The only year-end diary of books that actually captured how most people read was Alberto Manguel’s A Reading Diary (2004). The books that shaped his year ranged from Don Quixote to The Wind In The Willows; the most contemporary author on his list was Margaret Atwood.
But though the books he read were not of his times, the troubled history around him seeped into the diary. Goethe tells him how to interpret the social milieu in Calgary, the war in Iraq is filtered through Buzzati’s AThe Tartar Steppe. Manguel never disappears into reading so deeply that he forgets his times — if anything, the books return him inexorably to the present, over and over again.
It’s easier to put together a list of interesting or notable books of the year than it is to pinpoint the ideas that may have shaped the year, and yet the latter is a much more rewarding exercise. Here are three big ideas that sparked off intelligent debate in 2011.
Violence has been diminishing; we are kinder and gentler than we believe. (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, Allen Lane.) Pinker’s analysis of violence in the 21st century as opposed to the past was immediately controversial, but also compelling. With images of Darfur, or Syria, or riots in the UK playing across our television screens, he suggests that we are caught in a shared cognitive illusion, assuming that the scale of these conflicts parallels older battles and wars.
“If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million,” he observes. The real picture, if you look at data on homicides, war and other forms of mainstream bloodshed, is “shockingly happy”: “Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century.” Among his explanations for the kinder, gentler 21st century human is a surprising one — perhaps, as Peter Singer and other philosophers (and neurologists) suggest, there is a shift in empathy among humanity. Instead of people sharing “a small kernel” of empathy, among the relatively tiny circle of family and friends, those circles may have expanded in unusual ways.
The more the Internet is personalised, the more your perception of reality is filtered. (The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser, Penguin/ Viking.) For most people, the evolution of the Internet is measured in terms of speed and ease of use. Pariser looks at what might be called the moral evolution of the Internet, from its open-source days to the present, when a handful of companies (Google, Facebook and Amazon among them) control a great deal of the flow of information.
Pariser’s most provocative finding is that the Internet is not the same for everyone — personalisation has led to starkly different “versions” of the Net, where your browsing and buying history will shape what you see online. The “filter bubble” is dangerous, Pariser says — from 2009 onwards, we’ve been part of an invisible revolution that has changed the way in which we consume information. Allied to this is the idea that nothing is really private any more. Pariser makes his case with forceful clarity, but many might find his solutions impossibly utopian, especially his belief that we can return control to users and protect the early vision of the Internet as a place where the mind could be truly free.
Do you own your body, or does science? (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, PAN Books.) Sixty years after Henrietta Lacks died of cancer, her cells live on, apparently immortal, still reproducing at speed. The HeLa line of cancer cells became the foundation of decades of laboratory work, and there are now trillions of Henrietta’s cells in test-tubes across the world. But until Skloot started to ask questions, few scientists knew anything about the woman behind the HeLa line.
The story of Henrietta Lacks is fascinating in itself. Lacks was a black woman who grew up in tobacco country, survived a hardscrabble life and raised a family while fighting the cancer that would kill her. But Skloot’s focus is also, sharply, on the ethics behind the HeLa line. Henrietta Lacks never gave her consent to the use of her cells in research, nor did her family know about the HeLa line until 20 years after her death, and they would not have any share in profits from the cell line.
Do people have a right to their own tissues? The answer, says Skloot in a thoughtful Afterword, is that ordinary people don’t have ownership rights. They have the right to informed consent, but as the scale of tissue research gets bigger, they don’t necessarily have the right to profit from the use of cells, moles, growths or other parts of their bodies. “How you should feel about this isn’t obvious,” writes Skloot, pointing out that there is a difference between tissues excised from one’s bodies, which are essentially waste material, and tissues that are still parts of one’s bodies. Few other books will ask as many difficult ethical questions, or will challenge our sense of ownership over our bodies as much as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
