Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life
By Saleem H. Ali
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978-969-7343-83-6
275pp.

There is a big market nowadays for what we might refer to as “big-picture” or “vision” books. They are thick glossy paperbacks which attempt to reframe, reinterpret and re-present a big chunk of our reality. These books are vast in scope.

Aimed squarely at the layman, the authors hop multiple disciplines with practised ease. And one can gauge their ambition from the titles. The examples include Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, etc.

Writers have always been writing such books, but it is interesting how they have now become a mainstay of our culture. This has its pros and cons: readers usually appreciate the everything-old-is-new-again approach, but this market has also fast become commercial. Many of these books fall short of the mark.

The paradigm-shift promised by the blurbs rarely delivers, the reinterpretation turns out to be more of a repackaging, the writing is formulaic, and sometimes the author’s own politics and ideology overshadows their thesis.

A relatively slim but erudite and insightful book provides a guided tour, traversing nature, science, economics and politics, into the impulse for order across human knowledge and activity

Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life by Saleem H. Ali is a worthwhile exception. This relatively slim and understated volume is a grand celebration of modern human knowledge, which throws the spotlight squarely on the deep and fundamental connections underlying diverse and disparate domains of human knowledge.

The author has a Masters and PhD from Yale and MIT, and is currently Professor in Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware. Among his numerous accolades, Ali is a National Geographic Explorer, was selected as Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Geographical Society in the UK.

The book starts with the world of nature, with a dive into quantum physics, crystalline structures, magnetic fields and myriad other natural processes, outlying an inherent sense of order. From here we graduate to economics and social order, where we find a similar impulse in fields as diverse as resource scarcity, urban design, the vagaries of supply and demand, risk management, and the evolution of currencies.

The third major leap is into politics. Here too, Ali delineates for us the skeins of logic that underlie political and economic development, public policy, democratisation, border control and national outlook.

Some fascinating arguments include a comparison of the trajectories of India and China over the years, and exploring the paths taken by new countries birthed from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ali concludes the book with certain vital lessons we may draw on to invoke positive change.

There are several things to like here. The writing is clear and crisp, it reads like a personal walk, a guided tour, traversing nature, science, economics and politics, laden with sparkling insights, a distinct sense of wonder, and a genuine enthusiasm for the subject. On almost every page, we encounter fascinating and little known episodes in history, featuring scientists, philosophers and thinkers. Writers and intellectuals make cameo appearances: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, William Gibson, Robert Frost, and many more.

Just the quotations themselves are worth their weight in gold in how they force us to think outside the box. For instance, Ali exhorts us to intellectual humility by citing Bernard Shaw: “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.”

Ali follows this up with biologist Stuart Firestein’s colourful elaboration: “Isn’t that glorious? Science produces ignorance, possibly at a faster rate than it produces knowledge. Science, then, is not like the onion in the often-used analogy of stripping away layer after layer to get at some core central fundamental truth. Rather, it’s like the magic well: no matter how many buckets of water you remove, there’s always another one to be had. Or even better, it’s like the widening ripples on the surface of a pond, the ever-larger circumference in touch with more and more of what’s outside the circle, the unknown.”

This book is incredibly dense — the erudition simply drips off the pages — it does not lend itself to relaxed night-time reading. The writing is a touch technical in places and that cannot be helped. These things are to be expected, given the massive scope of this project. A certain kind of stamina is needed.

For me, the best way to engage with this book was to read three to four pages a day — the subsections are short and lend themselves to this strategy — to contemplate the material, digest it somewhat, and return to it again the next day.

Such books are rare: speaking for myself, they include classics by Alexis de Tocqueville or Oswald Spengler, their modern-day descendants, Christopher Lasch, Morris Berman, etc and, nowadays, books by John Gray and Patrick Deneen. On the mainstream side, we have Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, the seminal The Tao of Physics by Frithjof Capra, and the urgent Guide for the Perplexed by E.F. Schumacher. One can feel one’s mind wrestling with the content, struggling, being pushed past one’s comfort zone — the sense is almost physical, palpable.

And, in the long term, the ideas in this book continue to nudge my thoughts in subtle ways — a sure sign of an important book. We live in the age of the specialist: our modern tendency is reductionist, to study things in isolation, to fragment human knowledge to death, concentrate it in silos, and valuable interconnections are often ignored or lost.

What is most urgently needed today are holistic ways of seeing the world. Not only can it be personally very rewarding to see the world this way, but it may also prove critical. Many of the grand challenges we face today — growing inequality, technological excess, declining health, climate change — are simply too big to be treated by a single discipline.

To humanise and draw together the disparate domains of knowledge, as this book does, with a concern for stability, order and sanity, may prove necessary for our very survival.

I also find myself often mulling over the human element in this story. The key focus of this book has been the quest for natural order. But what of those pioneering spirits, those thinkers and scientists, who dared leap across boundaries to erect the scaffolding of modern knowledge?

Creating new paradigms requires not only insight and brilliance, but also courage — and to have come this far as a race, does this not speak to something fundamentally human in all of us?

Man is truly the measure of all things.

The reviewer teaches at the NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Islamabad.

He can be reached at taha.ali@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 2nd, 2024