Anglo Indians

India's Anglo-Indian community – a legacy of British rule on the subcontinent – is fighting for its survival as increasing numbers of their young men and women marry Indian partners.

There are an estimated 500,000 Anglo-Indians throughout the world – including in Britain, Canada, Australia and Pakistan – but in India itself their population has dipped to an estimated 150,000. At the time of India's independence in 1947 there were half a million Anglo-Indians in the country.

The community developed from mixed marriages between British officers, squaddies, tea planters and railway workers and local Indian women in the 19th century. Since then they have developed a unique hybrid culture which carefully preserves a pre-War sense of English identity. This largely Christian community has traditionally centred on some of India's largest cities, including Calcutta, Madras, Bangalore, New Delhi and the Kolar Gold Fields of Karnataka.

Many of its leading figures have thrived in India's armed forces, where the current Air Chief Marshal N. A. K Browne is an Anglo-Indian, and in the country's extensive railways, which they once dominated. The actor Ben Kingsley, entertainers Sir Cliff Richard and Engelburt Humperdink, and the former Olympic athlete Sebastian Coe, are claimed by the community as some of their highest achievers.

Recent DNA tests show that the Duke of Cambridge 'has Indian ancestry'. The Duke of Cambridge may be heir to the throne and born to wealth and privilege, but he is also a member of
racial minority - that he is an Anglo-indian. A geneticist at Edinburgh University has confirmed that DNA tests from members of his family have proved he has an Indian descendent on his mother’s side. Six generations before him, Eliza Kewark, a housekeeper, had a relationship with one of his mother Princess Diana’s ancestors, Thoedore Forbes, and bore him several children, including a daughter, Katherine, in 1812. Ms Kewark has, until now, always been thought to have been an Armenian living in India, where she met Theodore Forbes, a Scottish noble working for the East India Company which then ruled much of India. But DNA testing on saliva samples from William’s relatives by Jim Wilson, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, and the company Britain’s DNA have established beyond doubt that she was in fact an Indian. The clinching evidence is a rare type of DNA, R30b, found so far in only 14 others, all Indian except for one person, from neighbouring Nepal. Their discovery makes William one of the world’s dwindling number of Anglo-Indians.

Anglo-Indians were discriminated against by the British during the Raj because of racism and many were consigned to work on India’s railways where they continued to work after independence. Many were the result of secret affairs between tea planters and Indian pickers on their estates or relationships between British soldiers and local girls. Because of this they were also discriminated against by many Indians. Their women were often referred to in derogatory terms as ‘Chutney Marys'.

 Now this marginalised community which has lived in the overlap between British and Indian society has a new royal patron.

Leading Indian commentator Swapan Dasgupta said the discovery of Indian DNA in the prince had righted an historical wrong. Most of India’s invaders and occupiers, including the Aryans and the Mughals, had eventually become Indian, except the British. “They came as foreigners but got absorbed. I’m happy the Indian strain remains in the British monarchy. India may have been lost to Britain, but an Indian remains,” he said.

The largest group of European Indians, however, are descendants of British men, generally from the colonial service and the military, and lower-caste Hindu or Muslim women. From some time in the nineteenth century, both the British and the Indian societies rejected the offspring of these unions, and so the Anglo-Indians, as they became known, sought marriage partners among other Anglo Indians. Over time this group developed a number of caste-like features and acquired a special occupational niche in the railroad, postal, and customs services. A number of factors fostered a strong sense of community among Anglo-Indians. The school system focused on English language and culture and was virtually segregated, as were Anglo-Indian social clubs; the group's adherence to Christianity also set members apart from most other Indians; and distinctive manners, diet, dress, and speech contributed to their segregation.

During the independence movement, many Anglo-Indians identified (or were assumed to identify) with British rule, and, therefore, incurred the distrust and hostility of Indian nationalists. Their position at independence was difficult. They felt a loyalty to a British "home" that most had never seen and where they would gain little social acceptance. They felt insecure in an India that put a premium on participation in the independence movement as a prerequisite for important government positions. Some Anglo-Indians left the country in 1947, hoping to make a new life in Britain or elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Australia or Canada. Many of these people returned to India after unsuccessful attempts to find a place in "alien" societies. Most Anglo-Indians, however, opted to stay in India and made whatever adjustments they deemed necessary.

Like the Parsis, the Anglo-Indians are essentially urban dwellers. But  Unlike the Parsis, relatively few have attained high levels of education, amassed great wealth, or achieved more than subordinate government positions. In the 1990s, Anglo-Indians remained scattered throughout the country in the larger cities and those smaller towns serving as railroad junctions and communications centers.

Constitutional guarantees of the rights of communities and religious and linguistic minorities have  permitted Anglo-Indians to maintain their own schools and to use English as the medium of instruction. There is no official discrimination against Anglo-Indians in terms of current government employment. Indeed a few have risen to high posts; some are high-ranking officers in the military, and a few are judges. In occupational terms, at least, the assimilation of Anglo-Indians into the mainstream of Indian life was well under way by the 1990s. Nevertheless, the group will probably remain socially distinct as long as its members marry only other Anglo-Indians and its European descent. Breakfast tea from a cup and saucer, Agatha Christie murder mysteries and Mills & Boon romances, a weekly visit from the hairdresser, who sets a dowager’s delicate hair in a 1940s-style wave are still part of their lifestyle. Sometimes, a tailor comes to make the old-style garments like floral tea dresses, beloved by Anglo-Indian women of a certain age. The culture lives on, somewhat, in Anglo-Indian dishes like country chicken, a tangy dish seasoned with garlic and ginger, and pepper water, a spicy tomato-chili sauce, ladled on rice with meat on the side.

In some respects, Anglo-Indians tended to be socially progressive. By the early 20th century, many Anglo-Indian women worked outside the home, at a time when few middle-class Indian women did. They established an English-language education system, financed by the British, and a vast network of social clubs. Along with educational and social benefits, Anglo-Indians received preferential pay during British rule. In the 1940s a British train engineer earned around 300 rupees a month, while an Anglo-Indian would earn 200 and an Indian 100.

The demise of the British Raj was a shock from which the Anglo-Indian community took decades to recover. Many of the better off and more highly skilled left for new lives overseas. Those who stayed lost the privileges to which they had become accustomed. Government financing for separate Anglo-Indian schools, for instance, stopped in 1961. After hiring quotas for Anglo-Indians were abolished, their inability to speak Hindi and other Indian languages took a toll on their employment opportunities. Today, though, the fortunes of younger Anglo-Indians are generally rising because of their English skills and what Ms. Andrews, the anthropologist, describes as their “Western bearing” made  them attractive employees for multinationals and Indian outsourcing companies.

“You go for a job interview in a multinational with a name like O’Brien, and, well, it all flows pretty easily for our children these days,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s their fluency in English that makes it easy for them to get positions in multinationals and customer care positions in call centers,”.

The term "Anglo-Indian" was first used by Warren Hastings in the eighteenth century to describe both the British in India and their Indian-born children. In the nineteenth century the British in India still separated themselves from coloured people but accepted fairer (and often wealthier) people of dual heritage as "Anglo-Indian". Darker (and usually poorer) people were given the name "Eurasian". Today (apart from literature still alluding to the British who have lived in India for a long time as "Anglo-Indian" the term rightly signifies a world minority who have settled in Canada, New Zealand, the United States of Americas the United Kingdom and Australia. The East India Company directors in the seventeenth century paid one pagoda or gold mohur for each child born to an Indian mother and a European father, as family allowance. Children with British or European fathers and Indian mothers were called "country-born" and included those with Portuguese, Dutch or French fathers. These offspring were amalgamated into the Anglo-Indian community, forming a bulwark for the British Raj, a buffer but also a bridge between rulers and subjects. These Westernised people, their culture inherited from their male ancestors but enriched by the spirit of India, have descended from all classes, from both Indian and European aristocrats, from missionaries and naval men, and from traders and soldiers. By 1750 they outnumbered the often transient British.

The Anglo-Indians, were, however, more "Anglo" than "Indian". Their mother-tongue was English, and so was their religious upbringing, as were their customs and traditions. While most of them married within their own Anglo-Indian circle, there were many who continued to marry expatriate Englishmen. Very few, if any, married Indians. The same rigid social barriers that the British erected between themselves and the Anglo-Indians, also existed to isolate the Anglo-Indians from the vast majority of Indians. Neither the British nor the Anglo-Indians made any attempt at appreciating Indian music, art, dance, literature or drama. The "natives" were seen as idol worshippers, and not particularly clean ones at that, with their habits of blowing their noses, spitting and defecating in public. Not to mention eating with their fingers while sitting cross legged on the ground. The aloofness between themselves and their Indian subjects were of little concern to the British, and even less so now that they were going ‘home’. But the Anglo-Indians, left in a twilight zone of uncertainty, felt a bitter sense of betrayal – and dismay at the fact that Britain made no effort to offer her swarthier sons any hospitality in the land where their forefathers had been born.

But the Anglo-Indian identity is disappearing fast. Those who have found new lives abroad have merged into the mainstream. Other than the nostalgic reminiscences of an older generation (much of it irrelevant to the busy day-to-day concerns of their children and grand-children) their Indian past has all but faded into oblivion. In India, the Community are indistinguishable from their Indian friends and neighbours. The women wear saris or salwar kameez, the kids disco enthusiastically to Hindi film hits and watch Bollywood movies. Although English remains their first language, they speak the local vernacular with ease and fluency. It is a culture known for its good cheer, its generous hospitality and its ideals of keen sportsmanship.

Greg Francis, a 30-year-old Anglo-Indian from Calcutta, where his forefathers worked on the railroads, works for I.B.M.’s call center division in Gurgaon, a high-rise satellite city on Delhi’s edge where many multinationals have their headquarters where he trains Indians on dealing with Westerners said, " he could not shake the idea that his people’s best days were in the past."

“I feel kind of homesick for those old times although I never knew them.”

Wait, wait - whats your hurry?

I belong to a family of procrastinators or at least to the half that is not a procrastinator. My wife and son however are definitely charter members of the tribe. The important thing about them though is that they are very very creative in the excuses they come up with for delaying actions- from the phases of the moon being not just right to genetic predispositions or emotional trauma suffered early in life. The common part of these explanations is that it is the gods that are really responsible and that they have no control over their actions in the face of forces beyond their ken.

Alexendra Petri explains the rationale behind procrastination in this fun piece in a recent Washington Post article.

" I have, in theory, been working on this piece," she says," about How Not To Procrastinate for the past month. In theory. I would have finished it earlier, but I wandered off to eat a sandwich and do some laundry that had been piling up for weeks, and then YouTube suddenly became very interesting, and then it was 3 a.m. and I had accomplished nothing."

But according to her it the struggle is what counts. " In my defense, I procrastinate only on really important things. I live by the John Perry-Robert Benchley theory of structured procrastination, which states that the most effective way of appearing to get a lot of things done is to always be procrastinating on one big project. “Anyone can do any amount of work,” said Benchley, “provided it is not the work that he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

" This has always worked for me" she explains. "The trouble is that sometimes I need to finish an actually big project, and the only way of doing that is to commit myself to something even bigger. I am, for instance, working on a book. It has, comfortably, been the largest thing I have had to do for the whole year, and in consequence I have been able to write all kinds of other things. Plays. Screenplays. Graffiti. Unnecessarily thorough Yelp reviews. As the deadline crawls closer, I have been possessed by the creeping terror that in order to finish everything on time, I will have to agree to an even more gigantic commitment, by, say, adopting a small child. There is no other way. This is just how I have always lived." 

Apparently one of the most effective ways of procrastinating is by convincing yourself that what you are doing is not procrastinating, but working. In order to be in a good mood to write, you tell yourself,  you need to have an iced coffee, peruse your facebook page on the internet, do research for your work. As Burton Rascoe said, “What no wife of a writer ever understands is that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window.”

Before the Internet, you had to put real work into procrastinating. Benchley had to subscribe to illustrated magazines so that he could look at pictures of Animals Doing Cute Things. But he still did it, because procrastinators have their own professional pride.

Being a procrastinator, like being late, is a sign of optimism. It is because you have confidence in your powers. Most people would have to start this project weeks ago to do it well,” you tell yourself. “But not me, because I am Captain America.” Superheroes, you reflect, are always saving the day at the last minute. You never see the Avengers come to a burning building six hours before it gets set on fire to evacuate everyone in an orderly manner. No, they always show up just when it’s almost too late. That’s what makes it impressive.

“A good writer is a good reader,” you remind yourself, as you read through the Huffington Post and other miscellanous web sites while waiting for the creative inspiration to strike.

 You can also procrastinate by hunting online for Ways to Stop Procrastinating! Unfortunately,most of these suggestions boil down to: “So, you want to quit procrastinating? Here’s a suggestion! Try not putting things off until the last minute!” which is roughly the same as saying, “You want to not be late? Try showing up to things on time!”

Then there are Web sites for procratinators- kind of AAA for the usually late. Admittedly, a Web site that discourages you from procrastinating is like a T-shirt promoting nudism. There is even one called WriteOrDie that literally eats your words if you do not type fast enough. Then there  are apps “iWillNotProcrastinate,” or "There’s EndProcrastination Hypnosis", which boasts that “Hypnosis is proven to be the most effective method to eliminate procrastination and get more done. Do you avoid important tasks until the last possible minute? Are you a master of finding unimportant activities to do so you can delay doing the important ones? By changing your subconscious thoughts, the End Procrastination Hypnosis promises it will help you  get things done on time. After listening for just one to three weeks, you’ll begin to notice how liberating it is to complete important tasks quickly and easily", the site claims.  

However, few people actually finish the course. They have more important things to do!

Paul - the modern day seer

It is well known that from ancient times men have sought divine intervention to predict their future. Greeks went to the oracles of Delphi, Romans to their seers, Indians go to their astrologers. But now faced with a tense World Cup soccer, Germans have found a new seer - Paul.

Paul is an octopus who supposedly accurately predicted the results of the past association football matches. He also made several accurate predictions in the 2010 World Cup which brought him worldwide attention as an animal oracle. 

During divinations, Paul's keepers would present him with two boxes containing food. Each box was identical except for the fact that they were decorated with the different team flags of the competitors of an upcoming football match. Whichever box Paul ate from first would be considered his prediction for which team would win the match.

His keepers at the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, mainly tasked him with predicting the outcomes of international matches in which the German national football team was playing. Paul correctly chose the winning team in several of Germany's six Euro 2008 matches, and all seven of their matches in the 2010 World Cup—including Germany's third place play-off win over Uruguay on 10 July. Following these predictions, his success rate rose to 85 percent, with an overall record of 11 out of 13 correct predictions.Aside from his predictions involving Germany, Paul also foretold Spain's win against the Netherlands in the 2010 World Cup Final by eating a mussel from the box with the Spanish flag on it.

Experts have proposed several scientific theories to explain Paul's seemingly prescient behaviour, ranging from pure luck to the possibility that he was attracted to the appearance or smell of one box over another. But nobody really knows the secret of his success.

Paul was hatched in January 2008 from an egg at the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth, England, then moved to a tank at one of the chain's centres at Oberhausen in Germany. His name derives from the title of a poem by the German children's writer Boy Lornsen: Der Tintenfisch Paul Oktopus. According to Sea Life's entertainment director, Daniel Fey, Paul demonstrated intelligence early in life: ″There was something about the way he looked at our visitors when they came close to the tank. It was so unusual, so we tried to find out what his special talents were.″

The species Octopus vulgaris is almost certainly colour blind; neither behavioural studies nor electroretinogram experiments show any discrimination of a colour's hue. Nonetheless, individuals can distinguish brightness as well as an object's size, shape, and orientation. Shelagh Malham of Bangor University states that they are drawn to horizontal shapes, and indeed, there are horizontal stripes on the flags he has chosen. The flag of Germany, a bold tricolour consisting of three equal horizontal bands of black, red and gold, was Paul's usual favorite. But the flag of Spain, with its broad yellow stripe, and the flag of Serbia, with its contrast of blue and white, are more vivid still, possibly explaining why Paul picked those countries over Germany. Octopus vulgaris is also equipped with sensitive chemoreceptors on its tentacles, which are used to taste food and "smell" the water. According to Paul's keepers, there were holes in the jars to help him choose.

His prediction that Argentina would lose prompted Argentine chef Nicolas Bedorrou to post an Octopus recipe on Facebook. " There are always people who want to eat our octopus but he is not shy and we are here to protect him as well. He will survive" said Oliver Walenciak (Paul's keeper)

Paul correctly predicted the outcome of the semi-final, by choosing the food in the box marked with the Spanish flag. The prediction led to death threats as German fans called for Paul to be cooked and eaten. In response, Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero offered to send Paul official state protection, and the Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian called for Paul to be given safe haven in Spain.

The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, criticised Paul, accusing him of being a symbol of Western decadence and decay.

Doubts were expressed, notably in the German press, as to whether "Paul" was actually the same octopus in 2010 as in 2008. Here are some facts about the oracle Paul

1. He's originally from Weymouth. Although he now resides at the Aquarium Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, Paul was actually born in Weymouth and moved from the town's Sea Life Park in 2006.

2. He's a wanted man. Argentine chef Nicolas Bedorrou was so angry after Paul correctly predicted his team would lose its quarter-final clash with Germany, that he suggested a way to cook the octopus.
He posted on Facebook: "We will chase him and put him on some paper. We will then beat him (but correctly!) in order to keep the meat tender and then put it in boiling water."

3. He's big news. Paul's predictions have gained so much popularity that German news channel NTV has started to broadcast his predictions live, with two reporters situated next to his tank so they can bring their viewers all the latest goings on.

4. He's the biggest celebrity in Oberhausen. Having wowed the world's media with his predictions, Paul has put the mundane Germany city of Oberhausen on the map.

5. He's got a good track record. Paul began to predict Germany's results during the Euro 2008 tournament, correctly choosing the winner in four of Germany's six matches. He predicted Germany to win every match but was wrong when they lost to Croatia and in the final to Spain. So far at the World Cup 2010, Paul has correctly predicted the winner of each of Germany's five matches.

6. He could have made you a packet. Having correctly tipped the winner of Germany's five World Cup matches, backing Paul's tips could have netted you a few squid. A £1 accumulator bet on all five results would have won you £131, which could comfortably buy you a few bags of mussels.

7. He's an intelligent creature. Octopuses are highly intelligent animals and have been proven to have a strong short and long-term memory. Fiona Smith, head of animal care at Weymouth Sea Life Park said: “Common octopuses like Paul are very intelligent. We equate their intelligence with that of a dog and they love problem solving and figuring things out."

8. He's a Twitter and Facebook sensation. Paul has become an online phenomenon over recent weeks and is now one of the most talked about topics on the web.

9. He doesn't cheat. Paul predicts results by opening one of the two flag-covered plastic food containers in his tank.

10. And finally he's not scared of death threats. According to his keeper, Oliver Walenciak, Paul is unfazed by a series of death threats sent by Argentinian supporters who blame the octopus for their World Cup exit. He said: "There are always people who want to eat our octopus but he is not shy and we are here to protect him as well. He will survive."
 
Paul was last checked by staff on 25 October 2010, and was in good health, but the following morning he was found dead. He was aged two-and-a-half, a normal lifespan for the species. On 17 June 2014, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Paul was featured in a Google "doodle". He was represented as in heaven, perched on a billowy bed of clouds and adorned with a halo; when animated, he appeared to vacillate in his predictions for the day's matches.

A theory of jerks

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"Are you surrounded by fools? Are you the only reasonable person around? Then maybe you’re the one with the jerkitude" writes  Eric Schwitzgebel a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside.

To understand them you must picture the world through the eyes of the jerk: The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests. The flight attendant is not a potentially interesting person with her own cares and struggles but instead the most available face of a corporation that stupidly insists you shut your phone. Custodians and secretaries are lazy complainers who rightly get the scut work. The person who disagrees with you at the staff meeting is an idiot to be shot down. Entering a subway is an exercise in nudging past the dumb schmoes.

We need a theory of jerks. We need such a theory because, first, it can help us achieve a calm, clinical understanding when confronting such a creature in the wild. Imagine the nature-documentary voice-over: ‘Here we see the jerk in his natural environment. Notice how he subtly adjusts his dominance display to the Italian restaurant situation…’ And second – well, I don’t want to say what the second reason is quite yet.

As it happens,Eric does have such a theory. The word ‘jerk’ can refer to two different types of person. The older use of ‘jerk’ designates a kind of chump or an ignorant fool, though not a morally odious one. When Weird Al Yankovic sang, in 2006, ‘I sued Fruit of the Loom ’cause when I wear their tightie-whities on my head I look like a jerk’, or when, on 1 March 1959, Willard Temple wrote in a short story in the Los Angeles Times: ‘He could have married the campus queen… Instead the poor jerk fell for a snub-nosed, skinny little broad’, it’s clear it’s the chump they have in mind.

The jerk-as-fool usage seems to have begun as a derisive reference to the unsophisticated people of a ‘jerkwater town’: that is, a town not rating a full-scale train station, requiring the boiler man to pull on a chain to water his engine. The term expresses the travelling troupe’s disdain. Over time, however, ‘jerk’ shifted from being primarily a class-based insult to its second, now dominant, sense as a term of moral condemnation. And it is the immoral jerk who concerns us here.

Why, you might be wondering, should a philosopher make it his business to analyse colloquial terms of abuse? Doesn’t Urban Dictionary cover that kind of thing quite adequately? Shouldn’t you confine yourself to truth, or beauty, or knowledge, or why there is something rather than nothing (to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser answered: ‘If there was nothing you’d still be complaining’)? Doesn't our taste in vulgarity reveals our values.

The unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. The bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of ‘jerk’ has changed into a type of moral ignorance.

Some related traits are already well-known in psychology and philosophy – the ‘dark triad’ of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The asshole, James says, is someone who allows himself to enjoy special advantages out of an entrenched sense of entitlement. That is one important dimension of jerkitude, but not the whole story. The callous psychopath, though cousin to the jerk, has an impulsivity and love of risk-taking that need be no part of the jerk’s character. Neither does the jerk have to be as thoroughly self-involved as the narcissist or as self-consciously cynical as the Machiavellian, though narcissism and Machiavellianism are common enough jerkish attributes. 

The opposite of the jerk is the sweetheart. The sweetheart sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals are worthy of attention and respect. The sweetheart yields his place in line to the hurried shopper, stops to help the person who dropped her papers, calls an acquaintance with an embarrassed apology after having been unintentionally rude. In a debate, the sweetheart sees how he might be wrong and the other person right.

The moral and emotional failure of the jerk is obvious. The intellectual failure is obvious, too: no one is as right about everything as the jerk thinks he is. He would learn by listening. And one of the things he might learn is the true scope of his jerkitude – a fact that the all-out jerk is inevitably ignorant. 

But first some clarifications and caveats:

First, no one is a perfect jerk or a perfect sweetheart. Human behaviour – of course! – varies hugely with context. Different situations (sales-team meetings, travelling in close quarters) might bring out the jerk in some and the sweetie in others.

Second, the jerk is someone who culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him. Young children and people with severe mental disabilities aren’t capable of appreciating others’ perspectives, so they can’t be blamed for their failure and aren’t jerks. Also, not all perspectives deserve equal treatment. Failure to appreciate the outlook of a neo-Nazi, for example, is not sign of jerkitude – though the true sweetheart might bend over backwards to try.

 The Washington University psychologist Simine Vazire has argued that we tend to know our own characteristics quite well when the relevant traits are evaluatively neutral and straightforwardly observable, and badly when they are loaded with value judgments and not straightforwardly observable. If you ask someone how talkative she is, or whether she is relatively high-strung or relatively mellow, and then you ask her friends to rate her along the same dimensions, the self-rating and the peer ratings usually correlate quite well – and both sets of ratings also tend to line up with psychologists’ best attempts to measure such traits objectively.

Why? Presumably because it’s more or less fine to be talkative and more or less fine to be quiet; OK to be a bouncing bunny and OK instead to keep it low-key, and such traits are hard to miss in any case. But few of us want to be inflexible, stupid, unfair or low in creativity. And if you don’t want to see yourself that way, it’s easy enough to dismiss the signs. Such characteristics are, after all, connected to outward behaviour in somewhat complicated ways; we can always cling to the idea that we have been misunderstood. Thus we overlook our own faults.

With Vazire’s model of self-knowledge in mind, one could conjecture a correlation of approximately zero between how one would rate oneself in relative jerkitude and one’s actual true jerkitude. The term is morally loaded, and rationalisation is so tempting and easy! Why did you just treat that cashier so harshly? Well, she deserved it – and anyway, I’ve been having a rough day. Why did you just cut into that line of cars at the last minute, not waiting your turn to exit? Well, that’s just good tactical driving – and anyway, I’m in a hurry! Why did you seem to relish failing that student for submitting her essay an hour late? Well, the rules were clearly stated; it’s only fair to the students who worked hard to submit their essays on time – and that was a grimace not a smile.

Since the most effective way to learn about defects in one’s character is to listen to frank feedback from people whose opinions you respect, the jerk faces special obstacles on the road to self-knowledge, beyond even what Vazire’s model would lead us to expect. By definition, he fails to respect the perspectives of others around him. He’s much more likely to dismiss critics as fools – or as jerks themselves – than to take the criticism to heart.

Still, it’s entirely possible for a picture-perfect jerk to acknowledge, in a superficial way, that he is a jerk. ‘So what, yeah, I’m a jerk,’ he might say. Provided this label carries no real sting of self-disapprobation, the jerk’s moral self-ignorance remains. Part of what it is to fail to appreciate the perspectives of others is to fail to see your jerkishly dismissive attitude toward their ideas and concerns as inappropriate.

Ironically, it is the sweetheart who worries that he has just behaved inappropriately, that he might have acted too jerkishly, and who feels driven to make amends. Such distress is impossible if you don’t take others’ perspectives seriously into account. Indeed, the distress itself constitutes a deviation (in this one respect at least) from pure jerkitude: worrying about whether it might be so helps to make it less so. Then again, if you take comfort in that fact and cease worrying, you have undermined the very basis of your comfort.

All normal jerks distribute their jerkishness mostly down the social hierarchy, and to anonymous strangers. Waitresses, students, clerks, strangers on the road – these are the unfortunates who bear the brunt of it. With a modicum of self-control, the jerk, though he implicitly or explicitly regards himself as more important than most of the people around him, recognises that the perspectives of those above him in the hierarchy also deserve some consideration. Often, indeed, he feels sincere respect for his higher-ups. Perhaps respectful feelings are too deeply written in our natures to disappear entirely. Perhaps the jerk retains a vestigial kind of concern specifically for those whom it would benefit him, directly or indirectly, to win over. He is at least concerned enough about their opinion of him to display tactical respect while in their field of view. However it comes about, the classic jerk kisses up and kicks down. The company CEO rarely knows who the jerks are, though it’s no great mystery among the secretaries.

Because the jerk tends to disregard the perspectives of those below him in the hierarchy, he often has little idea how he appears to them. This leads to hypocrisies. He might rage against the smallest typo in a student’s or secretary’s document, while producing a torrent of errors himself; it just wouldn’t occur to him to apply the same standards to himself. He might insist on promptness, while always running late. He might freely reprimand other people, expecting them to take it with good grace, while any complaints directed against him earn his eternal enmity. Such failures of parity typify the jerk’s moral short-sightedness, flowing naturally from his disregard of others’ perspectives. These hypocrisies are immediately obvious if one genuinely imagines oneself in a subordinate’s shoes for anything other than selfish and self-rationalising ends, but this is exactly what the jerk habitually fails to do.

Embarrassment, too, becomes practically impossible for the jerk, at least in front of his underlings.

Embarrassment requires us to imagine being viewed negatively by people whose perspectives we care about. As the circle of people whom the jerk is willing to regard as true peers and superiors shrinks, so does his capacity for shame – and with it a crucial entry point for moral self-knowledge.

As one climbs the social hierarchy it is also easier to become a jerk. Here’s a characteristically jerkish thought: ‘I’m important, and I’m surrounded by idiots!’ Both halves of this proposition serve to conceal the jerk’s jerkitude from himself. Thinking yourself important is a pleasantly self-gratifying excuse for disregarding the interests and desires of others. Thinking that the people around you are idiots seems like a good reason to disregard their intellectual perspectives. As you ascend the hierarchy, you will find it easier to discover evidence of your relative importance (your big salary, your first-class seat) and of the relative idiocy of others (who have failed to ascend as high as you). Also, flatterers will tend to squeeze out frank, authentic critics.

This isn’t the only possible explanation for the prevalence of powerful jerks, of course. Maybe jerks are actually more likely to rise in business and academia than non-jerks – the truest sweethearts often suffer from an inability to advance their own projects over the projects of others. But I suspect the causal path runs at least as much in the other direction. Success might or might not favour the existing jerks, but I’m pretty sure it nurtures new ones.

The moralistic jerk is an animal worth special remark. Charles Dickens was a master painter of the type: his teachers, his preachers, his petty bureaucrats and self-satisfied businessmen, Scrooge condemning the poor as lazy, Mr Bumble shocked that Oliver Twist dares to ask for more, each dismissive of the opinions and desires of their social inferiors, each inflated with a proud self-image and ignorant of how they are rightly seen by those around them, and each rationalising this picture with a web of moralising ‘should’s.

Scrooge and Bumble are cartoons, and we can be pretty sure we aren’t as bad as them. Yet I see in myself and all those who are not pure sweethearts a tendency to rationalise my privilege with moralistic sham justifications. Here’s my reason for trying to dishonestly wheedle my daughter into the best school; my reason why the session chair should call on me rather than on the grad student who got her hand up earlier; my reason why it’s fine that I have 400 library books in my office…

The moralising jerk is apt to go badly wrong in his moral opinions. Partly this is because his morality tends to be self-serving, and partly it’s because his disrespect for others’ perspectives puts him at a general epistemic disadvantage. But there’s more to it than that. In failing to appreciate others’ perspectives, the jerk almost inevitably fails to appreciate the full range of human goods – the value of dancing, say, or of sports, nature, pets, local cultural rituals, and indeed anything that he doesn’t care for himself. Think of the aggressively rumpled scholar who can’t bear the thought that someone would waste her time getting a manicure. Or think of the manicured socialite who can’t see the value of dedicating one’s life to dusty Latin manuscripts. Whatever he’s into, the moralising jerk exudes a continuous aura of disdain for everything else.

Furthermore, mercy is near the heart of practical, lived morality. Virtually everything that everyone does falls short of perfection: one’s turn of phrase is less than perfect, one arrives a bit late, one’s clothes are tacky, one’s gesture irritable, one’s choice somewhat selfish, one’s coffee less than frugal, one’s melody trite. Practical mercy involves letting these imperfections pass forgiven or, better yet, entirely unnoticed. In contrast, the jerk appreciates neither others’ difficulties in attaining all the perfections that he attributes to himself, nor the possibility that some portion of what he regards as flawed is in fact blameless. Hard moralising principle therefore comes naturally to him. (Sympathetic mercy is natural to the sweetheart.) And on the rare occasions when the jerk is merciful, his indulgence is usually ill-tuned: the flaws he forgives are exactly the one he recognises in himself or has ulterior reasons to let slide. Consider another brilliant literary cartoon jerk: Severus Snape, the infuriating potions teacher in J K Rowling’s novels, always eager to drop the hammer on Harry Potter or anyone else who happens to annoy him, constantly bristling with indignation, but wildly off the mark – contrasted with the mercy and broad vision of Dumbledore.

Despite the jerk’s almost inevitable flaws in moral vision, the moralising jerk can sometimes happen to be right about some specific important issue – especially if he adopts a big social cause. He needn’t care only about money and prestige. Indeed, sometimes an abstract and general concern for moral or political principles serves as a kind of substitute for genuine concern about the people in his immediate field of view, possibly leading to substantial self-sacrifice. And in social battles, the sweetheart will always have some disadvantages: the sweetheart’s talent for seeing things from his opponent’s perspective deprives him of bold self-certainty, and he is less willing to trample others for his ends. Social movements sometimes do well when led by a moralising jerk. 

How can you know your own moral character? You can try a label on for size: ‘lazy’, ‘jerk’, ‘unreliable’ – is that really me? Instead of introspection, try listening. Ideally, you will have a few people in your life who know you intimately, have integrity, and are concerned about your character. They can frankly and lovingly hold your flaws up to the light and insist that you look at them. Give them the space to do this, and prepare to be disappointed in yourself. Done well enough, this second-person approach could work fairly well for traits such as laziness and unreliability, especially if their scope is restricted: laziness-about-X, unreliability-about-Y. 

To discover one’s degree of jerkitude, the best approach might be neither (first-person) direct reflection upon yourself nor (second-person) conversation with intimate critics, but rather something more third-person: looking in general at other people. Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks? Are you the only competent, reasonable person to be found?  If your self-rationalising defences are low enough to feel a little pang of shame at the familiarity of that vision of the world, then you probably aren’t pure diamond-grade jerk. 

But who is? We’re all somewhere in the middle. That’s what makes the jerk’s vision of the world so instantly recognisable. It’s our own vision. But, thankfully, only sometimes.

The disruptive theory

Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” Things began looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.

Most big ideas have loud critics. Not disruption. Disruptive innovation as the explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly because it’s headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism, as if to criticize a theory of change were identical to decrying change; and partly because, in its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.

The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and global warming. Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

The word “innovate”—to make new—used to have chiefly negative connotations: it signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end. Edmund Burke called the French Revolution a “revolt of innovation”; Federalists declared themselves to be “enemies to innovation.” George Washington, on his deathbed, was said to have uttered these words: “Beware of innovation in politics.” Noah Webster warned in his dictionary, in 1828, “It is often dangerous to innovate on the customs of a nation.”

The redemption of innovation began in 1939, when the economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his landmark study of business cycles, used the word to mean bringing new products to market, a usage that spread slowly, and only in the specialized literatures of economics and business. (In 1942, Schumpeter theorized about “creative destruction”; Christensen, retrofitting, believes that Schumpeter was really describing disruptive innovation.) “Innovation” began to seep beyond specialized literatures in the nineteen-nineties, and gained ubiquity only after 9/11.

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.

Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met.

The theory of disruption is meant to be predictive.  But disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact. History speaks loudly, apparently, only when you can make it say what you want it to say. The popular incarnation of the theory tends to disavow history altogether. “Predicting the future based on the past is like betting on a football team simply because it won the Super Bowl a decade ago,” Josh Linkner writes in “The Road to Reinvention.” His first principle: “Let go of the past.” It has nothing to tell you. But, unless you already believe in disruption, many of the successes that have been labelled disruptive innovation look like something else, and many of the failures that are often seen to have resulted from failing to embrace disruptive innovation look like bad management.

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, the financial-services industry innovated by selling products like subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and mortgage-backed securities, some to a previously untapped customer base. When the financial-services industry disruptively innovated, it led to a global financial crisis. Like the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the meltdown didn’t dim the fervor for disruption; instead, it fuelled it, because these products of disruption contributed to the panic on which the theory of disruption thrives.

Disruptive innovation as an explanation for how change happens is everywhere. Ideas that come from business schools are exceptionally well marketed. Faith in disruption is the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of God as explanation and justification. Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.

Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

The power of words

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once described writers as “the engineers of the human soul.” “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he claimed. 

Stalin clearly believed that literature was a powerful political tool—and he was willing to execute writers whose works were deemed traitorous to the Soviet Union. Stalin's sentiments regarding literature may seem like the deranged delusions of a dictator. But consider a similar Cold War-era comment by the CIA’s then-chief of covert action: “Books differ from all other propaganda media primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium.” He also used a military metaphor for culture, calling books “the most important weapon of strategic propaganda.” Despite the shared rhetoric, the CIA did not use Soviet tactics to neutralize writers deemed threats. But the American government, and the CIA in particular, has long been keenly interested in using literature to promote American ideologies and undermine communism abroad. Probably the best case study of the CIA’s foray into literary culture is the story of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago. 

Boris Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago around 1945 on blank paper he inherited from a dead friend, a Georgian poet who had been tortured and executed by the Soviet regime. The poet’s widow sent the paper to Pasternak, and he honored his friend’s literary defiance by writing a novel that ignored the official demands for literature to glorify the “Soviet man” and the revolution.

The finished product was hardly a celebration of capitalism or a “Western way of life,” but some passages openly doubted that the bloodshed of the revolution was justified, and large stretches were fairly indifferent to politics. A failure to praise the regime was as dangerous as a willingness to question it, and the Communist Party officials charged with overseeing cultural affairs were anxious to prevent the publication of Doctor Zhivago.

This was easily done within the Soviet Union, but Pasternak managed to pass a copy of the manuscript to a visiting Italian with publishing contacts. In The Zhivago Affair, Couvée and Finn recount the tangled tale of the book’s journey to publication. An Italian publishing house secured the rights to the novel, and Pasternak also gave copies to friends visiting from France and England. The Soviet authorities forged his signature and sent letters to the Italian publisher demanding the return of the manuscript, but Pasternak whispered his actual intentions to visiting Italians and sent special notes in French, telling his publisher to disregard communication in any other language. He wanted the book published, whatever the repercussions.

Not long after the novel’s initial 1957 publication, the CIA became involved. When the agency was created in 1947, Congress granted it the power to carry out “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” This rather vague mandate allowed the agency to expand into cultural domains. Through a number of front organizations, including Bedford Publishing Company in New York City, the agency successfully purchased, printed, distributed, and even commissioned a number of books with the goal of promoting a “spiritual understanding of Western values.” This included novels by authors as diverse as George Orwell, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce; and as Couvée and Finn reveal, one book Bedford commissioned was a false memoir of a Soviet-U.S. double agent. By smuggling books to the Soviet Union in everything from food cans to Tampax boxes, Bedford got as many as one million books to Soviet readers over the course of 15 years. The CIA’s program for the dissemination of literature continued until the fall of the USSR.

 CIA saw “great propaganda value” in Doctor Zhivago. Partnered with Dutch intelligence agents, they arranged for an illegal printing of a Russian-language version of the novel that was distributed at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. The agency also used its own press in Washington to print miniature pocket-sized copies; the diminutive edition was easier to smuggle.Given its literary culture, some CIA staff probably realized the irony of a powerful and well-funded government agency using clandestine methods to distribute novels by George Orwell. The American government was trying to manipulate the culture of the Soviet Union to help Soviet citizens recognize the dangers of a powerful government manipulating their culture. (Unsurprisingly, they didn’t want anyone to know they were involved.)

The operation had precisely the desired impact—for better and for worse. The reported price of the Russian edition on the black market in Moscow was close to a week’s wages. When Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature, Soviet officials viciously attacked him as a traitor fawning over Western idols. Writers around the world, however, rallied to his defense, and the notoriety of the book only fueled more sales.

American efforts at cultural engineering were generally subtler than Soviet ones; the CIA sought to promote rather than prevent the publication and dissemination of books, and the agency didn’t threaten or coerce authors into supporting a particular ideology. That said, there are some intriguing continuities between the cultural interventions of the two Cold War superpowers.

Pasternak did not think of his novel as a weapon for intellectual warfare. He referred to it as “my final happiness and madness,” hardly the phrase of someone who sees a book as a cultural grenade. He thought the work was much more than a vehicle to deliver a particular message, and he was frustrated by the way the international media always quoted the same passages to show that he was critical of the regime. He wanted his book treated as a novel, not a pamphlet.

The CIA, on the other hand, was delighted by the media spotlight on the anti-Communist passages. The CIA also recognized that the symbolism of the situation made the Soviet Union look at least as bad as the novel itself did. After accepting the Nobel Prize, Pasternak then voluntarily refused it after party officials put unbearable pressure on him and his loved ones. The image of the noble but persecuted writer, a courageous critic of a corrupt regime, created great copy for journalists and terrible publicity for the Soviet Union.

The entire episode, as chronicled in The Zhivago Affair, suggests an important lesson about the limited power of spy agency attempts at cultural warfare. None of the works the CIA commissioned are widely read today, and Soviet writers who celebrated official ideology are equally forgotten. Doctor Zhivago, however, remains a household name. Government intervention that precedes the creation of literature tends to fail; the CIA became entangled with Doctor Zhivago only after the novel was composed. Had they found and bribed a Russian author to write a book with anti-Soviet themes, it likely would never have become an international literary and media sensation. Authentic literary productions are far more powerful than the best government efforts at cultural engineering.

It seems, then, that spotting and supporting those cultural artifacts that promote national interests is a more effective strategy (and one worth considering) at a time when intelligence agencies seem obsessed with data collection, gadgets, surveillance, and drones. Distributing a novel might seem like a quaint caper for a spy agency, but it reflects a deeply different strategy: relying on art and ideas rather than force to advance security objectives. And in order for art of any kind to deserve the name, it must be more than a vehicle for politics.

Pasternak himself put it best: “It’s not true that people only value the novel because of politics. That’s a lie. They read it because they love it.”

The flesh is weak

" Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." Shakespeare

At the dawn of the second millennium overweight men were derided as womanly or weak. Thus, William the Conqueror was mocked for being so fat that he looked pregnant. The French King Louis VI (“the Fat”) was ridiculed in 1135 for being too portly to mount a horse. 

But very different conceptions of fitness came to the fore in the 14th and 15th centuries: Europe was a world of “hunger, severe restrictions, and food shortages.” Failed harvests, the plague, and other pestilences, as well as crushing poverty, generally contributed to “raising the accumulation of calories into an ideal.” Paradise was imagined as a place where “beer and wine flow like rivers [and] stews and roasts seem to pop out of the soil.” For men, a big belly was a sign of vitality. Long before Rubens, artists celebrated corpulent women. The 14th-century Parisian’s Household Manual (known in English as The Good Wife’s Guide) states that both horses and women should have “beautiful loins and big bottoms.” The fat woman was the fertile woman; the thin one was imagined to be barren. 

Throughout the Western world, fatness is deemed such a social sin that it is perfectly legitimate to stigmatize and discriminate against the very heavy. In this lively book from a master historian of the body, we learn that this disgust for fatness has been with us since medieval times. Georges Vigarello’s history of obesity is at heart a history of condemnation, how its shape has shifted in response to larger social, cultural, economic, and scientific transformations. 

The aesthetics of body shape varied widely for the next few centuries. The stout were sometimes considered mighty and at other times sick. The scrawny were never considered powerful and were sometimes thought feeble or diseased. Words were invented to distinguish between desirable and undesirable amounts of fat. The French term rondelet, for example, appeared in the “middle of the 16th century to designate a moderate, entirely ‘natural’ roundness.” Meanwhile, lourd conveys an undesirable thickness and torpor.

Notions of virtue and vice entered the mix. Fatness became associated with greediness. Rolls of heft indicated insatiability, an “infinity of oral desire” that demonstrated moral degradation and slovenliness. Class also became a consideration. Fatness went from being a trait of the wealthy to a characteristic of “fieldworkers and mule drivers.” The image of the lower class as obese, ham-fisted brutes became popular by the 17th century: “Beautiful Alison,” a sardonic song from 1633, mocks Alison for having “chubby arms like a mustard barrel” and “a stomach [like] a frozen cabbage.” Not long after, depictions of potbellied bankers and plutocrats flooded paintings and cartoons. 

The insight that food digested was converted into energy, which the body then could expend or store, was not widely held until the 20th century. In the meantime, hypotheses about the causes of weight gain and loss were based upon metaphors, and ancient notions dominated. Fatness was said to be related to blood, phlegm, and humors; other scientists attributed it to the types of food ingested, an excess of bodily fluids, or a preponderance of internal “winds.” Thirty years of data collection did not get Sanctorius very far: He continually found that the weight of the food he consumed exceeded the weight of his urine and feces, yet his own weight remained steady. In the equivalent of an intellectual tossing-up of the hands, he attributed the difference to “insensible perspiration.” 

Over time, Vigarello demonstrates, eating a lot was viewed less as a sign of vigor and robust health than a condition worthy of abuse. Shakespeare’s Henry IV has Prince Henry unleash a quiver of anti-fat barbs against Falstaff in Part One, Act II: “whoreson round man,” “horseback-breaker,” “huge hill of flesh,” and “swollen parcel of dropsies.” Fat, then, became increasingly stigmatized with the passage of time.

Combined with ignorance about digestion, the stigmatization of fat fostered a market for tinkerers, quacks, and just about everyone else to peddle remedies. One eminent man of knowledge in the 16th century directed that fat people reduce the pain of swollen legs by cutting their toenails so low that blood flowed. This would, he postulated, lesson the excess of fluids responsible for the swelling. A physician, C. J. A Schwilgué, “proposed a cold bath” with an electrical current running through it to tighten the body and force out excess fluids. Women were sold corsets and men used leather straps to depress their bellies. One 17th-century actor took the stage with a “cerclage made of wide and rigid iron” that flattened his girth.

Mercifully, science finally began to get matters right. Settled systems of weights and measurements enabled the collection of data on body shapes and sizes. These data were aggregated over time to develop averages, which could be used to create a baseline for “normal” heights and weights for every age. Industrialization helped make the scale a household item. 

Tracking one’s weight became democratized. Sometime after 1830 Adolphe Quetelet developed a formula for finding the ratio of weight to height that we know today as the Body Mass Index. Thanks to numerical precision, the present-day stout individual who visits a physican’s office might learn that he is “obese,” “severely obese,” or “morbidly obese.” The accumulation of scientific studies has re-centered the popular discussion of excess weight on medical conceptions. Nary a week passes without the press reporting on the latest study showing the increased probability of diabetes, impotence, and/or cardiac arrest from excess heft. The scrawny, meanwhile, might become centenarians.

Still, despite the march of science, old notions about body weight remain. Depictions of obese people as jovial and lazy live on, and the words “fat” and “slob” are often heard together. Whether these critical notions will ever depart is difficult to say. We all know people who have lost weight through exercise and diet changes, and we tend to attribute weight loss to force of will, to individual choice. The basic calculus of fatness strikes us as self-evident: Consume more calories than you burn and you become fat. Eat less, exercise more. 

What could be simpler?

Seven books for the curious mind

 Here are seven books for the curious mind. They are very different types of books each of them exploring the future of innovation from a different perspective. What they all have in common, though, is the ability to explain advances from sometimes arcane scientific fields (neuroscience, genetics or synthetic biology) in a way that generates a broader public discussion about the type of future that we want as a society.

Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind

While reading about the latest advances in neuroscience may not sound like the ideal way to lounge around the pool during the dog days of summer, Kaku is one of those rare science writers who appears to be just as comfortable on the set of The Daily Show as he is in a traditional academic setting. What Kaku argues here, essentially, is that the future of the mind will look nothing like it does right now, thanks to advances made possible by scientific endeavors such as President Obama’s brain initiative. It may still be some time off, but in the future, says Kaku, we will be able to reverse-engineer the human brain. Once that happens, we might be able to treat mental illness, create human super-intelligence or understand the meaning of consciousness.

Nina Tandon and Mitchell Joachim, Super Cells: Building With Biology

Nina Tandon and Mitchell Joachim take us on a whirlwind tour of the latest developments in bioengineering and synthetic biology. Yes, the book appears to be a bit high on the techno-utopianism quotient, but at under 100 pages, the book is a quick way to get up-to-date on the latest advances in an emerging field that the authors refer to as “bio-design.”The book maps out the amazing future of the cell, as it is used for everything from creating personalized human tissue replacements to growing new types of food. It’s a future in which the biology of nature becomes the building block for future innovation. Super cells, the authors argue, are the key to new advances in fields that one doesn’t typically associate with biology, such as fashion and architecture.

Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

This book seems to be part of a broader zeitgeist in which people question the type of future that we’ve been building with digital technology. There’s a sense, increasingly expressed online, that something is just not quite right — we give too much power to huge Internet giants such as Google and Facebook and all the former utopian potential of the Web doesn’t appear to be working out as planned. We were promised a “revolution” and ended up with something more like a “rearrangement” of power and influence. Astra Taylor argues that the Internet is actually contributing to the types of inequality that we observe throughout society and changing the way we think about art and culture.

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

At first glance, Kolbert’s book — with a dead woolly mammoth on the cover — would appear to be a book more about the past than the future. The book’s title refers to the five great extinctions that have occurred in the world’s history. The sixth extinction is humanity’s own extinction, brought about by radical changes to the planet’s ecosystem. Kolbert asks a poignant question: How is it possible that a technologically advanced society is slowly but methodically destroying itself?. Kolbert brilliantly explains why factors such as biodiversity matter, and why humanity needs to change its future by first realizing what it is doing to the planet. She draws on the latest thinking in fields ranging from geology to marine biology to explain how and why extinction happens.

Sharon Moalem, Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives — and Our Lives Change Our Genes

Moalem, a neurogeneticist by training, . Now he’s here to tell us how we can change our children’s “genetic inheritance.”he  says that, thanks to remarkable progress in understanding the human genome, we no longer need to assume that our genes can not be changed, or that we’re forced to accept a certain genetic fate for our children. The human genome is fluid, and that would appear to open the future to a world of low-cost genetic screening and even genetic enhancements for our offspring.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

Ever since the book was released in January, “The Second Machine Age” has made headlines in both economic and technology circles, leading to a debate about the way robots and machines are taking over from humans. The book outlines the ways that the growth of exponential, recombinant and digital technologies is leading to a brighter future for humanity. What Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue is that the next age of machines has important implications for how we think about everything – from the future of work to the future of artificial intelligence. Thanks to these “brilliant technologies,” the global economy is on the cusp of a new round of dramatic growth.

Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.

The co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios explains the secrets of creativity. This is not so much a book about the future, as about how to unlock the creativity and innovation within all of us. Not surprisingly, the book — with a Pixar cartoon character on the cover — has been a hit with the casual reader as well as business managers anxious to create a culture of creativity within the organization. What’s not to love? In a summer of blockbuster movies, find out from one of the Pixar geniuses how to go about creating your own creative blockbusters.