Books this year: a book diary

This book is a hugely personal account of what’s wrong with the US public education system. It’s from the 70s and I think out of print. The book talks about a lot of things, most centrally the issue of class in America. It’s a really good book and hard to summarize. I wish I still had it so I could page through it, but I gave it to another Peace Corps Volunteer who also loves Kozol.

One of the topics in the book is that discussion in school is never really open. It is always framed and controlled, but usually the teacher tries to state that anything is on the table, and he sometimes even believes this himself. However, there are almost always certain things that are impermissible for a student to bring up. For example, it’s really impossible for a teacher to have an honest discussion about coercion with people who are being forced to sit and listen to him. On this same note is the selection and framing of topics in curricula. There are anecdotes authors such as Howard Zinn and James Loewen use to describe some of the unjust omissions of material. One of my favorites among them is the story of Hellen Keller. I believe Jonathan Kozol was the first to bring this particular example up (at least this is the oldest book I’ve seen it in), and he has a nice list of figures who are left out because of their competing ideologies.

An interesting topic brought up is that of psychotherapy. Kozol tells a story of a woman who comes into a large amount of money. When she contrasts her own life with the poverty stricken people she sees around her, she falls into a deep depression, becomes physically ill and is unable to eat. She then begins to see a psychotherapist, feels better about herself and her life, and moves on. This story is used to illustrate that we as a society are happy to pat ourselves on the back, and sweep injustices under the rug, and that psychotherapy is often a tool to allow us to live with the suffering we inflict on others. As you can probably tell, Kozol (and myself) are under the impression that we definitely have more because others have less.

The book is very personal. Kozol tells about a young boy he visits in the slums who has a brain condition which would have been fixed at birth if the boy would have been in a higher social class and hence given access to the medical care he needed. He tells about visiting friends in a rich new development and after hanging out with them, pacing around for hours unable to sleep. His personal experiences led him later in life to give up some of the things (including medical care) he had access to because poor people did not. That’s a little much for me personally. I’m not going to give my kids a lower standard of medical care because my neighbor can’t afford it. It does suck and should be fixed, but for now I’m taking what I can get. But, Kozol is definitely a man of action, in this and other ways.

There are a lot of other interesting things in the book, but I can’t remember them all. I hear that most of Kozol’s books are good, but I haven’t read any others so I can’t compare.

This book is about quickly made unconscious decisions. In contrast to a gestalt view, a main theme of the book is what Gladwell calls thin-slicing, which roughly speaking is looking only at a small amount of available data in order to arrive at a decision. Part of this is the insight that some variables are unimportant enough to be discarded altogether from the decision making process.

We can learn something from this because people tend to be more confident when they consider 10 or 15 factors that might influence something, but people are also less accurate when doing so. It would be better to think of only the 3 or so most important factors. People also tend to think that long, conscious, deliberative judgments will most often be better. The truth is that we are often better off just going with a split second decision. Since both “Look before you leap” and “Trust your instincts” seem to have kernels of truth in them, the latter part of the book delves into when you should stop and think, and when it is better to make a quick decision.

Part of the contention of the book is that experts have better unconscious understanding of their field than nonexperts do. This would suggest that the unconscious can be trained.

Blink was not as good as Gladwell’s previous book, The Tipping Point. However, in my view it only falls short by a hair. The most fun aspect for me of reading a Gladwell book is that he throws in an almost endless potpourri of interesting facts and things and somehow has them all tie together to support his organic theses. They are close enough in quality for me to suggest that someone read whichever one they choose first.

This is a collection of early papers written on artificial intelligence. Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Turing is a brilliant 1950 paper in which he proposes his famous test as a proxy for the question of whether computing machines are capable of intelligence.

The Mechanical Concept of Mind by Scriven is a foolish 1953 paper with an insistence of looking only at non-behavioral (I read non-testable. This is his way of throwing out the Turing test.) aspects and silly word play like, “Here we have come to see that the human being need have no transcendent element, yet that machines will never be conscious, because we have come to see that a reproduction of a man sufficiently exact to be conscious is too exact to be still a machine.” To his credit, he did recant 10 years later. Minds, Machines, and Godel is a similarly foolish 1961 paper by Lucas that is an abuse of Godel’s Theorem. Hofstadter spends a considerable amount of time trying to debunk it in GEB, though I can’t see how it warrants it. He, like Scriven says things like: “… we should take care to stress that although what was created looked like a machine, it was not one really, because it was not just the total of its parts.”

There are 5 more papers in the volume. On a whole, all the arguments against AI seemed very poorly reasoned to me, and all the arguments for it seemed to be reasoned very well. The only paper I would really recommend people read is the Turing one, which is available online. Another good argument, against AI but written well after this volume was published is the Chinese Room Argument by John Searle.

Discrete Thoughts is a collection of essays on mathematics, science, and philosophy. It’s sort of a grab bag of papers on all kinds of topics. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in it about combinatorics, statistics, computer science, AI, game theory, logic, philosophy, and a lot more. There’s a very forward looking essay on Computer Aided Instruction which has many ideas which still haven’t been implemented many years later. There’s some semi-biographical stuff on Ulam, Kant, Heidegger, and others.

A lot of the most interesting things in the book, such as Cantor’s diagonal proof that the reals are uncountable were already known to me, but should be known to everyone. To the uninitiated, Cantor’s proof shows that there are real numbers which cannot be described in any fashion with a finite number of words. Then, one is forced to ask if it makes sense to talk of numbers which can only be described in an infinite phrase, or if there are numbers which simply cannot be described. If this makes you uncomfortable with the existence of the reals, you must propose an alternative to them if you wish to still believe in things like right triangles with legs of unit length. You might as well just do what I do and say that only the computable reals exist in this universe and the reals exist in the one on top of it.

There’s an article on restoring the autonomous liberal arts college which I couldn’t agree more with. There’s also an interesting essay on statistics which includes scientific problems it solves like why the sky is blue. I think I’ll stop here. Like I said, it really is a grab bag.

Howard Zinn’s blurb on the front of this book reads “Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. It is both a refreshing antidote to what has passed for history in our educational system and a one-volume education in itself.” I think this is about how I feel about the book as well. I found myself changed for the better for having read it.

The book is structured into chapters about individual topics in history, but I will structure my entry into what I view to be broad themes of major textbooks and American consciousness. Two of these are Heroification and the Myth of Progress. Heroification is the process by which powerful men are remembered as saints who never did anything wrong. An example of this is Christopher Columbus, whose brutal acts are never remembered. It is also a way of creating hagiographic vignettes by which to remember heroes that frame their lives in an inappropriately revisionist way. An example of this is Helen Keller, who is never remember for her radical socialism. I mean, think about her. She was a person who, despite many triumphs, actually came to believe that some people are truly powerless to change their situation. Sadly, this is a message that is censored from American children and replaced with a cover-up to appease those of us who insist Helen Keller be in the texts. The Myth of Progress is the belief that things are always getting better. This is demonstably false. Here is a quote from Lies by anothropology textbook writer William Haviland: “[that] some of the things that we aspire to today–equal treatment of men and women, to cite but one example–have in fact been achieved by some other peoples simply has never occurred to the average beginning undergraduate.” Combine Heroification and the Myth of Progress and throw in a healthy dash of ethnocentricism, and America emerges as the ultimate hero of every textbook and you have the self-excusing attitude shared by just about every American I know. After all, if progress is something we can count on, then we as individuals don’t need to do anything to hasten it. Sadly, the belief that a society is the vanguard of the future has had disatrous consequences in the past. I posit that it is having disastrous consequences today.

Another particularly pernicious trend I have observed in American society today is the belief that citizenship is not compatible with criticism and patriotism is equivalent to acquiescence. You can see it everywhere. Whether it’s Britney Spears “backing her president” or the Republican nominees saying that challenging a war is unpatriotic or my mom echoing these ideas, this is surely an idea that will have great consequence for the soul of America.Lies is a survey of 12 high school history texts, so they are often compared for coverage on particular issues. Sometimes one or two of them get it right, but it is never the same ones. Thus, one is forced to look outside of the standard texts to get real history. Unfortunately, this is one more reason to avoid public schools like the plague. Loewen believes museums and books like his are good sources of information.The question arises why further efforts are not made to silence books such as Loewen’s which question the order of things as they are. Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky (probably others) have addressed this question as well. Moore offers an explanation why the establishments he attacks sometimes help and fund his message. He believes they are so blinded by immediate profit that they will destroy themselves to get it. Chomsky and myself take the more Orwellian stance that it is better to let these ideas through and then stage a “debate” with the author where his work is denounced as “too radical for consideration”.

There is an argument put forth by many that school is intentionally structured this way to achieve the end of having a complacent, unquestioning worker-population. I believe this wholeheartedly and think it a consequence of giving the government control of people’s heads. Loewen rejects this “critical theory”, partly because he thinks the elite would supress books and articles that expose their influence (cf above). Unfortunately, I think he fails to see that outright supression would induce revolt. Everyone wants to appear “fair and balanced.” For the moment, I think this invisible slavery is going along without a hitch.There is so much more to say about the book, but I don’t want to make this post overly long. I think I can say without question that this is the best book I have read in 2007 or 2008.

When this book came out, it was already clear that Ron Paul would not be the next president of the United States. I had been an active part of the Ron Paul revolution, and so it was natural for me to read this book. Not surprisingly then, I was not surprised by much in The Revolution. It did however contain in one place a cohesive overview of Ron Paul’s Libertarian ideology, something one previously would have had to patch together from various speeches, writings, and interviews.There were however a few very important insights that I had been shamefully unaware of. For example, I had never stopped to reflect that, at the time of Prohibition, we were able to admit that banning a substance required a constitutional amendment, but that now the Federal government bans them routinely without batting an eye. Another interesting fact I picked up was the vital role played by sugar tariffs in our country’s overproduction of corn. I had been aware of the corn subsidies, but I was not aware that the government was simultaneously purposely inflating the cost of cane sugar.While I’m somewhat cynical about the potential of a book like this to change many people’s minds, it definitely would be more impactful were it read by someone with little exposure to these ideas about limited government and free market economics. As yet, I haven’t passed it on to anyone, but maybe I will someday.

Wow, what a great book! Frances FitzGerald said in her review of high school history books, America Revised, “It is not only radical or currently unfashionable ideas that the texts leave out — it is all ideas, including those of their heroes.” I find this to be a trend of all modern history books, even those written for a popular audience. Perhaps this modern taste for idealessness is why The Greeks is no longer in print. It is soaking with ideas! And why shouldn’t it be? The Greeks after all, were a people of ideas.

This book really tries to get at who the ancient Greeks were, and what they believed. It talks about how the way they lived was a conscious choice that involved sacrifices. In this way, one is rid of the notion that the Greeks were merely a deterministic product of external forces. The polis was a cathedral and artifice built by the human mind. The Greeks looked at themselves as different from everybody else they met because they were.

This book also convinced me that I love everything Greek more than I knew. I even love Greek morals more than I love Chrisian ones. The tragic turn of mind. The belief that one who does not give himself his due or seek vengeance is morally in the wrong. Everything I thought I might not like about the Greek is really truly great. A (probably poor, but off the top of my head) example is that their love of proportion and symmetry seems to leave out possibilities in architecture. But it was this love that stood as a spiritual reflection of their love of the whole of human life! I don’t want to ruin anything else for you. Buy it. It’s only 30 cents.

Where to begin, where to begin? Like all of the books in this series, this was a very long one (over 700 pages), so I will try to touch on just a few points and feelings I personally have about the book. Overall, I did not like this book as much as Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of the series.

I will try not to criticize Durant too much, but The Life of Greece was not nearly as good as The Greeks by H. D. F. Kitto, and there are many insights provided by that gem of a book that I didn’t get from Durant. Still, the main reason I am reading The Story of Civilization is for Durant’s synthetic view and sweeping coverage. It is hard to find other books which cover almost all aspects of a culture, actually tell a story, regularly come down on one side or the other on issues of morality, and cover such a broad expanse of time.

Durant’s favorite myth seems to be that there is a universality to the problems and themes in history. Unfortunately, I got the feeling that he was trying to find echoes of the past in the present even when they weren’t there. The comparison of Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe and Enoch Arden is an example that immediately comes to mind. He tries to play on the reader’s (at least mine) desire to believe in a universal myth by saying these things which are really very different are the same. Indeed, one of the only points of similarity he includes, that the wife does not recognize the husband upon his return is not even present in Robinson Crusoe or Enoch Arden! There are other examples, and sometimes all I had was a feeling, but I think it is true that Durant sometimes makes statements as if they were serious comparative history when they are really just speculation or cheerleading for his pet theory.

The other major criticism I have is that Durant tends to heroify. This is revealed most clearly when he is sympathetic to people who the orthodox view treats as bad. An example is Peisistratus. Another is Alcibiades, who I really thought was awesome after hearing Durant’s character study. While he is kind of awesome (a fact that Kitto’s much shorter book left out), he’s also a very bad man. Perhaps it is due to my own failings, but I didn’t get this impression at all from Durant.

Again, as previously mentioned, I don’t want to be overly critical. I generally like what Durant has to say, and anyways, there isn’t really a good alternative that I am aware of to The Story of Civilization. It was a better than average read, and I probably would have a much more elevated opinion of it had I not read Kitto’s book.

This book is the first volume of Coplestone’s 11 volume set designed for Catholic seminarians. He felt they weren’t getting enough education in philosophy, so this set was born. This volume covers Greek and Roman philosophy from the pre-socratics up to the neo-platonists, late stoa, and all those guys.

It took me a really long time to read this book. I probably started in 2007 and just kept picking it up and putting it down. I don’t know if it’s because it’s dry or over my head, or both. There are lots of untranslated quotes in Latin and Greek.

I found the sections on Plato to be particularly rewarding (Though not as rewarding as just reading Plato.) The rest… not so much. I think all the ideas are there, it’s just that it’s really not that exciting to read.  Coplestone covers the topics well and broadly, and he is fair despite his religious bent. He’s often defending philosophers because they didn’t know about the revealed religion yet, which I find humorous. He also believes you can prove the existence of God with philosophy. You can find the audio of his debate with Russell on the Internet Archive somewhere.

I’m going to try volume II, and if it’s still not very interesting, I’m going to give up on this series. There really aren’t that many alternatives for an overview of philosophy. There’s stuff like Sophie’s World. Then there’s Durant’s short Story of Philosophy. If you know of anything, put it in the comments. I’d love to hear about it.