A Year of Stanford Education for $150: Psychohistory

I recently recommended a series of brilliant audio lectures and books on the interlinked topics of ancient history and the evolution of culture, human nature, and the deep principles of social psychology and behavioral economics.

Below I overview my second “virtual semester” delving into modern history. Considering contemporary societal events through the lens of our ancient past is particularly illuminating.

Modern history: Intergroup conflict versus cooperation

Some of the great audiobooks recommended here.

Source: Collage of covers of books reviewed here, from publishers' publicly available images

D.W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Blight is a historian at Yale. This book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is a detailed and shocking reminder of how brutal and dehumanizing American slavery actually was, and how easy it was for people who were self-consciously Christian to defend it. It is also an awe-inspiring story of the heights human beings can reach, and Douglass (an escaped slave whose father was a slave-holder) and his relationships with family, friends, and powerful enemies, makes a brilliant study in personality and social psychology.

Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American banking dynasty. Chernow is not an academic, but his historical books have won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book award. This one is a fascinating tale of how Wall Street came to be, and how American financiers came to play such a large role in U.S. and world history. Like each of the books in this set, it reads (or listens) like a novel, full of fascinating depictions of an amazing list of characters in and around J.P. Morgan’s family and business associates.

Samantha Power: The Education of an Idealist. Power is a Harvard professor, who began as a war correspondent, won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on the Bosnian conflict, and went on to become the youngest U.S. representative at the U.N. This memoir, read by Power herself, also tells a fascinating story of her life, which began in Ireland during “the troubles,” and has since involved eye-opening and sometimes hair-raising journeys into the more dangerous corners of the world. Her depictions of dealing with modern-day bad guys make it clear that some of the nastier parts of human nature are still alive and functioning; yet the fact that there are people like her willing to fight for the downtrodden reflects our better side. The recurring theme of family relationships makes this read like a multi-generation novel, from her powerful relationships with her Irish parents to her own marriage to economist Cass Sunstein, and how their relationships with their own offspring influenced their lives.

See my earlier review of her book here: An open letter to Samantha Power: The real behavioral obstacle to worldwide justice is overpopulation.

Michelle Obama, Becoming. Obama was once a dean at the University of Chicago, and her reading of this book is a real treat. Her great-grandparents were slaves, and her grandparents were part of the great Northern migration, but her own Chicago inner-city upbringing is stereotype-defeating on every level. Family is again central to this story, including hard-working parents, a role-model brother who preceded her to Princeton, and her own two daughters and mother living in the White House. Her best friend in high school was Jessie Jackson’s daughter, and that connection certainly gave Barack a leg up into politics (though Michelle forthrightly describes her own ambivalence about his political ambitions).

Barack Obama, A Promised Land. Before taking on his other career, Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He also reads this book himself. It is rich with personal stories, such as his mother hearing about him being involved in bullying, and asking whether he’d rather be someone who put down other people to make themselves look good, or someone who helped others. Barack finally won over Michelle’s opposition to his presidential candidacy by arguing that an African-American president would raise dramatic new possibilities in the minds of young Black kids. But he is a role model for all of us, regardless of our age, group identity or skin tone—of human potential, curiosity, courage, and pure intellectual power. Besides his willingness to honestly explore his own motives and expose his own weaknesses, his immense love of books (also mentioned by Michelle) makes him a hero to some of us intellectual nerds.

The future: Overcoming ancient biases?

Thomas Homer-Dixon, Commanding Hope: The power we have to renew a world in peril. Homer-Dixon is a political scientist at the University of Waterloo. I discuss his ideas about how to save the world (and what's in the way of that goal) in three recent blogs:

• The Three Biggest Obstacles to Saving the Planet
• 3 Reasons to Hope for the Future
• 7 Things You Can do to Save the World

How are all these brilliant lectures connected?

Thinking about modern historical characters and the contemporary world in light of biology, cultural evolution, and ancient history (my first "virtual semester") two themes popped out in bold relief:

1. The continual interplay of culture and evolved mechanisms. Modern human history is dramatically different from that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But certain deep themes persist, including the centrality of kin relationships. Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order discusses the evolution of modern society as involving a) the emergence of a centralized state rather than battling local kin groups, b) legal systems that stand in higher authority than rulers and their dynasties (the rule of law), and c) governments accountable to the people. Those developments are hard-won, and there are persistent attempts by those in power to undermine them in ways favoring themselves and their own kin-based groups.
2. The perennial struggle between the positive and negative sides of human nature. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau wins; we have natural inclinations toward greed and generosity; personal ambition and social service, curiosity, and complacency. Understanding those tendencies could help design a better future world.