From The Sunday Times July 19, 2009

Books that helped to change the world

Big ideas from Vance Packard, Edward de Bono, Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking altered modern thinking
Bryan Appleyard Theres a hunger for the big one the idea that will make sense of the world. In the absence of religion, culture or national purpose, people seize on consoling stories, grand simplifications providing opinions, perspectives, a feeling that their life is not entirely without meaning. The big idea might be anything a way to live or work, a crusade or a new theory of the underlying truth of things. But it must, first, be a book. Books are still, in spite of all the competing technologies, the most persuasive and authoritative medium. Second, it must be big enough to fill the mind with wonder or determination. Thus, Malcolm Gladwells The Tipping Point offers a way of understanding the manner in which successful ideas are disseminated and Richard Dawkinss The God Delusion provides the tools with which to turn secularism into a cause. There have always been big-ideas books, though they became much more common in the 20th century. Several forces were at work full democracy giving people a stake in great issues, more or less universal literacy, the decline of deference and the relentless leakage of authority from the church. HG Wells was probably the ages first great intellectual populariser. For much of the first half of the 20th century, he was Britains semi-official painter of the big picture. In resonantly titled books such as The Fate of Man and The Outline of History, he brought the new orthodoxy of scientific secularism to the masses. He effectively created the genre. The post-war period was defined first by the confrontation between communism and capitalism, two utterly opposed big

ideas, and second by the collapse of that confrontation and its replacement by a bewildering multiplicity of possibilities, theories, causes and conflicts. Add to that the internet explosion of global connectivity and you have a big-ideas hothouse from which emerges a tropical profusion of grand summations. Now, every week, big-ideas books pour from the presses. I get sent most of them, giving me not an intellectual problem, but a troublesome storage issue. Grand panjandrums of the big idea have emerged Gladwell, Chris Anderson (The Long Tail and Free), Dawkins and, dazed by the money to be made, academics queue up to package their ideas for the mass market. Making any kind of sense of this paper blizzard is impossible, but the blizzard itself proves that the genre is the message. The very fact that we want such books is a sign of what we have lost, primarily a coherent base from which to assess the world. In addition, the blizzard demonstrates the difficulty, if not plain absurdity, of thinking there is such a thing as a universally applicable big idea. If, said Chekhov, there are many cures for a disease, then there is no cure. The list that follows is my compilation of the 12 most effective big-ideas books of the post-war period. Effective means successful in moulding the minds of large numbers of people. This is not, of course, the same as true, or good though a few are one or both of these things. And the list does not necessarily include the most important or lasting ideas books of the period. Erwin Schrdingers What Is Life?, Ludwig Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations, James Lovelocks Gaia and Marilynne Robinsons The Death of Adam are not included simply because, crucial though they may be, they were not big popular successes. My list is, therefore, a pop chart, but one that tells us much about who we are. The Power of Positive Thinking Norman Vincent Peale, 1952 This is the great precursor of all self-help books. Full of boundless American optimism, it offered a way through, as Bill Clinton said after Peales death, the antagonisms and complexities of modern life. Though Peale was a preacher, his books importance lies in its very secular belief in a therapeutic system that would lead to

success and in its burdening of the individual, rather than an institution, with executing a demanding programme for his own salvation. The Hidden Persuaders Vance Packard, 1957 The date is important. This was when the anxieties that lay behind post-war affluence began to emerge. Packard exposed the conspiracy beneath the good life of 1950s suburbia by showing how advertisers manipulated consumers with quasi-scientific methods derived from psychology and sociology. Its obvious now; it wasnt then. The current television series Mad Men, set in the New York advertising world of the early 1960s, derives its power from the conflict, defined by Packard, between the innocence of the public and the cynicism of the admen.

Silent Spring Rachel Carson, 1962 From what seemed to be a small technical insight that the pesticide DDT caused thinning of the shells of birds eggs Carsons book launched modern environmentalism. The fate of the birds, symbolised by the possibility of a silent spring, dramatised the interconnectedness of nature that is at the heart of all greenery. DDT had been thought to be present in such small quantities that it would do no harm, but the food chain focused and intensified its effects. Some say this book cost millions of lives because it led directly to the banning of DDT. Used judiciously, it could have wiped out malaria in Africa. The Use of Lateral Thinking Edward de Bono, 1967 The idea that we are not using our innate capacities to the full is a central feature of contemporary paranoia. People commonly feel there must be some trick to getting more out of life. De Bono brilliantly provided one answer in a phrase lateral thinking that has become a clich. Best summarised by the current term thinking out of the box, his idea was simply to come at problems from unexpected angles. It bridged the gap between the self-help genre and the business book. The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer, 1970 A scholarly polemic that remains the best of the primary feminist texts. Rude and raucous, it redefined womanhood as aggressive, self-determining, sexually potent and outspoken. It was a crusading work, a call to arms. It sprang from the alternative society of the late 1960s and it was, perhaps, the most effective subverter of the mores of postwar affluence. After Greer, no husband could reasonably expect to cry Honey, Im home and find dinner on the table. In Search of Excellence

Tom Peters and Robert H Waterman Jr, 1982 Management theory is like Marxism in the last years of the Soviet Union nobody believes it, but everybody must pretend that they do. As a result, it has been an incubator for a series of more or less mandatory bestsellers. This book, coming at the beginning of the right-wing Reagan-Thatcher resurgence, is the primary specimen of the genre. It codified the idea that there is a single transmissible method of business success. Quaint.

The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom, 1987 This is another primary right-wing text of the 1980s. Here, however, the politics is cultural conservatism rather than the hard capitalist right-wingery of management and economic theorising. Bloom attacked American universities for abandoning western culture in favour of various destructive ideologies that destroyed critical judgment. Though this was unarguable at the time, the book had the unintended consequence of firing neoconservatives with the gross delusion that this must mean violently imposing western culture on the rest of the world. A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking, 1988 Usually either bought but unread or read in total incomprehension, this book tried to explain the state of contemporary physics to the common reader. Its huge success inspired a wave of popular-science writing. At its heart was the assumption in the event, wrong that physicists were on the verge of a theory of everything that would account for the entire history of matter. Its scientific triumphalism led directly to the antireligious tirades of books such as Richard Dawkinss The God Delusion. The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama, 1992 Fukuyamas neoconservative text was a direct product of the collapse of communism. The West having triumphed, he argued that this represented the end of all ideological conflict. Liberal, democratic capitalism was the end of history. This no longer seems credible. Not only has history restarted in countless other ways, it is also clear that the system Fukuyama defined is only really an American version of politics. Yet he inspired the neoconservatives in the Bush administration though he broke with them over Iraq and he

ignited a global debate about whether there was any credible alternative to the American way. The answer was always yes. The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell, 2000 The book is more important than the ideas it contains. It made Gladwell the supreme modern big-ideas merchant. A brilliant storyteller, he became an auditorium-filling speaker, able to dramatise ideas previously inaccessibly academic. Neither The Tipping Point nor his subsequent books, Blink and Outliers, are intellectually remarkable. But Gladwells role as an ideas entrepreneur is the clearest demonstration of the contemporary hunger for the grand, explanatory narrative. The God Delusion Richard Dawkins, 2006 Dawkins could also have been in this list for The Selfish Gene (1976), a brilliant popularisation of one interpretation of Darwinism, but Hawkings A Brief History is a better example of science as the faith of our age. The God Delusion is the flip side of that faith a savage assault on religion. Thanks primarily to Dawkins, militant atheism is now the noisiest cult of our time. It was inspired by the mounting influence of two fundamentalisms Christian in America and Islamic across the Muslim world. Neither defines the mainstream faith and, as a result, the targets of the militant atheists appear rather narrow and specialised. The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007 This is the book that forecast the banking meltdown. It is unique in this list in that it promotes an anti-idea. All our big ideas are wrong, argues Taleb, because all are subject to the workings of uncontrollable chance. The banks crumbled because they used demonstrably false mathematics as a way of controlling the future. We crumble when we apply our always deficient theories to the unending sea of randomness on which we sail. But the book has a message rise above it all, adopt a classical

composure in the face of defeat. If you are to be executed, remember to shave. The Black Swan could be a valedictory to the idea of the big idea, to the folly of hoping we can be made well, better, more successful or more wise by the next bestseller, But I fear not. Another fat book has just arrived The Evolution of God by Robert Wright to tell me there is a hidden pattern within the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Im sure there is, but Im afraid I have this thing that prevents me finding out what it is. I call it a life.