Category: Book Notes

Asimov the Polymath

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A new production this year of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is apparently now out on the Apple+ channel (are they called “channels” or what, “streaming service” seems awkward).  There is also somewhere in movie land a pretty fair production of I, Robot.  Long ago I liked to read Asimov’s science fiction but it is really too bad that his other works are lesser known.  In fact, Asimov wrote books on chemistry, literature, philosophy, religion, humor, politics, social science, and well about everything.  He published over 500 books and someone once told a story about him picking up a book that he thought was interesting only to find that he had written it himself many years before.  He was prescient in the world of computers and foretold many of the ideas we now wrestle with including the worries about AI and robotics.  In fact, he invented the word “robotics.”  Here is the OED entry for his neologism:

1941   I. Asimov in Astounding Sci.-Fiction May 53   There’s irony in three of the greatest experts in robotics in the world falling into the same elementary trap, isn’t there?

One of my favorite Asimov book is an enormous work on bible history, Asimov’s Guide to Bible.  It spans 1295 pages and no, I haven’t finished it.  It surely must rank as one of the most objective and thorough examination of perhaps the world’s most influential books. Asimov was a humanist, an atheist who was the president of the American Humanist Society.  His work on the bible is historical and a kind of exegesis of mythology of the Hebrew Tribe.  Asimov himself was born to a Jewish family in Russia but he was a secular Jew, as are many second-generation Jewish immigrants (unless the popularity of Buddhism among secular Jews makes them a little more religious).

I did finish Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor, at least twice.  This is not just another joke book but a light yet perceptive commentary on humor itself.  I have started it again and I was reminded in the first introduction that Asimov had the same disgruntled view of travel as Adriel.  He says he began the humor book during a dreaded weekend vacation.  He writes that “vacations send me into a deep melancholy” that he soothed by spending his time writing in a room of the “elaborate hotel of a type I detested beyond measure”. Asimov also wrote several collections of limericks including one for children.  That one is available but sadly, Lecherous Limericks is out of print although copies are available for $896.00.

More on Sandel

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Elsewhere on this blog I mention Sandel’s discussion of the controversy over diversity in college admissions. He thinks a resolution is reached by considering the telos of the university: what is it for, what is its purpose? (Michael Sandel, in his iTunes U course on Justice, lesson 9). Recently, and especially during the COVID pandemic, university admissions are no longer requiring standardized test scores to be submitted by applicants. Of course, colleges need to increase enrollment and this would help them financially, but it is usually characterized as broadening the student populations. Making it more diverse. Maybe so.

Recently, Razib Khan’s blog raises some concerns (https://razib.substack.com/p/applying-iq-to-iq). Khan shows the relationship between high IQ and other tests scores and academic and even general success such as book writing and patent development. He suggests that by selecting less academically gifted students, the universities could return to selecting more of the elite, the wealthy, and the well connected. The best education has usually, or formerly, been reserved for the elite and the well-born aristocracy. In Europe, the universities were created to prepare aristocrats for a life of, well, aristocracy. But it has been said, that in America, and elsewhere in the movement towards democracy, the purpose of higher education was to prepare for a well functioning democracy. Khan notes “But the age of aristocracy ended in Europe, and a new egalitarian ethos required ways to identify those with talent but no connections or pedigree. Intelligence testing appeared in modern Europe as a way in which to identify talented individuals born outside of the elite.” Khan describes the ancient practice of testing in China as a selection tool for higher office and higher education. But there was a time when testing was not done as we now see happening in American college selections. “When examinations fell out of favor, as occurred during the Eastern Han, the Tang, and the Yuan, the consequences were inevitable. A coterie of great families, or ruling castes, came to dominate the administration, and unattached youth of talent were excluded and marginalized. The testing regime was uniformly disliked by the aristocrats because they already had power, connections, and polish. They perceived in themselves the right to rule. They required no test to validate their self-worth.”

It would seem to me that in America, which strives to be inclusive and diverse. At least in our values, we want everyone to have equal opportunity for a full and prosperous life and that democracy must be equalitarian if it is truly rule by the demos. So whether testing is required or not, the purpose of our universities is to serve us all and they must be some selection method that is not blind to academic qualifications but does not see that alone as the most important entry criterion. And higher education should neither be blind to race or ethnicity nor regional difference or social and economic status but should embrace a multiplicity of backgrounds in student selection.

In Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy, he decries the selling of higher education in terms of financial gain. Universities have always had as part of their purpose to train students for a career. But to value education primarily on the basis of the size of future income is self-defeating. Sandel thinks that if the standards of higher education are no higher than common greed, then universities are no longer serving a higher purpose. A liberal arts education should change a student’s life in a more substantial way than making money.

Recent changes in college life were depicted and satirized in the recent streaming television series The Chair. There has been a trend toward dropping humanistic education and the classics often because these represent white colonial culture. In The Chair, the college administration buckles under student demands for their view of correct behavior. A new book by a man of color pushes back on the regrettable trend of dropping the classics from the curriculum. Roosevelt Montas, a Dominican immigrant, was the director of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, a classics based studies required of all students. His book Rescuing Socrates, reviewed this week by the WSJ, tells of how his own undergraduate years studying in the Core Curriculum gave him a transformational sense of his own self.

Holy Circus

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I have read that in Japan there are common expressions for the blissful state of being in large crowds.  Americans claim that they dislike crowds despite the evidence of massive throngs at music festivals, sporting events, and megachurches.  The Southern Baptist church, Prestonwood Baptist, claims enthusiastic crowds exceeding 15,000 believers (and donors) every week. 

The Church of Trump has them beat.  Twenty to thirty thousand screaming followers can often attend. President Obama drew larger crowds but I doubt his supporters turned over their lives to these events.  Some Trump-crazed supporters would attend dozens of such events, traveling hundreds of miles to worship at these church-like raves.

The journalist Carl Hoffman traveled the Trump rally circuit to interview and even befriend some the rally pilgrims.  He reports on his crazy journey in Liar’s Circus, subtitled A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies (HarperCollins, 2020).  Hoffman says little about what nonsense Trump had to say at the rallies (God-knows we’ve had enough of that) but rather he writes about the crowd and its true-believer people. 

The rally fans were fanatics, they were worshipers at the altar of crazy.  Hoffman does indeed remark on the quasi-religious nature of the MAGA rallies.  He witnessed rituals, songs, chants, prayers, emotional outbursts, testimony, and wild sermons worthy of a Mississippi tent revival.  Hoffman references the American Great Awakening and he refers to how the rallies, like the 19th century protestant resurgence, swept across the country like a virus.  At the Trump rallies there were prayers and demons who were mostly the wicked liberals who had an “agenda” to destroy the right wing manifest destiny to a Whites-only greatness.

As Hoffman waited with the faithful in long overnight vigils to enter the hall, he befriended several who followed the circus circuit to dozens of rallies.  They had trailers and tents and did cookouts like massive tailgate parties.  They came, mostly by car again and again, from distant states but they didn’t come for politics. They came for the event, for the tent revival, for the crowd.  Sociologists have studied and written about the strange, enormous power of the crowd over the emotions of the individual.  Elias Canetti, in his Nobel Prize winning book, Crowds and Power, explained how tyrants use the power of crowds to gain power over the individual.  The crowd takes on a kind of spooky animation wanting growth and sustaining itself with increasing power over thought and emotion. Individuals in crowds surrender their personal power to the autocrat.  Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about how singing and motion in a celebratory crowd can de-individualize the participant and cede power and adulation to the leader.  

Hoffman “realized Trump was a preacher and this was a fundamentalist revival.”  Trump preached against a loss of our souls to the Satanic Democrats, or immigrants, or the media.  The Trump church endures and the congregations want more and more.  Personally, I am praying to hear less and less.

Well Worn Jeans

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In the Netflix series “Unorthodox,” a young Hasidic woman flees her husband and family and the oppressive strictures of ultra-orthodox life in New York and seeks a new life in Berlin.  She struggles with a modern society and her own fears and limitations, but slowly, step by step, gains the confidence to survive.  At a pivotal moment in her battle for personal freedom, she puts on a pair of blue jeans under her orthodox prescribed skirt. In the following sequences, she wears the jeans and contemporary clothes as she slips off the burdens of ancient customs and rules.  It seems to me that restrictive blue jeans signify freedom from restriction. 

How we deal with existential fears and mysteries is the subject of Matthew Hutson’s The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking. Hutson doesn’t condemn magical thinking or consider it unusual and thinks it may well be an essential part of a healthy emotional life. We hold tight to things that help us make sense of life.  An old ring that a grandmother had, a numbered shirt worn in a winning game, my dad’s dog-tags.  Significant life changes are usually accompanied by things that don’t change.  There are wedding rings, coming of age body alterations of all types, maybe a tattoo of Amanda (maybe have that one replaced), the holy water of baptism, and, in the end, a granite tombstone. Ancient handprints of Hindu women made just before sati.  Who doesn’t save a special toy belonging to a now grown child or a wedding gown or a Louisville Slugger from a home run?  And I missed my old VW bug named ‘Liz’. 

My old school friend George told me once about a pair of special blue jeans, the almost lucky jeans.  George was, and still is, an artist who made imaginative and beautiful objects of clay and took compelling photography.  As a starving art student at Florida Atlantic University, he slept in the pottery building or the fieldhouse where there were nice showers.  After graduation, he still struggled to survive until his art was recognized.  I lost track of him for a while after college but connected a little later.  Then he said he was a painter.  He painted the lines on the highway for the Ohio road department and was paid well during warm months.  In the winter and spring, he received enough unemployment money to make ends meet while living in a barn of an Amish farm in Ohio.  He traded a little help around the farm for free accommodations in the hayloft while doing what art work he could.   

And as he prepared to leave for his recall to work, the farmer’s daughter comes up to say goodbye.  I asked George if this was the start of a farmer’s daughter joke but he swore to its truth. The young woman of course was wearing her traditional long skirt and Amish clothing. She asked for one small favor.  George, take off your jeans.  George is thinking:  my lucky day! I guess I’ve hit the jackpot.  The farmer’s daughter slipped off her skirt and took the blue jeans and zipped them up snug.  Then she slowly takes them back off and gives them back. She says, George, I just wanted to know for once what it feels like to wear blue jeans. 

The jeans must be long gone now and George is a successful artist and does have the good luck and steady income of an art museum director.  I don’t know what he wears to work. 

Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

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I did enjoy this best-selling novel about Kya, a girl who grows to a woman almost entirely alone in the marshes of North Carolina. The book, by the naturalist Delia Owens, is a bildungsroman of a girl Mowgli, not raised by wolves but by herself and her sea birds, insects, and and all the teeming wildlife of the marsh.
It was a little off-putting to accept the idea of a girl of six abandoned almost completely by her family except for an abusive alcoholic father who was rarely home and eventually completely gone. So it took a bit of the willing suspension of disbelief to enter the wondrous and dangerous world of a marvelous child with only one day of school who grows in self-reliance to womanhood by her own strengths and curiosity.
There is also a murder mystery here too, not in the sense of a whodunit, but in the more classic sense of the inevitability of tragic consequences. What is so appealing in this book is how the author weaves together the characteristics of the natural world into shaping Kya’s sense of identity. What she learns in her solitary life about the natural world and natural selection is not only how she lives and prospers but how she survives and prevails. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens, 2018, Putnam’s.

Capital and Taxes

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The New York Times has reported today on a ProPublica study that shows that the wealthiest US individuals regularly pay little or no income tax. The NYT mentions that this has revived an interest in a wealth tax.
A few years ago, there was much excitement over the publication of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Now there is a Netflix documentary which I haven’t seen yet but I did read the Picketty’s book. In record time I think, a full two and half-month for all its nearly 700 pages and I understood some of it. As a matter of fact, Picketty was careful to explain each of his formulas in plain English (translated from the French). Here is the most important one: r > g that is, the r or rate of return on capital will always be greater than g, the rate of growth of the economy which is the source of income for us 99 percenters. Some economists have criticized the book on various points (one accusing him of “mathiness” like “truthiness” using a lot of math to overwhelm the reader into thinking he must be right, it’s math after all). I take it from Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman, that the book is one of the most important texts of our age. And of course the right-wing suggests the book is just more liberal socialism. Picketty’s book was given to me by my wonderful friend Tom, a dyspeptic but benign old Marxist professor. I think Tom was a little disappointed that Picketty’s Capital wasn’t a modern version of Das Kapital.
Of all the controversy about the book, no one has criticized his major point. Capital relies on labor to increase its value and will always increase faster than labor’s earning power causing increasing income inequality. Picketty spends a lot of time showing the negative effects of inequality including not only poverty and ill health but social upheaval and even violence. Picketty also documents generational wealth, vast fortunes passed along down the ages growing to enormous proportions. Mostly untaxed.
The solution is a wealth tax. In the US we do have one form of wealth tax, the tax on real estate, usually the only form of wealth for most Americans. Some European countries have a wealth tax on assets like holdings in a stock market.
When a significant wealth tax was implemented in France a few years ago, many of the enormously rich elites simply fled. That’s why Picketty proposes that there be an international and therefore inescapable wealth tax that is the same rate universally. Fat chance.
At any rate at least the idea is being discussed. Elizabeth Warren had proposed a wealth tax as one of her many plans, but the Biden folks have dismissed it.
I do wish people would remember when they shell out for the their real estate tax payment, that a retiring Jeff Bezos will be looking down on us all from above the skies in his space ship and just rolling in his enormous billions and paying no tax at all. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Picketty, Harvard University Press. 2014.

Parity for Clams (Pt. 3 of saving clams)

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I read good article in Aeon that has another discussion of the matter of approaching our treatment of animals with respect to the Kantian vs the Consequentialism approach. (refer to my previous entries on the dignity of mollusks)  Peter Godfrey-Smith, in “Philosophers and Other Animals” (https://aeon.co/essays/why-korsgaards-kantian-argument-about-animals-doesnt-work) comments and critiques the approach of Christine Korsgaard in her book Fellow Creatures.  (I have not read that one, but he writes that Korsgaard extends the Kantian approach from a universal principle among persons (what others would do in similar circumstances) to a more nuanced approach.  Korsgaard thinks there is no inherent values, but values derive from valuers. We must respect what others value and that leads us to form moral judgments that are respectful of others—and the “others” include animals.  Obviously, sentient creatures value life and avoiding not just pain but avoiding death.

Peter Godfrey-Smith doubts that all of us will respect the values of others.  He thinks the approach of expecting each person to suss out the valuing process is questionable. 

I am not really sure about this.  First of all, I don’t see how the different the Korsgaard approach is from Peter Singer’s approach of respecting the preferences of others including the preferences of animals.  But I think that this article helps to clarify the idea of “parity and consistency, as well as empathy, reverence and more” that Godfrey-Smith writes about in his approach to the veggie question.  If we make a moral judgment about one thing, it should apply to a similar situation, that would be parity.  And the simple notion of applying empathy to animals and respecting their values, or preferences, should be an important component of our moral decision making.  As Adriel says, “I just want to live in peace with my fellow creatures on this earth.”

The Rights of Clams (Pt. 2)

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Peter Singer takes up the case contra clams in Chapter 4 of Animal Liberation: A New Ethic For Our Treatment of Animals (1975). He discusses where to draw the line between those we should not kill and eat and those living things which are far too elemental and primitive to earn the right to live. He writes “Oysters, clams, mussels, scallops, and the like are mollusks, and mollusks are in general very primitive organisms.” An exception is made for the octopus which is a much classier and a super cool mollusk. Since Singer is okay with killing insects, which are primitive invertebrates, he throws lobsters in the pot with the mosquitoes and locusts. Well, if you have ever thrown a living lobster in the boiling pot or dared to watch the horrific procedure, you know that lobsters feel pain. And they have a pronounced desire to continue to live which is why the murderous cook will bind their claws lest he lose a finger. Singer admits it is difficult to draw the line. Unless you are Leviticus I suppose.

So why not avoid the impossible task of making these fine distinctions and simply value life over killing wherever possible. It is unnecessary to kill the clam, unless you are marooned and hungry on a Pacific island, and just eat your broccoli, beans, and barley? Humanity is not a superior life force. [Editor’s Note: here Adriel is going back to Part 1 q.v.]. Peter Singer seems to acknowledge that point in Chapter 1: “All Animals Are Equal.” He writes (in a sort of Kantian fashion) “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to eat another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose.” (this is page 7 of the Avon paperback edition.)

So let’s don’t avert our eyes from the boiling lobster or butchered cow. If it seems awful then it is. C. S. Peirce, the developer of the philosophy of Pragmatism, viewed the instinctual response as a valuable tool in resolving ethical dilemmas. (entry on Pragmatism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Some moral decisions simply have no clear rule or guidebook. The fact that we must rely on natural feelings and are not reliably reasoning beings would seem to mean that you listen to your heart, and don’t destroy creatures whether they have a heart or not.

The Rights of Clams (Pt. 1)

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Adriel won’t eat clams or fish. But the author of Animal Liberation, the utilitarian Peter Singer, eats clams but not fish. Singer (I took his remarkable class on Coursera) emphasizes the suffering of fish. The fish is not just sentient but is aware of its own existence, struggles mightily to continue to live, and most of all, obviously feels pain and can suffer physical pain and suffer from loss of life itself. It is not ethical to cause unnecessary suffering and it is unnecessary to eat fish. Despite being the foremost living utilitarian philosopher, Singer uses two Kantian ideas in his seminal book. In his ethics he espouses the “rights” of animals and also claims that animals are to be treated as ends in themselves, not as a means to our ends. Both the ideas are most associated with Immanuel Kant but Kant, who was a carnivore, viewed rational humans as having rights but not animals that could be used as serving the needs of humans. We have a duty to avoid causing pain to animals but they do not have rights equal to reasoning beings according to Kant.

On the other hand, Peter Singer sees the qualities of animals for their somewhat limited self-understanding and their avoidance of suffering as an equivalence to the same qualities in humans. Therefore animals have the same rights as us folks. But not for the poor, dumb clams. The life of a clam is not equivalent to that of me, or Sally, or even Rover. Singer says simply “I don’t think that bivalves — mussels and clams — I don’t think they can suffer, so I eat them” (Vox interview https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/10/27/21529060/animal-rights-philosopher-peter-singer-why-vegan-book).

So Peter Singer eats clams, and I supposed Immanuel Kant did too if they were nicely fried. But I won’t. For two reasons. First, with regard to the Kantian view, I don’t see humans as “higher” animals because of the (seldom used) ability to reason. The idea that we are something special, something spectacular, and rule the universe by reason is not acceptable to me or even to science. Current scientific research show more the amazing abilities of animals and the limits of human reason. The kind of cruelty and evil perpetrated by humans has no peer in the non-human animal kingdom. We are animals, the equals of other animals. Our rights are equivalent, not superior. Second, with regard to Singer’s emphasis on preventing suffering, I think the avoidance of causing pain is fundamental but not decisive. Rather, life itself should be the ultimate value, not just life free of suffering and not just human life. Of course, even bacteria or plants have a kind of life but so primitive and limited as to not be regarded on the level of sentient creatures. Even if a clam or an insect might not be considered “sentient” or having the ability to feel pain, a decent respect for life itself ought to cause an ethical person to avoid killing non-thinking creatures. I understand that it is sometimes necessary to kill lesser creatures, certainly dangerous animals or a deadly bacteria or virus, but it is not necessary to eat a clam or a hamburger to live. It is certainly important to kill disease bearing mosquitoes but unnecessary to kill an annoying jaybird.

Adriel follows the Buddhist hope that all sentient beings may live in peace. As I say to my friends, I am a vegetarian because I just want to live in peace with my fellow creatures on this earth. If that fly is bothering you, try to throw it outdoors. If you see a clam, let it lie. Or is it lay? Never can get that right.

Proof

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Kurt Gödel, the crazy genius who was a companion of Einstein at Princeton, is best known for his enormous contribution to logic, the incompleteness principle. Despite reading a full and tedious book about this brilliant man (A World Without Time, by Palle Yourgrau), I have really no idea of how the principle works although it apparently points out some kind of flaw in all logical proofs. But there is to my mind a sort of proof of his belief that there is a flaw in the United States constitution. When Gödel appeared with Einstein at his examination for U.S. citizenship, the examiner told him that as an Austrian immigrant he is lucky the constitution prevents a take-over by a dictator. To Einstein’s consternation, Gödel declared he could prove that the U.S. constitution would indeed allow for the legal rise of a dictator. No one knows how he arrived at that proof, but he was swiftly hushed up at the hearing and was granted his papers. It has been a long time since that incident, but surely the ascendancy of former President Donald T*** provides some sort of proof Gödel was right. (a record of the incident at the hearing can be found here: https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html).