I enjoyed this book immensely for the way it catapults pantheism into a sensible middle way between theism and atheism, with delightful digs against both of the latter. But it does not quite crystallize the expectations laid in its introduction. Maybe that is asking too much, or the wrong thing.
What I wanted after the introduction was a more systematic, and more critical, examination of the way that Western metaphysics “opposes mind to body, human to animal, male to female, the unchanging to the changing, the rational to the irrational, the spiritual to the material, perfection to imperfection, light to darkness, activity to passivity,” and the ways that table of dualities has been coded as “anthropomorphic, unchanging, rational, and masculine” versus “animal-vegetal, changeable, irrational, and feminine.” (Pages 2–3.) Instead most of the book reads like a selective but evocative annotated bibliography strung together by a skilled and witty scholar. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But if we are to enact the ethic prompted by the book, to transcend (or even smash) the pervasively gendered metaphysic that can “most definitely kill us” (page 187, quoting Hortense Spillers), then something more thorough and critical than this slim tome would be helpful. I am left with the sense that this would be possible, and the hope that someone will carry it out.
But, again, perhaps that is more than deserves to be demanded of this book. This might be the brief show more that unleashes a torrent of pantheology, the better to build the bridge we need between the two great problems of our age: the nature of reality, and the source of morality (and the shadowy problem between them the might be even greater, namely whether they are in fact the same problem). I hope so. We are in dire need of some constructive and clarifying transgression these days.
In the meantime, I look forward to reading further from this book’s bibliography, which includes a great number of women whose work had not previously come to my attention. I just wish the ideas here were more digested, more developed, more of the author’s, and less a collection of others’. show less
What I wanted after the introduction was a more systematic, and more critical, examination of the way that Western metaphysics “opposes mind to body, human to animal, male to female, the unchanging to the changing, the rational to the irrational, the spiritual to the material, perfection to imperfection, light to darkness, activity to passivity,” and the ways that table of dualities has been coded as “anthropomorphic, unchanging, rational, and masculine” versus “animal-vegetal, changeable, irrational, and feminine.” (Pages 2–3.) Instead most of the book reads like a selective but evocative annotated bibliography strung together by a skilled and witty scholar. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But if we are to enact the ethic prompted by the book, to transcend (or even smash) the pervasively gendered metaphysic that can “most definitely kill us” (page 187, quoting Hortense Spillers), then something more thorough and critical than this slim tome would be helpful. I am left with the sense that this would be possible, and the hope that someone will carry it out.
But, again, perhaps that is more than deserves to be demanded of this book. This might be the brief show more that unleashes a torrent of pantheology, the better to build the bridge we need between the two great problems of our age: the nature of reality, and the source of morality (and the shadowy problem between them the might be even greater, namely whether they are in fact the same problem). I hope so. We are in dire need of some constructive and clarifying transgression these days.
In the meantime, I look forward to reading further from this book’s bibliography, which includes a great number of women whose work had not previously come to my attention. I just wish the ideas here were more digested, more developed, more of the author’s, and less a collection of others’. show less
This book should have been titled "The Condition of Human Existence." There is nothing here about meaning, or how it might be created. This is just a biologist reminding everyone again that evolution by natural selection is scientifically factual, and creation myths and folktales are not. Here and there, he flits back and forth between insisting that the sciences and the humanities need each other, but then extolling the sciences as superior. Well, okay.
The sciences are undoubtedly superior for describing and classifying the phenomena that we experience, including ourselves. But recognizing the evolutionary bases of the human condition says nothing about the meaning of our existence—it only clears away the authority of mythological accounts that are rooted in supernatural revelation. (And his discussion of those accounts, while appropriately dismissive, is still irritatingly simplistic.) Remaining open is the question of whether, given the condition of the human species as a product of natural selection, anything resembling meaning or purpose is possible, and, if so, how we might discover or create it. Wilson has nothing to say on that question, and fails even to acknowledge that it might be asked.
He does suggest an interesting idea, which is that "individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue" (p. 179), but it's not clear how that ought to affect the question of meaning. Undoubtedly, we humans experience a troubling conflict between our show more individuality and our need for social support, but that is a condition of our existence, not its meaning.
If you are looking for another restatement that, yes, evolution by natural selection really does have more explanatory power than supernaturalist creation myths for establishing the conditions of human existence, then this is a decent little book. But it offers nothing further, particularly if you are excited by the title and the prospect of tackling the problem of meaning. And for those who are not already persuaded of our evolutionary nature, I doubt this book will shift your view; he's preaching to the choir. show less
The sciences are undoubtedly superior for describing and classifying the phenomena that we experience, including ourselves. But recognizing the evolutionary bases of the human condition says nothing about the meaning of our existence—it only clears away the authority of mythological accounts that are rooted in supernatural revelation. (And his discussion of those accounts, while appropriately dismissive, is still irritatingly simplistic.) Remaining open is the question of whether, given the condition of the human species as a product of natural selection, anything resembling meaning or purpose is possible, and, if so, how we might discover or create it. Wilson has nothing to say on that question, and fails even to acknowledge that it might be asked.
He does suggest an interesting idea, which is that "individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue" (p. 179), but it's not clear how that ought to affect the question of meaning. Undoubtedly, we humans experience a troubling conflict between our show more individuality and our need for social support, but that is a condition of our existence, not its meaning.
If you are looking for another restatement that, yes, evolution by natural selection really does have more explanatory power than supernaturalist creation myths for establishing the conditions of human existence, then this is a decent little book. But it offers nothing further, particularly if you are excited by the title and the prospect of tackling the problem of meaning. And for those who are not already persuaded of our evolutionary nature, I doubt this book will shift your view; he's preaching to the choir. show less
This book is worth reading and having around, but wasn’t nearly so good as I hoped. The author, David Kyle Johnson, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy who put in a delightful appearance on the Rationally Speaking podcast to discuss this book; that probably raised my expectations too far.
Things started to go south for me in the discussion of Myth No. 1 (“Jesus is the Reason for the Season”). Johnson begins with a rejoinder that I, too, have used: “the tilt of the earth on its axis" is the "reason for the season.” But then he backs into some prehistorical speculation about “the ancients,” by which he appears to mean people who lived 4,000 years ago. Because these ancients “didn’t know about the tilt of the earth” (fair enough, probably), they “didn’t know what caused the seasons” (also fair, if we mean that ancient knowledge about the cause of the seasons would not be sufficient to modern standards). He continues: “All they knew was that the sun kept getting lower in the sky and the days kept getting shorter. What if it never stopped? What if the sun kept getting lower until it disappeared? What if the daylight dwindled into nothing? What if winter lasted forever? It was a terrifying prospect indeed, and the ancients had no way of knowing this wouldn’t happen.” But that’s a troublesome thing to say, unless you believe that the people living 4,000 years ago were idiots with no memories—despite the fact that “anatomically modern” show more Homo sapiens (or people basically the same as we are, physiologically) had been around for probably almost 200,000 years before. Surely the people living 4,000 years ago, even if they lacked the wealth of data and theory that we enjoy today, were intelligent enough to recognize that the seasons were cyclical, that days did not shorten forever, and winter ultimately ended, over and over. (A more reasonable speculation, I should think, is that if some people were alarmist about their prospects for escaping winter, then there must have been some jaded elders rolling their eyes and reminding people, or saying to themselves, that they’ve seen this happen over and over.) Finally, Johnson slides deep into the speculative abyss: “At some point in time, people were so worried about this that they started performing rituals that they thought would ensure the return of spring. Since spring did subsequently return, they fallaciously concluded (as humans are apt to do) that their rituals worked.” Whoa! Does Johnson have any evidence for when this “point in time” occurred, or whether this is more than a secularist just-so story about the stupidity of these “ancients” and the birth of these unidentified rituals? An endnote number at the end of the sentence raises hopes. But flip to the back of the book and those hopes are dashed: it’s not a citation to any archeological, anthropological, or historical scholarship on topic; it’s just note about how, “[f]or those interested, the name of this fallacy is post hoc ergo propter hoc.” Never mind whether the fallacy was actually committed as described, I guess. For a book about challenging “myths,” here is one that passes without a critical word.
Fortunately, Johnson’s weird speculations about the mental and social lives of these relatively recent “ancients” is not necessary to his (correct) argument that Jesus is not “the reason for the season” (as in, the singular historical origin of the Christmas holiday we know and love today). But that kind of sloppiness leaves a bad taste in my mouth, particularly when it comes from a smart, secular philosophy professor who really ought to know better. (As the saying goes, it’s painful to see an argument you agree with badly made.)
Other chapters are better. The one on Myth No. 3 (“Our Christmas Traditions Are Old-Fashioned”) is pretty good. But I suspect that’s because it’s mostly a summary of Stephen Nissenbaum’s excellent book, The Battle for Christmas. (Read it.)
The chapter on Myth No. 4 (“Christmas Spending is Good for the Economy”) is okay for what it is. But throughout I kept wondering whether I have actually encountered that myth, and whether Johnson’s discussion really gets to the heart of the issue. This economic “myth" has always struck me as not the “real” argument people are making, but a rationalization to cover a much more interesting phenomenon of building and maintaining social ties through gift-giving rituals. Johnson gives the impression in this chapter that if people have given up on a Christianized rationale for Christmastime gift-giving, then they have switched over to an economic it’s-good-for-GDP rationale. But I think he misdiagnoses the situation, and could have written a much stronger chapter by considering the work of anthropologists on gift-giving practices in various cultures, and how our modern Western Christmas fits into that.
The one on Myth No. 5 (“Santa Claus is St. Nicholas”) is also decent. It also happens to be the one I was most exited to read after hearing Johnson on Rationally Speaking. He gave the impression on that podcast of having delved into a wide range of historical sources, and I was looking forward not just to having the story in written form, but also a scholarly apparatus with some good citations. But I was disappointed to find that he is mostly just rehashing secondary sources that may or may not be reliable (I don’t know—I guess I have to go find those books now, too). There is nothing wrong with that; plenty of books on that model are worth reading; but the author needs to have some credibility. And after his speculations about “the ancients” and their beliefs, Johnson’s credibility for historical analysis is significantly tarnished for me.
And there is another problem of credibility, at least for me. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, so I expect more from him than I would from others. But this book lets me down. Consider this comparison. The last paragraph of the introduction begins with this odd personification: “Right now, Christmas owns us. We do what it expects, when it expects it.” Then, in the discussion of Myth No. 6 (“The Santa Clause Lie is Harmless”), there is an objection (“It’s okay for kids to literally believe that Santa exists…because he does!”) to which Johnson responds with some brief remarks on—really, a misreading of—Eric Kaplan’s Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation. He writes, in part: “You should agree with [Kaplan’s] claim that Santa exists only if, by ‘Santa exists,’ you mean what he (but seemingly no one else) means by that phrase: ‘there is a gentle face of the limitless.’ And that’s being generous; that’s assuming that phrase actually means anything to begin with. In my opinion, a 43-year-old adult using his own variety of mystic psuedoscience to defend Santa’s existence only helps prove my point that literal belief in Santa promotes credulity.”
There are a couple problems here. First, Johnson plays bait-and-switch with Kaplan, holding him up as a “champion” of belief in a literal Santa Claus, then ridiculing a single phrase from what Kaplan actually wrote, even though that phrase is clearly not about belief in a literal Santa Claus. If “exists” can have the different meanings that Johnson implicates (and why not?), then uncritically applying a word like “literal” to a belief in whether something “exists" is just sloppy. There is a lot more analysis of “literal” and “exist” that Johnson just rushes past without consideration—he just lobs a couple of insults and scurries off to the next topic. Second, and more importantly for evaluating this book, the fact that Johnson is able to personify Christmas in his own introduction, but—for reasons no more fully articulated than the epithet “pseudoscience” (which, when applied to Kaplan’s book, or philosophy in general, is probably a category error)—Johnson cannot abide personification of “the limitless” in a later chapter, betrays a significant blind spot in his own thinking. Sure, there are significant differences between “Christmas” and “the limitless,” most importantly that the word “Christmas,” whatever it might mean, generally refers to discrete phenomena, while “the limitless” does not. But if we are poking around at the qualities of concepts, there is a much more interesting discussion to be had.
To be fair, Johnson does provide a link in the endnotes to his review of Kaplan’s book. His discussion there is a little better, but still mostly just derisive without engaging Kaplan’s argument (which really just uses “Santa Claus” as an emblem to discuss much more interesting mental phenomena). More importantly, however, nowhere in that review does Johnson suggest that he understands Kaplan to be a champion of a belief in a literal Santa Claus. So why does he present Kaplan that way in The Myths that Stole Christmas? Like the speculations about “the ancients,” his argument would have done just fine without this part.
I am happy to see a well-designed book that critiques some of the prevailing myths about Christmas. The book is worth reading and thinking about, and there are endnotes with plenty more to explore. But there are significant defects, so keep your eyes open. show less
Things started to go south for me in the discussion of Myth No. 1 (“Jesus is the Reason for the Season”). Johnson begins with a rejoinder that I, too, have used: “the tilt of the earth on its axis" is the "reason for the season.” But then he backs into some prehistorical speculation about “the ancients,” by which he appears to mean people who lived 4,000 years ago. Because these ancients “didn’t know about the tilt of the earth” (fair enough, probably), they “didn’t know what caused the seasons” (also fair, if we mean that ancient knowledge about the cause of the seasons would not be sufficient to modern standards). He continues: “All they knew was that the sun kept getting lower in the sky and the days kept getting shorter. What if it never stopped? What if the sun kept getting lower until it disappeared? What if the daylight dwindled into nothing? What if winter lasted forever? It was a terrifying prospect indeed, and the ancients had no way of knowing this wouldn’t happen.” But that’s a troublesome thing to say, unless you believe that the people living 4,000 years ago were idiots with no memories—despite the fact that “anatomically modern” show more Homo sapiens (or people basically the same as we are, physiologically) had been around for probably almost 200,000 years before. Surely the people living 4,000 years ago, even if they lacked the wealth of data and theory that we enjoy today, were intelligent enough to recognize that the seasons were cyclical, that days did not shorten forever, and winter ultimately ended, over and over. (A more reasonable speculation, I should think, is that if some people were alarmist about their prospects for escaping winter, then there must have been some jaded elders rolling their eyes and reminding people, or saying to themselves, that they’ve seen this happen over and over.) Finally, Johnson slides deep into the speculative abyss: “At some point in time, people were so worried about this that they started performing rituals that they thought would ensure the return of spring. Since spring did subsequently return, they fallaciously concluded (as humans are apt to do) that their rituals worked.” Whoa! Does Johnson have any evidence for when this “point in time” occurred, or whether this is more than a secularist just-so story about the stupidity of these “ancients” and the birth of these unidentified rituals? An endnote number at the end of the sentence raises hopes. But flip to the back of the book and those hopes are dashed: it’s not a citation to any archeological, anthropological, or historical scholarship on topic; it’s just note about how, “[f]or those interested, the name of this fallacy is post hoc ergo propter hoc.” Never mind whether the fallacy was actually committed as described, I guess. For a book about challenging “myths,” here is one that passes without a critical word.
Fortunately, Johnson’s weird speculations about the mental and social lives of these relatively recent “ancients” is not necessary to his (correct) argument that Jesus is not “the reason for the season” (as in, the singular historical origin of the Christmas holiday we know and love today). But that kind of sloppiness leaves a bad taste in my mouth, particularly when it comes from a smart, secular philosophy professor who really ought to know better. (As the saying goes, it’s painful to see an argument you agree with badly made.)
Other chapters are better. The one on Myth No. 3 (“Our Christmas Traditions Are Old-Fashioned”) is pretty good. But I suspect that’s because it’s mostly a summary of Stephen Nissenbaum’s excellent book, The Battle for Christmas. (Read it.)
The chapter on Myth No. 4 (“Christmas Spending is Good for the Economy”) is okay for what it is. But throughout I kept wondering whether I have actually encountered that myth, and whether Johnson’s discussion really gets to the heart of the issue. This economic “myth" has always struck me as not the “real” argument people are making, but a rationalization to cover a much more interesting phenomenon of building and maintaining social ties through gift-giving rituals. Johnson gives the impression in this chapter that if people have given up on a Christianized rationale for Christmastime gift-giving, then they have switched over to an economic it’s-good-for-GDP rationale. But I think he misdiagnoses the situation, and could have written a much stronger chapter by considering the work of anthropologists on gift-giving practices in various cultures, and how our modern Western Christmas fits into that.
The one on Myth No. 5 (“Santa Claus is St. Nicholas”) is also decent. It also happens to be the one I was most exited to read after hearing Johnson on Rationally Speaking. He gave the impression on that podcast of having delved into a wide range of historical sources, and I was looking forward not just to having the story in written form, but also a scholarly apparatus with some good citations. But I was disappointed to find that he is mostly just rehashing secondary sources that may or may not be reliable (I don’t know—I guess I have to go find those books now, too). There is nothing wrong with that; plenty of books on that model are worth reading; but the author needs to have some credibility. And after his speculations about “the ancients” and their beliefs, Johnson’s credibility for historical analysis is significantly tarnished for me.
And there is another problem of credibility, at least for me. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, so I expect more from him than I would from others. But this book lets me down. Consider this comparison. The last paragraph of the introduction begins with this odd personification: “Right now, Christmas owns us. We do what it expects, when it expects it.” Then, in the discussion of Myth No. 6 (“The Santa Clause Lie is Harmless”), there is an objection (“It’s okay for kids to literally believe that Santa exists…because he does!”) to which Johnson responds with some brief remarks on—really, a misreading of—Eric Kaplan’s Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation. He writes, in part: “You should agree with [Kaplan’s] claim that Santa exists only if, by ‘Santa exists,’ you mean what he (but seemingly no one else) means by that phrase: ‘there is a gentle face of the limitless.’ And that’s being generous; that’s assuming that phrase actually means anything to begin with. In my opinion, a 43-year-old adult using his own variety of mystic psuedoscience to defend Santa’s existence only helps prove my point that literal belief in Santa promotes credulity.”
There are a couple problems here. First, Johnson plays bait-and-switch with Kaplan, holding him up as a “champion” of belief in a literal Santa Claus, then ridiculing a single phrase from what Kaplan actually wrote, even though that phrase is clearly not about belief in a literal Santa Claus. If “exists” can have the different meanings that Johnson implicates (and why not?), then uncritically applying a word like “literal” to a belief in whether something “exists" is just sloppy. There is a lot more analysis of “literal” and “exist” that Johnson just rushes past without consideration—he just lobs a couple of insults and scurries off to the next topic. Second, and more importantly for evaluating this book, the fact that Johnson is able to personify Christmas in his own introduction, but—for reasons no more fully articulated than the epithet “pseudoscience” (which, when applied to Kaplan’s book, or philosophy in general, is probably a category error)—Johnson cannot abide personification of “the limitless” in a later chapter, betrays a significant blind spot in his own thinking. Sure, there are significant differences between “Christmas” and “the limitless,” most importantly that the word “Christmas,” whatever it might mean, generally refers to discrete phenomena, while “the limitless” does not. But if we are poking around at the qualities of concepts, there is a much more interesting discussion to be had.
To be fair, Johnson does provide a link in the endnotes to his review of Kaplan’s book. His discussion there is a little better, but still mostly just derisive without engaging Kaplan’s argument (which really just uses “Santa Claus” as an emblem to discuss much more interesting mental phenomena). More importantly, however, nowhere in that review does Johnson suggest that he understands Kaplan to be a champion of a belief in a literal Santa Claus. So why does he present Kaplan that way in The Myths that Stole Christmas? Like the speculations about “the ancients,” his argument would have done just fine without this part.
I am happy to see a well-designed book that critiques some of the prevailing myths about Christmas. The book is worth reading and thinking about, and there are endnotes with plenty more to explore. But there are significant defects, so keep your eyes open. show less
Not optimism, pessimism, or fatalism, but the power of assertion ultimately animates Cloud Atlas: we cannot have the world we wish for unless we assert it and call it into being. First the narrative migrates through the centuries on six connected, but unfinished stories: a murderous sea-passage; the travails of an adolescent artist; a daring nuclear intrigue; the absurd crumbling of a mostly wasted life; a sick and deluded future; and finally a renaissance of brutality, with shades of redemption. Then the narrative returns the way it came. As it slips backward in time to complete each of the stories, bare survival passes through stoic martyrdom, trite recovery, uneasy repose, the release of death, and, finally, the equipoise of rebirth and a bold new assertion.
Because violence, malice, greed, and inhumanity permeate all six stories despite the efforts of the protagonists in every one, and despite the hints that each might be making a difference for the next, one could easily read Cloud Atlas as an indictment of humanity as a race indelibly marked with evil. But one would have to ignore the structure of the narrative; to achieve that pessimistic effect, each of the six stories might just be told in full, one right after the other. They are not, however, and the bold assertion in the final pages suggests a different effect, that the futures we’ve seen are not what will be, but what might be. And the hints repeated throughout the book, that each of the six stories is show more affected with half-truths and elaborations, reinforce that impression: not only are the narrators unreliable, but also the redactor. Together, the six stories of Cloud Atlas form not the account of a unitary fictional past and future, like a quasi-historical fantasy on the transmigration of souls, but an agglomeration of themes consciously spread across different fictions to illustrate an idea: that we live in worlds shaped by the stories that others have told, and the assertions that others have made, but retain the underlying freedom, as did those others, to tell our own stories, make our own assertions, and shape our own world.
This book is a complex web of styles, forms, and themes. The different styles of writing, from past to future, suggest the changing uses of words, and the ways in which our understanding of the world is limited by the categories of our language, prompting reflection on the forgotten histories embedded in the words we use every day. The cycle of forms through which the narrative passes—diary, letters, thriller, memoir, interview, and campfire yarn—marks out different ways of building a world out of stories. And the relation between author and reader is shifted along its own chiastic pattern, creating parallels of its own: diary and memory; letters and interview; thriller and memoir. Or: constitution of self, communication to other, and establishment of genre. Are these modes of storytelling also progressively more restrictive? Should we be surprised that human history, as depicted in the contents of the stories, appears to reach a troublesome tipping point in the generic stories? Freedom and slavery, capture and captivity, are major themes in each of the six stories, as is the idea that captors are, in their way, slaves to the duality, which perpetuates itself, and devours itself, by reification. In this way form and style align with theme in Cloud Atlas, so that the people most like us, closest to our time, and the most decadent, are rendered in the stories that most closely adhere to standard fictional styles. We constitute ourselves; we are the fictions. And if Cloud Atlas seems also to be literary criticism disguised as a novel, there is the next layer. If we create our own world by assertion, and construct ourselves into fictions, then are we not free to escape the confines of genre and convention?
There are characters, too, piles of them in each of the six stories. Even the ones that are drawn mostly on the periphery, like poor, brilliant, straight-shooting Rufus Sixsmith, the deliciously execrable Henry Goose, the coarse thug Nurse Noakes, and the driven but enigmatic Hae-Joo Im are vivid and memorable. But here is the puzzle on main display: Are Adam Ewing, Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi-451, and Meronym all reincarnations of the same person? Repeated suggestions to that effect are undercut by several expressions of skepticism, and the fact that all six of them are deeply unique, having not much in common except a birthmark and experiences with oppression, captivity, slavery, or some form of entrapment. Frobisher cannot get over himself while Cavendish deprecates himself; Rey cannot imagine herself as anyone but the hero, while Meronym only reluctantly comes to that role; Sonmi is born into slavery while Ewing is born into privilege. And there are plenty more differences. This is not a metaphysical reincarnation of souls, but a metaphorical reinforcement of the common humanity of disparate individuals.
Cloud Atlas is a strange book, but brilliantly evocative on a singular theme in many variations: we are all storytellers, and that gives us the capacity to be free. show less
Because violence, malice, greed, and inhumanity permeate all six stories despite the efforts of the protagonists in every one, and despite the hints that each might be making a difference for the next, one could easily read Cloud Atlas as an indictment of humanity as a race indelibly marked with evil. But one would have to ignore the structure of the narrative; to achieve that pessimistic effect, each of the six stories might just be told in full, one right after the other. They are not, however, and the bold assertion in the final pages suggests a different effect, that the futures we’ve seen are not what will be, but what might be. And the hints repeated throughout the book, that each of the six stories is show more affected with half-truths and elaborations, reinforce that impression: not only are the narrators unreliable, but also the redactor. Together, the six stories of Cloud Atlas form not the account of a unitary fictional past and future, like a quasi-historical fantasy on the transmigration of souls, but an agglomeration of themes consciously spread across different fictions to illustrate an idea: that we live in worlds shaped by the stories that others have told, and the assertions that others have made, but retain the underlying freedom, as did those others, to tell our own stories, make our own assertions, and shape our own world.
This book is a complex web of styles, forms, and themes. The different styles of writing, from past to future, suggest the changing uses of words, and the ways in which our understanding of the world is limited by the categories of our language, prompting reflection on the forgotten histories embedded in the words we use every day. The cycle of forms through which the narrative passes—diary, letters, thriller, memoir, interview, and campfire yarn—marks out different ways of building a world out of stories. And the relation between author and reader is shifted along its own chiastic pattern, creating parallels of its own: diary and memory; letters and interview; thriller and memoir. Or: constitution of self, communication to other, and establishment of genre. Are these modes of storytelling also progressively more restrictive? Should we be surprised that human history, as depicted in the contents of the stories, appears to reach a troublesome tipping point in the generic stories? Freedom and slavery, capture and captivity, are major themes in each of the six stories, as is the idea that captors are, in their way, slaves to the duality, which perpetuates itself, and devours itself, by reification. In this way form and style align with theme in Cloud Atlas, so that the people most like us, closest to our time, and the most decadent, are rendered in the stories that most closely adhere to standard fictional styles. We constitute ourselves; we are the fictions. And if Cloud Atlas seems also to be literary criticism disguised as a novel, there is the next layer. If we create our own world by assertion, and construct ourselves into fictions, then are we not free to escape the confines of genre and convention?
There are characters, too, piles of them in each of the six stories. Even the ones that are drawn mostly on the periphery, like poor, brilliant, straight-shooting Rufus Sixsmith, the deliciously execrable Henry Goose, the coarse thug Nurse Noakes, and the driven but enigmatic Hae-Joo Im are vivid and memorable. But here is the puzzle on main display: Are Adam Ewing, Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi-451, and Meronym all reincarnations of the same person? Repeated suggestions to that effect are undercut by several expressions of skepticism, and the fact that all six of them are deeply unique, having not much in common except a birthmark and experiences with oppression, captivity, slavery, or some form of entrapment. Frobisher cannot get over himself while Cavendish deprecates himself; Rey cannot imagine herself as anyone but the hero, while Meronym only reluctantly comes to that role; Sonmi is born into slavery while Ewing is born into privilege. And there are plenty more differences. This is not a metaphysical reincarnation of souls, but a metaphorical reinforcement of the common humanity of disparate individuals.
Cloud Atlas is a strange book, but brilliantly evocative on a singular theme in many variations: we are all storytellers, and that gives us the capacity to be free. show less
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia is Gregory Benford's four-part meditation on lengthy periods that are essentially unimaginable for humans. But "meditation" may not be the right word. Benford has encountered deep time in his professional life as a scientist; each of the four parts of his book describes one of those encounters. The ideas in the book should probably induce a meditative consideration of our place in the universe, but Benford writes more journalistically than analytically, searchingly, or meditatively.
The first part is a relatively open-ended exploration of how to communicate danger to people in the far future who are unfortunate enough to find the places where we have buried radioactive materials. Benford writes about his time as one of several experts, appointed by the government, to work on this problem. It sounds like they enjoyed the opportunity to play with farfetched ideas. But since none of them had been implemented when Benford wrote his book (and to my knowledge remain unused), the main effect of this part is to tickle the mind of the reader with a perspective shift. "Deep time" not only starts to mean something, but inspires by suggesting, if only by implication, that humanity is on the cusp of an epic adventure across generations.
In part two, Benford heads for outer space. Once again, he finds himself on a panel of experts, this time trying to communicate not just across deep time, but with unknown extraterrestrials—through show more a disc that was intended to fly on the Cassini spacecraft. Like the first part, the subject here is evocative. There are problems at both ends of this communication: what should we say? and who are we saying it to, anyway? They're good questions, which deserve a book of their own. Unfortunately, the story bogs down in politics and begins to read like little more than a revenge against Carolyn Porco, whose antics (according to Benford) made all their efforts for naught.
Part three stays in deep time, but only marginally, and leaves behind the problem of communication. Worse, Benford appears to be continuing the sour-grapes theme that ruined part two. Now he is reviving a proposal he wrote in 1992, for the cryogenic preservation of life in the face of decreasing biodiversity. He twice observes that two major journals rejected his paper and admits that his views are unpopular and idiosyncratic. But that makes a bad impression in this book. It feels as though, needing more material on the "deep time" issue, he is just padding the book with a popularization of his old proposal. When he suggests that there is no reason to worry about actually retrieving information from the cryogenic storage system he proposes, since humans of the future will likely have better technology than we have, one is compelled to question the whole enterprise. If human development and progress will continue to hum along invariably, providing fantastic new technological tools for studying life, even as biodiversity plummets, then cryogenic storage of lifeforms, just for the sake of biodiversity itself, seems more than a little pointless. Using cryogenic storage as a method for "communication" across "deep time" suggests a societal discontinuity, caused in part by the ecological crisis of losing biodiversity; but if the method only works by assuming not just continuity, but technological progress, something does not add up.
The final part of the book is an improvement over the middle parts. Here Benford addresses climate change and suggests, though without using the word (since it probably hadn't been invented yet), that we have entered an anthropocene age. Our activities here will change the earth for a long, long time—maybe forever. Here the "communication" theme is only half-revived. Benford suggests that our most obvious "communication" to the future will be these permanent, or quasi-permanent changes, which are mostly inadvertent. He gets into geoengineering a little, which might suggest "communication" across "deep time," but not really; if we only use geoengineering to preserve the climate that we like, it seems unlikely that the "message" in the deep future will mean much. Moreover, if knowledge about the past is based on examining artifacts of change in the environment, it seems disingenuous to say that knowledge was the result of "communication," especially when the environmental artifacts are the result of our dunderheaded inadvertence. Even so, the chapter includes some interesting ideas about mitigating carbon emissions, few of which seem likely to be used, since human political systems have a hard time addressing anything but human conflicts.
Deep Time is not a bad book, but it could have been much better, mostly by leaving out the second half, removing the muckraking from part two, and greatly expanding the ideas explored in the first half. But since those other parts are there, one might improve the experience offered by this book by reading it in conjunction with Nicholas Basbanes' A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Basbanes focuses on the problem of communication over long time periods, while Weisman gets into the ways that humans have changed the earth. show less
The first part is a relatively open-ended exploration of how to communicate danger to people in the far future who are unfortunate enough to find the places where we have buried radioactive materials. Benford writes about his time as one of several experts, appointed by the government, to work on this problem. It sounds like they enjoyed the opportunity to play with farfetched ideas. But since none of them had been implemented when Benford wrote his book (and to my knowledge remain unused), the main effect of this part is to tickle the mind of the reader with a perspective shift. "Deep time" not only starts to mean something, but inspires by suggesting, if only by implication, that humanity is on the cusp of an epic adventure across generations.
In part two, Benford heads for outer space. Once again, he finds himself on a panel of experts, this time trying to communicate not just across deep time, but with unknown extraterrestrials—through show more a disc that was intended to fly on the Cassini spacecraft. Like the first part, the subject here is evocative. There are problems at both ends of this communication: what should we say? and who are we saying it to, anyway? They're good questions, which deserve a book of their own. Unfortunately, the story bogs down in politics and begins to read like little more than a revenge against Carolyn Porco, whose antics (according to Benford) made all their efforts for naught.
Part three stays in deep time, but only marginally, and leaves behind the problem of communication. Worse, Benford appears to be continuing the sour-grapes theme that ruined part two. Now he is reviving a proposal he wrote in 1992, for the cryogenic preservation of life in the face of decreasing biodiversity. He twice observes that two major journals rejected his paper and admits that his views are unpopular and idiosyncratic. But that makes a bad impression in this book. It feels as though, needing more material on the "deep time" issue, he is just padding the book with a popularization of his old proposal. When he suggests that there is no reason to worry about actually retrieving information from the cryogenic storage system he proposes, since humans of the future will likely have better technology than we have, one is compelled to question the whole enterprise. If human development and progress will continue to hum along invariably, providing fantastic new technological tools for studying life, even as biodiversity plummets, then cryogenic storage of lifeforms, just for the sake of biodiversity itself, seems more than a little pointless. Using cryogenic storage as a method for "communication" across "deep time" suggests a societal discontinuity, caused in part by the ecological crisis of losing biodiversity; but if the method only works by assuming not just continuity, but technological progress, something does not add up.
The final part of the book is an improvement over the middle parts. Here Benford addresses climate change and suggests, though without using the word (since it probably hadn't been invented yet), that we have entered an anthropocene age. Our activities here will change the earth for a long, long time—maybe forever. Here the "communication" theme is only half-revived. Benford suggests that our most obvious "communication" to the future will be these permanent, or quasi-permanent changes, which are mostly inadvertent. He gets into geoengineering a little, which might suggest "communication" across "deep time," but not really; if we only use geoengineering to preserve the climate that we like, it seems unlikely that the "message" in the deep future will mean much. Moreover, if knowledge about the past is based on examining artifacts of change in the environment, it seems disingenuous to say that knowledge was the result of "communication," especially when the environmental artifacts are the result of our dunderheaded inadvertence. Even so, the chapter includes some interesting ideas about mitigating carbon emissions, few of which seem likely to be used, since human political systems have a hard time addressing anything but human conflicts.
Deep Time is not a bad book, but it could have been much better, mostly by leaving out the second half, removing the muckraking from part two, and greatly expanding the ideas explored in the first half. But since those other parts are there, one might improve the experience offered by this book by reading it in conjunction with Nicholas Basbanes' A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Basbanes focuses on the problem of communication over long time periods, while Weisman gets into the ways that humans have changed the earth. show less
The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages:Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts by Edward Grant
In The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, Edward Grant argues that the Scientific Revolution ignited in Western Europe during the 17th century had historical roots in the late Middle Ages. Which seems like a truism, if you pay attention to how the world works; great ideas rarely, if ever, arise spontaneously, without precedent.
But, as Grant observes, when Galileo wrote his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems to explain how his new cosmology differed from the older view, his literary approach—using the character of Simplicio to caricature Aristotelianism (which Grant carefully distinguishes from Aristotle himself)—left a lasting impression on Western views of everything that happened during the thousand years before the 16th century. So there is room for revision in our understanding of how the process played out.
Since the late 19th century, medievalists have done much to rehabilitate that vast millennium. For example, they have conceptualized the sensibly-named "Early Middle Ages," "High Middle Ages," and "Late Middle Ages." (Precise delineations of historical periods, like political geography, are debatable, of course, but you would remain within the mainstream if you imagined the Early Middle Ages as comprising the 4th through the 10th centuries, the High Middle Ages as the 11th through the 14th, and the late middle ages as the 15th and 16th.) Plenty happened in Western Europe during those periods, but critical to Grant's analysis are three show more developments during the High and Late Middle ages (starting in the late 13th century): the emergence of universities as independent corporate bodies; the recovery of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, in Latin translations from the Arabic; and the rise of theologian who were also natural philosophers.
Here is a (probably too simplified) summary of Grant's thesis. The universities institutionalized the promotion and protection of learning (or at least intellectual gymnastics) for its own sake. Aristotle and his Arabic commentators gave the faculties of those universities much to chew on. And the Christian theologians who embraced Aristotelian natural philosophy paved the way (as I read Grant) for just enough support from the Church that new ideas were allowed to simmer until finally boiling over into the Scientific Revolution, but not so much that the Church followed boldly when scientific cosmology began to suggest a diminished role for God in the workings of the world.
Grant generally avoids that last point, about how the Church responded to the Scientific Revolution, so my summary may run a little wild there. The book is not an argument for why we have a conflict between science and religion; it is an argument that the Scientific Revolution had historical precedents in the deeply religious Middle Ages. But Grant is also not an apologist. He admits that something different happened in the 17th century—the Scientific Revolution was unique to Western Europe, despite potential precedents in other times and places around the world. But he is careful to note that we can no more blame the church for obstructing the development of science in the late Middle Ages than we can say that the "extraordinary process" by which modern science arose "was fast or slow." (Page 171.) On whether the Scientific Revolution marks a "continuous or discontinuous" movement in history, Grant provides a miniature bibliographic essay that reaches no conclusion. (Pages 224–225.)
Given the strong opposition expressed by many religious people against much of the scientific enterprise, it would be nonsensical to suggest (as some have) that the conflict between science and religion is illusory. Those arguments are essentially just efforts at creative redefinition (usually to insist that "true" religion is not inconsistent with science, which raises interesting questions about the many people, past and present, who have identified themselves as religious, or affiliated with religious institutions, and drawn upon the notions and rhetoric of those institutions in their opposition to various scientific ideas and practices). And that is not to say that creative redefinition, in the form of new interpretations or revisionist history, is never an admirable or useful pursuit. Probably recognizing this minefield as territory whose conquest is not required by his thesis, Grant avoids it well. If you are looking for a better understanding of the conflict between science and religion, you should include this book in your researches; but you will be disappointed if you hope for a robust explanation of that particular phenomenon.
Foundations of Modern Science begins in earnest in the 13th century, which leaves a stretch of several hundred years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire when other cultures did produce greater intellectual achievements than the people of Western Europe, notably Islam. The story of modern science as the gift of rediscovered Greece is incomplete. In the final pages of the book, Grant observes that "the modern science that emerged in the seventeenth century in Western Europe was the legacy of a scientific tradition that began in Ancient Greek and Hellenistic civilization, was further nurtured and advanced in the far-flung civilization of Islam, and was brought to fruition in the civilization of Western Europe, beginning in the late twelfth century." (Pages 205–206.) He continues, pointedly: "Latin scholars in the twelfth century recognized that all civilizations were not equal. They were painfully aware that with respect to science and natural philosophy their civilization was manifestly inferior to that of Islam." (Page 206.) So they learned. And they institutionalized science in a way that Islam never did, or perhaps ever could. Decide for yourself, I suppose, how moral value should be apportioned throughout the process.
Grant argues compellingly not just that something unique happened in Western Europe, but that spectacular developments in the 17th century were dependent on what happened during the previous 400 years. And the pivotal factors were universities, the recovery of Aristotle, and the work of theologians who were also natural philosophers. One might say that the West, awakened from its intellectual doldrums in the late 13th century, took up Aristotle, spent the next four centuries chewing him up, only to spit him out, and, in the process, find a vastly superior method for developing knowledge of the world.
Foundations of Modern Science, though not especially lengthy, is not a quick read. Proceed slowly and carefully in the first seven chapters, which are dense, and organized to guide you through a momentous shift in how the people of Western Europe conceived their world. If the narrative seems to bog down in details about Aristotelian cosmology during the middle chapters, resist the temptation to skip ahead. The synthesis in the final chapter comes to great effect if you have digested the earlier chapters thoroughly. show less
But, as Grant observes, when Galileo wrote his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems to explain how his new cosmology differed from the older view, his literary approach—using the character of Simplicio to caricature Aristotelianism (which Grant carefully distinguishes from Aristotle himself)—left a lasting impression on Western views of everything that happened during the thousand years before the 16th century. So there is room for revision in our understanding of how the process played out.
Since the late 19th century, medievalists have done much to rehabilitate that vast millennium. For example, they have conceptualized the sensibly-named "Early Middle Ages," "High Middle Ages," and "Late Middle Ages." (Precise delineations of historical periods, like political geography, are debatable, of course, but you would remain within the mainstream if you imagined the Early Middle Ages as comprising the 4th through the 10th centuries, the High Middle Ages as the 11th through the 14th, and the late middle ages as the 15th and 16th.) Plenty happened in Western Europe during those periods, but critical to Grant's analysis are three show more developments during the High and Late Middle ages (starting in the late 13th century): the emergence of universities as independent corporate bodies; the recovery of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, in Latin translations from the Arabic; and the rise of theologian who were also natural philosophers.
Here is a (probably too simplified) summary of Grant's thesis. The universities institutionalized the promotion and protection of learning (or at least intellectual gymnastics) for its own sake. Aristotle and his Arabic commentators gave the faculties of those universities much to chew on. And the Christian theologians who embraced Aristotelian natural philosophy paved the way (as I read Grant) for just enough support from the Church that new ideas were allowed to simmer until finally boiling over into the Scientific Revolution, but not so much that the Church followed boldly when scientific cosmology began to suggest a diminished role for God in the workings of the world.
Grant generally avoids that last point, about how the Church responded to the Scientific Revolution, so my summary may run a little wild there. The book is not an argument for why we have a conflict between science and religion; it is an argument that the Scientific Revolution had historical precedents in the deeply religious Middle Ages. But Grant is also not an apologist. He admits that something different happened in the 17th century—the Scientific Revolution was unique to Western Europe, despite potential precedents in other times and places around the world. But he is careful to note that we can no more blame the church for obstructing the development of science in the late Middle Ages than we can say that the "extraordinary process" by which modern science arose "was fast or slow." (Page 171.) On whether the Scientific Revolution marks a "continuous or discontinuous" movement in history, Grant provides a miniature bibliographic essay that reaches no conclusion. (Pages 224–225.)
Given the strong opposition expressed by many religious people against much of the scientific enterprise, it would be nonsensical to suggest (as some have) that the conflict between science and religion is illusory. Those arguments are essentially just efforts at creative redefinition (usually to insist that "true" religion is not inconsistent with science, which raises interesting questions about the many people, past and present, who have identified themselves as religious, or affiliated with religious institutions, and drawn upon the notions and rhetoric of those institutions in their opposition to various scientific ideas and practices). And that is not to say that creative redefinition, in the form of new interpretations or revisionist history, is never an admirable or useful pursuit. Probably recognizing this minefield as territory whose conquest is not required by his thesis, Grant avoids it well. If you are looking for a better understanding of the conflict between science and religion, you should include this book in your researches; but you will be disappointed if you hope for a robust explanation of that particular phenomenon.
Foundations of Modern Science begins in earnest in the 13th century, which leaves a stretch of several hundred years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire when other cultures did produce greater intellectual achievements than the people of Western Europe, notably Islam. The story of modern science as the gift of rediscovered Greece is incomplete. In the final pages of the book, Grant observes that "the modern science that emerged in the seventeenth century in Western Europe was the legacy of a scientific tradition that began in Ancient Greek and Hellenistic civilization, was further nurtured and advanced in the far-flung civilization of Islam, and was brought to fruition in the civilization of Western Europe, beginning in the late twelfth century." (Pages 205–206.) He continues, pointedly: "Latin scholars in the twelfth century recognized that all civilizations were not equal. They were painfully aware that with respect to science and natural philosophy their civilization was manifestly inferior to that of Islam." (Page 206.) So they learned. And they institutionalized science in a way that Islam never did, or perhaps ever could. Decide for yourself, I suppose, how moral value should be apportioned throughout the process.
Grant argues compellingly not just that something unique happened in Western Europe, but that spectacular developments in the 17th century were dependent on what happened during the previous 400 years. And the pivotal factors were universities, the recovery of Aristotle, and the work of theologians who were also natural philosophers. One might say that the West, awakened from its intellectual doldrums in the late 13th century, took up Aristotle, spent the next four centuries chewing him up, only to spit him out, and, in the process, find a vastly superior method for developing knowledge of the world.
Foundations of Modern Science, though not especially lengthy, is not a quick read. Proceed slowly and carefully in the first seven chapters, which are dense, and organized to guide you through a momentous shift in how the people of Western Europe conceived their world. If the narrative seems to bog down in details about Aristotelian cosmology during the middle chapters, resist the temptation to skip ahead. The synthesis in the final chapter comes to great effect if you have digested the earlier chapters thoroughly. show less
The Closing of the Western Mind is a long and detailed argument, which might be easier to follow if one began with the Epilogue. But Charles Freeman begins instead with a late 15th century fresco called "The Triumph of Faith," by Filippino Lippi, which depicts Thomas Aquinas, triumphant over heretics and philosophy alike. The reference is somewhat ironic; Freeman returns to Aquinas in his final chapter, to observe his rehabilitation of Greek reason, through the integration of Aristotle into Christian theology, which was so successful "that he unwittingly laid the foundations of the scientific revolution that was to transform western thought." (Page 328.) And in his Epilogue, Freeman makes it clear that wants to explain why the legacy of Greek rational thought needed rehabilitation in the first place, but without making the "simplistic" argument that Christians just suppressed it. (Page 339.)
The journey to the closing of the Western mind proceeded by innumerable steps over several centuries, through processes more than just theological or intellectual. Political forces were at work, too, and Freeman argues that "[t]he important question to answer is why Christianity was different from other spiritual movements in the ancient world in insisting that Christians throughout the empire should adhere to a common authority." (Page 336.) He argues that the demand for orthodoxy was prompted by a need for social stability in the midst of the disintegrating Roman Empire, but was also show more carried along, to a lesser extent, by the problem of group identification, which was difficult in a cosmopolitan new religion that was open to all, without regard to traditional social markers like race or ethnicity.
During the first five centuries of Christianity, when the Greek ways of rational inquiry held greater sway, the continuous eruption of doctrinal disputes threatened the unity of the movement. Emperors, needing the assistance of the bishops to maintain order, called the famous councils—at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon—to quell the riotous arguments and establish authoritative doctrines to which bishops would adhere in order to receive patronage. Ultimately, under Pope Gregory ("the Great"), in the sixth century, the doctrinal identity of the western church was consolidated and history was rewritten, to expunge "the political dimension to the making of Christian doctrine," as Freeman puts it. (Page 339.) Rather than recognized as evolving in a political, theological, philosophical, and social pressure-cooker, those consolidated Christian doctrines were posited as having existed for all time, producing the oddity that even the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—are said to have known the Trinity. (See page 313.) This rewritten history persists today, especially within the Catholic church, where the ancient "heresies" are understood not as simply on the losing side of history, but as having espoused obvious theological falsehoods, which were rooted out by people who were appointed by God to stamp out heresy, not by people who became authorities simply by virtue of being the political and historical victors. (And there the adage that history is written by the victors is fully true.)
So Freeman has dug into the recent scholarship to write a history of the formation of Christianity that has the refreshing virtue of reading the source material far more evenhandedly than church-aligned historians do. The historical players in this book do not come across like their craven and bastardized descendants in modern fundamentalism, who make a conscious effort to suppress any ideas that conflict with their beliefs simply because of the conflict. Instead, the people who laid the foundations for the doctrines that later became the fodder for fundamentalists come across in Freeman's argument as people who struggled to solve other kinds of problems, of a more immediate nature, like how to maintain social order and reconcile conflicting ideas within their scriptures. The suppression of the Greek ways and the silencing of rational debate appears not as the result of a conscious program, but rather as a corner that the western church painted itself into without really noticing until centuries later. But there is Thomas Aquinas, standing at the other end of the long bewilderment, rediscovering reason and, as Freeman puts it, unwittingly laying the foundation for the scientific revolution.
The book is not burdened by academic prose, but the reading is made difficult by the combination of a long narrative arc, stretching several centuries, and the great amount of supporting detail. As suggested above, reading the epilogue first might help, but the entire book needs to be read carefully and cohesively; if one pulls out a chapter here or there, the direction of the argument will be hard to perceive. This reviewer read several of the chapters more than once before proceeding to the next, in order to maintain a fuller sense of the argumentative direction, with all its attendant details. For the best experience, be sure to check the endnotes; they often include tangential commentary or additional quotations from source material that can be both entertaining and edifying. Freeman cites many other modern works and his notes and bibliography suggest that the fascinating pursuit to answer his central questions could easily be continued, and ought to be. show less
The journey to the closing of the Western mind proceeded by innumerable steps over several centuries, through processes more than just theological or intellectual. Political forces were at work, too, and Freeman argues that "[t]he important question to answer is why Christianity was different from other spiritual movements in the ancient world in insisting that Christians throughout the empire should adhere to a common authority." (Page 336.) He argues that the demand for orthodoxy was prompted by a need for social stability in the midst of the disintegrating Roman Empire, but was also show more carried along, to a lesser extent, by the problem of group identification, which was difficult in a cosmopolitan new religion that was open to all, without regard to traditional social markers like race or ethnicity.
During the first five centuries of Christianity, when the Greek ways of rational inquiry held greater sway, the continuous eruption of doctrinal disputes threatened the unity of the movement. Emperors, needing the assistance of the bishops to maintain order, called the famous councils—at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon—to quell the riotous arguments and establish authoritative doctrines to which bishops would adhere in order to receive patronage. Ultimately, under Pope Gregory ("the Great"), in the sixth century, the doctrinal identity of the western church was consolidated and history was rewritten, to expunge "the political dimension to the making of Christian doctrine," as Freeman puts it. (Page 339.) Rather than recognized as evolving in a political, theological, philosophical, and social pressure-cooker, those consolidated Christian doctrines were posited as having existed for all time, producing the oddity that even the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—are said to have known the Trinity. (See page 313.) This rewritten history persists today, especially within the Catholic church, where the ancient "heresies" are understood not as simply on the losing side of history, but as having espoused obvious theological falsehoods, which were rooted out by people who were appointed by God to stamp out heresy, not by people who became authorities simply by virtue of being the political and historical victors. (And there the adage that history is written by the victors is fully true.)
So Freeman has dug into the recent scholarship to write a history of the formation of Christianity that has the refreshing virtue of reading the source material far more evenhandedly than church-aligned historians do. The historical players in this book do not come across like their craven and bastardized descendants in modern fundamentalism, who make a conscious effort to suppress any ideas that conflict with their beliefs simply because of the conflict. Instead, the people who laid the foundations for the doctrines that later became the fodder for fundamentalists come across in Freeman's argument as people who struggled to solve other kinds of problems, of a more immediate nature, like how to maintain social order and reconcile conflicting ideas within their scriptures. The suppression of the Greek ways and the silencing of rational debate appears not as the result of a conscious program, but rather as a corner that the western church painted itself into without really noticing until centuries later. But there is Thomas Aquinas, standing at the other end of the long bewilderment, rediscovering reason and, as Freeman puts it, unwittingly laying the foundation for the scientific revolution.
The book is not burdened by academic prose, but the reading is made difficult by the combination of a long narrative arc, stretching several centuries, and the great amount of supporting detail. As suggested above, reading the epilogue first might help, but the entire book needs to be read carefully and cohesively; if one pulls out a chapter here or there, the direction of the argument will be hard to perceive. This reviewer read several of the chapters more than once before proceeding to the next, in order to maintain a fuller sense of the argumentative direction, with all its attendant details. For the best experience, be sure to check the endnotes; they often include tangential commentary or additional quotations from source material that can be both entertaining and edifying. Freeman cites many other modern works and his notes and bibliography suggest that the fascinating pursuit to answer his central questions could easily be continued, and ought to be. show less
Wood has strong ideas about the blend and interaction between the voices of authors and those of their fictional characters. He admires most the authors who can write fiction that follows its own conventions faithfully by signaling the different voices without breaking a self-imposed aesthetic. And aesthetics may be the most important factor in Wood's evaluation. We should be able to take written fiction as we find it and evaluate it on its own terms, but authors who fail to grasp and commit to a consistent aesthetic within a work make it difficult for readers to do that.
Readers whose chief interactions with a book are to determine whether they are "entertained," whether they "like the characters," and whether "the plot is believable" may see Wood as just another snobbish aesthete that revels in a lack of what they might call "clarity" ("Why should the meaning of the story be indeterminate or encoded? Why not just come out and say what happened?"). But those interested in plumbing the depths of language and all its most artful employments should find enlightenment, or at least enjoyment, with Wood and How Fiction Works. For the others, do try—it may tarnish your love for what Wood calls "commercial realism," but it will add more potential dimensions to your enjoyment of a text than perhaps you thought possible.
Readers whose chief interactions with a book are to determine whether they are "entertained," whether they "like the characters," and whether "the plot is believable" may see Wood as just another snobbish aesthete that revels in a lack of what they might call "clarity" ("Why should the meaning of the story be indeterminate or encoded? Why not just come out and say what happened?"). But those interested in plumbing the depths of language and all its most artful employments should find enlightenment, or at least enjoyment, with Wood and How Fiction Works. For the others, do try—it may tarnish your love for what Wood calls "commercial realism," but it will add more potential dimensions to your enjoyment of a text than perhaps you thought possible.
To Kill a Mockingbird persists as classic literature not because Atticus Finch incarnates modern values in 1930s Alabama—he doesn't—but because Harper Lee wrote into her story the complex problem of cultural change, the resistance of adults, the malleability of children, and the danger of acculturating into rigidity by coming of age. Scout is a naïve narrator; she does not comment on the problem of overcoming racism and its resulting iniquities, but describes its manifestations in service of her own story, which might be styled, "How Jem Broke His Arm and Atticus Lost Tom Robinson." The truer story hides in the details: "How a Culture Resisted Good, without its People being Evil."
Modern readers have criticized To Kill a Mockingbird, and Atticus Finch, for failing to be angry enough about the injustice of racism, and have read the book as very nearly a defense of systemic racism. Atticus, the apparent moral center of the story refuses to hate Bob Ewell and Adolf Hitler; he allows cultures and mob mentalities to excuse the acts of evildoers. But the final pages of the book reveal his flaw: his accommodation of Bob Ewell was surely mistaken—the man attacked his children! When Heck Tate insists that Jem will not be accused or exonerated in the murder of Ewell, that Atticus shall not allow his son to stand trial, Atticus' moral code disintegrates. He is no longer the lawyer who had to defend Tom Robinson, or forfeit the right to tell his children what to do; he becomes show more a father who, instead of laying bare the truth for his children, obscures it by complicity with Tate, and leaves Scout's naïveté intact—Bob Ewell fell on his knife. There is no simple, smooth transition from old ways to new. The torch is passed from Atticus to Jem and Scout, who stand to advance the cause of justice even further than Atticus was able to take it.
Throughout the book, Scout sees and experiences the changes in outlook that come with age, embracing the new ways, even as she feels the pull of acculturation into the old ways. She is puzzled that Aunt Alexandra refuses to let her associate with the blacks or the poor white trash, but, even as she is unable to articulate her reasons, she resists the old ways of the Southern Woman. There are hints that Jem is more susceptible to acculturation, until the conviction of Tom Robinson, contradicting the evidence he weighed in court himself, breaks his faith in the populace. Jem will surely grow into the angry idealist prized by the critical modern readers; but Scout, who seems to believe in democracy, will probably be a more innocently color-blind adult.
And the old ways are troublesome. Families, and "old" families, are socially constructed from nothing but gossip and endowed with "streaks" to favor certain vices. Only Atticus and the children perceive individuals where everyone else sees Ewells and Cunninghams and Finches. And even as the other children, toward the end of the book, recognize the problem with Hitler rounding up the Jews, Cecil Jacobs reveals how hard the old ways die: "They're white, ain't they?" he says of the Jews, demonstrating both his capacity for charity when applied to circumstances abroad and his abject failure to recognize the circumstances of his own community.
To Kill a Mockingbird is not a tragedy of racism, but a tragedy of the human failure to overcome its homegrown evils. Culture constrains progress, perhaps even by definition, and makes its participants and creators, apparent free will and all, blind to the alternatives that might be clear to outsiders. And we, the readers, are obviously outsiders; we see clearly the shortcomings of everyone in the story, including Atticus Finch, who is not the apex of justice, but only an earlier step in the long march to the future.
The ladies' meeting toward the close of the book, to discuss the "sin and squalor" of foreign lands, is a blast of irony, coming just as Scout, the unwitting anthropologist, is completing her own record of the sin and squalor of Maycomb County. To Kill a Mockingbird is not about the evil of the old ways, but about how difficult it is for the new ways to take hold, even when they are obviously better. show less
Modern readers have criticized To Kill a Mockingbird, and Atticus Finch, for failing to be angry enough about the injustice of racism, and have read the book as very nearly a defense of systemic racism. Atticus, the apparent moral center of the story refuses to hate Bob Ewell and Adolf Hitler; he allows cultures and mob mentalities to excuse the acts of evildoers. But the final pages of the book reveal his flaw: his accommodation of Bob Ewell was surely mistaken—the man attacked his children! When Heck Tate insists that Jem will not be accused or exonerated in the murder of Ewell, that Atticus shall not allow his son to stand trial, Atticus' moral code disintegrates. He is no longer the lawyer who had to defend Tom Robinson, or forfeit the right to tell his children what to do; he becomes show more a father who, instead of laying bare the truth for his children, obscures it by complicity with Tate, and leaves Scout's naïveté intact—Bob Ewell fell on his knife. There is no simple, smooth transition from old ways to new. The torch is passed from Atticus to Jem and Scout, who stand to advance the cause of justice even further than Atticus was able to take it.
Throughout the book, Scout sees and experiences the changes in outlook that come with age, embracing the new ways, even as she feels the pull of acculturation into the old ways. She is puzzled that Aunt Alexandra refuses to let her associate with the blacks or the poor white trash, but, even as she is unable to articulate her reasons, she resists the old ways of the Southern Woman. There are hints that Jem is more susceptible to acculturation, until the conviction of Tom Robinson, contradicting the evidence he weighed in court himself, breaks his faith in the populace. Jem will surely grow into the angry idealist prized by the critical modern readers; but Scout, who seems to believe in democracy, will probably be a more innocently color-blind adult.
And the old ways are troublesome. Families, and "old" families, are socially constructed from nothing but gossip and endowed with "streaks" to favor certain vices. Only Atticus and the children perceive individuals where everyone else sees Ewells and Cunninghams and Finches. And even as the other children, toward the end of the book, recognize the problem with Hitler rounding up the Jews, Cecil Jacobs reveals how hard the old ways die: "They're white, ain't they?" he says of the Jews, demonstrating both his capacity for charity when applied to circumstances abroad and his abject failure to recognize the circumstances of his own community.
To Kill a Mockingbird is not a tragedy of racism, but a tragedy of the human failure to overcome its homegrown evils. Culture constrains progress, perhaps even by definition, and makes its participants and creators, apparent free will and all, blind to the alternatives that might be clear to outsiders. And we, the readers, are obviously outsiders; we see clearly the shortcomings of everyone in the story, including Atticus Finch, who is not the apex of justice, but only an earlier step in the long march to the future.
The ladies' meeting toward the close of the book, to discuss the "sin and squalor" of foreign lands, is a blast of irony, coming just as Scout, the unwitting anthropologist, is completing her own record of the sin and squalor of Maycomb County. To Kill a Mockingbird is not about the evil of the old ways, but about how difficult it is for the new ways to take hold, even when they are obviously better. show less
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a nearly-awesome meditation on what it means to be human. But it ultimately falls short, right along the frontier of Philip Dick's ability, where he slips into hallucination and religiosity. The problem of identifying humans, for social and ethical purposes, within a great continuum of physical and mental varieties, is a fascinating one, which holds the promise of far more devastating and sensible conceptual reversals than the ones Dick provides.
Instead of just suggesting, in passing, that some people might be indistinguishable from a humanoid robot, why not explore the possibility to its extreme? The moment when Deckard recognizes he has more empathy for the android Luba Luft than for the human Phil Desch, why not push the contradiction even further? Why not introduce a legitimately ambiguous character? By the end of the book, there is no question about who is an android and who is a human, but what is the point of the story unless humanity means something other than biological or technological provenance?
There are a lot of interesting but mostly undeveloped ideas here and this reader wonders whether an author with a more rigorous analytical approach could have succeeded where Dick only goes halfway.
Instead of just suggesting, in passing, that some people might be indistinguishable from a humanoid robot, why not explore the possibility to its extreme? The moment when Deckard recognizes he has more empathy for the android Luba Luft than for the human Phil Desch, why not push the contradiction even further? Why not introduce a legitimately ambiguous character? By the end of the book, there is no question about who is an android and who is a human, but what is the point of the story unless humanity means something other than biological or technological provenance?
There are a lot of interesting but mostly undeveloped ideas here and this reader wonders whether an author with a more rigorous analytical approach could have succeeded where Dick only goes halfway.
Karen Armstrong makes no case for God and only a weak, uneven, and confused case for "God." She clearly (and rightly) dismisses theology that treats God as merely the greatest power in existence, but ultimately fails to explain why the word or label "God" remains useful. In the final pages, where I hoped to see her "case" become clear, she only advocates what amounts to active engagement with life, mindfulness, and recognition of uncertainty. Why we need "to engage with a symbol [like "God"] imaginatively [and] become ritually and ethically involved with it" is not clear, except Armstrong claims that doing so will "allow it [the symbol] to effect a profound change in you." (See page 321.)
Armstrong rightly points out that "God" the symbol too easily becomes God the idol, which is "one of the pitfalls of monotheism" (page 321), so why should we bother putting a label on "religious experience," which she appears to define as "explor[ing] the normal workings of our minds and notic[ing] how frequently these propel us quite naturally into transcendence" (page 327)? And what is "transcendence" anyway? If putting words on these things creates a dangerous "pitfall," then Armstrong has fatally undercut her case. To portray her book and her argument as being a "case for God," she is only irresponsibly perpetuating the problem that she has spilled so much ink to reveal, not just in this book, but in several earlier ones.
It does seem quite "natural" or "normal"—perhaps a better word show more is "commonplace"—to recognize that we remain ignorant of the true nature of reality, but doing so while actively engaging with life and practicing mindfulness does not require having a label or a symbol like "God." Or Armstrong, at least, has not convincingly argued that it does, which is what I expected her to do, right from the beginning of the book.
Ultimately (and unfortunately), this book follows what now appears to this reader as a clear progression in her work: writing that increasingly looks less like history, or even history of ideas, and more like roughly chronological bibliography with connective glosses here and there. It is not an argument, but a guided tour through Karen Armstrong's reading. Taken on those terms, The Case for God is quite an interesting work. But taken on the terms by which it seems to present itself, it is a failure. show less
Armstrong rightly points out that "God" the symbol too easily becomes God the idol, which is "one of the pitfalls of monotheism" (page 321), so why should we bother putting a label on "religious experience," which she appears to define as "explor[ing] the normal workings of our minds and notic[ing] how frequently these propel us quite naturally into transcendence" (page 327)? And what is "transcendence" anyway? If putting words on these things creates a dangerous "pitfall," then Armstrong has fatally undercut her case. To portray her book and her argument as being a "case for God," she is only irresponsibly perpetuating the problem that she has spilled so much ink to reveal, not just in this book, but in several earlier ones.
It does seem quite "natural" or "normal"—perhaps a better word show more is "commonplace"—to recognize that we remain ignorant of the true nature of reality, but doing so while actively engaging with life and practicing mindfulness does not require having a label or a symbol like "God." Or Armstrong, at least, has not convincingly argued that it does, which is what I expected her to do, right from the beginning of the book.
Ultimately (and unfortunately), this book follows what now appears to this reader as a clear progression in her work: writing that increasingly looks less like history, or even history of ideas, and more like roughly chronological bibliography with connective glosses here and there. It is not an argument, but a guided tour through Karen Armstrong's reading. Taken on those terms, The Case for God is quite an interesting work. But taken on the terms by which it seems to present itself, it is a failure. show less
Rather than exploring the problem of what Gregory Benford has called "deep time," or suggesting that monasticism could be an effective way to preserve knowledge across dark ages, or critiquing religious beliefs as deforming and becoming less relevant over time, this book is essentially no more than unabashed advocacy of the Roman Catholic church. Because of that focus, all sorts of interesting issues are passed over and ignored.
It might be a compelling story for someone who already believes (or wants to believe) that the Roman Catholic church has something important to offer the world, but this reader got all the way up to the last page still wondering, "When will he finally reveal that these monks, having preserved knowledge across a dark age, have fulfilled their function and are now irrelevant? When will he shift the narrative focus to depict the complexity and nuance of 'secular' governance with the same care he used to render monastic life?" But those things never came and the book is just a fictional form of the Catholic obsession to place their own institution at the center of all history, as though none of the rest of us matter.
Contrary to its reputation, A Canticle for Leibowitz offers nothing worthwhile.
It might be a compelling story for someone who already believes (or wants to believe) that the Roman Catholic church has something important to offer the world, but this reader got all the way up to the last page still wondering, "When will he finally reveal that these monks, having preserved knowledge across a dark age, have fulfilled their function and are now irrelevant? When will he shift the narrative focus to depict the complexity and nuance of 'secular' governance with the same care he used to render monastic life?" But those things never came and the book is just a fictional form of the Catholic obsession to place their own institution at the center of all history, as though none of the rest of us matter.
Contrary to its reputation, A Canticle for Leibowitz offers nothing worthwhile.