The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

Just as I was finishing business school, three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman published the book The World is Flat.. This book seemed to be very popular among many of my graduating fellow MBAs, some of the professors, and a lot of people in the business community. I turned my back on the business world and put my MBA to use in public service management. I had also been working on an MA in Philosophy at a Thomistic Catholic College, so Friedman’s work was the last thing on my priority list at the time.

However, I recently ran across a copy of The World is Flat at a used book sale for fifty cents. I decided that it was time to take a look at Friedman’s book. There have certainly been a number of macroeconomic changes in the almost ten years since this book’s first publication (2005), most notably the housing bubble and the Great Recession begun in 2008.

Friedman’s theme is not hard figure out: the flat world is a metaphor for globalization “gone wild,” where a high school graduate in the United States competes for jobs not only with other Americans but also with hard-working Indians, Chinese, and other new global economic players. The author devotes page after page of anecdotes in support of this thesis. His second thesis is that to be competitive with foreign labor (physical, mental, and technological) the American worker must learn to be constantly evolving, using an almost paranoid sense of impending change as the driving force for “rebranding” themselves at roughly the same rate as the increase in computing power.

My main criticism with The World is Flat is that it seems desperately to want to be a book of social science. Unfortunately it is not. Therefore, when we put down the text we feel as though we have learned something about the proliferation of economic and cultural globalization—but we haven’t. What we have learned is Thomas L. Friedman’s opinion about these things based upon the anecdotal evidence he has collected in his own life.

This is not to say that Friedman’s theses are not correct, but I can offer only the support for them that Friedman offers in the text itself—which is very little. The World is Flat does have many redeeming qualities, however. It is well written with a unique voice. Friedman does manage to cram in a lot of little facts and figures (perhaps to make up for the lack of a proper scientific basis for support) which are interesting. Yet, by far the most interesting parts of the book are those that give a brief glimpse into the inner workings of corporations like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Dell, and the company founded by all-around unique individual Ross Perot.

While there are some compelling aspects to the case Friedman makes with his “flat earth” metaphor, the book is too flawed to be of any serious use in guiding economic and public policy. Where it fails in its descriptive aspect (to provide any sort of scholarly research to support its main conclusions) it necessarily fails in its prescriptive methods.

I believe that if a journalist is going to undertake the type of project represented by the content of The World is Flat, he or she must work in collaboration with at least one social scientist. Much of the progress of the last 100 years has come about through the use of the scientific method to propose and then support or refute these proposals through a rigorous academic process. Without such standards, all we are left with is conjecture. It might be exquisite, well-written conjecture—but it is conjecture nonetheless.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

My wife and I regularly read a book together, typically a classic from American literature, and discuss it as we go through the pages. Some past selections are The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. Recently, we finished William Faulkner’s As I Lay  Dying.

We approached the novel with some trepidation. I had previously tried reading it when I was in my late teens but I found its labyrinthine first-person, stream-of-consciousness multiple narratives almost entirely incomprehensible. This time, reading it with another person proved to be much more fruitful.

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying over the course of only 6 weeks while he was employed at a power plant. It was published in 1930. The title is taken from Homer’s The Odyssey: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." Chapter lengths vary, each one presented in the first person by a new narrator.

The plot centers on the Bundren family in rural Mississippi at what seems to be the turn of the 20^th century. The mother of the family, Addie, is dying. She is presented at first in a somewhat pious fashion, we learn about her demons later. Her husband, Anse, is self-pitying opportunist whose first comment after his wife passes is something like, “Well, maybe now I can get them teeth.” (He claims to have been edentulous for 15 years.) Her children are Cash (a carpenter), Darl and Dewey Dell (twins), Jewell (foul-mouthed and ill-tempered), and Vardaman (who is still at least an adolescent).

The basic plot seems to be inspired by ancient epics although in a more absurdist vein than a heroic one. Addie’s dying wish was to be buried miles away among “her people” in Jefferson, Mississippi. Recent rains have left the rivers flooded and as the family loads her into the coffin and onto their wagon it becomes quite apparent that the journey will be fraught with misadventure.

I will not recount the entire plot here. Instead I will give some general impressions that both my wife and I took from the novel. First and foremost, Anse Bundren is a despicable, annoying, and pathetic human being. Second, Faulkner’s contrast of the simple vernacular of these people with rich, complex inner monologues serves to demonstrate that just because they might seem simple-minded doesn’t mean that they actually are.

Darl is particularly articulate and there are hints that he has a “second sight” that is off-putting to most of his neighbors and even family members. He stands in stark contrast to his younger brother Jewell, who was the “apple” of his mother’s eye. Darl is thoughtful, Jewell is pragmatic. Darl is analytical, Jewell plays his cards close to his chest.

In the end, however, each of these strong characters portrayed in the children gives some part of their very being to see that their mother receives a proper burial. Only Anse gets away clean, looking dirtier than ever.

Read this novel.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

Mr. Pierce is a freelance writer and I am most familiar with his work from Esquire magazine. His writing is witty, acerbic, and very insightful on subjects ranging from sports to current affairs. It is the latter that is the subject of this book.

Pierce describes the contemporary United States as something of an intellectual wasteland. He begins by painting a vivid picture of the inherent absurdity of the so-called Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. Men ride dinosaurs fixed with English saddles. A couple of triceratops are lined up (baby ones to conserve space) on Noah’s Ark. Elephants are rescued from the Hindu religion and its god Ganesh.

Pierce described “Idiot America” (undefined, but probably best understood as the mass of the public, the aggregate of US opinion) acting as follows: “It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. In this “new media age” (the 24-hour news cycle), “everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is,” (p. 8). He uses controversy over teaching “intelligent design” in public schools and the “debate” over the same. Pierce lambasts press coverage regarding the undermining of the teaching of evolution through pseudo-scientific propaganda.

In a country pulsing with technological innovation, how do such misguided ideas gain popular support, or even an audience? Pierce asserts three premises that guide the commoditization of ideas which allows them to flourish in contemporary American society: 1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units. 2) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it. 3) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough. His unique talent, in this text, is in chronicling the decline of the informed and educated citizenry sought by James Madison. Pierce’s recollections of Madison’s idealism feels like a sad lament, one with which most thoughtful Americans might closely identify.

One of the saddest comments recorded in Pierce’s text is from a minister in Pennsylvania, Pastor Ray Mummert: “We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture.” This is a comment that is difficult to stomach, yet one can easily identify this sentiment as pervasive in our popular culture. Intelligence has almost become some kind of stigma in public life. Recall the election of 2000: Bush vs. Gore. Gore, the soft-spoken intellectual was consistently skewered by both the media and by his jovial, from-the-gut common-man opponent. This is not to say that either candidate’s party or platforms were superior to the other’s, or to criticize or condemn anyone who supported either candidate. The point is that logic, facts, or ideas were marginalized in favor of emotional, gut-level appeal.

Pierce also gives a short biography of a crackpot (he calls a “crank,” in fact “The Prince of the Cranks”) named Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly lived from 1831 to 1901 and in this stretch of time completed a large collection of popular works on topics ranging from Atlantis to politics to Shakespeare as well as a plethora of pseudoscientific and pseudohistoric ideas. He was also intimately involved in politics in Minnesota and the US. Pierce’s point is to contrast the way in which fringe ideas and movements developed in the 19^th century versus their pervasiveness in contemporary life. Donnelly, although popular and not without a following, was largely relegated to the fringes of public discourse where he belonged. However, these days we are inundated from every corner by pseudoscience and pseudohistory, ranging from Dr. Oz to Ancient Aliens.

In another amusing segment of the book, Pierce discusses so-called reality television. He recalled a mid-2000s Writer’s Guild strike that led to the temporary stoppage of reality television shows such as survivor. According to Pierce, there was no one available to “write” reality. Reality itself has become a more twisted concept than ever. I am struck by the way in which individuals carefully craft a multi-media narrative about their lives through the use of social media, particularly Facebook. Thus, now more than ever, we truly are authors writing the story of our lives; only now, it is more literal than figurative.

Idiot America is a solid, well-thought argument about the “dumbing-down” of popular culture in America. The major problem that I found with the book is that it is mostly descriptive of cultural maladies and rarely offers anything in the way of prescription. Also, by the time the reader has finished the majority of the text, Pierce has reviewed copious supporting examples. I think some of the space the author used to present examples of his cultural critique could have been better used to examine the origins of our reactionary, apathetic, and ultra-conservative culture.

Likewise, the conclusion of the book would have been more effective, to me, if the author had presented some of the ways in which Americans have gotten it “right.” For example, the same country that produced the absurdist Creation Museum is also the only nation to have landed a human being on the moon. The same people that fight and squabble over whether homosexuals should be allowed to contractually enter into a monogamous union was able to struggle, strategize, and protest until women and African-American citizens had equal rights and protections under law. While current affairs might tend to make one despair, it is a better use of the intellect to inspire true social change. With that said, I still would certainly recommend Pierce’s book to anyone seeking to attain a better understanding of where our culture is at present as well as how our government’s various functions have become quite dysfunctional in many respects.

Happy learning!