We live in exceptional times. Girded by the technological revolution, we're braced for a series of advancements that promise to transform our world. But times of great change are also times of great risk. And so, while there have never been more people focusing their erudite minds on the outstanding problems of science and technology, our societies have surely never been more preoccupied by mind-less distractions. Many seek to profit from these imperfections. We have doctors pedaling proscriptions for happiness, politicians touting back to basics ideologies, and companies promoting products that promise- to cure all our ills. And then there are the alarmist historians who get a kick out of researching fallen civilizations, deriving a list of blunders that may have contributed to their downfalls, and then using these conclusions to, first, scare the crap out of everyone by pointing out the ways in which our civilization is charting a similar decline and, then, offering a miraculous solution to extricate ourselves from this mess of ours. Ms. Costa may be more respectable than most who profit from this particularly repugnant beat-up, but that doesn't make her any more right.
The Watchman's Rattle mixes historical conjectures and largely unsubstantiated science to cook up half-baked theories about why humans struggle to cope with problems bigger than themselves. From a cultural obsession with economics to the rise of oppositional politics, Ms. Costa researches the origins of some of humanity's most important weaknesses. Some of her investigations bear interesting fruit, like her theory that the human mind has not evolved to cope with problems on a societal scale, choosing, as a result, to ignore them. But while such theories are interesting and engaging, Ms. Costa over-inflates the importance of these weaknesses by arguing that they threaten to bring down the whole of human civilization. Why? Because she believes these same weaknesses lead to the fall of prior civilizations, including the Roman and the Mayan. Even if she's right, and it's not at all clear that she is, this rather conveniently ignores the lightyears of knowledge and experience that exists between our civilization and all of the previous civilizations combined.
Ultimately, Ms. Costa has teased out those less enviable aspects of our characters, as people and as societies, blown them up to mammoth proportions and used the fear generated from these to sell the idea that the only thing standing between us and doom is human insight. She devotes the latter half of her book to an investigation of insight, what it is, how it works, and how we can train our brains to utilize it. Along the way, she sites fascinating examples of how leaps of insight have saved lives and changed how we view the world.
Perhaps Ms. Costa is right. Perhaps our civilization is sliding towards extinction and that, because of the magnitude of the problems facing us, our poorly adapted minds refuse to grapple with these existential questions. I know this much. I'd believe her a lot more if she didn't have an interest in magnifying problems in order to pedal her own solutions. No, we and the world we've made aren't perfect, but somehow we manage to live, love and be productive on a daily basis without detonating ourselves and our civilizations in. So maybe, just maybe, we actually know what we're doing. Maybe we're headed towards better things and not grimmer ones. It's always darkest before the dawn...
There are virtues here; some of Ms. Costa's ideas on insight are thought-provoking, but the everything's falling apart setup, followed by the I have your solutions right here for you soft-sell is both disappointing and frustrating. (2/5 Stars)
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