Ignaas Devisch - Een Kleine Filosofie Van Grote Emoties (Pelckmans, 2023) ***

In dit korte en frisje boekje schrijft filosoof Ignaas Devisch over het belang van onze 'grote emoties'. En dit kunnen vele soorten emoties zijn: als iets wat je raakt als individu, als iets dat je kan delen met anderen, als een sterkte om je te kunnen uitdrukken. Hij wijs echter ook op de gevaren van het gebruik van emoties op de juiste plaats en het juiste moment. Het moet relevant en authentiek zijn, en geen vorm van zelfzuchtige zelfpromotie.

"Een gesprek met een journalist of een bekende per­soon gaat al gauw over de mens achter de functie en hoe die in het leven staat, welke donkere pe­riodes die heeft meegemaakt en wat hem of haar drijft. Niet hoe de wereld is staat centraal, maar hoe we die ervaren en met die ervaring naar bui­ten komen. En het is maar de vraag of we hier niet doorslaan en stilaan terecht zijn gekomen in een opbod aan getuigenissen." (blz 31)

Of nog:  

"De Nederlandse filosoof Theo de Wit het stelt kan slachtofferschap een aantrekkelijke manier wor­den om jezelf op de kaart te zetten en aandacht te eisen, maar gaat die aandacht gepaard met een ranzig kantje. Zeker 'in een postideologische wereld waar 'waar­heid' vooral gevoelsmatig beleefde waarheid aan het worden is. Respect voor anderen is dan vooral respect voor andermans beleving van de waarheid. De kritische vraag naar de feiten achter die beleving kan dan als uiterst ongewenst worden ervaren; over gevoelens is het namelijk moeilijk discussieren.' Wanneer emoties een wapen worden om ons ge­drag niet langer ter discussie voor te willen leg­gen, wordt het lastig om met elkaar samen te leven. Zoals Plato dacht dat je emoties kan uit­schakelen om goed te kunnen nadenken, zo pro­beert men hier het omgekeerde: de gevoelens worden aan het gesprek of het debat onttrokken zodat ze de status van vastliggende waarheid ver­krijgen en anderen er geen toegang of zelfs geen verhouding tot hebben." (blz 73)

Als iemand die de belangen van patiënten behartigt, kan ik het alleen maar eens zijn met volgende paragraaf: de mens is meer dan een klinisch gegeven, en behandelingen zijn meestal pas succesvol als ze echt rekening houden met de volledige mens. 

"Wie daarentegen met mensen omgaat - denk aan artsen die patiënten ontmoeten - heeft wel de­gelijk andere kennis nodig dan alleen klinische gegevens. Weten hoe iemand eraan toe is en wat een ingreep met hem of haar doet, is allemaal bij­zonder relevant en noodzakelijk voor een goeie omgang met elkaar. Dan gaat het vaak om erva­ringskennis waar emoties een grote rol in spelen, en minder het louter cijfermatige of in formules om te zetten data. " (blz 56)

 Niet alle emoties komen evenveel aan bod, en misschien is emotie als drijfveer tot handelen misschien de grootste misbedeelde in dit overzicht. We doen wat we doen omdat we ergens door gepassioneerd zijn, nieuwsgierig zijn, moreel geschokt zijn. Deze diepe emotie dat de wereld beter kan zijn, lukt enkel dankzij de energie die deze emoties tot stand brengen. Als Plato zijn figuurlijke paarden met de ratio in bedwang denkt te houden en de emoties naar de achtergrond wil brengen, dan stopt hij ook het draaien van onze wereld. Zelfs de grootste wetenschapper - die uiteraard geen persoonlijke gevoelens in haar methode toelaat -  doet haar onderzoek gedreven door een diepe persoonlijke overtuiging en emotie. 

Maar ik kan het iedereen aanraden. Denken over emoties met Devisch als gids, biedt veel inzichten en stof tot nadenken. Het is geen wetenschappelijk werk uiteraard, maar een persoonlijke mijmering die zeer laagdrempelig en zelfs een tikje persoonlijk. 

Jonathan Rauch - The Constitution Of Knowledge (Brookings Institution Press, 2021) ***

Jonathan Rauch is a senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, an American think tank focused on social sciences and economics, and a contributing writer to The Atlantic. 

The topic of the book is of the highest importance today. Society should not be governed by untruths and by ignorance, if if that is today more the rule than the exception. 

Rauch presents two core rules, wich he further elaborates with more distinct categories and examples. 

"Liberal science's distinc­tive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conver­sation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are 

• The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else's fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others' errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.
• The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based."

I do believe that at times he does not go deep enough in his reasoning, especially when knowledge is the basis for policy-making. You need knowledge and expert opinions up to the level when political choices have to made that reside in the ambiguity, uncertainty or need for prioritisation between conflicting choices. A "reality-based community" as he describes it, will still need to make decisions that are beyond truth and knowledge, because only the future can tell wether a decision was right or not, meaning that it needs to measure its impact, and accept to change course if the decisions do not lead to the expected result. In politics today, we rarely go to that level: political parties usually just adapt the narrative. 

I also disagree with his statement that "Some militant secularists insist that faith and science are bound to be enemies: that in effect, the Consitution of Knowledge cannot tolerate rivals. But that rigid view is wrong. The Constituion of Knowledge needs supremacy in the realm of public knowledge, but not in the realm of private belief." I may be a 'militant secularist', but for good reasons. The topic of his book needs to be part of education. Every schoolchild should learn how truth can be achieved, how the scientific method works, how important doubt and uncertainty are, how valuable observation, measurement and course-correction are. These important notions are incompatible with religious education, as I experienced during my years in catholic schools, or what we witness now in schools with religious students who reject the concept of the origin of the universe and evolution. You cannot push religion back to the privacy of the home, when society is still full of it. How can you believe one thing in private, and then defend truth in public? It simply does not work that way: either you stand by your beliefs all the time or are willing to subject everything to rules of knowledge. You cannot have it both ways. 

Otherwise, Rauch's book gives a good overview of what I think most rationalists already think today. He does not come with very new ideas, but he has the merit to have placed them in context. Anything that advocates for truth and knowledge is welcome in our sad times. 

Maarten Boudry - Waarom De Wereld Niet Naar De Knoppen Gaat (Polis, 2019) ****

Wie Stephen Pinker's 'The Better Angels Of Our Nature' en het meer recente 'Englightenment Now' heeft gelezen, of nog Hans Rosslings "Factfulness" of Bob Duffy's "The Perils Of Perception" zal één en ander herkennen in dit boek van filosoof Maarten Boudry. De thesis is dezelfde: het gaat beter met onze wereld dan in het verleden, en alle feiten ondersteunen deze vaststelling. Alleen staat onze gebrekkige perceptie in de weg om dat te zien.

Mijn vakterrein is de gezondheidszorg, en wat we op dat gebied in de voorbije decennia hebben gezien als vooruitgang, zouden mensen zelfs dertig jaar geleden niet hebben kunnen geloven, en niet alleen bij ons, maar ook in ontwikkelingslanden.

Boudry vertrekt vanuit eenzelfde bezorgdheid voor het kennen van de juiste feiten en die ook correct te interpreteren. Hij richt zich tegen de intellectuelen (en anderen) die een positieve houding tegenover de vooruitgang als te snel wegwuiven als een naïef gebrek aan kritische zin. Boudry verdeelt deze vooruitgangscritici in vier groepen: de nostalgische pessimisten, de doemdenkers van de 'wacht maar'-school, de cyclische pessimisten en tenslotte de tredmolendenkers.

Hij behandelt de grote thema's van vandaag: ongelijkheid, racisme, islam, de globalisering van de media, ons milieu, en de grote boeman: het neoliberalisme. Zijn ontwarring van deze thema's is verfrissend (waarschijnlijk omdat ze ook sterk aanleunen bij mijn standpunt hierover).

Mijn opinie hierover: mensen hebben vaak een verkeerd beeld over de grote onderwerpen als ze die moeten evalueren op een abstract niveau. Maar als je aan mensen vraagt hoe hun leven er vandaag uitziet, wat ze doen, of ze doen wat ze willen, of ze zien wie ze willen, enz, dan merk je al snel dat het heel goed gaat met de mensen. We kunnen vandaag waar onze grootouders nog niet aan dachten te kunnen doen. Ze leefden in een uiterst bekrompen wereld van kleine dorpen met versmachtende sociale controle, pestgedrag en machtsmisbruik, een verstikkende godsdienst en als je het slecht had ook geen enkel perspectief om het ooit beter te hebben.

Boudry geeft een brede en diepe analyse van onze wereld, zowel internationaal als in Vlaanderen en Nederland.

Een aanrader!

Bobby Duffy - The Perils Of Perception (Atlantic Books, 2018) ****

In a world of post-truth and alternative facts and fake news, this book is a welcoming read for everybody to understand how wrong they are. It is in fact the perfect companion book to Hans Rosling's "Factfulness".

Bobby Duffy is head of one of the world's leading opinion-polling agencies, which one lucky day started - for promotional reasons - to conduct studies on political thinking and reality. Now, decades later, the agency has conducted their surveys around the world, allowing them to compare countries, trends over time, and of course of perceptions by common people completely differ from the actual reality of the country.

Whether the topic is health, money, immigration, religion ... or even less emotional topics such as internet access, public perceptions are almost always completely off the mark, and not by a short distance, but a very large margin in most countries.

This book is an essential read for anybody in politics, public affairs and journalism. It demonstrates the extreme dangers of referendums, because the average population does not have a clue about reality. They don't. It explains why populism has such an easy task of exploiting these misperceptions and use them to advance their evil cause. It explains a lot of the anger and the fear among populations, two emotions that are often misdirected, but they relate more about people's perceptions than about reality. To put it differently, people seem to be afraid of their perceptions rather than from reality.

And the book is very well written: simple coherent, non-judgmental, objective.

Tim Harford - Messy - How To Be Creative and Resilient In A Tidy-Minded World (Abacus, 2016) **

Financial Times journalis Tim Harford explains why "being messy" is an integral part of the creative process, and also helps in generating unexpected business results. On the other hand, he also gives examples of how mechanical thinking can lead to catastrophes.

Of course he is right on both accounts, but also possibly wrong. It seems critical to me to allow for lateral thinking and hence to break through the mechanistic concepts of thought, but at the same time you should also allow for some systematic approaches, and be very selective in which level of messiness you can endure. His elaboration on the dangers of automated systems without human intervention to avoid incidents, has in fact nothing to do with 'messiness', but it operates on a totally different plane.

There's a lot of name-dropping in the book, either of people Harford visited (such as Brian Eno), or whose works he read. Unfortunately, many of those quotes are only relevant at surface level. They don't add to the argument, but just serve as illustrative purposes.

In his endeavour to merge many different thoughts of sociology, business, art and psychology, he also tends to mix things up at the same time.

What you would have expected to find the right balance between messiness and order, not only that the former is important, because that's too obvious.

On the positive side, the book offers a lot of interesting anecdotes and stories. I only wish they were linked with a more rigid logic, instead of just beying a messy heap of unrelated events.

Hans Rosling - Factfulness (Flatiron, 2018) ****

If you don't know Swedish epidemiologist Hans Rosling, it's high time you find out about him on the internet, via his Gapminder Foundation, or through this book, which was published posthumously. 

Rosling is an incredible educator and big picture thinker, who managed to show the state of the world through very interesting visualisations of the evolution of poverty and wealth, of diseases and of demographic changes. 

"Factfulness" describes in a comprehensive way all his teaching, youtube presentations and TED Talks. 

This book should be mandatory reading in all schools across the world. It will bring both humility and hope for everybody. He demonstrates that most countries in the world are currently having the same living standards as the richest countries somewhere in the middle of last century. He shows how things improve for many people across the world, and how our categorisation of the world in "developed" and "developing" countries is completely outdated. 

One of the best things about his lectures, is that Rosling always submitted his audiences to a quiz before his presentation, only to show how most of us have completely wrong assumptions about the state of the world. And these audiences included politicians, journalists, WHO and IMF collaborators, who in general and with great majority gave the wrong answers. 

And that includes both you and me. So you'd better read this book too!

Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now (Allen Lane, 2018) ****

We know Pinker, we love Pinker. "Enlightenment Now" is subtitled "The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress", and that's exactly what the book does. The good thing is that Pinker gives a very high level overview of the progress that's been made in the last centuries, thanks to the insights of the enlightenment philosophers, scientists and politicians who radically put evidence and democracy at the heart of society. This led to better science, better understanding, but also better justice and well-being to many.

This book is a kind of sequel to "The Better Angels of our Nature", in which he describes how society has become less violent over the millennia.

He tackles the big picture topics of wealth, equality, happiness, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, the environment, ... and he is right: based on all evidence, things are getting better, despite the growth of the population.

His appeal to reason and democracy are a deep cry from an entire intellectual community who sees populism on the rise across the world, with 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' increasingly dominating our news and social media.

As with so many books, this one will also be preaching to the converted. Its main advantage is that it give the converted a very strong overview of facts to support their arguments. Nothing new here, just very well presented and documented.

If I had his skills and knowledge, this is the book I would write.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Skin In The Game (Allen Lane, 2018) **

Ha! I couldn't keep thinking throughout the book that mathematician and stock broker Nassim Nicholas Taleb was contractually bound by his publisher to write a book yet had no idea what to write about. "Skin In The Game" is about people making choices that influence other people's lives without having 'skin in the game', and therefore are also not impacted by the choices they make. By itself this seems like a good angle to comment on today's society, but the book never delivers on its promise. Rather, it is a long and repititive tirade about how clever he is, and how dumb the rest of the world, especially the Intelligent Yet Idiots (IYI), which include people such as Stephen Pinker and Noble Prize winners for economy Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. He complains that his papers against the rhetoric of Thomas Pikkety on capitalism never got the attention they deserved.

Taleb's fascination with his own self is so omnipresent in the book that you start wondering which childhood trauma lies at the basis of it. He has to show off that he speaks and reads in several languages, that he is as comfortable in quoting Aristotle, the bible and quantum physics, that he understands all aspects of religion, history, philosophy, economy, psychology and finance better than anyone else. Taleb is able to judge everybody in every discipline of thought because clearly he is the cleverest of them all.

You find quotes like this on almost every page: "For it looks like you need a lot of intelligence to figure probabilistic things out when you don't have skin in the game. But for an overeducated nonpracticioner, these things are hard to figure out. Unless one is a genius, that is, has the clarity of mind to see through the mud, or has sufficiently profound command of probability theory to cut through the nonsense".

In contrast to "The Black Swan", which I can highly recommend, this book is more a collection of musings and unrelated ideas and accusations with no immediate use in daily life, and yes, his starting point is interesting and true, but not really elaborated upon in a systematic way.

That being said, many of his ideas are thought-provoking and give a different angle to many assumptions that are at least worth considering. Personally, I can agree with many of his ideas, including about Krugman and Stiglitz, but please, do something about your self-obsession.

Barbara Ehrenreich - Dancing In The Streets (Granta, 2007) **

A nice and easy to read history book on "The History of Collective Joy", from ancient dances in Greece to today's rock festivals, and how celebrations have always been at the center of all cultural activities, often within the culture, but equally as part of a counter-culture and even strongly opposed by the official authorites and moral leaders.

Keep dancing!

Howard Bloom - The Genius Of The Beast (Prometheus, 2011) ***

Howard Bloom is a kind of a unique author. He is well-read, and knows his way in many science areas, but he is not a scientist (even if he pretends to be astro-physicist, evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist - which he never formally studied). He used to be the PR guy for famous rock stars in the 70s and 80s for Prince, Billy Joël, Michael Jackson, Queen and pretends to have generated more than 28 billion USD by doing that. He is many things but he is not humble. His self-obsession in his books can be irritating and off-putting, but at the same time he has some great qualities.

Why I like him is because of his big picture thinking. He brings things together in a way that very few people can, creating links between mass behaviour theories with physics, history and paleontology. I like the way he tries to build grand theories about how abstract processes underly totally different phenomena. I like the way he writes, with passion, without dwelling too much on the details, but steadily dragging the reader on towards new insights and new parallels and new facts. He is strong at giving new perspectives on known realities.

In The Genius Of The Beast, he tries to look at the forces that drive us, our emotions and values to create innovations and a better world, or as the subtitle says : "a radical re-vision of capitalism".

Like a good marketeer, he gives names to his own inventions: he calls itthe "secular genesis machine", the "evolutionary search engine", and the two rules of science: the truth at any cost, including the cost of your life, and to look at what is right under your nose as if it is the first time you have seen it, then proceed from there. He describes how our deepest feelings of personal self-fullfilment combined with empathy will move the world forward, looking for improvements in the culture we create, failing oftentimes, yet moving forward, course-correcting and continuing on the new track. And why capitalism is important, because in the end the consumer will dictate where he or she wants to go, and go for those items that are giving pleasure, that surprise and that create fun. And if there are side-effects, the system will handle those and move forward.

This book, like some of his other books, reads like an endless rant, without clear structure but written with passion. I'm not sure whether you have to take what he writes seriously, clearly he jumps from one subject to the next, finding big analogies between the way molecules work, or beehives, or tribes or complex societies, without any evidence that there is a natural link. Bloom is not a scientist, despite his own claims, but he creates wonderful collages of related and unrelated facts.

If you have a good sense of criticism, some of his ideas may be of interest, and surely challenging some of the thoughts you currently hold, making you think about the topics he writes about. That by itself is already a good result, even if you won't find any conclusive answers.

Howard Bloom - The Lucifer Principle (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995) ***

In "The Lucifer Principle", self-proclaimed scientist Howard Bloom investigates the power of evil: its  reason to exist, its value, its biological, psychologial and social causes and purpose, and luckily also how to deal with it. As with any of Bloom's books, you get an incredible display of borrowed knowledge, from biology, paleontology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, history, economy, psychology and any other "ology" you can think of. He is the guy with the big picture vision, who identifies patterns and analogies to substantiate his thesis, regardless of whether these patterns actually exist, or regardless of whether there is any causal relationship between these grand analogies he identifies.

In his view, evil is an inherent part of our life. It's part of everything that happens. It's the power of destruction versus the power of creation at work in everything that's taking place.

Like in his other books, he has an optimistic view on the future. The global superorganism to which we increasingly belong, will try to find ways to deal with evil, and the former tribal fights over resources (land, live stock, women), the deepest savagery that drives humanity, will be turned to positive outcomes through the power of imagination, the new world that we can imagine to live in one day.

Even if Bloom connects what should not be connected, or even if he jumps to conclusions, or even if he too eagerly wants to prove that he is right - instead of taking the scientific method to question his own theory - the sheer amount of interesting facts make this a highly interesting book, which will surely challenge your current ideas. If only for that reason, it's worth reading.

Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of our Nature - A History Of Violence And Humanity (Penguin, 2011) *****

It took me some years before I actually starting reading this book, because its size, close to 1,000 pages in small print, meant that I needed to have time, also to put aside some other books I wanted to read.

Trust me, this is a must-read ... and more than worth to make time for. Its author, Steven Pinker is a well-know psychologist from Harvard University, and he became famous with his books about the workings of the mind: "The Language Instinct" and "How The Mind Works", both highly recommendable books. Pinker is not only a scientist, he is a very gifted writer, able to synthesise gigantic quantities of studies in a very readable format for an educated lay audience. The breadth of his knowledge allows him to give a very big picture of the broad scientific areas of cognitive sciences, neurology, linguistics and psychology.

In this book, "The Better Angles Of Our Nature", Pinker goes even further in the breadth and scope of his vision, giving an amazing overview of the nature and the size of violence in history, with the remarkable conclusion that we currently live in the least violent period ever in humanity. It is remarkable because we are bombarded on a daily basis with scenes of horror in the Middle East, in South Sudan, in the Sahel, with terrorism apparently on the rise and daily stories of homicides and rapes and brutal aggression.

But Pinker breaks through this bias by presenting us figures from anthropologists, paleontologists, historians, economists, sociologists and other specialists that are truly eye-opening. One of the most striking figures is that in pre-historic times, not less than one third of all the people living in small tribes were killed by other humans. Death by disease, accidents and animal attacks have to be added to this figure. Dying of old age was almost unheard of.

Pinker guides us through history, and the horror of incessant fights and brutal killings among the conquered nations. But he also looks at modern times, at warfare and homicide in the 19th century and the 20th. Sure, not all statistics can be trusted, but even then the results speak for themselves. The rise of human rights, the global agreements on codes of warfare, the increased respect for minorities, the acceptance of societal diversity have led to a significant reduction in rape and murder, also in the most "civilised" societies.

But Pinker wouldn't be Pinker if he didn't delve into human nature and what can be done to improve things in the future. He believes - and he gives the evidence for it - that because the scope of our world has increased, through globalisation, international commerce, travel and tourism, the thinking about "the other" has changed. Global views and policies take consequences about the out-group into account. The financial interests of international commerce make politicians think twice before declaring war on other states. He also sees the importance of women in leading functions as an evolution towards more dialogue and less violence. He introduces some elements of game theory - changing the Prisoner's Dilemma into the Pacifist's Dilemma - to explain how an attitude of non-violence is always the better choice, and as a consequence also one of biological survival.

The amazing thing is that view people perceive our world as such, and think about former times, when everything was peaceful and calm. That past is as much an illusion as anything else of course.

Pinker's book gives hope. It is encouraging for all people who fight for more democracy, human rights, peace and tolerance. He demonstrates that we are moving in the right direction, even if the news of the day may show otherwise.

A must-read.

Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers (Back Bay, 2011) **

This book has been hailed by many, and it makes some interesting points, yet often I wondered what all the fuzz was about. Gladwell gives an overview of remarkable extremes - in football, wealth, intelligence, career success stories, etc. ... and comes to the conclusion that luck is a common trait, or rather, to be at the right time on the right place, and to be looked upon by the outside world in the right way. His search for reasons is often interesting, and his anecdotes well researched and presented, but then you say 'so what?'. The value of the book is that it opens new ways of looking at things, instead of just attributing success to personal talent and character. On the other hand, the scientific value of some of his conclusions can be challenged. Some of his claims - like the selection of the players in a soccer team - could be more the result of chance than anyting else.

The most interesting list in the book is the one with the richest people ever in history, including Amenophis III, Cleopatra and Crassus, and guess what, the richest men ever, all come from the same period in the US, and all were active in building railways, oil, steel or cars: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Ford. It is clear that some people paid insufficient taxes.

Derrick Gosselin & Bruno Tindemans - Thinking Futures (Lannoo, 2016)

An interesting book on how companies and organisations can do scenario-planning in uncertain futures. The authors give a good summary and sequence of the models and steps that can be used to develop these future scenarios, although they do not provide much evidence that this will lead to results. Case studies are unfortunately totally absent. So we must trust them that what they propose also actually works in practice.

Edward O. Wilson - The Social Conquest Of Earth (Liveright, 2013) ****

Tijdens mijn studies antropologie heb ik ooit het boekje "The Use And Abuse of Biology : An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology", van Marshall Sahlins moeten lezen, een sterke kritiek op de sociobiologie zoals die door Edward O. Wilson werd geponeerd, en die verketterd werd als sociaal determinisme en biologisch kapitalisme, waarschijnlijk deels omdat het hele veld van sociologie en antropologie was ingepalmd door Marxistisch beïnvloede "wetenschappers", en deels omdat het niet kon dat een bioloog zich op het terrein van de socioloog begaf.

In dit boek geeft E.O. Wilson een populair-wetenschappelijk overzicht van al zijn bevindingen, die deels zijn opgebouwd rond zijn veldwerk bij mieren en andere insecten, en die ook analoge processen kennen bij de mens. De basis van zijn stelling is dat evolutie verloopt door "groep-selectie", eerder dan selectie door verwantschap ('kin selection'). Hij noemt dit "eusociale evolutie".

Hij begint met een overzicht van de evolutie van de mensheid, telkens wijzend op het belang van groepsdenken en - gedrag op overlevingskansen, evenals het belang van taakverdeling. Het is duidelijk dat de meest succesrijke soorten op onze aardbol als groep ageren. Hij gaat dan na wat precies de menselijke natuur uitmaakt, en onderzoekt het ontstaan van cultuur, taal en religie, en hun belang bij groepsevolutie.

Nu zijn we op een punt gekomen dat ons succes zich tegen ons riskeert te keren, en we zijn onze wereld grondig om zeep aan het helpen. Ons ingebakken stamdenken moet plaatsmaken voor een ruimer denken van onze soort en de omgeving als groep. Godsdienst en andere ideologieën, van zowel rechts als links, moeten als elementen van een verouderd denken worden gezien.

Een stevig betoog, goed onderbouwd en gedocumenteerd, vol interessante wetenswaardigheden, en vlot geschreven.