Books this year: a book diary

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In this book, Postrel (the editor of Reason), argues that our political dichotomy (red vs. blue, right vs. left) is outdated, and will soon be replaced by one that better reflects the real ideological battle of the day: stasism vs. dynamism.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 book almost violates one of our sacred rules here at the book diary. It’s kind of a work/school book. It was loaned to me by the freakishly brilliant, eloquent, and always well-dressed Megan Power, who is my boss. BUT, I think she loaned it as a friend, and I didn’t read it for work, but for pleasure.

The Art of Teaching is a book written by a poet who was coincidentally quoted in the last book I read. It is about college teaching, and it’s very much a love song to academia. It is beautifully written, and even though it paints the life of libraries, journals, seminars, and academic debates in the most gorgeous of lights, I have to say that only made me feel more strongly than ever that I am not an academic. Parini describes the academic life as a 24/7 job. He talks about squeezing productive academic work into the 20 minutes between one appointment and another, and it’s not me. I could not tolerate a future that would never allow me to sit four hours shirtless on a sandbar on a whim.

With regards to teaching, the main thing the book says is that teaching is a performance art. It’s theatre. Parini suggests that the fledgling teacher must get over the notion that donning a mask is wrong and inauthentic. This is because, as Parini understands it, we always wear masks, and we never have an “authentic” face to present anyway. So Parini talks about the various personas he’s tried on. Characters. Fictions. He even talks about the importance of selecting a wardrobe to fit the part.

I’ve always admired adept mask users. Ani Difranco’s play-dumb-then-do-something-brilliant shtick slays me every time. But again, this is not me. I’ve tried to teach as a character, and it doesn’t work. I’m at my best when I’m really me - goofy Kenny - fumbling with the chalk and jumping up and down, and I could never play the philosopher or the schoolmaster for effect. Maybe I just don’t have the skill for acting.

Anyhow, beautiful book, and Chris should read it just for the talk about St. Andrew’s.

I came upon this book by accident when I was looking for material on conversation analysis in the UTSA library. Rather than being a treatise on the function and theory of conversation in a linguistic sense, Miller’s Conversation is “a history of a declining art” that tells the story of conversation from Plato and Job to Eminem. The book rambles and strolls freely like an Umberto Eco book (or like a good conversation, for that matter), and as with an Umberto Eco book, I don’t mind much, because so much of what the author says is so fun.

The book is constructed almost entirely out of quotes and paraphrases from wiser dead men, and the story of conversation runs something like this: conversation was good, people tolerated and made fun of and criticized each other and everyone had fun and learned and was kept mentally healthy, and then everything went to crap, and people became intolerant and impolite and uninterested in social interaction without monetary incentives. Then came the iPod and the laptop and people got stuck in their own worlds and shut out any voice that didn’t say exactly what they wanted to hear and vanished into a technologically facilitated solipsism (remember that C.W. book?). Everyone became shamelessly angry and self righteous (especially about politics), and modern America lost one of the finest pleasures in life.

Man, life sucks.

A while back, during the peak of my interest in Christian apologetics, I read a biography of the mid-century British literary club “The Inklings“, primarily because I was interested in the life and conversion of C.S. Lewis.

As I read that book (alongside Kierkegaard and Richard M. Weaver), I came to abandon the errand of apologetics and to believe instead in ultimate choice. Appropriately, I also became fascinated with Charles Williams.

My first C.W. novel, Descent into Hell, is a “metaphysical thriller”. Williams, it turns out, is a brilliant, occultic, existentialist, Christian, literary and psychological genius. The novel, which has the feel of an old ghost story, is largely about its characters’ journeys to salvation or damnation.

Williams has an almost Buddhist sense of a Heaven and a Hell which can be occupied even by those who have not yet died. (Though the there is obviously reason a Christian may believe in the same (Ephesians 2:6).) Heaven, for Williams, is the state of being which consists of the painful confrontation of reality, and Hell is an orientation of inward focus that leads the damned into ever greater solitude and narcissism.

The character whose “descent into hell” gives the book its name gradually withdraws from the world in order to participate in a hallucinatory, masturbatory false-reality with a demonic creature that takes the form of a woman he fancies. The narrative voice makes off-hand mention of the fact that if this character (a scholar) had had a true scholar’s devotion to truth-for-itself, even in his trivial scholarly arena, he may have been saved from his descent.

Williams’ equation of the scientific search for truth with the religious quest reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin’s discussion of the same, and lends itself to a terrifying interpretation, at least for a sci-fi sucker like me. Should the future continue to offer more and more compelling fantasy worlds as an alternative to this one (and TV’s just a start), I wonder if William’s masturbatory “descent into hell” will not soon be a reality, even without the aid of supernatural forces.

When I used to read Chomsky on politics, I read Victor Davis Hanson for good measure. Any time I start to really believe in something, I feel it’s my duty to hear the strongest voices that speak for its diametric opposite.

So after becoming enamoured last year with Kierkegaard and his intellectual progeny, I felt it was only right to pick up Beyond Good and Evil.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche more or less invented Existentialism at the same time without having ever heard of each other. Existentialism is defined (here, roughly, and by me) as the post-enlightenment era of philosophy that finally figured out that philosophers had been kidding themselves about certainty and the real bases for their beliefs. Nietzsche begins his book with a roaring laugh at their expense.

The style of Good and Evil is postmodern and “literary” in that rather than coming out and saying what he means, Nietzsche tells a bunch of jokes and stories and makes contradictory observations, and hopes that the reader can figure it out (or maybe he hopes they can’t).

Nietzsche thinks that philosophers choose what they want to believe and then find reasons later. Rather than debunk the reasons, he usually laughs them away, and it usually works for me. Those who love making fun of super-serious people without girlfriends will find a hero in Nietzsche.

The point where Nietzsche diverges from Kierkegaard and becomes his evil twin is this: Kierkegaard chooses to believe that we can all only choose what we believe because God intentionally made the universe in such a way that matters of morality and theology are unprovable. Nietzsche believes in the necessity of choice because there is no God or morality, so we can make things up as we go along, raping and pillaging, and always laughing, all the way.

It’s actually a rather compelling vision, and even if Kierkegaard’s is better, Nietzsche is worth reading, even if only for the purpose of appropriating his transcendent, world-swallowing laugh.

Click here to get Beyond Good and Evil on Librivox, like I did.