Tag Archives: Society

The Meaning of Things – A.C. Grayling

“The ‘considered life’ is a life enriched by thinking about things that matter — values, aims, society, the characteristic vicissitudes of the human condition, desiderata both personal and public, the enemies of human flourishing, and the meanings of life. It is not necessary to arrive at polished theories on all these subjects, but it is necessary to give them at least a modicum of thought if one’s life is to have some degree of shape and direction.”

Philosophy is to learn how to die, Montaigne tells us. It’s not clear Grayling agrees: as the founder of the New College of the Humanities, a private liberal arts college in London, he very much wants to teach people how to live. The Meaning of Things is a collection of short essays (2-3 pages) to that purpose, meant for a general audience and on topics ranging from loyalty, to faith, to fear, to Christianity.

Grayling is a self-described man of the left, and the essays show a consistent perspective on the world, applied to a wide range of subjects. He argues, for example, that we are today very moral – historically accepted ideas from prostitution to child labour are now forbidden – but that we are not, by and large, civil. “The loss of civility means that social feeling has been replaced by defensiveness, with groups circling their wagons around ‘identity’ concepts of nationality, ethnicity, and religion, protecting themselves by putting up barriers against others.”

His best essays are on subjects such as racism, civility, and leisure. His weakest are those that deal with religion; an aggressive atheist, he does not give his opponents the benefit of the doubt they deserve, and so his essays on the subject sometimes feel like one-sided monologues rather than engagement with an issue or idea.

A subject as vast as fear can hardly be addressed well in two pages. What Grayling does do well is direct the attention to some possible sources for further insight: the essays draw from a wide range of sources, helping them fit into the broader scope of philosophy. Grayling himself also presents some nice insights, and most readers will likely find an essay or two that appeals. A difficult book to sit down and read in a single sitting, but certainly interesting as one to leaf through and browse as the mood strikes. Grayling’s goal, after all, is to prompt reflection, and in that he succeeds.

Rebellion: The history of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution – Peter Ackroyd

Rebellion: a beautifully written, compellingly organized tale of a century that would shape much of England’s history to come.

The 17th century laid the foundations for much of the English history that followed. Agricultural and Industrial revolutions were driven by Francis Bacon and Newton’s devotion to empirical science, as well as the study of greats like Christopher Wren, Halley, and Robert Hooke; religion was fundamentally shaped by the civil war in England as well as the release of the King James Bible; the seeds of empire were sown with the establishment of colonies in North America and the West Indies, while merchants visited ports in Africa, Asia, and America; Cromwell would score some of England’s greatest military victories, including conquering Scotland, which no English king had managed, as well as disabling Spain’s naval power and assuring English dominance of the high seas; and writers would shape English literature, including Milton (private secretary to Cromwell), John Bunyan, Pepys, and Hobbes. Even national holidays would be given a kickstart with Fawkes’ attempt to blow up parliament, odd as the English national fetish about that is.

It was a busy century. Peter Ackroyd tells its story, one focused around the civil and religious war that would end in the beheading of Charles I and the elevation of Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration that would bring back Charles II as king. The book’s greatest strength is that Ackroyd truly does tell its story: he presents a narrative that is as interesting as any novel. Much of the book focuses on the lives of kings, but chapters do also examine things like the role of women in society, literature, and other topics, giving the book a breadth it would not otherwise have.

The book is the third of six planned volumes on English history. Its fault, perhaps, is that it ends not with a bang but a whimper: having covered the glories of Restoration, the book can drag a bit as it ends with the politicking of Charles II that would lead to the Glorious Revolution. That aside, Ackroyd is a fascinating writer of history, and for quality of writing as well as depth of knowledge, Rebellion appeals. Newcomers looking for an introduction to an important but under-known period of history and experts should be equally delighted.

Disclosure: I read Rebellion as an advance reader copy. It is released October 21st.

Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians, and Other Persons of Interest – Curtis Wilkie

“In the Klan structure, where Code One called for a crossburning, Code Two a whipping, and Code Three an arson attack, the extreme penalty was Code Four — death.”

In 1963, the civil rights activist Medgar Evans was killed by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council. De La Beckwith was tried twice in 1964 by all-white juries, both of which result in hung juries; not until 1994 was he found guilty, less than two decades ago. In Bill Clinton’s run for office, coming as he did from Arkansas, he placed an overt emphasis on racial reconciliation, and his decisions affect politics today. In a way that many of us not from the American South may struggle to appreciate, taking civil rights for granted, the strife of the 1960s continues to leave scars on the region.

Assassins opens with the story of De La Beckwith’s third trial. Curtis Wilkie was one of the original Boys on the Bus, the group of journalists following the 1972 election between Nixon and McGovern. Since then, he has become known as one of the best journalists covering the American South, particularly his home state of Mississippi. In Assassins, he takes a selection of his articles from various years and subjects and uses them to paint a broader picture: of the American South, of Israel/Palestine (where he lived for a time), of Carter and (Bill) Clinton, both of whom he knew personally, and even of a gubernatorial race between a playboy and a Ku Klux Klan leader in Lousiana and a lesbian colony in Mississippi.

Wilkie has spent his life covering these issues, and it shows. The book is insightful and entertaining. For those of us who didn’t grow up in the American South, it’s also enlightening. Readers may know about Freedom Summer, when college students from across the US came to Mississippi to help register African-Americans to vote, but reading of the multiple murders of activists and the trials paints a striking picture of the South that seems almost unthinkable now, only two generations later. For readers with little knowledge of the subject, but an interest in understanding what the South was like at the time, well worth a read.

Disclosure: I read Assassins as an advance reader copy.

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

“Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.”

“The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going.”

As a third steam age science fiction, we turn to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Dorian Gray is a young man with everything going for him; he is young, handsome, charismatic, in the flower of manhood. He is also convinced that beauty and pleasure are the highest goods, that “the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality.”

As is pointed out early in the novel, however, all that will fade with time: as he ages he will lose his beauty, and with it his social prestige and his status. So Dorian makes a Faustian bargain: his portrait will age and wither while he remains fresh and young, unblemished by a life of sordid activities.

The book is in some ways a classic tale of a deal with the devil, in which the protagonist goes from bad to worse. It is different, however, in the way that many of Wilde’s tales are different: it is not always obvious what Wilde himself believes. Unlike in Faust, where we can generally assume that Goethe is anti-devil though sympathetic to Faust, Wilde sounds at times actively supportive of Dorian’s ideas, giving the tale a very different slant.

At root, the story itself is perhaps not the most compelling: it can feel long where it should have been short. It is saved though by Wilde’s ability to turn a phrase: it is full of memorable quotes and lines, many of which persist today in comments like the world knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’ or that ‘it is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.’

 

“All sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.”

“There was romance in every place. But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.”

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

As the summer ends, I thought I’d brush up on some steam-age science fiction: Jekyll and Hyde, Around the World in 80 Days, and Picture of Dorian Gray. First up: man and beast!

“It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation of my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.”

Jekyll and Hyde is of course well known to most of us, even if that’s from watching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The original text though has some interesting differences. Modern characterization tend to show Hyde as large and brutal, almost an ogre of a man: he has served as inspiration for Batman’s Two-Face and the Hulk. In the original, though, he is significantly smaller than Jekyll, representing the fact that Jekyll’s life had been mostly good, not evil. Instead of intimidating size, all who see him report that he gives ‘an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.’

Perhaps more profoundly, the original text focuses on the psychology of a clash between good and evil within a person. In many ways, it is the story of the fall: a man’s descent into evil, as he gradually loses control of his darker side until his only escape is suicide. Jekyll himself notes though that there are many sides to a man, and good and evil represents only two: indeed, Hyde may be evil, but Jekyll is by no means good, suggesting a duality may be overly simplistic.

The need to bite back comments or restrain ourselves from impulsive action is hardly a stranger to any of us, I suspect. Though satisfying in the short run, such decisions are rarely desirable in the long. For Jekyll, though, the problem is more acute: Hyde himself has no such restraints, but a single lapse for Jekyll in succumbing to the transformation leads to many transgressions. Though less obvious for the rest of us, we often face a similar problem: once we have succumbed once, we develop an attachment to the behaviour, and may never be free of it. Abstention, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, may be superior to moderation.

The End of Normal – James K. Galbraith

“The 1970s were not an interlude brought on by shocks, bad management, and policy mistakes – but instead, in certain respects, a harbinger of the world conditions that we now face and from which we will not, on this occasion, so easily escape.”

“There remains one alternative. It is to engineer the economy to grow at a low, stable, positive rate for a long time, and to adjust ourselves materially and psychologically to that prospect. It is to pursue slow growth: a rate above zero but below what cheap energy and climate indifference once made possible.”

For all the books on the financial crisis, I think most people struggle to understand what happened, or even differentiate it from the European sovereign debt crisis or related issues. James Galbraith, as befits the son of one of the best known economic historians of earlier in the century, John Kenneth Galbraith (a Canadian!), takes a long view of it, looking at broad trends of demography, world finance, and technology.

Galbraith emphasizes the oft-ignored role of resource prices in driving – and slowing – economic growth. At root, he argues, we rely on resources to fuel our economies and our bodies. When they become scarce or expensive, we must give up our resource-intensive activities and accept a lower intensity of civilization, or face destruction. When the meteor hit, and sunlight became scarce, the dinosaurs gave up space to smaller mammals that were less resource intensive: he suggests we should think of our society from a similar frame, and choose a level of resource intensity appropriate to resource availability. The financial crisis isn’t a deviation from the mean, but rather a signal of things to come.

The book addresses an important issue, and from a relatively novel perspective. Predicting the future is always hard, and Galbraith wisely spends more time on first principles than on trying to predict future conditions, other than saying they won’t be great. The book’s weakness is in structure: non-economists may find it difficult to follow. Galbraith leaps around from idea to idea and engages with things he disagrees with rather than advancing his own ideas, so some ideas can be hard to keep track of unless you already know the literature. In his attempts to make it accessible, it also feels a bit superficial at points: criticizing economists for finding their models beautiful seems a bit irrelevant. Not the last word on the subject, but definitely a start, and very much an underdiscussed issue.

Excellent Sheep – William Deresiewicz

“The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but are also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose…great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”

“Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to.”

“People go to monasteries to find out why they have come, and college ought to be the same.”

Elite colleges tell their students how special they are, how they were picked from an enormous pool of possible applicants and showed themselves better than all the rest. In 1957, the Dean of Yale took a rather different view: welcoming the new students, he told them how large a pool of applicants they’d had that year, and pointed out that had they rejected every student in the room, they could still have had a great incoming class. Each student, he argued, was responsible for showing why they deserved to be accepted. The modern version has rather a different emphasis.

In recent years, between a third and a half of graduates of elite US colleges with a job head to finance or consulting. In contrast to the popularity of those fields, whole areas have disappeared: clergy, military, teaching, electoral politics, even academia to a lesser extent. Excellent Sheep worries that this stems from the warped perspective promoted by these colleges, that in telling the students endlessly that they are the elite and the special, they rule out whole worlds of possibility by implying they are a waste of a fancy education. Schools, Deresiewicz argues, are complicit in this because they like the fat donations they receive from graduates in consulting or finance, far more than they receive from a happier but poorer graduate who ends up as a minister or teacher.

Where the book suffers is when it turns to broader societal implications. The author’s background is in English, and though that should never be a bar to writing anything, in this case it betrays him a little when he attempts to look at issues of policy, society, and statistics. He also doesn’t really have any insight into structural solutions: his advice to students to go to a second tier school is all very well, but hardly scalable.

The value of such books though is what they make the reader think, rather than just what the author says. Reflecting on my own experience, I’ve largely been spared the lost or aimless feeling Excellent Sheep describes, despite being lucky enough to attend an elite college. My advantage, I think, is no surprise to readers of the blog: that I read widely. Any student seeking to find a sense of self and wisdom through their education needs to get beyond the bubble of their friends and professors, and reading is a great way to do that, to engage in debate with some of the foremost minds of our species, living and dead. Exposure to such great ideas and new perspectives can ground you, and provide a frame of reference very different from your own.

Deresiewicz also suffers from some of the same blind spots he criticizes elite schools for: he makes no effort to find out what students from top state schools do, for example, appearing to forget that schools other than the Ivy Leagues even exist as anything other than an abstraction. Nevertheless, Excellent Sheep’s opening sections are interesting, persuasive, and well-written. For those alone, the book is worth reading, and I recommend it. If the second half falls a bit short, that’s not the end of the world. As a book that makes you consider your own education – or lack thereof – it’s well worth it.

Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher: How Government Decides and Why – Donald J. Savoie

“It is exceedingly difficult for front-line workers and their managers to have a sense of responsibility in their place of work. It is true that their work was once guided by fairly rigid administrative rules, but it is also true that a number of these administrative rules have been done away with. In their stead, the work of front-line managers and workers is subject to many voices, many hands, and many oversight bodies.”

The public service is a classic whipping boy in the press and in the living rooms of the people. It is, the story goes, bloated, corrupt, inept, overstaffed, overpaid, underworked, and takes too many holidays. Statistics seem to support this impression to some extent: between 1995 and 2006, the Canadian public service ended up with 51% more executives, 46% more financial managers, 98% economists, and 40% fewer general service staff, including music teachers. While the private sector was in crisis between 2007 and 2010, the number of public servants paid over $100,000 a year doubled.

Savoie, a respected academic with a long history of work with the public service, proposes an explanation for why. The past few decades have seen, with the best of intentions, a push to use lessons from the private sector in the public service: extensive performance audits, centralizing final authority, making sure that things are cost effective.

These are doomed to failure, says Savoie. Cost-benefit analysis requires a bottom line, and that’s something the public sector, by definition, does not have. These attempts to create a private sector culture have sacrificed public service ideals like frugality and service without gaining commensurate benefits. The result has been steadily decreasing emphasis on front line workers like music teachers, and steadily increasing centralized control powers that have little to contribute to the overall public service mandate, leading to a reputation for bloat, overpay and underwork.

The book can sometimes be a bit heavy into political theory, but the bottom line message is interesting. Savoie is also sometimes a bit overeager to interpret things in a way that supports his theory, when it could as easily go the other way. Still, it takes on an interesting question, and if you flip through the political theory bits, it does so in an interesting way. If this is something you’re interested in, I suspect it’s one of the best books in the field. Well worth the read.

Capital in the 21st – Quotes

Having reviewed Piketty’s Capital earlier this week, I thought I’d also pass along a few choice quotes. If you haven’t read the review yet, though, I’d start there.

On his thesis

“A society structured by the hierarchy of wealth has been replaced by a society whose structure depends almost entirely on the hierarchy of labor and human capital. It is striking, for example, that many recent American TV series feature heroes and heroines laden with degrees and high-level skills, whether to cure serious maladies (House), solve mysterious crimes (Bones), or even to preside over the United States (West Wing).”

“Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.”

“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy (as it did through much of history until the nineteenth century and as is likely to be the case again in the the twenty-first century) then it logically follows that inherited wealth grows faster than output and income.”

On ideology

“I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism, some of which simply ignored the historic failure of Communism and much of which turned its back on the intellectual means necessary to push beyond it.”

“Both the antimarket and the antistate camps are partly correct: new instruments are needed to regain control over a financial capitalism that has run amok, and at the same time the tax and transfer systems that are the heart of the modern social state are in constant need of reform and modernization, because they have achieved a level of complexity that makes them difficult to understand and threatens to undermind their social and economic efficiency.”

Interesting Facts

“There is no historical example of a country at the world technological frontier whose growth in per capita output exceeded 1.5 percent over a lengthy period of time.”

“Billionaires today own roughly 1.5 percent of the world’s total wealth, and sovereign wealth funds own another 1.5 percent.”

“Capital is a better indicator of the contributive capacity of very wealthy individuals than is income.”

Spillover – David Quammen

“Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behaviour are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.”

The elimination of smallpox is unquestionably one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Before it was eradicated, it killed upwards of three million people per year in the 20th century, far more than the world wars or any other cause. Sadly, it also remains one of only two diseases to be eradicated in human history (the other is rinderpest): polio has seen a recent resurgence, partly due to unwillingness to accept vaccines, and we aren’t even close on most other diseases. A dramatic failure on humanity’s part, and one with an end goal that we all agree on: it doesn’t bode well for global warming.

Quammen, however, has some more bad (but interesting!) news. Many diseases are zoonotic: they use animals as reservoir hosts, often causing no symptoms, and are only noticed when they mutate and jump to humans. AIDS, Ebola, bubonic plague, Spanish influenza (and all influenzas), West Nile fever, rabies, anthrax, Lyme disease; all zoonotic, and the list goes on. That means elimination isn’t really an option, unless we’re prepared to resort to xenocide against the species in question, and as humans eliminate natural habitats and spread more widely we make cross-species infection, called spillover, more and more likely. In most countries, AIDS education materials recommend practicing safe sex or not sharing needles: in Cameroon, the signs recommend not eating apes.

What makes the book work is that the existence of reservoir hosts makes the study of the disease like a detective novel: scientists have to search for the reservoir and solve the mystery, though most of them don’t wear deerstalkers. Disease is one of those things it’s easy to forget about when we’re not in the grip of a crisis, but preparation, as with anything, is critical to reducing the impact later on. For that reason alone, I’d say it’s worth reading Spillover: the fact that it has some fun stories and interesting characters in it is icing on the cake. Even better, mind you, is seeing Quammen speak in person about it, as I was lucky enough to do: he’s a good speaker, and summarizes both content and stories well. Either way, a serious issue for humanity, and one the wise should definitely be thinking about.

You can get a copy of Spillover here.