Review of Stefan Klein’s book “How We Change the World” – Culture

A non-fiction author should think carefully about what title to give his work: because if he promises too much, then his book may shine through all possible qualities, but it is still difficult to forgive him for being misled. Stefan Klein chose the title “How We Change the World – A Brief History of the Human Spirit” for his new book. He has made up his mind!

Its shortness – 240 loosely designed pages of text – shouldn’t be blamed for the book, it is announced in the title, and could even be an advantage. Provided the author knows exactly what he wants and has a strong concept. But that’s a problem.

It starts with the fact that he never thinks about what it actually would be, the human mind. The spirit seems tacitly to take the place of the English “mind” and to have shaken off all of its German oscillations between ghost and world spirit. You can do that, but you should explain it. This carelessness is repeated later with intelligence, especially artificial intelligence, of which Stefan Klein remains fairly open, where here at best the boundary between algorithm and consciousness runs.

The book is best at the beginning, where it describes the enormity of the first human inventions

And then there is creativity, the real keyword of the book! Klein, thoughtless and obedient to authority, relies on the general high esteem for figures like Mozart, Picasso, Leonardo, Einstein, whose names keep coming up without taking into account the peculiarities of their achievements. He doesn’t notice that Picasso, for example, also produced some mediocre things. What inadequate idea Klein has of the essence of art, which remains the creative field par excellence, can be seen on page 164, where he shows a picture of the Mona Lisa – executed as a blunt pencil drawing. So that’s enough for him when he needs a Leonardo.

Most interesting and worth reading is the book at the beginning, where it describes the enormity of the first human inventions, the making of fire and the hand ax, and here the brevity becomes a real balm. The obvious emblematic figure was already set by Hermann Parzinger in his unjustifiably highly praised book “The Children of Prometheus” as the figure of the beginning; and Klein also titled his foreword “We are Prometheus”. Parzinger invents the hand ax twenty times, so to speak, by giving each of the dozen prehistoric cultures that existed on this planet before the invention of writing its own portrait – regardless of the fact that all these shards and splinters have a tiresome family resemblance. Thankfully, Klein abbreviates it. He carefully selects the things that interest him and can clearly illustrate the difference between the first East African stone tools three million years ago and the cave paintings from 30,000 years ago, which are completely different in their symbolic content.

However, the further he progresses towards the present, the less informative he knows how to present. The old camels are piling up like those of Columbus’ egg and Archimedes, who hops out of the bathtub with the exclamation “Eureka”. But it is precisely these anecdotes that serve the cult of genius, which Klein actually wants to get away from when he repeatedly emphasizes: “Because new things arise between people, not in a single brain.” That is just culture.

Which he is definitely right about. It is all the less easy to understand why he pays so much attention to neurology, which is the science of the individual brain. The book begins to fall apart and loses its illuminating value by following two tracks that do not match each other at once, the individual-neurological and the collective-cultural. Incidentally, it cannot be said that neurology has come particularly far with the individual brain: it is now able to determine that electrical currents and so on flow in certain areas of the brain during certain mental activities – but how this connection arises and how the physiological findings behaves in relation to the subjective imagination that accompanies it, that remains a mystery for the time being.

Science, which is always exactly what it counts but does not know what it counts, completely sucks

However, this does not deter the author in his belief in science. He reports in detail on a study with 622 test persons, which aimed to understand creativity. 622! Nothing should go wrong there. The procedure and its rendering in Klein deserve a closer look, for what happens here is typical of both science and its popularizer.

First, intelligence, openness to new experiences and originality are tested. How do you do that? The subjects are allowed to think of unusual ways of using bricks or ballpoint pens as possible. “The more original the answers, the more points there were in this discipline.” Originality is therefore a discipline that can be graded according to points. Doesn’t that contradict the essence of originality, which is just emerging from the continuum? And who awards the points according to which criteria? That seems to be a blind spot in the process. Then the participants have to indicate which creative activities they pursue in their life, with particular mentioning the invention of recipes, photography and diary writing. These are considered to be good markers of creative potential, regardless of the obvious objection that these three hobbies are strongly based on predetermined schemes and that a bonus for company noodles addicting themselves can easily arise in advance. (Thomas Mann in “Zauberberg”, for example, evaluates the fact that Ms. Stöhr has mastered a hundred different sauce recipes as proof of her stupidity.)

Then, thirdly, the quality of the creative result is examined, which happens in such a way that its success is recorded, as it is measurably reflected in performances or publications, regardless of the fact that this mainly reveals characteristics of the audience – in case of doubt, better something praises and enjoys what it somehow already knows as something fundamentally new. And when one has achieved a picture of the creative personality through all these measures, then it is compared with certain diagrams of the brain activity. The scan then reveals “a strange pattern that the researchers called the High Creative Network”. O miracle: whoever is creative is creative! Such miserable science, which is always precise in what it counts but does not know what it counts – to put it in-house: has a high level of reliability and low validity – is completely screwed up.

In terms of content and intellectual power, this volume is accordingly far below what Jürgen Kaube, for example, has achieved with his thematically related book “The Beginnings of Everything”. Klein, who has already written numerous books about time, coincidence or the path from the Big Bang to the cloned human, is described in the blurb as the “most successful German-speaking science author”. If that is the case, it is not a glory sheet for the German public and not good news for science.