Can A Book Explain Everything?
Why did the book “Theory of Everything” become popular?
Since Thomas Piketty wrote the bestseller Capital in the 21st Century 10 years ago and tried to explain the most fundamental economic forces shaping the world, many books have been written that try to tell human history, evolution, and economics from a new perspective. Sapiens — A Brief History of Humankind, published in English in 2015, is one such book. Such books often have an ambitious vision and want to change our worldview. But can a book explain “everything”?
Nine years ago, when Piketty spoke at London’s Peacock Hall on a summer evening, no one fainted, but people lined up outside the building. Piketty had a message people wanted to hear: the economy should be used for good, not evil, to redistribute wealth effectively.
Piketty wanted readers to agree that the 20th century was unusual: a rapid and unrepeatable increase in population that helped accelerate growth, alongside shocks (the two world wars, the Great Depression) that reduced the value of capital and thus kept inequalities low. These are exceptions in human history, not the rule. He gave reasons that the 21st century will not be the same as the 20th century. If we put our hands on it, the accumulation of capital in the hands of very few people will create a situation similar to the 18th or early 19th century.
Now that we are in the midst of a new economic crisis headed by a millionaire prime minister (meaning Rishi Sunak), it seems clear that Piketty’s message has not been shared. But what was formed after the unexpected success of capital was the phenomenon of the book “Theory of Everything”.
“One of my favorite literary genres is what I like to call ‘the one thing that explains everything,’” says Michael Motokrishna, a professor at the London School of Economics.
Examples of this genre, which have mushroomed since the publication of Capital in 2013 (and its English translation in 2014), include the 704-page book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graber & David Wingroe (2021); ); The 636-page book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015), written by Peter Frankopan; The latest work of the Oxford world history professor, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (published this year, on 736 pages); Sarah Bickel’s 464-page book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist, and every book Yuval Noah Harari has ever written, especially his 512-page book, Humanly Possible: A Brief History of Humanity, published in English in 2015.
Add Motokrishna’s book to all of these: A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, which was published this September. His book opens with a story by the late American novelist David Foster Wallace about two fish who swim happily together until they become old fish. “Good morning guys,” says the old fish. “How is the water?” While two young fish are swimming, one asks the other: “What is the other water?”. This is one of Motokrishna’s aims for a single theory that explains everything, to stop something that, because of its importance, we are oblivious to.
For fish, it is about water; For us, for the reasons given by Motokrishna, it is about energy. We press a key and the light turns on. We turn on the microwave and don’t think about where the electricity comes from to heat our leftovers or where the food itself came from.
Motokrishna’s theory links energy to evolution: “This [book] is about how the development of energy, during our species’ long presence on Earth, has led to periods of abundance which in turn have led to an increase in human numbers, and this, in turn, It has led to famine and strife.”
Such books often have a very ambitious vision. They want to disrupt our optimistic worldviews. In Silk Roads, Francopan tries to reassess world history without the comments of famous Western figures. Graeber & Wingrow also do the same thing in The Dawn of Everything, and in their book, they use Gandhi’s statements about Western civilization, which undermines the seemingly enlightened and rational West.
Of course, writing a compact book is not a new thing. George Eliot nails such claims in his 1871 novel Middlemarch, where he describes the Reverend Casabon’s endless quest to write a massive book called A Key to All Myths. Casabon’s wife, Dorothea, who was less delusional, understood what he did not: the new research of the Germans had made the product of his life’s research nothing but a waste of time [because Casabon did not speak German]. Newer models have different problems. One of the best-selling non-fiction volumes of the last millennium, Stephen Hawking’s 1988 A Brief History of Time, was once called the most unread book of all time. Even in 2014, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg coined the “Hawking Index,” which measures how much people on average read a book before putting it down. A Brief History of Time average was 6.6%, while the epic novel The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, averaged 98.5%.
Therefore, the publisher’s dream is to combine the depth of Hawking’s writings with the readability of Tart’s writings and create a book that anyone who can use two brain cells at most will want to get that book for Christmas.
According to Cassiana Ionita, managing director of Penguin Publishing, the appeal of such books is that academic experts can give us something that lying, inegalitarian, and self-serving politicians deny us in this post-truth era.
“After decades of hearing the dominant narratives from traditional economies and neoliberalism, people want to hear new narratives. This interest in specialists is very encouraging after years of politicians telling us we don’t need them.” — Ionita
Ionita will say she is the co-editor of some of the best non-fiction works written by academics in recent years that have brought big ideas to mass audiences — the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli; Albanian political science specialist, Lee Ipi; Russian-American specialist in complexity, Peter Turchin; and Canadian sociologist, Michel Lamont. He says: “I think readers have a significant appetite for books that offer a new perspective to understand the developments of the last few years, developments like Brexit and Trump, pandemics, climate change, war.”
Now who reads these books? Turchin’s book, End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, may provide a clue. According to him, one of the main readers of these elites is the surplus produced by neoliberal capitalism. According to Turchin, there is a large group of enthusiastic but disaffected people, often well-educated and highly capable, who feel left out of the game. The Western world is full of low-status humanities graduates in what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “nonsense jobs.”
Surely these disillusioned elites are perfect targets for books that try to explain how the world works. But, as Motokrishna says, these books rely on deception. “You and I know — and so do the authors of these books — that the world is complicated. The arrows of causality point in multiple directions, and even react to each other. No single thing can explain everything.”
This is the truth that Hawking, who officially wrote a book called The Theory of Everything, realized after realizing the full implications of Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. According to this theorem, in any reasonable mathematical apparatus, there are always true propositions that cannot be proved. Nevertheless, we still do our work regardless of the truth. Finding a theory for everything — explaining all the forces and particles in the universe — is still the holy grail for some physicists. But you probably say to yourself that the fact that there are many professors who each have a theory for everything means that we don’t have just one theory, but there are many claimants who are trying to make their point.
