The 9 Books I Finished in September
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The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by: Carl R. Trueman
I’ve been watching a lot of Big Bang Theory. As something of a sacrilege I watch it at 2x, so a normal 20 minute episode ends up being a 10 minute break. Which takes it from an irresponsible indulgence to a perfectly acceptable “10 minute break”. I guess having given you an insight into my strange little world I shouldn’t hesitate to reveal the full extent of my madness. Episodes of the show actually range in length from 18 minutes to 22 minutes. So I set the speed increase such that it always takes 10 minutes—1.8x for the 18 minute episodes and 2.2x for 22 minute episodes. I’m not taking a break of about 10 minutes, I'm taking a 10 minute break!
I bring this up because Chuck Lorre, the creator of the show, always ends each episode with a message on his vanity card. In the course of reading each of these cards you gain a glimpse into his life (for example you find out more than you might expect about his love life). As I sat down to write this intro I realized that it’s sort of similar to what I do here. Once a month I briefly pause in my jeremiads to give you a brief glimpse into what’s going on in the world outside of my writing. I get the feeling that Chuck Lorre found it therapeutic. That’s probably one of the reasons I do it as well.
As far as what happened in September, it was busy. I went to Gencon and my son got married. The marriage was excellent and beautiful. The convention was enjoyable but also a glimpse into the impact and the weirdness of COVID. My favorite restaurant in Indy is St. Elmo’s, but I can only afford to go there once. My second favorite restaurant, Claddagh, which I sometimes went to 3 or 4 times, did not survive the pandemic. This was surprisingly heartbreaking. Though it would have been less so if my third favorite restaurant, The Ram, hadn’t also succumbed. And then there’s the weirdness of the pandemic theater. As just one example they set an attendance cap at 60% of normal. Implying that there’s some level of transmission which happens when you gather in groups of 50,000 which doesn’t happen when gather in groups of 30,000
But of course the most important news of all is that I didn’t catch COVID, which was good, because if I had, I would have missed the wedding, and my wife would have killed me.
I- Eschatological Reviews
by: Carl R. Trueman
426 Pages
Briefly, what was this book about?
The trend, starting with Rousseau, of people deriving truth from an inner sense of authenticity rather than an external sacred order.
Who should read this book?
Probably anyone who’s interested in a better understanding of the modern world.
General Thoughts
I heard Trueman give a presentation about his book at an LDS apologetics conference I attended back in August. (Trueman himself is not LDS.) Even just based on the limited information he was able to pass along in his 45 minute presentation I knew I wanted to read the book immediately. It did not disappoint, and the cursory overview given by his presentation did in fact accurately foreshadow a deep philosophical treatise I’m still trying to process. As a result my “general thoughts” are still coalescing, but I’ll see what I can do.
Trueman builds off the work of a lot of other authors including Philip Rieff, and Charles Taylor. I’ve already read a couple of books by Charles Taylor, but Rieff was unknown to me. I may have to add him to my list because he presents a very intriguing framework.
Rieff imagines four stages of development for civilization. First there was “political man”. This was followed by “religious man”, who was then eventually displaced by “economic man”. Before we finally arrive at our current state which is “psychological man”. I’m not sure how I feel about his first stage, as I said I should probably read some of his books. But the other three stages, and particularly the last one, feel dead on.
For Rieff the psychological man is:
...a type characterized not so much by finding identity in outward directed activities as was true for the previous types but rather in the inward quest for personal psychological happiness.
In Trueman’s reading of Rieff it becomes apparent that the “psychological man” demands a “therapeutic culture”, where:
...the only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it conduces to the feeling of well-being in the individuals concerned. Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling.
All of this ties into the idea of authenticity, which Trueman pinpoints as starting with Rousseau, but which is then expanded on by a host of other philosophers including Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Freud’s contribution becomes particularly important to understanding the current world as he’s the one who identifies sex as the most important part of psychological happiness and individual well-being.
Pulling all of this together, truth does not originate from a sacred external order or anything external period. Individual preferences become the only source of truth and the deeper the preferences the more truth they contain. Sexual preferences are the deepest preferences of all which is how LBGTQ+ issues (the acronym Trueman uses) become the most important and truest things of all.
This becomes both an epistemology and a distributed teleology which has profound...
Eschatological Implications
When I decided to focus on eschatology I said I wanted to expand it to focus on things lower down the scale than just the end of the world. That I wanted to talk about the end of culture. This book is an excellent opportunity to do just that.
Continuing with Rieff, he asserts that culture is derived from having an external sacred order. He’s not alone in this Samuel Huntington makes essentially the same argument in Clash of Civilizations. That a civilization in its proper sense must inevitably be attached to a religion.
So what happens to a culture when you dispense with religion and a sacred order? When you start to derive all truth from internal claims of authenticity? In that case you have no culture. Everyone is a culture unto themselves. Rieff calls this an “anticulture”. Trueman asserts that this is exactly what has happened.
He doesn’t spend much time going beyond this assertion into predictions of what will happen to a civilization which ends up with an anticulture in place of a culture, he’s mostly interested in identifying things rather than prognostication. But in the best case it has to be radically different, and in the worst case (the most likely case?) it would appear to be entirely unsustainable. If for no other reason than it’s lack of cohesion.
As I mentioned, Trueman draws the path to our current situation through a lot of different philosophers, including Nietzche. In particular he mentions the madman passage from The Gay Science, which contains the famous assertion that “God is Dead”. I’ve been a big fan of this passage for quite a while. I even wrote a whole post about it. But this time around I was struck with how it ended:
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.
Trueman is not the first to complain about the disintegration of morality, the distortion of ethics, or the downfall of civilization. But perhaps all those who came before him came too early. After reading this book it kind of feels like it has all come together. That I finally understand the madman’s warning.
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
256 Pages
Briefly, what was this book about?
To quote from the book, “This [is] a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Specifically environmental problems.
Who should read this book?
If you’re looking for a reasonably pragmatic book about the damage to the environment caused by humans and the hard trade-offs faced by people trying to solve those problems, this is the book for you.
General Thoughts
Most of the examples in this book follow a fairly predictable pattern. Humans want to do X. X causes environmental issues, but by the time anyone realizes the extent of the issues it’s too late to stop doing X. So they come up with some idea Y which will hopefully allow them to continue doing X only without the issues. Sometimes there’s a chain of such causes and effects. For example:
Back in the 50’s and 60’s people were using lots of pesticides and herbicides. These chemicals were getting into the water and causing issues. This was part of what inspired Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring. As one might have hoped, Carson didn’t merely use the book to complain, she also offered solutions. One of her recommended solutions was that instead of using pesticides and herbicides you could set one biological agent against another. As people looked for ways of taking this advice and furthermore complying with things like the Clean Water Act Asian carp became very attractive “biological agents”. It was thought they could get rid of invasive weeds, clean algae from the water and eat pests. Accordingly the Fish And Wildlife service deliberately brought them over to America… Where they promptly ended up basically everywhere.
This quote from the book is illustrative:
“At the time, everybody was looking for a way to clean up the environment,” Mike Freeze, a biologist who worked with carp at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commision, told me, “Rachel Carson had written Silent Spring, and everybody was concerned about all the chemicals in the water. They weren’t nearly as concerned about non-native species, which is unfortunate.”
I said they ended up basically everywhere, that is everywhere in the Mississippi River Basin, but so far they’re not in the Great Lakes Basin. And people are desperate to keep it that way. This wouldn’t be very difficult except, in order to solve yet another environmental problem, Chicago sewage, a canal was dug which connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. And now this canal is the front line in the war against carp. Of course some have suggested that they just reintroduce “hydrologic separation”. The Army Corps of Engineers studied the problem and determined that indeed it would be the most effective solution, but it would also take 25 years to accomplish and cost $18 billion.
Currently they use an electrical barrier and a few years back when they had to shut it down for routine maintenance they used 2000 gallons of poison which resulted in 27 tons of dead fish. Not an ideal solution, but that’s basically the point of the book. There are no ideal solutions.
Eschatological Implications
Of course the biggest X of all is humanity’s desire to burn fossil fuels for power. And the book’s title comes from one of the Y’s which have been suggested for dealing with the environmental damage this has caused. The Y is geoengineering, specifically injecting things like sulfates or calcites into the atmosphere as a way of blocking solar radiation, which would cause the sky to turn from blue to white.
As you might imagine, debate over geoengineering is fierce, and merely exploring it as a potential solution has provoked death threats directed at the scientists involved. And while I don’t at all condone death threats, I do understand why people would be hesitant.
Interventions often backfire, I just provided two examples of exactly that. And it would be hard to make any guarantees that geoengineering won’t have harmful, unforeseen second order effects. That said, not all interventions backfire, some end up saving the lives of millions. If we have a default expectation that they will backfire it’s most likely because those interventions that do, get all of the attention.
Here’s where eschatology comes into play. It’s as if we’re being offered our choice of dooms. We can allow global warming to proceed without attempting any interventions and hope that climate change skeptics are right. (Though oftentimes that skepticism comes from an assumption that we will do some geoengineering.) Or we can intervene, and assume that the world with intervention will be better than the world without intervention, once everything is accounted for. All that said, the book does point out that it’s much easier to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.
There is of course the idea that we will reverse warming by cutting emissions and sequestering carbon in the atmosphere, but I get the feeling that this author, like many of the people I’ve read, thinks that’s as likely as reimposing hydrological separation between the Mississippi and Great Lakes.
II- Capsule Reviews
Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
by: Julia Galef
288 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
An overview and introduction for how to think rationally. A book length defense of mistake theory over conflict theory.
Who should read this book?
This is something of a self-help book written using the framework of rationality. If either of those terms (“self-help” or “rationality'') sound attractive you should read this book. If you’re on the fence I would read Scott Alexander’s review of it (hopefully in addition to mine.)
General Thoughts
Scout Mindset as another work to emerge out of the Bay Area rationality movement. The movement itself is another in a long series of attempts at developing a philosophy for how people should act. With the ultimate goal of making the world a better place.
In order to accomplish this you need some way of spreading that philosophy. Traditionally this has taken the form of a book, something that you could give to someone and say “Here. Read this. It will change your life.” In similar fashion to how those attempting to spread Christianity might give someone a Bible. Scout Mindset is attempting to fill that role for rationality.
Previous contenders for the job were The Sequences (published in book form under the title Rationality: AI to Zombies) and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Both of these contenders were written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and suffered from many deficiencies, of which perhaps the greatest was that both clocked in at over 1500 pages. In a past post, as a way of illustrating my point, I observed that the idea of someone in prison reading the Bible and converting to Christianity is so common as to be a cliche. The idea of someone reading the Sequences and becoming a rationalist, on the other hand, is so strange as to sound like the premise for a sitcom.
Scout Mindset gets much closer to this mark than any of the other two contenders. It’s not only short, it’s also well written, and easy to understand. This last point is particularly important because we’re not talking about just improving the way that smart people act, or people who live in the Bay Area. Ideally if any philosophy for improving the world is going to be successful it has to be something that can work with anyone.
I don’t claim to be an expert on the ideology of rationality, though I have read the entirety of The Sequences, HPMOR, and every last Slate Star Codex post. Out of this reading I would say that in the beginning the focus was on being right (or “Less Wrong”), on identifying and eliminating biases, and on understanding and accurately using probabilities (Bayesianism). But more recently the focus has shifted to being charitable to those you disagree with intellectually and attempting to understand them. This is the whole basis of the difference between what Galef calls the “scout mindset” and the “soldier mindset”—between mistake and conflict theory.
In other words the philosophy of rationality ends up being at least as much about being a good person as it does about how to be rational. But rather than taking my word for it let’s turn to the aforementioned review by Alexander:
I’m mentioning this story in particular because of how it straddles the border between “rationality training” and “being-a-good-person training”. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis...I think Julia thinks of rationality and goodness as two related skills: both involve using healthy long-term coping strategies instead of narcissistic short-term ones.
But all these skills about “what tests can you put your thoughts through to see things from the other person’s point of view?” or “how do you stay humble and open to correction?” are non-trivial parts of the decent-human-being package, and sometimes they carry over...
In one sense, this is good: buy one “rationality training”, and we’ll throw in a “personal growth” absolutely free! In another sense, it’s discouraging. Personal growth is known to be hard. If it’s a precondition to successful rationality training, sounds like rationality training will also be hard.
Here Scout Mindset reaches an impasse. It’s trying to train you in rationality. But it acknowledges that this is closely allied with making you a good person.
Here Alexander hits on the point I’ve brought up before. If the difficult part is making people good then perhaps we should just focus on that. And if that’s our focus, is there any reason to believe that rationality is better than traditional religion?
I understand that religion does not unfailingly produce good people, but neither does rationality (A point Alexander makes at another point in his review.) Making people good is enormously difficult and even the best methods only shift things a little bit. We’re not interested in individual examples of improvement. As I mentioned before we’re looking for something that works with everyone. We’re looking for something that improves society in aggregate. And in this respect, while I think Scout Mindset is a great book with excellent advice, I’m not convinced that it would achieve better outcomes than the way we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.
Perhaps it would help to present it in the form of a hypothetical situation: Imagine that you can add one book to the curriculum of all the schools in the nation. That you’re hoping to make the nation and maybe even the world a better place. Would you add Scout Mindset or the Bible (or maybe just the New Testament)? Particularly given the facts we’ve just discussed. 1) You want something that works with everyone. 2) Both books are trying to make people good by emphasizing kindness and charity. In this case would it not be better to go with what has worked for thousands of years, then re-inventing the wheel under the heading of “rationality”?
Given the choice I would recommend that people read both the Bible and Scout Mindset. But as much as I enjoyed the latter I think if you were only going to read one I’d read the former.
Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution
by: Mike Duncan
512 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A biography of Lafayette, a French noble who fought in the American Revolution and then went on to be a major player in the French Revolution and the subsequent July Revolution of 1830.
Who should read this book?
Anyone who enjoys Duncan’s Revolutions podcast. Or who is interested in either Lafayette, or the connection between the American and French revolutions.
General Thoughts
I quite enjoy the Revolutions podcast and I quite enjoyed this book. Lafayette was a central figure in French politics during its most tumultuous decades. Despite this the French apparently don’t have much interest in him. I was listening to Duncan being interviewed on another podcast. He mentioned that as soon as he told people who he was researching they would nod in understanding. “Of course,” they said, “because only Americans are interested in Lafayette.” Duncan speculated that this was because Lafayette was too much of a royalist to ever be embraced by the hard-core revolutionaries, and too much of a liberal to ever be embraced by the conservatives. This put him in a no man’s land where he wasn’t idolized by either side. But it also makes him something of his own man. And someone like that is always a joy to read about.
If I were going to point out anything specific about the book, it would probably be how much of a family man he was. When he was imprisoned in Austria (which probably saved him from the guillotine) his wife and two daughters, unwilling to be separated from him, traveled to Austria, and finding there was no other way to see him, joined him in prison and remained there for two years. It seems pretty clear that the harsh conditions his wife experienced while in prison contributed to her early death at the age of 48.
Can you imagine anything similar happening today?
This Is How You Lose the Time War
by: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
209 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Two people on opposite sides of a time war who begin sending letters to one another.
Who should read this book?
This novella won the Hugo and the Nebula and a few other awards besides. If you have four hours (the length of the audio book) and you want to read an award winning novella, here’s your chance.
General Thoughts
I expected to like this book more than I did. And I assume that many of the people reading this would enjoy the book, so I don’t necessarily want to do anything to close off the possibility of you doing just that, but this is a review so I have to say something. I guess I can do that in the form of a criticism sandwich:
The writing was gorgeous and to the extent that the book won awards I assume this was a large part of it.
At the bottom of that gorgeous writing most of the chapters were pretty repetitive. 1) Describe interesting location in the past or the future. 2) Describe elaborate way enemy operative hid letter. 3) Read contents of letter.
All time travel stories have to have a twist at the end involving the manipulation of time. The twist at the end of this story was pretty good. Not fantastic, mind you, but interesting and enjoyable.
Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism
by: Sharyl Attkisson
320 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
An insider’s account of the liberal bias in the media, particularly as it is manifested against Trump.
Who should read this book?
Those who want a description of how the liberal media bias actually plays out in the decisions made in newsrooms of the major networks (CBS and CNN in particular).
General Thoughts
There are upsides and downsides to reading insider accounts. One of the upsides is you get to hear the stories first hand. Meaning that in the future you don’t have to argue about the media’s liberal slant based on vague inferences you picked up while watching or reading the news. You can point to actual accounts of news directors exercising ideological censorship over what stories get pursued. One of the downsides is that insiders generally have axes to grind, often with specific people, and it can be difficult to disentangle the biases of the person telling the story from the biases they’re describing.
I’m not sure how well I have disentangled Attkisson’s biases from the stories she tells, but even if only half of them are true (and I suspect that they’re all mostly true) then the situation is pretty bad, and the neutrality of the press has been severely compromised.
If we accept that this is the case then what should we do? Attkisson offers some recommendations for outlets and individuals who are still doing good journalism. Beyond that she offers the standard recommendation that there should be no censorship. That if we just allow all the information to circulate that the truth will rise to the top. I used to believe the same thing, these days I’m far less confident in that solution.
By way of illustration, one of the biases which keeps coming up in the book is a bias in the level of evidence necessary to make a story newsworthy. Attkisson describes many cases where the slightest accusation of a Trump misdeed will make the front page, while much more credible evidence of misdeeds by Biden or Clinton will be judged as being not substantial enough to report on. Attkisson doesn’t want the Trump standard applied to Biden, she wants the Biden standard applied to Trump, but that’s the problem. Social media has allowed us to signal boost slight accusations against everyone. Often without any evidence at all. I think over time the truth might rise to the top, but by the time that happens the “top” has long ago been buried under multiple additional layers of B.S.
by: Plato
1848 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The collected works of Plato (including stuff that may or may not be Plato) one of the greatest philosophers ever.
Who should read this book?
I don’t think anyone should read the entire book, certainly I didn’t (see below). But probably everyone should read at least some Plato.
General Thoughts
This is a continuation of my project to read the Great Books of the Western World. Which is a huge undertaking. I did not read every last page of the book. I solicited recommendations and trimmed it down to a little over half of the total content. One assumes you could trim it even further than that.
As usual with the classics, it’s difficult to know what to say, since so much has been written about them already. But I do have a couple of observations:
First, The Republic. My sense is if you’ve read anything by Plato it’s probably this. Which is interesting because after a strong start where it resembles most of the other dialogues, it quickly descends into offering solutions and plans. As I pointed out in a previous post, for whatever reason you can take the wisest person you know, and the minute they start offering solutions they end up in crazytown. As an example of what I mean: In Book III there’s a whole discussion on what sort of things they’re going to allow children to read. And how they’re going to censor passages from Homer and get rid of tragedies. All of this will allow them to unfailingly raise courageous and noble children.
Now this isn’t the craziest solution he comes up with. (That probably belongs to something like having all wives in common so that no one would know who their father is.) But it is amazing how we’re still grappling with this issue thousands of years later. And despite all that time and effort we have neither managed to keep kids from getting ahold of material we deem unsuitable, nor managed to hit on exactly the right material to give them the education we want them to have.
Second, speaking of modern issues appearing in ancient texts. In reading Plato I was very much reminded of the modern rationality movement, and things like The Sequences (which I already mentioned in another review). There’s this sense in both of discovering a tool which, if used properly, will solve all of our problems. In Plato it’s the dialectic. For modern rationalists, it’s Bayesianism. And of course there are other historical examples which could be added. Now it’s certainly possible that modern rationalists will bring the world to heel with reason despite all the previous failures, but I don’t think that’s the way to bet.
Next I should be reading Aristotle, but in the course of reading The Landmark Thucydides, I discovered that the people who had done that had gone on to give the same treatment to Herodutus, so I think I’m going to go back and read that first.
by: Ryan Holiday
288 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Stillness: “To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude—exterior and interior—on command.”
Who should read this book?
Those who have heard of Ryan Holiday and enjoyed his writing in the past. Or potentially anyone who’s feeling overwhelmed.
General Thoughts
This is a self-help book. But if you imagine that self-help books exist on a continuum between those that are almost textbooks, with exercises at the end of every chapter and those that are essentially history, containing lots of stories of people you should emulate. This is definitely all the way on the history end of things.
I will say that stillness is definitely something I’ve been working on, and this book certainly helped. But it’s also difficult to summarize how it helped. As you may have gathered from the above it’s more meditative than practical—more right-brained than left. Perhaps, befitting its theme, it would be accurate to call it a quiet book.
by: Goethe
121 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Werther, a man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, who is unfortunately engaged to someone else. Charlotte appears to reciprocate Werther’s feelings, but still ends up marrying the other man. Their chaste relationship continues in spite of her marriage, but eventually Werther can suffer it no longer and takes his own life. It may be the very first emo book.
Who should read this book?
Hard to say, on the one hand the book was immensely popular, and probably has some historical significance. On the other hand Goethe himself all but disowned it later in life. On the gripping hand it’s short...
General Thoughts
I think this book is most interesting for the story surrounding it rather than for the story it tells. To start with there is the aforementioned opinion of the author. This book catapulted him to fame when he was only 24, but as he grew older it turned into an embarrassing example of youthful excess. Then there were the fans of the book. Apparently it was so popular that people dressed up as Werther, and it even spawned associated merchandise, including a perfume. But what’s perhaps most interesting is that the book engendered some of the first known examples of copycat suicide. With people going beyond just dressing up as Werther all the way to dressing up as him and then killing themselves using the same pistols described in the book.
I’m not sure if all of this strikes me as strangely modern or bizarrely foreign. Maybe a mix of both?
Now that we’re done with September and into October it appears that the weather has finally turned. Yesterday may have been the last day this year where the high was over 80. You would expect that as it gets colder that I would be inside more and thus read more, but as most of my “reading” is audiobooks which I listen to while I walk, cold weather may have the opposite effect. If you’d like to encourage me to power through the cold and “read” as much as always consider donating.