Books
Shakespeare's Secret Booke: Deciphering Magical and Rosicrucian Codes
David Ovason
Clairview Books £14.99
Although one must say at the outset that this book is not solely about Shakespeare and his plays and poems, the Bard more than exemplifies Ovason's theme, which is the result of some truly remarkable research into the lore and legacy of the Rosicrucians, the mystical secret society founded in medieval Germany. Indeed, Ovason has found a key to a treasure trove of lost knowledge.
The title of Ovason's book is taken from lines in the first part of Shakespeare's King Henry IV in the Folio edition of 1623: 'And now I will unclaspe a secret booke ...' This, he claims, points to a hidden numerological code embodied in the esoteric literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; its existence there is 'well beyond doubt', he says, and its full significance has yet to be explored.
This magical code extends even to the Shakespeare 'curse-stone' in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon - which Ovason shows has the word Shakespeare encoded in its inscription - and to the memorial in Westminster Abbey.
Ovason is convinced that Shakespeare and many other literary figures of the time, including Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon, used a variety of codes devised by the Rosicrucians and designed to be recognized by initiates. But Shakespeare was not a Rosicrucian himself, Ovason concludes.
Paying particular attention to the significance of the number 33, the number of perfection traditionally linked to the age of Christ at his death, Ovason says this number was adopted in the 17th century to symbolise the Ego which, in a cosmic sense, represented the higher, invisible Self, a symbol of 'the interface between the familiar realm and the higher realm of spirit'. The number was used, for example, to determine the number of letters, or lines, in a relevant text - Hamlet's famous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, for example.
Evidently, such coding was used by a host of writers over a period of nearly 300 years, and marked the flowering of esotericism in Europe. It was especially adopted for the Rosicrucians' high-flown esoteric literature, of alchemists and related fraternities. John Dee, the Elizabethan occultist, and Nostradamus, the French apothecary and seer, borrowed it 'to enrich the value of the "booke"'.
With the Shakespearean intrigue dealt with in the first two chapters, the remaining five are taken up with an adept and finely detailed examination of Rosicrucian works, and how an understanding of the widespread encoding of the number 33 allows access to many of them, as well as to alchemical and peripheral literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
It must be the uncertain times we live in that have led us to an almost obsessive literary fascination with codes that must be cracked. Perhaps it has arisen out of a contemporary distrust of and dissatisfaction with surface appearances: a belief that everything and everyone has ulterior motivation, that there must be deeper, hidden patterns that can explain the past, present and future, including happenings in our everyday lives and relationships.
Indeed, it has reached the extent where the word 'code' itself has become code for a publishing cliche. A quick web search will reveal the following fiction and non-fiction book titles from recent years that begin with 'The' and end with 'Code' - and this is by no means an exhaustive list:
Atlantis, Aztec, Bible, Biker, Bond (James), Cosmic, Culture, Da Vinci (of course), Devil's, Doomsday, Egypt, Einstein, Emotion, Eternity, Ezekiel, Freemasons, Genesis, God, Healing, History, Honour, Impact, Love, Lucifer, Marketing, Messiah, Moses, Narnia, People, Romeo and Juliet, Serenity, Social, Soul's, Templars, Temple Mount.
And Shakespeare, of course, has not been immune. There's been Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare by Clare Asquith (2005), The Shakespeare Code by Virginia M Fellows (2006), Breaking the Shakespeare Code by Robert Nield (2007) and Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code by Brenda James (2008).
While these four books make for a fascinating phenomenon, I have found none of their arguments particularly persuasive, either about the Bard's 'true' identity or the alleged secret codes in his works. Because so little of Shakespeare's life is known to us, there's pretty much a blank canvas on which to paint.
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
Clive Finlayson
Oxford University Press UK £9.99 / US $16.95
The Neanderthals were a variety of human that separated from our lineage half a million years back, and whose last communities died out about 28,000 years ago. Popular misconceptions have led many to believe that they were lumbering dullards forced into extinction by fleet-footed and clever modern humans who came out of Africa 100,000 years ago. This is a simplistic view.
And this book will change the ideas of many by revealing that, until quite recently, we were not the only kind of human walking the Earth - we have descended from one of several populations of humans that existed about 50,000 years ago. An intriguing possibility arising from this is that, if several types of human existed on our world in the distant past, there easily could be similar that have evolved elsewhere in the universe, on another planet orbiting another sun.
Finalyson, in his cool, objective, albeit materialistic, assessment, allows us a much wider perspective on events that contributed to the migration of the modern human into Europe, as well as what could have taken place when the two populations came into contact, and what eventually drove the Neanderthals into terminal decline.
This is a comprehensively biological account of human evolution, replete with challenging but persuasive insights into the whole range of evidence. Throughout the book, Finlayson an evolutionary ecologist with a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and director of the Gibraltar Museum and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, shows how we owe our existence to chance.
From asteroid impacts to volcanic eruptions to simply being in the right place at the right time, we are here because of luck, he insists. Many highly successful lineages went extinct simply because their luck ran out - the Neanderthals and other populations of our proto-ancestors among them. More lineages of humans disappeared on the way than those that made it to today.
It was the people living in marginal environments who needed to be the most inventive, therefore the successful populations were always those living on the edge of others who monopolised the good-quality territory. It was on the periphery that the innovators were to be found.
Finlayson sees the expansion of farming from about 9,000BC as marking the start of the 'illusion of progress' towards a world of unsustainable growth, a dream that has become a nightmare today as we procrastinate while the present state and future of our planet hang in the balance due to our voracity.
When we stop to think about what a tiny fraction of our evolutionary history has been taken up by our post-farming existence - a mere 10,000 years or so - it becomes obvious, he says, that our biological make-up was formed almost entirely in the millennia before farming, so that our technological and cultural achievements today are mismatched with our biology produced over millions of years.
The author declares: 'Humans auto-domesticated themselves, inadvertently, while domesticating plants and animals.' However, latest research suggests otherwise. There is increasing evidence for intervention in the human story by advanced helpers who introduced agriculture and civilized codes in the Near East at that very time.
The late Christian O’Brien, a Cambridge scholar and exploration geologist, proposed convincingly in the 1980s that members of a technologically superior race - known in the records of Sumeria, the world’s oldest known civilization, as the Anannage - were responsible for this elevation of the human status (see Ancient Civilizations page). Ongoing research by the Golden Age Project in recent years suggests that the Anannage were the survivors of a civilization decimated by planetary catastrophe in about 10,400BC when cosmic debris collided with the Earth.
Christmas: Better Than a Lump of CoalEdited by Scott C Lowe
Wiley-Blackwell £11.99 / US $19.95
So what is, or what should, the festive season be all about? This book urges you to take some time out to think about that at Christmas - and, yes, to think about what you think until the billion dollar bash comes round again.
Here are wickedly humorous and innovative philosophical insights in a range of essays on Christmas themes that make you think more than twice about the most widely celebrated holiday in the Western world.
What does Christmas mean to atheists and pagans? Should parents lie to their children about Santa Claus? What does the Bible have to say about the virgin birth? Just how does Santa know if the kids have been good or naughty - and is there a darker side to our rotund festive friend?
Edited by Scott C Lowe, a professor of philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Bloomsberg University of Pennsylvania, the contributions are drawn from a diversity of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, religious studies, English literature, cognitive science and moral psychology.
From Santa Claus, elves and Ebenezer Scrooge to rampant consumerism and controversial questions of multiculturalism and miracles, this is an immensely entertaining and thought-provoking volume, in the oft-audacious Philosophy for Everyone series, exploring a plethora of philosophical issues raised by the practices and beliefs surrounding Christmas.
What about 'The Mind of Santa Claus and the Metaphors He Lives By', or 'Santa's Sweatshop: Elf Exploitation for Christmas'. Oh, and there's an afterword from Santa himself (he says that, overall, he likes the book - even though one writer accuses him of elf abuse). You get the idea. Having this book in your Christmas stocking would certainly be better than the lump of coal that misbehaving children get!
But behind all the delicious irony and truculent polemics pervading this book lie serious issues affecting us all, and with which we often wrestle in our daily lives (or ought to). Along with the many titles that have set out to popularise philosophy in recent years - and succeeded - it demonstrates yet again what unmitigated oddball fun there is to be had in rigorous thinking.
The endemic contradictions of the Christmas phenomenon are mercilessly filleted to great effect - while Christmas is one of the holiest day in the Christian calendar, it's also the key pagan festival of Yule, of course, relating to the celebration of the winter solstice, it's a secular cultural carnival, and, of course, a commercial event on the grandest of scales.
The Philosophy for Everyone series, which invites readers to ruminate on the things they care about, whether they be major or minor, significant, trivial or simply odd, is certainly wide-ranging, covering, for example, cannabis, porn, college sex and serial killers among less lurid topics such as motherhood, fatherhood and gardening and cycling.
Nicholas Hagger
O-Books UK £14.99 / US $24.95
As we survey the debris of the old order, in which we conduct our lives in time of transition to an interdependent, regional world not yet complete, we cannot help wondering, says Hagger, what the best model would be for the new supranational authority into which we are passing, and how it would work in practice.
This is what makes his book important right now and essential reading for anyone pondering the possibility of a political escape route to a brighter future from the seemingly unrelenting strife of the present day. The collapse of the old order has left many problems for the world which the nation-state system has been unable to solve - war, poverty, pandemics, climate change, famine and financial crisis - says this prolific and cosmopolitan author in a timely and well-considered work.
In a previous book, The New Philosophy of Universalism, Hagger considered the oneness of the universe and humankind and its implications for many disciplines, including international relations. Now, in this cogent but potentially highly controversial study of political universalism, written in manifesto style with many statistical appendices, he sets forth the long-held human dream - going as far back as Ancient Egypt - of a world state that would enforce peace. Hagger's is an extremely challenging philosophical vision of a better future in the traditions of Plato and Kant.
Ever since Plato, philosophy has been interested in proposals for an ideal state, and Hagger cites Churchill, Einstein, Eisenhower, Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II, among many other luminaries, who have promoted the idea. But it is only relatively recently that one could realistically contemplate a world state, Hagger points out; it is today's instant communications and globalisation that makes world government a 'realistic possibility'.
Of course, it would be disastrous under the control of dictators or those self-interested elites who want only to continue to plunder the planet's resources to enrich themselves. But in the hands of a body of philanthropic experts and elected representatives, it could do away with war, famine, disease and poverty. This would be covered by the world state's seven goals: peace and disarmament, sharing natural resources and energy, solving environmental problems, ending disease and ending famine, solving the world financial crisis, and redistributing wealth to end poverty. All this with as little surrender of sovereignty on the part of nation states as possible.
While Hagger says peace and disarmament would be 'enforced' by international law, he does not suggest how this would be achieved, although one does understand that the book is only a 'blueprint'. Nevertheless, how would the system actually cope with and 'enforce' rogue states such as North Korea, Iran and Somalia? And what about terrorism and the likes of Al Qaida and the Taliban, not to mention international organised crime, in particular, the drug cartels? Would massive military force be used to nullify such threats at any cost? Hagger does not address such questions, but someone would have to. The devil surely will be in the detail.
However, the global financial crisis could be solved by the creation of a world currency, a new Earth dollar worth, say, 10 present US dollars. This might involve a massive devaluation of currencies but, at a stroke, it would wipe out nine-tenths of the global debt. If applied everywhere on the same day, it would enable the world to escape from its legacy of debt, and start over. The entire foreign currency market would vanish overnight and the financial sector would go into terminal meltdown but, bearing in mind the fierce influence of unelected markets on the governance of countries, this might not be such a bad thing.
Naturally, sceptics will say a world government can never happen because vested interests are too powerful and no government will vote for a reduction in its own sovereignty. But Hagger says governments might well see that their compensatory gain in a share of world government would bring a peace dividend, with funds previously spent on defence then able to be used to assure prosperity for their peoples.
As a 'Golden Age' of global government could not be ushered in without America's participation, Hagger ends with an appeal to the President of the USA and to the UN to have the courage and foresight to pave the way to the universalist world state.
The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth's Deep History
Jan Zalasiewicz
Oxford University Press UK £16.99 / US $27.95
In the awe-inspiring sweep of this engaging volume, Jan Zalasiewicz, a field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, tells the story of an ordinary slate pebble found on a beach in Wales - just one story of many, packed more tightly in the pebble 'than sardines in the most ergonomic of tins'.
Zalasiewicz demonstrates how such an everyday object contains astonishing evidence of vanished oceans, long-extinct life-forms, the cooling of subterranean magma and the upraising of mountain ranges, a tale going back to the beginning of time and into the furthest recesses of space.
Indeed, pick up a shiny pebble from the seashore and, as William Blake famously saw the world in a grain of sand you, like the visionary poet, 'hold infinity in the palm of your hand'.
The dramatic narrative of our planet's deep history which unfolds from the lowly pebble starts as its particles coalesce amid awesome violence in the far-distant past of the universe, following the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies, supernova explosions, and the creation of our sun and solar system.
Zalasiewicz carefully reveals how such a small and apparently uninteresting object as a coastal pebble contains a near-unbelievable complexity of events which shaped Earth through untold aeons: volcanic eruptions and earthquakes on a gargantuan scale, massive extinctions, and the creation of widespread mineral deposits and ores.
Here we have an abundance of valuable insights into how the painstaking forensic approach of the analytical Earth scientist makes the smallest amount of mineral matter a veritable time capsule replete with the cataclysmic incidents in our world's extraordinary history recorded in crystals and microscopic fossils.
Finally, Zalasiewicz' eloquent storytelling pebble is returned to the beach - yet it still has many destinies before it eventually crumbles, dispersing back into the realm of the sub-atomic particles out of which it originally evolved, only to reform ultimately in a new pebble after some vast period of time.
Zalasiewicz ends on a philosophical note, pondering for how long these apocalyptic cycles of nature will continue before the sun dies and Earth with it, conveying the atoms of that Welsh pebble into another star system where, in a kind of cosmic cadenza, new planets might be coming into being. After all, that's how we and our planet began - from dust to dust, the interstellar variety, that is.
The End of Discovery: Are We Approaching the Boundaries of the Knowable? Russell Stannard
Oxford University Press UK £14.99 / US $24.95
The Nobel prize-winning physicist Neils Bohr, as Professor Stannard remarks, argued that what scientists write in textbooks is not a description of the world at all but a description of us looking at the world: that is to say, interacting with it.
If we try to go beyond the interactions to try to describe the world itself, 'we get bogged down in those paradoxes that arise out of the misuse of language ... there are no paradoxes when language is used correctly to describe solely our observations'. Can we ever know if the world-in-itself exists between our observations?
It is surely the mysteries of the cosmos that are paramount and permanent and the attempted explanations of them that are probative and ephemeral. Science does not really try to explain, and hardly even interprets, but mainly makes models - mathematical constructs which describe observable phenomena, their justification being no more and no less than that they are expected to work.
Stannard, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, suggests that, one day, fundamental science will come to an end. This will not be when we have discovered everything there is to know about the universe, but when we have discovered whatever is available to us to understand. Limitations as to what the human brain can conceive or comprehend, he says, together with practical considerations bound up with the need for increasingly elaborate and expensive equipment, are likely to ensure that our knowledge remains forever incomplete.
In many instances, scientists might already have come up against the boundaries of the knowable, for example, in finding out where the laws of nature come from, in inquiring into the cause of the Big Bang which, theoretically, originated the universe, in asking why the universe is life-friendly and if there are universes other than our own - not to mention such mysteries as dark energy, dark matter and the odd behaviour of vanishingly small particles in the sub-atomic realm.
Notwithstanding all this, Stannard seeks to promote an appreciation for the achievements of science, while engendering an even greater sense of awe when faced with the mystery of existence. He does succeed on both counts, providing a clear and succinct review of cutting-edge science - but he thinks that our brains evolved for survival on a small planet, not for probing complex problems far beyond human experience.
At the outset, he says that when it comes to deep scientific understanding of the world, we have to do our science with an instrument, the brain, that evolved 'in response to other requirements'. This is surely reason enough, he contends, to be cautious about claims that it's only a question of time before it will have unlocked all of nature's secrets.
However, a recent approach in consciousness studies has been to argue that throughout evolution there have been emergent properties in the brain, with underlying biochemical explanations, which have had the purpose of developing brain functions to a higher level. There's no reason why this shouldn't continue to happen and, indeed, it could be happening again right now, with the human brain evolving beyond those original 'requirements'.
Stannard takes the pessimistic view that a steady increase in intellectual capacity in the past does not automatically mean that the same process will continue indefinitely. While 'directed evolution' could come about in the future through manipulation of the gene pool, he also points to the threat of nuclear holocaust.
I'm always a little wary of books with 'the end of' in the title. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man was published. Nine years later came 9/11.
Mind Games: 31 Days to Rediscover Your Brain Martin Cohen
Wiley Blackwell £9.99
To me, this book is not so much a celebration of human consciousness, as Cohen himself suggests, or an exploration of the mystery of it, as its publicity suggests, but rather an indication of how we are limited by the existing level of it, and how important non-rationality can be in our lives.
Psychological problems, for example, arise from our thoughts, but we can get rid of them by changing our thoughts, as the American psychologist George Pransky found. The mind itself dictates most of our feelings and responses, and one of the key things that Cohen reveals is how we are often bound by habits of thinking which would be better broken.
Indeed, there are powerful arguments here against always placing rationality on a pedestal, which can work against a fuller understanding of how people and societies actually function. Indeed, Cohen optimistically sees a space being re-opened in the traditional concerns of social studies and philosophy for consideration of esoterica, ritual and mystery.
The upshot is that readers of this book who already have a philosophical bent will enjoy engaging with it at a discursive level while the more general reader will gain a deeper sense of the diversity and quirkiness, the subtleties and complexities, of that infinite inner world which is the mind.
The book comprises a batch of thought experiments that will help you find out more about how your mind works, not with games in the sense of brain-teasers, nor with detours into neuro-science, but with a month-long self-directed course of off-beat and entertaining exercises.
Cohen is an author who specialises in popular books on philosophy, social science and politics and, essentially, this new one is an introduction to thinking about thinking. It blends psychological and social studies with philosophical theory for the first time, eschewing technical jargon and using easily understood scenarios to demonstrate the theme.
Actually, there is much more than a month's activities here, as I found out as, conscientiously, I followed the day-by-day schedule. Each of the 31 exercises at the front of the book is matched by an 'answer', or reflection, in a debriefing section at the back. I was intrigued particularly in the first week when my responses to the exercises were entirely at odds with what Cohen seemed to expect - this came as welcome confirmation that I was beyond the 'norm' (whatever that is)!
For example, on Day 2, when I was asked what I associated with the words coffee, car and cigarettes, my answers bore no resemblance whatsoever to the 'unconscious codes' in the brain that they were supposed to reflect, according to a French psychologist (I shouldn't reveal these codes because it would interfere with your own enjoyment of the book).
Similarly, asked about my favourite animals and why, on Day 5, my answers completely confounded the expectations which were supposed to reveal how I see myself and other people. And I don't (and never did) find the poet John Donne 'exquisitely depressing' as, evidently, I was expected to on Day 6. And as for not talking to anyone (Day 7), that's no problem for me! Maybe I'm naturally subversive.
From the second week, however, I found myself a lot less trouble for Cohen's project. In this part of the book, he ranges from behaviourist principles, investigating memory and the effect of wearing upside-down goggles, to issues of mind over matter involving such activities as walking over hot coals and lying on a bed of nails - the latter with the necessary disclaimers, of course (I drew a line here and opted for visualisation instead).
Such experiments in practical philosophy, and making 'miscellaneous philosophical investigations', I found much more edifying, including exploring 'un-reason', subliminal messages and dreams, testing the power of prayer and attempting telepathy.
Networks, Crowds and Markets: Reasoning
About a Highly Connected World
David Easley & Jon Kleinberg
Cambridge University Press UK £30 / US $50
About a Highly Connected World
David Easley & Jon Kleinberg
Cambridge University Press UK £30 / US $50
The web, social networks, the behaviour of stock markets, epidemics and 'social contagion' - how new ideas, beliefs, opinions, products, technologies and social conventions spread through the internet - are among the up-to-the-minute topics discussed in this, the first book to thoroughly explore the new science of networks.
Networks are having profound effects on many aspects of our lives - the internet and the web being major information sources and economic drivers - and will surely continue to do so at an increasing rate into the 21st century. They are the key to why news and information, as well as financial crises and epidemics, can spread around the world with such speed and intensity.
The authors point out that either you have to understand networks or stand to be exploited by them, as they quirkily but perceptively engage with the myriad ways that, in a connected world, our decisions inevitably have consequences for others, with unexpected or counterintuitive outcomes.
Professors David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, of Cornell University, who are at the forefront a new discipline emerging at the interface of computer science, economics and sociology, have combined insights from these fields to explain the networked connectedness of modern society. Easley is a leader in market microstructure (the study of how stock markets actually work) and in the study of information and expectations, and Kleinberg is a leader in the analysis of social and information networks.
At 730 pages, their book is an academic tour de force, but its innovative, interdisciplinary approach, using economics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, computing, information science and applied mathematics to raise and address fundamental questions about the links that connect us, covers an arena of crucial importance, and much valuable enlightenment awaits readers prepared to lend themselves to it.
File-sharing, social networking and technology have created a paradigm shift in our world. They often appear to operate powerfully without strict rules, but here, with astute use of graph theory, the authors explain them. They say that understanding social networks is critical for knowing who has power, who controls information, and how to use social contacts more effectively.
In the news, for example, we often hear about what the stock markets ‘expect’ or ‘believe’ or will 'stand', often in response to government policy. But what does this mean, given that a market is simply an institution where people meet to perform transactions? The book explains the economic principles behind these ideas.
It also explores the relationship between on-line social networks, such as Facebook, and traditional ones, and describes how web search engines like Google and Bing work in providing information by analyzing the content of web pages and the ways in which they link to each other. It explains how social networks can be used to establish or suppress common knowledge, and how this matters for phenomena as diverse as marketing a new product or inciting a revolution, and how Google makes enormous profits by selling ads targeted to the search terms that users enter.
Game theory is used throughout demonstrate how the world often reacts in unexpected ways to the decisions of policy-makers and firms.
The authors also provide the science behind the stories in recent popular books such as Critical Mass, The Tipping Point and The Wisdom of Crowds. They explain tipping points, the 'wisdom of crowds', the long tail, the 'six degrees of separation', social capital and the 'tragedy of the commons', among many other concepts. In doing so, they fill the gap between popular accounts of these ideas and the research literature.
And still there's more in this remarkable volume - a dizzying array of topics feeding into networks science which presents one of the major scientific and intellectual challenges of our time.
Networks are having profound effects on many aspects of our lives - the internet and the web being major information sources and economic drivers - and will surely continue to do so at an increasing rate into the 21st century. They are the key to why news and information, as well as financial crises and epidemics, can spread around the world with such speed and intensity.
The authors point out that either you have to understand networks or stand to be exploited by them, as they quirkily but perceptively engage with the myriad ways that, in a connected world, our decisions inevitably have consequences for others, with unexpected or counterintuitive outcomes.
Professors David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, of Cornell University, who are at the forefront a new discipline emerging at the interface of computer science, economics and sociology, have combined insights from these fields to explain the networked connectedness of modern society. Easley is a leader in market microstructure (the study of how stock markets actually work) and in the study of information and expectations, and Kleinberg is a leader in the analysis of social and information networks.
At 730 pages, their book is an academic tour de force, but its innovative, interdisciplinary approach, using economics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, computing, information science and applied mathematics to raise and address fundamental questions about the links that connect us, covers an arena of crucial importance, and much valuable enlightenment awaits readers prepared to lend themselves to it.
File-sharing, social networking and technology have created a paradigm shift in our world. They often appear to operate powerfully without strict rules, but here, with astute use of graph theory, the authors explain them. They say that understanding social networks is critical for knowing who has power, who controls information, and how to use social contacts more effectively.
In the news, for example, we often hear about what the stock markets ‘expect’ or ‘believe’ or will 'stand', often in response to government policy. But what does this mean, given that a market is simply an institution where people meet to perform transactions? The book explains the economic principles behind these ideas.
It also explores the relationship between on-line social networks, such as Facebook, and traditional ones, and describes how web search engines like Google and Bing work in providing information by analyzing the content of web pages and the ways in which they link to each other. It explains how social networks can be used to establish or suppress common knowledge, and how this matters for phenomena as diverse as marketing a new product or inciting a revolution, and how Google makes enormous profits by selling ads targeted to the search terms that users enter.
Game theory is used throughout demonstrate how the world often reacts in unexpected ways to the decisions of policy-makers and firms.
The authors also provide the science behind the stories in recent popular books such as Critical Mass, The Tipping Point and The Wisdom of Crowds. They explain tipping points, the 'wisdom of crowds', the long tail, the 'six degrees of separation', social capital and the 'tragedy of the commons', among many other concepts. In doing so, they fill the gap between popular accounts of these ideas and the research literature.
And still there's more in this remarkable volume - a dizzying array of topics feeding into networks science which presents one of the major scientific and intellectual challenges of our time.
Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs
Andrew Robinson
Oxford University Press UK £18.99 / US $34.95
While Andrew Robinson agrees that the most creative ideas appear to come unexpectedly out of nowhere, he is convinced they are not as unpredictable as they seem, and that science can shed light on the act of creation.
He finds that gradual evolution turns out to be typical of creative breakthroughs when their histories are examined in detail. They may not always involve a recognizable 'eureka' experience but they are always preceded by a long period of thought and labour, and always followed by intensive scrutiny and development.
The first part of this eminently readable and absorbing book surveys the scientific study of creativity, covering talent, genius, intelligence, memory, dreams, the unconscious, savant syndrome, synaesthesia and mental illness (how madness is perceived as being close to genius).
In the second part, Robinson tells the fascinating stories of five breakthroughs by artists - Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Virginia Woolf, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Satyajit Ray - and five by scientists - Christopher Wren, Jean Francois Champollion, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. They were chosen for the significance of their achievements and the diversity of their domains.
Despite this diversity, spanning cinema, languages and literature, archaeology, physics and medicine, Robinson then looks for key elements that might be held in common in these careers, and whether they follow patterns such as the intriguing 'ten-year rule' - first identified by the psychologist John Hayes in 1989 - that a person must spend this period of time learning and practising a craft or discipline before a breakthrough can be made. The rule does seem to apply to all ten of Robinson's selected geniuses.
As I have said elsewhere, whether inspiration leads to artistic or scientific genesis or discovery, my theory is that as we are all connected by a quantum substrate, which reveals a participatory structure of energy fields, including our conscious and unconscious minds, inspiration arises from the collective unconscious.
Robinson doesn't follow this route, but could there be any better metaphor for the flow of inspiration into the human imagination than the quantum realm, which is quite magical in its 'dance' of unpredictability and indeterminacy. To be inspired is surely to connect with that divine cosmic energy, replete with potential and creativity, that envelops us.
In the 21st century, talent appears to be on the increase, and genius in decline. Where today is the Darwin, Einstein, Beethoven, Chekhov or Shaw, the Cezanne or Picasso? Even in popular music, genius of the quality of Bob Dylan, the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix is a thing of the past.
Why should this be? Robinson, a former literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement, puts it down to the ever-increasing professionalization and specialization of domains, especially in the sciences - the breadth that feeds genius is harder to achieve nowadays.
A second reason appears to be the ever-increasing commercialization of the arts - it's much less challenging and more remunerative to produce imitative, sensational and repetitious work than to pursue originality over time. There is also the pernicious 'anti-elitist zeitgeist', which seeks to mythologise genius and cut it down to size.
Robinson is sure genius is not a myth, but that sudden genius is. The ten breakthroughs he discusses did not involve magic or miracles, but were 'the work of human grit, not the product of superhuman grace'. And he is right to suggest that from this truth we can derive both strength and stimulus for our own life and work.
The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor EnglandAlec Ryrie
Oxford University Press £8.99
It was only by accident that Ryrie, a professor of theology and religion at Durham University who specialises in the history of the Reformation, stumbled across the intriguing case of Henry, Lord Neville while researching for his PhD.
It stayed in his mind and, returning to it a couple of years later, he became hooked, following the trail for the next seven years - a trail which led to this fascinating portrait of one Gregory Wisdom, a con-man extraordinaire, magician and physician from the shadowy corners of 16th-century London, whose remarkable story was previously unknown. Lord Henry was Wisdom's most illustrious victim.
In a valuable social document, Ryrie paints a vivid picture of the capital as a seething cauldron of trickery and intrigue, lawlessness and dissipation - a scary, chaotic world markedly in contrast to the order and glamour often cast on society by writers and poets of the time.
Through the machinations of Wisdom, the hapless Lord Henry, an incumbent of London's crooked gambling dens and brothels, came to be accused of plotting the murders of his wife and father by witchcraft.
The case had all of the elements of sensational scandal: aristocracy, lust, envy. attempted murder, and the mighty suddenly brought low. But the way in which the murders were to be carried out took everything up another notch - Lord Henry was relying not on the nobility's traditional methods of dispatching adversaries, such as poison or ambush, but malevolent magic.
In the Tudor underworld, gambling, pickpocketry, highway robbery, prostitution and complex magical fraud came together. Wisdom's bizarre career, which Ryrie cleverly reconstructs using many previously unknown documents, is a telling snapshot of this 'nexus of criminality'.
We learn about the organised crime of the city, the ruthless business of early modern medicine, the religious upheaval of the time, charlatan conjurors, alchemists, disease and desperation, and the hidden connections between them.
Wisdom's story helps us to understand Tudor England more fully, and in doing so we realise that it was a world less remote from our own than we might like to think. Ryrie's approach to his subject is both scholarly and urbane and opens up a realm largely neglected in Tudor political and social history. It's a compelling read.
The Dangerous Man Karen Sawyer
O Books UK £14.99 / US $24.95
With its sub-title of ‘Conversations with Free-Thinkers and Truth-Seekers - a Collection of Alternative Research’, this book’s linking if unstated theme is the blinkered consciousness - as Colin Wilson famously said, ‘everyday consciousness is a liar’ - and its aim the removal of those blinkers from the population at large.
On her mission to seek out truth, Sawyer presents a non-conformist phalanx of what she regards as ‘the most dangerous and controversial minds of our time’, including David Icke, Michael Tsarion, Bruce Lipton, Cleve Backster, Ralph Ellis, Jerry E Smith, Neil Hague, John Perkins, Winston Shrout, Michael Cremo, Ellis C Taylor, Jonathan Goldman, Daniel Tatman and Alan Wilson.
It’s a heady mix of occultism, mysticism, ufology, druidism, gnosticism and alternative takes on history, science, big business, law and the environment. For me, ‘The Dangerous Environment’ and ‘The Dangerous Corporation’ are the most telling and most immediately relevant chapters, and I’m glad to see Peter Taylor, that most eloquent exponent of the minority view on climate change, and Ian Crane, the doughty opponent of consensus reality (see my DVDs page), included here.
I like the book’s dedication to the memory of Patrick McGoohan, star of the unique Sixties TV series The Prisoner, from which comes the oft-quoted phrase ‘I am not a number, I am a free man’. As Sawyer says, this series was way ahead of its time. It has become more relevant as the decades have passed until the real 'danger men' have become those with their hands on the levers of power. Even in a 1977 interview, McGoohan was able warn we were run by the Pentagon, by Madison Avenue, by television - ‘and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt, we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche’.
Sawyer introduces us to a total of 33 thinkers but, although the number is numerologically significant, the names do seem to have been fairly randomly selected. What about such major names in this field as Wilson, Hancock, Thomas, Gardiner, Bauval, Brophy, Temple, Knight and Butler, to name only a few, and who are sadly missing? I’m glad Sawyer lists some recommended books by Hancock, Gardiner, Glickman, Pinchbeck and others.
Some of those included in the collection would seem to make uneasy bedfellows; many, it must be said, are rather short on analytical and critical rigour. And, unfortunately, there is only one 'dangerous woman' included, and that’s the Canadian Mary Croft on ‘The Authority Hoax’. To be fair, though, Sawyer does say that by using the term ‘dangerous man’ she is referring to mankind, both men and women.
While a worthy attempt at presenting a wide range of challenging post-millennial thinking, there’s a lot that needs to be ironed out here in terms of the notions and definitions of truth and freedom, and the book must remain something of a curate’s egg, generally short on pragmatism and long on paradox.
‘The truth does not exist, but truth certainly does - and it is not “out there” - it is within,’ Sawyer says. ’Truth is not a fixed point in time - it is relative to the perception of the individual, which is likely to change.’ Hers is thus a relativist position. Dylan sang: ‘Freedom, just around the corner from you/But with truth so far off, what good will it do?’ What good indeed?
Yet Sawyer is right to point out how we go along with the laws and regulations of those who seek to control us while at the same time denying responsibility for our actions that occur as a result, and that the solution is to take responsibility for ourselves. I agree also that it’s time for us to come to informed decisions not only for ourselves, but for the generations that follow, and to that end this book is a tottering step along the way.
Sawyer is a freelance journalist in the mind/body/spirit sphere, an artist and a musician, and her first book, Soul Companions: Conversations with Contemporary Wisdom Keepers - a Collection of Encounters with Spirit, featured interviews with 45 shamans, seers, visionaries and sages from around the world. She is the founder of Soul Companions Gatherings, bringing together those from that book, and the Alternative Research Community, many of whom contributed to the new book.
Weaving the Cosmos: Science, Religion and EcologyChris Clarke
O Books UK £14.99 / US $24.95
Tackling burning issues of the day, this is a worthy attempt, by a scientist, to mediate between the scientific and religious antagonists and suggest a way of healing the rift - until 1999 Clarke was professor of applied mathematics at the University of Southampton with research, in four books and about 80 papers, having covered astrophysics, relativity, quantum cosmology, the philosophy of quantum theory and the physics of the brain.
‘It is salutary to realise from the example of quantum theory that this world is one and cannot be divided up,’ says Clarke, who interweaves his narrative, sometimes poetically, with the his own experiences of learning the principles through which we can bring about a beneficent integration in ourselves and in society.
Religion needs science, and science needs religion, he insists. Each is lame without the other, but together they can create a new and harmonious way of living on our planet. And his key idea is that modern ecology can bring the two sides together, and ‘liberate humanity into a lasting ecological consciousness’.
This is because, as he sees it, ecological ideas can extend into both science and spirituality, to provide a standpoint where nature can be encountered and where we can judge how wisely we are integrating our intuitive and rational functions by seeing the impact we have on nature. And the spur for such a change in society is climate change, which offers the chance to unite the world in a common endeavour.
The rational and scientific and the non-rational and mystical are complementary ways of knowing, Clarke contends, each requiring the other in order to make sense. It has been our obsessive over-emphasis on the rational that has caused us to forget the dynamism of the intuitive; we can not only think, but think about our thinking, either rationally or intuitively. Yes, but as Hamlet discovered, thinking itself can be a problem, with action ‘sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought’. As the American psychologist George Pransky asserted, we induce much of our own misery.
For Clarke, religion and science correspond to two threads from which the universe, as well the human mind, is ‘woven’, and he is convinced that the positive aspects of religion are indispensable if humanity is to prosper. Within the major faiths, he sees openings for a unifying ecological vision and practice, both in their existing traditions and in emerging new practices. It‘s true that a case could be made for seeing religions as the first environmental campaigners through their traditional reverence for the natural world and care for sacred sites.
So far, so good. But surely the big problem with religions is still ‘God’, an almost impossible concept for science and religion to reconcile.
Clarke admits that his references to love and unity as the core of religion might seem off-target when there is so much violent conflict and hatred in the world, but this conflict is the inevitable transformation of religion into its opposite which happens when we fail to understand the actual nature of religion and of human beings.
He contends that matter and spirit are two sides of the same coin, matter being the source of being, a concept pointed to by both religion and quantum theory. The driving dynamic of the universe is the process of spirit being called out of matter. But consciousness must arise out of the quantum field, too, and the question is: does it have a spiritual function?
Clarke sees the role of consciousness as ‘the essence of being that stands as a complement to form’, opening up a link with spirituality, and thus between science and religion. Certainly, form may be seen as the physical equivalent of memory, which is an aspect of consciousness. But the world’s problems, in my view, are largely due to unconsciousness, which perhaps could be countered by the kind of consciousness-raising ecological initiative that Clarke envisages, and so one can only applaud the polemic in his book.
For many years, Clarke has been a trustee of the charity Green Spirit and has served on the editorial board of Ecotheology, and he has been teaching and publishing on the relations between science and spirituality for a decade now.
Anglesey: A Megalithic JourneyNeil McDonald
Mutus Liber £10
This is much more than a simple guidebook. It is one man’s vision of a sacred landscape. Today, we are much more conscious of the concept of sacred landscape, as exemplified supremely by the world heritage status of the Stonehenge and Avebury region in Wiltshire, and by the megalithic maelstrom of the south-west of Ireland, and Neil McDonald is fully aware of its application to the ‘mystical’ isle of Anglesey, as he describes it on his first page.
He conjures up the megalithic magic of the island, off the north-west coast of Wales, in an illustrated volume, slim in bulk but big on ideas, which is unique in both concept and editorial approach. It certainly makes one want to visit Anglesey to probe the Stone Age secrets it guards in one's own mytho-geographical odyssey - the kind of outcome which is surely the mark of success for any such publication.
Evidence of human habitation on the island goes back to 7,000BC although, as Neil points out, continuous occupation may have begun much earlier. With its high concentration of megalithic sites, Anglesey is bound to be one of those places where the ancient landscape can boost one’s personal energies in a significant way, where one enters into the collective memory of our ancestors which remains rendered in these venerable stones.
Passionate about his subject, and extremely well-informed about it too, Neil has shepherded many groups of captivated visitors around Anglesey in recent years under his Megalithic Tours enterprise, so he knows the territory to advantage, being a reliable guide to the hidden as well as the accessible.
There are personable and informative descriptions and discussions of the Bryn Celli Ddu and Presaddfed chambered tombs - the former being the most important Welsh prehistoric site - the Bodowyr cromlech, the Mein Hirion standing stones, and a range of other burial chambers and imposing megaliths, including the hard-to-find, such as the Bryn yr Hen Bobl burial chamber.
Neil generally resists the urge to romanticise, placing the monuments in a proper historical perspective, blending the mystical with the material, but recognizing their importance as the locations of religious ritual and ceremony, and bringing in the local myths and legends associated with them. And he always mentions the view!
However, he does not restrict himself to the Stone Age, as there are also chapters which cover Penmon Priory and St Seiriol’s Hermitage and sacred well, the Parys Mountain copper mine, and Holyhead’s St Cybi’s Church and Caer Gybi Roman fort.
All this makes for a very rounded account of Anglesey’s deep history and distinctive culture which doesn’t fail to register the isle’s special atmosphere and allure.
The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus recorded that when his fellow countryman and governor of Britain Suetonius Paulinus took his army to Anglesey, then known as Mona, in the early 60s AD, an ‘enemy host’ confronted him across the Menai Strait with druids ‘raising their hands to the sky and shouting dreadful curses’, terrifying the soldiers. Among the armed men across the water, ‘dashed women in black attire like Furies, with hair disheveled, waving flaming torches’.
This dramatic snapshot of druidic ferment may well be an invention by the unreliable historian, but today’s ‘invaders’ - we megalithic marauders and other tourists - are not confronted with any such antics on the part of the island‘s inhabitants, although much that is wild and mysterious still lies within its shores.
See profile of Neil McDonald on the Mysterious North of England page.