Books this year: a book diary

While I enjoyed this book immensely, I don’t know that I’d recommend reading it cover-to-cover at one go, mostly because it can get overwhelming at times. The chapters are mostly independent from one another, which permits browsing, though one ought to read the introduction before anything else. It is, essentially, a collection of essays about the history and development of a dozen or so words - wit, free, life, conscience/conscious, and world among them.

Each of the words he writes about has a sense that he labels the “dangerous” sense, dangerous because it is a relatively recent sense of the word, which has generally become prominent over all previous senses of the word, leading to mis-readings of works older than a hundred and fifty years or so. One example (out of many) is the use of “world” in the Gloria Patri to mean “ages” or “eternity” instead of “earth” or “globe”.

While there was plenty in the book I didn’t know before reading it, there was nothing unexpected, no sense of a word or development of meaning that stopped me in my tracks - until i got to World, and more specifically to the uses of “world” in the New Testament. “World” translates two sets of Greek-Latin pairs, ge-mundus (world in the physical sense) and aion-saeculum (world in the sense of “age” or “period”). When Jesus talks in Matthew’s Gospel about “this world or the world to come,” most people assume he’s talking about this mundus or the next, heaven, the afterlife. But he’s not - he’s talking about the next aion, which started with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.

I can’t convey in a blog post how much this blew my mind, and I won’t try. But I read it shortly after hearing Bp. Ken Myers teach for five hours about eschatology (go here for the audio of the conference) - and the next day I read this sermon by N.T. Wright. I’ll end with the relevant paragraph:

“[The book of] Acts, which of course begins with the story of the Ascension, never once speaks in the way […our] whole tradition […] so easily does. At no point in the whole book does anyone ever speak, or even sound as though they’re going to speak, of those who follow Jesus following him to heaven. Nobody says, ‘well, he’s gone on before and we’ll go and join him’. And for a very good reason. When the New Testament speaks of God’s kingdom it never, ever, refers to heaven pure and simple. It always refers to God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, as Jesus himself taught us to pray. We have slipped into the easygoing language of ‘the kingdom of heaven’ in the sense of God’s kingdom being ‘heaven’, but the early church never spoke like that. The point about heaven is that heaven is the control room for earth. Heaven is the CEO’s office from which earth is run – or it’s supposed to be, which is why we’re told to pray for that to become a reality. And the point of the Ascension, paradoxically in terms of the ways in which generations of western Christians have seen it, is that this is the moment when that prayer is gloriously answered.”

This is a remarkable collection of (sometimes very) short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, mostly translated by Anthony Kerrigan. You know all those thoughts you think or heard others think in movies like Adaptation, The Matrix, or Waking Life? Thoughts about the ontology of the future, the nature of chance, parallel universes and quantum mechanics, monkeys with typewriters or everything being in the digits of Pi, self-reference and the distinction between reality and fiction, the need for rules and generalization versus the strange and subtle elegance of having a name for everything like Chinese characters? Borges had them too, a long time ago. And he had them in a beautiful, Marquezian way.

This is a collection of mathematical tidbits that David Wells found throughout his life as a mathematics lover and teacher. I have a penchant for thoroughly reading bathroom reader material like this because I find it to be so enjoyable. This love of trivia is probably not a good thing and compares to other mindless activities I loathe such as sudoku. It has proven to make me an incredible Cranium player though. The following are some things worth commenting on

“The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. Much of the fascination of statistics lies embedded in our gut feeling — and never trust a gut feeling — that abstract measures summarising large tables of data must express something more real and fundamental than the data themselves. (Much professional training in statistics involves a conscious effort to counteract this gut feeling.)” -Steven Jay Gould

This is utter rubbish. If anything, professional statistical training consists of the exact opposite. We are reminded again and again that there is something under the data, and that this is in fact the correct (and useful) way to think about things. I’ve seen this in a number of modeling texts, and these reminders are there because sometimes you have the opposite gut feeling and forget to think in terms of true parameters. There’s also nothing wrong with trusting your gut. It certainly doesn’t constitute a proof, but neither has Gould proved that Platonism is in error.

Also mentioned is the universality of river-crossing problems. These seem to me to be too complex to have arisen independently in all the places they did (Gaelic, Danish, Russian, Italian, Romanian, and Black American folklore). And did you know that Aristotle knew of only one people who used a base other than ten and offered lots of explanations for why it might be popular to use ten?

I leave you with the following passage: ‘During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukranian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.

Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The skeptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. “All right,” he said, “calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot.” Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.

Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader.’

I decided to buy this book after watching a compelling lecture by Wolf online. Wolf says that she had a conversation with a Jewish mentor of hers who repeatedly made the comment “They did this in Germany” while watching news reports here in America. While she initially wrote it off, her friend eventually forced her to listen which started Wolf on a research campaign to discover more of the similarities between what is happening in our country today and what had happened in Italy, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and other democracies that were closed down in the past.

The book is organized around 10 things that Wolf says form a blueprint which is invariably followed by those who are trying to shut down an existing democracy. If you wish to see these 10 steps, I refer you to the Wikipedia article. I think it’s pretty undeniable that all 10 steps are fascist in nature and are happening here today. If you aren’t convinced, or could just use a little disillusioning, in particular of the myth that It Can’t Happen Here, this might be a good book to read. If you happen to be in the unlikely position of already being convinced and having people who will listen nearby, it’s nice to have some ammunition.

Edward Said wrote in Culture and Imperialism that this novel could be read as an African (or North African, anyway) response to and reversal of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The narrator (who remains nameless) tells the story of a Sudanese man who travels to London for school in the 1910s, but instead spends his time having sex with lots of European women - some of whom commit suicide, and one of whom he kills - and then returns to a village on the Nile to start his life over. Except he can’t really let go of the past, and soon after confiding in the narrator (who also studied in London, a generation later), he disappears during a flood - whether his death is accidental or suicide remains open (I suppose it’s not entirely clear that he’s dead at all, as his body is never found).

In a way, reading the novel reminded me of watching The Prestige or Memento: you know Mustafa’s story after 45 pages, and then he disappears. But as the novel goes on, the narrator covers the same ground again and again, peeling back another layer of the story each time, so that when the climactic moment occurs, it stops you in your tracks, even though it’s already been explicitly referred to a half-dozen times.

The big question this novel raises - like Heart of Darkness - is whether the evil in Kurtz and Mustafa was already in them, or if they were somehow infected with it by the foreign land they sojourned in. And, naturally, neither novel answers the question - the texts allow either as possibilities. The question in Season of Migration is further complicated by the setting - post-colonial Sudan - so one can ask if the violence Mustafa does to the women of London is learned from the colonizers.

It’s a challenging novel, like Heart of Darkness - not to belabor the comparison too much - short but incredibly dense, largely ambiguous, raising a lot of questions and answering few, if any. Both are, naturally, well worth the effort, and as relevant to the times as the day they were written.

Ok, I’m going to make this one really quick. I bought Liberation Biology because I thought it would be deep and inspiring like Nonzero or The Singularity is Near, and I thought that in making the moral case for the biotech revolution, Bailey would talk up technology-as-liberator, which is a theme I rather like.

Instead, it was the same old thing as The Future and its Enemies, only minus a lot of the philosophy. It was a libertarian book. What is it with libertarian writers? They’re dead right, but all they know how to do is bore you to tears with citations from academic journals, and they forget that liberty is beautiful and anarchy is fun! I give this thing two and a half stars. It’s a synthesis of recent progress in biotech journals that you’re already aware of if you read reddit, and some whining about laws, with legal and academic citations.

I was inspired to finish reading this book (which had long been shelved half-done) by all of the connections to it that I found in Nonzero.

In this book, Postrel (the editor of Reason), argues that our political dichotomy (red vs. blue, right vs. left) is outdated, and will soon be replaced by one that better reflects the real ideological battle of the day: stasism vs. dynamism. “Dynamists”, as Postrel defines them, are people who can tolerate (or even have fun with) the chaos, uncertainty, and pain that come from letting the masses have the liberty to make thier own choices, driving society towards some terrifying and un-planned unknown. Stasists, on the other hand, believe that left to its own devices society will self-destruct, and so we need architects of the future, blueprints in hand, to save us. Under Postrel’s new dichotomy, Al Gore and Pat Buchanan are on one side (as are Hannity and Colms), and Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky are on the other. Likewise, the encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft are using one model, while the Wikipedia and Linux use the other.

Postrel makes a very good case for the notion that our progress and prosperity are closely related to the degree to which we are dynamists. She makes this case by marshalling fact after fact, CX debate style, until you want to puke and say “OK, I GET IT ALREADY.”

I’m happy to have read this book, anyhow, because it provides me (if tediously) with a cherished link between libertarianism and utopian futurism.

Nonzero reads like a cross between an anthropology textbook and The Singularity is Near. The basic gist of the book is this: that human society (and the evolution of all life, before it) has been on a trajectory towards greater and greater complexity and interconnectedness because of the superior Darwinian viability of organizations defined by non-zero-sum relations (be they nations or slime molds).

Wright’s greatest contributions to the growing literature on this subject are (in my opinion) (1) that he proposes a mechanism by which history is propelled along this trajectory (whereas Kurzweil’s treatment of the subject is empirical and Teilhard de Chardin’s is mystical/theological), and (2) that he answers Karl Popper and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and makes the obvious connections to Teilhard de Chardin and Martin Luther that most students of the singularity (being strictly technological folk) either don’t care or know to make.

Nonzero didn’t teach me a lot of new stuff, but it’s a beautiful and accessible synthesis of a lot of things that I’d already gotten through harder and more boring reading. It’s one less book I have to write.

This is volume 1 of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. It covers Egypt, Sumeria, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, the Hebrews, India and some other stuff in pre-modern times. It also covers China and Japan up to the modern age. The first 100 pages or so is a nice anthropological summary about how civilization comes to be. Durant is a relativist, and this comes out in these first few pages, as he inevitably starts talking about how every tribe had it’s own traditions and beliefs and how just about every variation had at one time or another been tried.

One thing that draws me to the series is its synthetic style. Despite its age, this is almost certainly the newest history of this scope (11 volumes) which focuses on all the many aspects of culture, and is written in a storytelling style. The other thing is that I tend to agree with just about every observation Durant makes. Despite our differences, he is a really good writer and tends to draw sound conclusions.

I learned a lot from this book. I learned that of all the ancient cultures, I like the Indians the best. I also learned that Egypt was really awesome. Anyone who really likes history should definitely check it out.

It might seem a bit odd that Lewis’ last book is, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “an introduction to Medieval and Renaissance literature,” but it is. He’s generally remembered for either Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters or The Chronicles of Narnia, and the fact that he was, by training and profession, a medievalist is largely forgotten.

The subtitle is a bit misleading, however. It’s not, as one might expect, a list of medieval authors or works that Lewis thinks everyone should read. Rather, it’s his attempt to re-construct for modern readers the worldview - or cosmology, maybe - of the average European of the Middle Ages; Lewis calls it simply “the Model.”

He begins with an overview of the literature (often incomplete or fragmentary) that was transmitted to the Middle Ages from the Classical and ‘Seminal’ (c. AD 205-533) periods. Medieval poets and authors placed a great deal of emphasis on following ‘the authorities,’ so the literature that did survive the Dark Ages was of extreme importance to them. Having an idea of what books they had - and perhaps more importantly, which books they didn’t have - aids one in the attempt to look at the universe like they did.

Lewis then examines the different parts of the Model from the top down, or the outside in. He begins with the Heavens, from the Primum Mobile down to the Moon, where the Heavens end, discussing both how the work and the beings that live in them. He then discusses the Earth, focusing primarily on humanity: the Soul, the Body, the Past.

The book is, as Lewis says in the preface, “based on a course of lectures given more than once at Oxford” - which makes it sound rather dull (as does my brief summary of it, I imagine). It often reads like a lecture - which is not to say that it’s boring, but merely to note the style. There are far more passing references to things Lewis expects his audience to know than in his sermons or books like Mere Christianity. It is obviously intended for a smaller readership; I don’t think I’d recommend it to someone who didn’t know Dante from Chaucer, or either from Milton. (I know that sounds elitist, and maybe it is. But I’ll willingly admit to being elitist.) It’s well worth the time, though, for anyone who in any way engages the art or philosophy or culture of the Middle Ages. Lewis does an excellent job (as usual) of slightly altering our angle of vision, and so showing us something completely new where we thought we had seen it all.

I will admit up front that I was predisposed to like this book. Lewis (along with Tolkien and Williams) occupies a place of honour on my bookshelf, exempt from such mundane categorizations as “fiction,” “philosophy,” or “theology.” Also, I like books about books. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.