Gets Many Big Things Right–But Revolution Fizzles,
October 28, 2001
Bill O'Reilly
This is a really great book with 20 short chapters that span the full range of American life from class, money, and sex to politics, race, religion and personal relations.
There are some really sharp insights here, and a fundamental honesty, that should inspire the majority of voters–those who earn an honest wage and go about their business while being polite to others.
Best of all, O'Reilly has beat the media system and earned the power to tell it as he sees it, without bowing to the censorship that characterizes most news programs today, obsessed as they are with entertainment.
There is a down side–this one man show is just that, and both his own Republican party as well as the Democratic party have both sold out to class, corporate money, and a status quo that has the average tax payer paying for all the perks at the top.
There is a lot of beef to O'Reilly, but as one who agrees with most of what is on his mind, I am left with the unanswered question: where's the revolution? Where are campaign finance reform and a massive turn-out of voters able to take back the government and bring common sense back into government?
O'Reilly talks a good show, let's see if he can take it to the next level and start both a web site and a popular reform movement.
Uplifting, Informative, Good Benchmark for Reflection,
September 24, 2001
Neil Howe
I was very impressed by the author's earlier book, Generations, and when this one came along I grabbed it, for I have three children in the 1982-1998 birth date range that demarcates the Millennial Generation.
As we come away from the 11 September attack on America, the horrors of genocide from Kosovo to Burundi to East Timor, the stock market crash and the threat of recession, this book is nothing if not uplifting.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone who has children, deals with children or young employees, or who likes to speculate on where the future will take us.
According to the authors, and their earlier book provides a very fine and well-research foundation for their prognostications, the Millennial Generation is the next “great generation” and it will be fully capable of rising to the many challenges that face us all.
Especially encouraging is their view that much of the malaise felt by our teenagers in the post Cold-War years is being rapidly eliminatedour young people appear, at least in the most developed portions of the world, to be moving decisively toward a kinder and gentler demeanor, including a restoration of family values.
The structure of the book is useful (see the table of contents) but there is one very serious deficiency for a book of this caliberthere is no index. When I went to see all the references to “culture wars”, the one somber note in this otherwise very positive assessment of the future, the lack of an index prevented me from using the book as a reference work.
This gives rise to my one concern about this generation (I have three children in the Millennials), and that is their lack of international studies and comparative religion training. It is my impression that even the best of our schools are failing to teach foreign affairs and global conditions, and failing to show how what happens beyond our water's edge has a direct bearing on our future peace and prosperitythe author's would have done well to spend more time on the differences between our US-born millennials and foreign millennials (whom they characterize as several years behind but on the same track), and to address the gaps in our education of this otherwise stellar generation.
Every parent and teacher, and every politician who wants to be elected in the next 20 years, needs to read this book. If Hollywood and other purveyors of products to the 10-25 year old marketplace were to read this book, we might get to a kinder and gentler broadcast, print media, literature, and family entertainment culture even more quickly than the book predicts.
Jihad and Cultural Creatives versus McWorld and Davos,
September 24, 2001
Benjamin Barber
Others have written good summaries of this book, so I will focus on bringing out one key point and recommending two other books.
The heart of this book, in my opinion, is on page 210 where the author carefully distinguishes between the Jihad's opposition to McWorld consumerism and development patterns, as opposed to democracy or other political notions.
All groups have their extremists and lunatics, and all groups have their bureaucracies and overly-rigid institutionalizations of past preferences. The one needs to be stamped out, and the other radically reformed–no matter what beliefs you aspire to.
Where I see the vitality and promise of this generation is in the possible energizing of the publics of many nations, including the nations of Islam, and public engagement of the core question of our time: what changes must we make in our corporate and consumerist behavior in order to, at once, establish both a sustainable model for the quality of life and choice we aspire to, while simultaneously establishing new forms of regional political and cultural accommodations that respect very strongly held beliefs?
There are two books that bracket this one in interesting ways. The first, readily identified from top-notch reviews such as appear in the Los Angeles Times, is Chalmers Johnson book, “BLOWBACK: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire”. The second, less readily perceived, is Howard Bloom's “GLOBAL BRAIN: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.” ]
In a nut-shell, then, we are engaged in three world wars right now: one between cultures that cannot talk to one another because the necessary portions of the brain have been literally killed in the course of intra-cultural development; one between the political and economic manifestation of our respective cultures, between a politics subservient to corporations on the one side and a politics terrified of the religious zealot individuals on the other side; and a third war, the most important, the war that has not really started yet, between individuals and corporations over campaign finance reform and the consequent outcomes that can be managed with respect to politcal economy and political education.
There is much in this book, depending on one's particular interests, that can be skimmed or skipped. With patience, however, the book in its entirety is a rewarding experience for it calls into question much about how we organize ourselves politically, economically, and socially.
The bottom line, and very consistently with other great books such as “The Manufacture of Evil” on the low end and “Consilience” on the high end, is that Western thinking has been corrupted to the point that the West has become, as the inside flap says, “a vast, incomprehensible directionless machine, run by process-minded experts….whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality.”
As my own interests run toward public intelligence and public effectiveness in guiding the polity, I found his several chapters related to secrecy, immorality, and the “hijacking of capitalism” to be especially worthwhile.
He concludes that secrecy is pathological, undermining both public confidence and the public dialog. Intelligence in his view is about disseminated knowledge, not secrets.
Throughout the book the author discusses the contest between those who feel that the people cannot be trusted–the elites who strive to remain in power by making power appear an arcane skill with rites and formulas beyond the ken of the people–and those who feels that the people–and especially the larger consciousness of the people–are more in touch with nature and reality and the needs of the people than these elites.
This is a difficult book to absorb and enjoy, but I recommend because it sets the broad outlines for the real power struggle in the 21st Century–not between terrorism and capitalism, but rather between the government-corporate elites with their own agenda, and the larger body of people now possibly ready to turn every organization into an employee-owned and managed activity.
Live and Let Die Group Dynamics, Bacteria Are Winning
July 13, 2001
Very very few books actually need to be read word for word, beginning with the bibliography and ending with the footnotes. This is one of those books. While there are some giant leaps of faith and unexplained challenges to the author's central premises (e.g. after an entire chapter on why Athenian diversity was superior to Spartan selection, the catastophic loss of Athens to Sparta in 404 BC receives one sentence), this is a deep book whose detail requires careful absorbtion.
I like this book and recommend it to everyone concerned with day to day thinking and information operations. I like it because it off-sets the current fascination with the world-wide web and electronic connectivity, and provides a historical and biologically based foundation for thinking about what Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand set forth in the 1970's through the 1990's: the rise of neo-biological civilization and the concepts of co-evolution.
There are a number of vital observations that are relevant to how we organize ourselves and how we treat diversity. Among these:
5.0 out of 5 stars Solving Major Problems Early for 1/50th of the Cost
July 4, 2001
I first heard Kris Wheaton lecture in Europe, and was just blown away by the deep understanding that he demonstrated of why commanders and CEOs are constantly missing the warnings their subordinates and forward scouts are sending back–the huge cost! Kosovo, for example, could have been a $1 billion a year problem if acted upon wisely and early, instead it became a $5 billion a year problem. I like this book very much because it makes his deep insights available to everybody in a very readable, well-illustrated, and concise book.
I strongly recommend this book because it offers the only thoughtful explanation I have ever seen on the conflict between the senior decision-maker's attention span (can only think about $50 billion problems) and the early warning that *is* available but cannot break through to the always over-burdened, sometimes arrogant, and rarely strategic top boss. In this regard, his book is a fine complement to the more historical work by Willard Matthias on “America's Strategic Blunders.”
This book also offers solutions. It is a book that should be required reading for all field grade officers in all military services, as well as state and local governors and majors, university and hospital and other non-profit heads, and of course the captains of industry who spend billions, often unwisely, because they have not established a scouting system that can be heard at the highest levels *in time*. America, among many other nations and organizations, has a habit of ignoring its iconoclasts and mavericks–in an increasingly complex world where catastrophic combinations of failure are going to be more common, such ignorance will eventually become unaffordable and threatening to the national security as well as the national prosperity of those who persist in thinking about old problems in old ways.
There is one other aspect of this book that merits strong emphasis: it focuses on human understanding and human engagement with the world, and makes it clear that technology has almost nothing to do with how well we cope with the external environment that defines our future. There aren't five people in the US government, to take one example, that adequately understand the rich intellectual history of Islam nor the core difference between the Islamic emphasis on knowledge integration as the core value and the Christian emphasis on love as the core value. The author of this book is one of America's foremost authorities on the Balkan conflict and the deep importance of historical and cultural understanding as part of current political and operational competency–we need 1000 more intelligence professionals just like him. This book will inspire and provoke and is a great value for anyone who deals with the world at large.
Subtle–Not for the Impatient–and Useful to Revolutionaries,
June 1, 2001
Malcolm Gladwell
For those aspiring to revolutionary change in any aspect of life (e.g. the Cultural Creatives), this book is a subtle revolutionary manifesto–at a more mundane level it is a sales guide. I like this book because as we all deal with the information explosion, it provides some important clues regarding what messages will “get through”, and what we need to do to increase the chances that our own important messages reach out to others.
This book is in some ways a modern version of Kuhn's “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” While more of a story than a thesis, there is a great deal here that tracks with some of the more advanced information theory dissertations, and the book could reasonably be subtitled “The Precipitants of Social Revolutions.”
The most subtle message in this book is that substance is not vital–perception is. The contagiousness of the idea, the life-altering potential of the smallest ideas, and the fact that revolutionary change is always cataclysmic rather than evolutionary, will frustrate those who think that years of intellectual exploration will be rewarded with acceptance.
However, despite the revolutionary nature of the final “tipping point”, there is actually a clear path taking up to 25 years, from the Innovators to the Early Adopters, to the Early Majority, to the Late Majority. My sense is that America today, with its 50 million Cultural Creatives, is about to cross over from the Early Adopters to the Early Majority stage, and will do so during the forthcoming Congressional elections when we see a rise in Independents and more attention to energy and other alternative sustainable lifestyle issues–hence, this book is relevant to anyone who either wants to promote a shift in America or elsewhere away from consumerism (or who wants to go on selling consumerism), or who wants to seriously revisit what many would call the failed strategies of the early environmentalist, human rights, and corporate accountability advocates.
The book ends on an irresistably upbeat note–change is posssible, people can radically transform their beliefs for the common good in the face of the right kind of impetus. Each of us has a role to play, whether as a Connector, a Maven, a Salesman, or a Buyer, and our role will not be defined in rational terms, but rather in social terms. In many ways, this book is about the restoration of community and the importance of relationships, and it is assuredly relevant to anyone who thinks about “the common good.”
