Challenging Traditional Wisdom: Two Books by and a Chat with Steven Johnson

from the Newport Mercury and Rocky Mountain Bullhorn

The Ghost Map

How Do You A Stop an Invisible Killer Who Haunts the Neighborhood?

Unless you are a hardcore lit nerd, it’s hard to imagine that a book about Victorian London would be an evocative and exceptionally fantastic read. It’s even harder to believe that such a book would be wholly relevant to the plights of modern civilization, and yet that is exactly what you get with The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson’s historical narrative. Via telephone, the bestselling author of the polemical Everything Bad is Good For You (see below), Johnson confessed that The Ghost Map is “not just a book about history,” but “a book about why this particular point in history is incredibly relevant for a number of reasons.”

That point in history is the horrifying cholera outbreak on Broad Street in London’s SoHo district in 1854 that ultimately claimed hundreds of lives in less than two weeks. Told in chapters named for each day that the epidemic ravished through the neighborhood, Johnson follows the path of Dr. John Snow, an amateur epidemiologist who has a theory that the spread of the disease is somehow related to the water pump in the center of the district. Though it does so understatedly, The Ghost Map turns out to be a strong case against mass-market consumerism while drawing attention to “engaged amateurism,” as Johnson writes, and the underlying heroism and undervalued advantages of knowing one’s neighbor.

Both high readable and wonderfully conceived, The Ghost Map is a resounding and noteworthy lesson in perspective and the interconnectivity of everything, from microbes to city infrastructure. Not unlike Everything Bad, The Ghost Map utilizes what Johnson calls a “long-zoom approach,” backing up far enough to have a bird’s-eye view of patterns of life and death. “One of my favorite parts of the book was attempting to figure out why the miasmatic theory [that cholera and other diseases were transmitted through the air and not the water, like we know today they are] stayed around as long as it did.” Johnson’s speculation on this point is one of the book’s most venerable aspects. Tying together parallel facets of bacterial and human evolution, microbial and urban consciousness, as well as medical and political history, Johnson subtly yet effectively compels his readers to undertake a sort of collective self-assessment on the way they live now.

Asked why he took on the topic of Victorian disease, Johnson asserted that “the history of bad ideas is especially important to teach. Every age in the history of humankind has had an enormous blind spot that they don’t know about. A hundred years later, though, we can look back and see our mistakes.” Answers and revelations about these errors often come from those who “think across many fields of study at once.” Success, it seems, is the result of working on different levels simultaneously.

The Ghost Map closes with musings on the future of humans, cities, and diseases that love nothing more than densely populated areas. And though the epilogue, with its ruminations on the next one hundred years, is truly terrifying, it doesn’t lack a dose of optimism. The book’s last line is, “So let’s get on with it,” a simple declaration that works to capture Johnson’s confidence that the human race can do monumental amounts (both individually and communally) to change our world, but only when it finally chooses to do so.

Not surprisingly, Johnson is at work on his next book about the “transmission of creative and original ideas,” especially those by amateurs. Who would have thought that the local dedicated novice—the heroic figure at the center of The Ghost Map—might turn out to be our greatest weapon against disease, terrorism, and global warming?

Everything Bad is Good For You

How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

Steven Johnson has great news for America’s couch potatoes: “All around us the world of mass entertainment grows more demanding and sophisticated, and our brains happily gravitate to that newfound complexity.” That’s right. The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, even Surviror and The Apprentice and LOST challenge and improve our cognitive abilities. What once was dismissed as low-brow garbage has hugely redeeming features.

If you’ve been at all conscious the last fifteen years, you should be shouting, “What the hell?!” As Johnson states, “The most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all.” Is this guy saying that hours spent in front of Grand Theft Auto and 24 are improving our culture and not dumbing it down as years of critics have demanded? Yes, and he’s damn convincing about it, too.

Consider video games whose objectives are rarely explicitly spelled out, whose completion requires great multitasking, whose graphics are multidimensional, whose narrative mazes spawn thousands of online chatrooms. Or a television series that asks the viewer to follow as many as twenty plot threads an episode over years of syndication and leave out vital information just to get viewers more involved.

Johnson’s message is extremely difficult to disprove: “Popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways.” The question Everything Bad begs of us, though, is at what cost? If watching these shows and playing these games and involving ourselves in the vast realms of the internet is making us smarter, it could also be making us fatter and less available for living life ourselves.

Everything Bad brings up poignant problems our society soon needs to face collectively.  Johnson’s conclusion, in which he states that parenting is still eminently important as is moderation and consumption of mass media, should have been his preface so that no one misunderstands his overarching point: popular culture can be extremely enjoyable, but also dangerously addictive. Convenience and entertainment could be our culture’s newest disease if we are not careful.

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