The best 'smart thinking' books of 2020

This was the year that writers from the humanities aped their science-oriented cousins by taking some fairly terrifying, ants-under-the-microscope views of human affairs. In Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (Fourth Estate, ￡16.99), English lecturer David Farrier locates human beings in Deep Time by considering what might survive of us in the far distant future (mostly chicken bones, it turns out: “a testimony to the intrusion of human appetites in the geological record”). The book is as much about stories as sediment. From buildings to beltways to bottles, from Benjamin to Ballard to Burtynsky (and that’s just the Bs), Farrier weaves modish anxieties about the future into an elegiac (and disconcertingly accurate) guide to our present condition.

Carolyn Steel, an architect, looks upon our affairs from a perspective that’s more down to earth, but ultimately no less uncanny, in Sitopia (Chatto & Windus, ￡16.99). Steel’s utopian project is to straighten out a global food supply that overfeeds some, pushes others towards famine, and undernourishes just about everybody. Our relationship with the land will have to change quickly to accommodate the coming world population spike. Enclosing land and inflating its value no longer works; we need to reinvent the commons, argues Steel.

The twistedness of our material culture likewise features in economist Noreena Hertz’s The Lonely Century (Sceptre, ￡20), only this time we see how humans – or at any rate their humanity – can evaporate, even while the lights are still burning and the trains still running on time. Several factors – political, technological and broadly cultural – were driving us apart from each other, well before the Covid-19 pandemic made our civic losses self-evident. Social media isolates us, our work atomises us, even our street furniture prevents us gathering. We’ve become a civilisation desperate to save itself, rather than a civilisation worth saving. As a consequence, we’ve forgotten how to trust each other.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman makes a brave stab at reminding us that people are generally, you know, fairly all right, in Humankind (Bloomsbury, ￡20). According to Bregman, the bleaker results obtained from 50-odd years of ex-perimental psychology are wrong, reflecting little more than the jaundiced views of the experimenters. People are weird, but not malign. They don’t obey orders unquestioningly; they don’t usually stand by when others are in trouble. Where Bregman comes unstuck is when he tries to sketch a politics that can harness this newfound trust in humanity.

But veteran economists Paul Collier and John Kay are on hand to confirm that Greed Is Dead (Allen Lane, ￡16.99) – or at any rate, on the way out – as a model of how humans behave. In an elegant and nuanced argument that we may, for these purposes, reduce to “Give people money, stupid”, Collier and Kay explain how our culture of hyper--centralisation is choking us. There is no easier way to control people than by manipulating their sense of reality – and to do that well, you first have to narrow it. “Follow the evidence!” our betters cry, dazzling us with “evidence” that reduces the world’s buzzing complexity to a figure or a line on a chart.

In Calling Bullsh*t (Allen Lane, ￡20) data scientist Jevin D West and evolutionary biologist Carl T Bergstrom reveal how shockingly easy it is to deceive with numbers, in a book that has profound implications for science – and for politics. The Bilingual Brain (Allen Lane, ￡20) sums up 20 years’ study into language and consciousness by neuro-linguist Albert Costa, and it’s a powerful testament, not just to the brain’s capacities and its plasticity, but to its ability to abstract and manipulate useful information from the world. Did you know, for instance, that bilinguals are better at resolving conflicts? (Try doing that with a bar chart, if you dare.)

We should take our direct, unmediated perceptions of the world seriously; this is the deeper message of James Hamblin’s Clean (Bodley Head, ￡16.99). These days Hamblin, a doctor, washes his hands with soap and lets the rest of his body take care of itself, more or less. He’s no starry-eyed beatnik, forgoing personal hygiene in pursuit of some specious bodily “authenticity”. He’s interested in discovering what we learn when we start paying attention to our skin, rather than smothering it in unnecessary products (eczema sufferers, take note).

As many a natural observer has demonstrated, paying attention to our own experience also brings us into closer touch with the world outside. Helen Macdonald is one of the best nature writers now working, and Vesper Flights (Jonathan Cape, ￡16.99) celebrates how much we can learn about ourselves, once we open our eyes to a world that still (just about) has a place in it for buck hares and wild boars, cuckoos and warblers.

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