace. In fact, people who assume everyone is untrustworthy are awful at spotting liars. Why? Because if you assume everyone’s out to get you, you don’t bother to learn what people are really like. Zaki again, “Gullible people blindly trust; cynical people blindly mistrust.” People who are unable to trust others are not safer. They can’t form strong bonds. Sooner or later, we all need help, and it’s a lot harder to get from a stranger than it is to get from a friend. And last, hope is not just for the privileged. Imagine a world in which everyone simply sat down in the road and said, “What’s the use?” Cynical people are immobilized by hopelessness. They can’t envision a better life for themselves or anyone else. In the end, no one is as good at transforming our lives as we ourselves are. It may be harder for some than for others. But without hope for the future and trust in other people, we can’t do it at all.
There’s a middle path between optimism and cynicism. It’s called skepticism. Skepticism allows us to approach others with an open mind. The more often we do this, the more we learn about others, and the better we get at judging people’s trustworthiness accurately.
I recommend both of these books, which offer a lot of food for thought about our present and our future.
It’s been a lovely spring day here, cloudless and warm, the trees full of birds building nests — the ultimate act of hope. To celebrate, tonight’s “music” is a little different from usual. Someone has taken a poem by one of my favorite poets, Wendell Berry, and made the reading of it into a short video with images and background music. I think it’s quite beautiful, and as always with Berry’s poetry, it gives me heart. The reader, musician, and producer is Alex Delfont, an eclectic artist from the U.K. Which is about all I was able to find out about him. In case you’d like to see “The Peace of Wild Things” written, or read by Wendell Berry himself, find it here.
And now…oh my…I think I hear crickets! It’s time for bed. Till next time, I wish you an open and skeptical couple of weeks.
You asked if anyone reads several books simultaneously and the answer is YES, I do. Actually at anyone time I can be reading more than 2 and usually, in one way or another they complement; or at least my mind works in a way that sees connections in things that may not, on the surface, seem too related. For me the interesting thing is that I often don’t finish a book because I get caught up in one idea or another and then pursue that for a while in several places. In a way I’m like a biblioparasite; I devour what interests me and skip the rest. There are exceptions of course.