Abstract
Born in Sydney, Professor Emeritus Anthony Reading completed his medical degree there before his move to the US in 1960 to spend 5 years at the John Hopkins University School of Public Health studying the evolutionary biology of behaviour. Reading states, ‘I then thought it would be a good idea to learn more about psychiatry and human behaviour, as a way of integrating this newly acquired knowledge with my medical training. So, without any idea of actually becoming a psychiatrist, I entered the psychiatry residency program at John Hopkins Hospital (p.ix)’.
Early in his psychiatric career, puzzled in trying to understand what had gone wrong with patients he looked after, Reading hypothesized that ‘they appeared to have gone astray somewhere in their journey along life's highway because of some defect in their ability to generate and maintain realistic hopes about the future (p.x)’.
Reading's book, published after half a century in medicine, is his considered synthesis of the many issues that have a bearing on the constructs of hope and despair. When writers tackle such subjects that have such profound historical, philosophical and biblical dimensions, there can be an unfortunate tendency to centrally position the author's own idiosyncratic conceptual model, with its implied profundity bolstered by sweeping and dismissive criticisms of a few selected eminent scientists or philosophers. All, too frequently, such writers expose their underlying problem with an over-reliance on quoting themselves and multiple factual and referencing errors that expose poor scholarship trying to masquerade as profound insight. One expects to be scrutinized from many quarters when one titles a major section of the book, ‘The human condition’, a title identical to that in a chapter of another book dealing with complex but related issues, The Private Life of the Brain, by Susan Greenfield [1]. With these considerations very much in mind, I was left to acknowledge that on this occasion they represented unnecessary concerns.
Whether the central objective of the book is to understand hope and despair or whether indeed such an objective is subsumed in a wide-ranging discourse on the nature of being human and how we both evolved and developed to achieve that state is a moot point.
Reading's book is one that probably had a very long gestation and it impresses as a work derived from wideranging reading and a lot of thought given to the synthesis of thought provoking conceptualizations that draw on many disciplines. The style of work is engaging and there are numerous examples of well-integrated thinking, illuminated by clear writing and well-selected quotations.
The history of civilisation is essentially a history of mankind's increasing ability to predict the future. (p.15)
As Haldane (1940) once remarked, ‘the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but may be even queerer than we can suppose’. (p.29)
Consciousness is probably as necessary for the experience of language as language is for the experience of consciousness. (p.66)
Civilisation is but a six-thousand-year-old veneer that has been layered over the long evolutionary journey that shaped our species' basic nature. (p.99)
It is probably impossible to think consciously of ideas and concepts except in words or other symbols. (p.107)
Because what comes later is built on what came before, formative experiences during childhood play amajor role in moulding adult destiny, sometimes in ways that cannot be later modified. (p.117)
Science and religion are systems we have created to help us understand the world and make it more predictable. (p.131)
Reading does not project himself on to his work. It is not anecdotal or self-referenced and there are no gratuitous put-downs of those who have likewise toiled with equivalent sincerity in trying to achieve some measure of understanding of humans and the many factors (genetic, evolutionary, cognitive, neurophysiological, societal, economic etc.) that impact on how we see the future, both for ourselves and for our species. Reading's message is that ‘the hope is not to change human nature but to understand it sufficiently to be able to shape our social, economic, and political environments so that they bring out the best in us, not the worst (p.172)’.