Tyler Cowen and Peter Suderman have both compiled (non-definitive) lists of books which have influenced them the most over the years.  I have thought about this some, and come to the decision that the books I read as a child were by far the most influential – far more influential than anything I read later as a college student or the ones I read nowadays.  So here’s a list, from memory, of the most influential books I read as a child.

The Lord of the Rings – This one is the obvious choice for a fantasy reader, I suppose.  I read it in fourth grade for the first time and loved it, and have read it several times since. It is still the definitive work of epic fantasy, I believe.  The only downside is that so many people attempted to imitate Tolkien when they should have been writing their own ideas.

The Prydain Chronicles – Lloyd Alexander was never as well known as Tolkien, but his Prydian books were wonderful young adult fantasy novels steeped in Welsh myth.  So while some of the characters mirrored those in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the stories themselves were unique and interesting and lively.  I read these ones countless times.

The Dark is Rising Sequence – This series taps into the old Welsh and British mythology fairly heavily, mixing the modern world and Merlin and time travel together in an epic clash between good and evil.  One of many books I read and loved that transports us from the mundane world into one much darker and more fierce.

A Wrinkle in Time – This was one of those books that really stopped me in my tracks. Free will, conformity, and the seduction of evil are all present here.

The Giver – Another glimpse into totalitarianism and conformity and the dangers of ‘sameness’ and ignorance of history.  Less fantastical than my typical childhood read, but sort of shocking also.

The Bridge to Terabithia – They made a movie about this book recently.  Please don’t watch it.  Sometimes movies can enrich the book experience, but not when they are mangled by over-Disneyfication. Terabithia helped me understand tragedy and loss better.

The Castle in the Attic – To be honest, I can barely remember this book, but like Narnia it helped transport me into another world – something I did a lot of as a kid.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – This was a good, funny, cynical take on the King Arther stories.  Very helpful to round out all that heroism and chivalry with some good, honest, witty realism.

Narnia – Like the Lord of the Rings, these books are simply staples of young adult fantasy.

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table – I have read so many King Arthur books at this point I can barely keep track of them.  This was one of the first.

I Am the Cheese – This was far more dystopian a tale than I typically read as a child, and still sort of haunting whenever I think about it.

Some honorable mentions:

Watership Down, Lord of the Flies, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, The Wind in the Willows, The Last Unicorn, the Redwall books, the books of Roald Dahl and many others…

I should probably put child’s things away at this point and read more serious works of fiction and non-fiction – more philosophy, theology, et alia.  And yet … perhaps it is having children of my own now, or perhaps it is simply that I read to escape, but when it comes down to choosing I still find myself with some fantasy novel in hand, or some work of science fiction or mystery.  Yes – I do dip into non-fiction at times.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is certainly one of the most influential histories of my adult life. A Short History of Nearly Everything has been one of my favorite non-fiction reads in the past few years.  Crime and Punishment is hardly fantasy, and has been one of my favorite works of fiction that I’ve read since high school.  I blazed through a great deal of literature both contemporary and classic during college.  Some of it was quite good.

But the books that I’ve really loved have been Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell; the George R. R. Martin books; even the Harry Potter books.  True – much of the fantasy genre is fairly awful. Perhaps that’s why I’m so glad whenever I do find something good – even older children’s fantasy that I missed somehow as a child, like the work of Diana Wynne Jones.

What I’d like to read soon are the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks. And Jane Jacobs. And Diane Ravitch’s latest. And Joe Abercrombie (who, like Banks, is mysteriously missing from the local library…) And some Chesterton.

I’m currently reading  the sprawling Malazan books of Steven Erikson (now on House of Chains); and After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre – though I do not spend enough time reading (and I have a suspicion that this will remain the case until my children are older.) I’ve also got Mieville’s The City and the City lined up, though I admit to being a little stuck in Erikson’s series, making it hard for me to move on to other things.

So much to read, so little time.

Matthew’s criticism of St. Patrick’s Day is well taken, and as someone who’s given to teasing my “Irish” friends about their debased heritage and Papist superstitions, I should be very enthusiastic about putting St. Paddy down.

But despite my bias, I’ve always felt pretty good about our crude assimilation of Irish culture. By now, Irish-American historical lore is well-established: generations of discrimination, “Dogs and Irishmen Keep Out,” Kennedy’s storied presidential campaign, and so on. But look: The Irish have made it! A group that was once thought of as completely alien is now firmly established within the American mainstream. You can take several lessons from this experience, but the one that seems most relevant is that the United States has been astonishingly successful at assimilating disparate ethnic groups. This strikes me as something worth celebrating.

Conservatives will sometimes ask why organizations like the NAACP are necessary when white ethnic groups have no comparable political representation. The answer to this is simple: Most white ethnics have made it! Their traditions have been thoroughly assimilated into American culture (a cynic might say they were thoroughly diluted in the process, but that’s another story). They no longer need organizations that grew out of political and cultural oppression.

I look forward to the day when the NAACP is universally viewed as a cultural curator or an outdated relic of past political struggles. Maybe we’ll have Black History Month parades and everyone will claim they’re secretly descended from Frederick Douglas or something. This assimilatory process – fueled by commercialism and crude cultural generalizations – will undoubtedly sap some of the vitality from African-American culture (just as St. Patrick’s Day is a far cry from anything authentically Irish). But the end result is still something worth celebrating.

St. Patrick’s Day is America’s favorite ethnic holiday. It is also the strangest. In a calendar crowded with Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, and gay pride parades, St. Paddy’s is the one chance for the white, middle-class majority to dress garishly and get drunk while celebrating a history of suffering overcome.

No doubt, most St. Pat’s revelers have been motivated by nothing other than the desire to have a little fun. But it’s worth asking why this desire took the form it did. Many white Americans really are Irish, of course, but the reason so many white people of all ethnic backgrounds celebrate this one ethnic holiday rather than, say, Oktoberfest, goes deeper. It would be a little weird, not to say unseemly, for Americans of English or German descent to parade in the street celebrating their ethnic heritage. To do so would be like dancing in the end zone of colonial history. And so, because the Irish were actually the subjects of discrimination and oppression, Irishness has become the go-to white ethnicity.

St. Pat’s isn’t the only example of this cultural phenomenon. When Margaret Mitchell set out in Gone With the Wind to create a narrative of white suffering and triumph, she chose an Irish protagonist with green eyes and a green dress. Scarlett’s father, Gerald O’Hara, a proud Irishman who named his plantation ‘Tara’ after the ancient seat of the high kings of Ireland. This is a strikingly explicit ethnic background for a family meant to represent the overwhelmingly Protestant and Anglo Reconstruction- era South. But her unusual choice makes perfect sense. In order to tell a narrative of white suffering that would not seem laughable beside the injustices visited on enslaved blacks, Mitchell had to turn to the one group of whites that had been oppressed: the Irish. Thirty-million books, a Pulitzer Prize, and an iconic film later, a white southern lady had displaced Uncle Tom as the great American symbol of injustice suffered.

Being half Irish myself, I think there are many good reasons to celebrate St. Patty’s, not least Ireland’s impressive religious and literary heritage. But I think it is weird that one of the reasons the holiday exists is to give the privileged a chance to dress up in the drag of historical oppression.

Much ado has been blogged about Emily Howell, the computer program that writes Bach chorales , Mozart sonatas, and other kinds of pieces in the style of various composers. You can listen to two samples of the program’s work here.

The samples are impressive, but there are three considerations that temper the achievement:

First: the program itself is not simple. The programmer added innumerable tweaks in order to get the output to sound right. Presumably he did this with a clear idea of what the output should sound like. Why he should add tweaks to produce certain kinds of output (beautiful output) and not other outputs preserves the basic mystery of why we find the particularities of classical composition beautiful. The algorithm does nothing to explain this mystery.

Second: the pieces are based on statistical analyses of past composers. These analyses extracted methods, then, which were created not by the program but by human beings. Presumably the program cannot create new musical idioms as composers have done.

Third: the samples, while surprising and occasionally beguiling, are not as good as the originals. Not even close. The first sounds like it’s supposed to imitate Faure, though the article doesn’t say, and it’s quite successful at capturing his characteristic harmonic moves, but try listening to it five times in a row, as I have just done. Then listen to a piece by the real Faure (an amateur musician playing on a wretched piano, which I hope evens the score somewhat, since the computer’s music was generated by a player piano).

The second sample’s inferiority is harder to understand, for several reasons. It is a perfectly correct fugue, and the mere form of a fugue is beautiful (I, for one, would love to listen to, say, a 64-voice fugue in Bach’s style written by Miss Howell). Also, many of Bach’s ardent admirers miss what is exciting about him. As grouchy Adorno wrote:

“his influence…no longer results from the musical substance of his music but rather from its style and play, from its form and play, from formula and symmetry, from the mere gesture of recognition.”

Bach is himself partly to blame. His greatness is particularly difficult to grasp, among the really greats. DB Hart wrote a piece in First Things this morning that describes the poetry of T’ao Ch’ien in terms that can be applied to Bach:

“The greatest writers of China’s poetic golden age regarded him as the absolute virtuoso of ‘the natural voice,’ almost magically able to combine the subtle and the simple in verse that was most lyrical precisely where it appeared least adorned. ‘On the outside,’ remarked the great Sung poet Su Shi (Su Tung-p’o), ‘it is withered, but on the inside abundant. It seems plain, and yet is truly beautiful.’”

With that in mind, listen to the most hellish performance I could find of a Bach fugue.

All this is not to say that the program doesn’t mean anything. As with many technologies, it neither upends the way we’ve been doing things for millennia nor leaves everything the same. Specifically, I no longer see any use for the industry that composes music to accompany movies. If I were a studio executive, I’d already be inquiring about how much it might cost to licensed a copy of Emily Howell.

Stephen Walt thinks that the latest spat between Israel and the US is grounds for bringing back up a topic that very few want to discuss:  what plans/solutions/options remain if (and when) the two state solution fails?

His ideas on that subject (which are worth the read) are here.

Obligatory preface on Stephen Walt–I didn’t find his Israel Lobby book persuasive.  I do find his questions about the future of the two state solution very important and worth consideration.  (i.e. The second link above).

The Two State Solution, which as Walt correctly notes was only official policy at the extreme terminus of the Clinton administration, was officially endorsed (from the beginning) by George W. Bush (but never really followed up on) and is now the de facto position across the board, reflected by the Obama administration’s outrage over the recent Israeli decision to start construction on 1600 (1600!!!) houses in East Jerusalem.  East Jerusalem being of course at the center of the Two State Solution as the planned capital of the (hypothetical) Palestinian state.

The Two State Solution I believe is an extension of the earlier successes of US, Arab, and Israeli diplomacy–the so-called Land for Peace paradigm.  Israel gave back land captured in the Six Day War to various Arab states who in turn recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel and end the state of war between the two countries.

This basic format worked in the case of The Camp David Accords with Egypt and formed the template for the later Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, which President Clinton helped negotiate.  It’s also the deal that President George H. W. Bush offered (via Sec. of State Baker) to the Syrians (and by extension at the time their proxies Lebanon) and continues to this day to be on the table–which the Syrians have yet to take the Israelis up on.

This framework, however, worked because the states in question already existed as states.  Applying this model to the Palestinian process appears to have put the cart before the horse.  The failure of the Oslo Accords looms large in this scenario.  If you take a more pro-Israeli position, the failure occurred because the PLO/Fatah never really led in the fashion of true statesmen.  If you take the side of the Palestinians, Oslo failed because the deal offered was not a viable one that any group (including Fatah) could have claimed domestically as a win and thereby cemented their legitimacy.

In other words, the PLO wasn’t a state and therefore couldn’t negotiate under a paradigm presuming its existence existence as a state.  [Even PM Rabin more or less unilaterally declared the PLO the rightful spokespersons for the Palestinian Authority.]

Here is Walt on the options remaining if (as I believe looks increasingly likely) the Two State Solution dies: [Read more →]

One of the ways I differ from the typical gay-activist blogger (aside from being a shameless free-marketeer) is that I’m willing to give ex-gays at least some benefit of the doubt, in a few very limited ways. These seem related to our conversation below about falsifiability, so I thought now would be a good time to share them.

Being an openly gay man means asking people to credit my inner experience in a way that, in Popperian terms, is not falsifiable. I declare that I’ve always felt this way, that I’ve never sincerely been attracted to women, and that I really, genuinely find intimacy with my husband appealing rather than uninteresting or repulsive. That’s just how I am, I ask you to believe, and I ask for this belief on no evidence whatsoever. And guess what? Most of you believe me!

It seems only fair, then, that I should credit others’ affirmed internal experiences as well, even if I can’t falsify theirs, either. So I don’t imagine that I can convert heterosexuals. When they tell me that they can’t change, I accept it.

Likewise, I’m willing to credit ex-gays — those who say that they can change, and who say that they have changed. Ex-gays often fault gays for failing to do this, and I have to admit that they have a point. If we’re going to make truth claims based on introspection, we had better at least be consistent about it. [Read more →]

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007)

Below I talk with Ordinary Gentleman David Schaengold about the remarkable work of the recently deceased director Eric Rohmer.

MS: As I wrote in my recent First Things piece on Eric Rohmer, a lot of people think his films are boring. You won’t be surprised to hear that I strongly disagree:

A character played by Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn’s film Night Moves memorably says, “I saw a Rohmer movie once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” A subtler form of this criticism is present in the habit—especially noticeable in the obituaries—of comparing Rohmer to great novelists and painters. Whether the reference is to Sherwin-Williams or Cezanne, the insinuation is that while Rohmer may have crafted delicate tales and created striking visual compositions, he was not really a filmmaker; he never made movies. Rohmer did place speech over spectacle, but only out of a belief that in life the real action takes place in conversations. In his essay “For a Talking Cinema,” Rohmer noted that twenty years after the introduction of sound to film, words still were seen as secondary to the image. Rohmer called for the kind of cinema he would go on to create, one in which speech was integral to the structure.

Possibly related, David, is the observation you once made to me that Rohmer offers a successful example of Brechtian cinema. What did you mean by that?

DS: Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t say right off. I’d like to invoke Rilke first, specifically the Archaic Torso of Apollo. Rilke’s poem is meant to convey the experience of being slowly transfixed by a work of art, I think he ends with perhaps the most famous non sequitur in lyric poetry after describing the torso, he says, abruptly: “you must change your life.” It is an odd thing to say so unadornedly, but Rilke was, I think, evoking a particular feature of the phenomenology of aesthetics. The torso, like all works of art, is frustratingly silent on what, precisely, you must do to change your life, but the imperative is categorical and unforgettable.

[Read more →]

I recommend Br. Brafford’s post on non-foundationalism for the layman, but I find his treatment of Thomas Kuhn quite unfair:

I’m reading Thomas Kuhn’s controversial classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn put forward, among other things, the suggestion that there not be any sense in which we can say that modern science puts us closer to the truth than Aristotelian and Ptolemaic science. Kuhn rejects the kind of foundationalist epistemology that claims we can have objective certainty about our knowledge. Since intellectuals were practically required to take a position on Kuhn in the several decades after he published, I’ve been flipping through the books on my shelf to see if I can make more sense out of discussions of Kuhn the second time through.

As one of the three members of the League born and raised in the greater Cincinnati area, it is incumbent upon (at least one of) us to defend a native son of our fair city and his very important (when correctly understood) philosophical insights.

Kuhn’s work is best analyzed in relation to the the theories of Karl Popper, then dominant in the field of philosophy of science.

The wiki on Kuhn is here helpful:

In this book, Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called “paradigm shifts” (although he did not coin the phrase), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. In general, science is broken up into three distinct stages. Prescience, which lacks a central paradigm, comes first. This is followed by “normal science“, when scientists attempt to enlarge the central paradigm by “puzzle-solving”. Thus, the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher, contra Popper’s refutability criterion. As anomalous results build up, science reaches a crisis, at which point a new paradigm, which subsumes the old results along with the anomalous results into one framework, is accepted. This is termed revolutionary science.

As stated, Kuhn revealed the limitations of Popperian falsification theory by showing the way in which science exists in a scientific worldview or cultural space.  This intrinsic worldview element to science, however, does not mean there are no better or worse theories than others, that none give us scientific objective insights.  It simply means there is no myth of the given but rather contextualized truth worlds–which generally build upon key insights of earlier worlds.

Because of the adherence to a scientific frame, various scientists observe and seek out evidence confirming the already existing overarching theories.  They form hypotheses influenced (if not directly deduced from) said dominant overarching theory (or paradigm cum worldview).  The data that emerges via such experiments and observations is data (under almost all circumstances) that makes sense within the dominant paradigm.

Sometimes, however, data will emerge (via a more sophisticated technology perhaps or by sheer luck/accident, etc.) that will reveal new data which disconfirms the dominant scientific narrative.  Here is where Kuhn adds an element missing in Popper–in Popper such data intrinsically falsifies the current paradigm.  However Kuhn showed historically this was not necessarily the case and it required scientists to open creatively to new framework and thought.   To allow themselves to think thoughts (or be thought by thoughts you might say) not arising within the current frame.

Take the move to quantum physics, a (uh-oh there’s the word) paradigmatic example of a scientific revolution.   [Read more →]

{Note: I wasn’t planning to post this because it’s a bit rambling and digressive. But, I realized that it sort of fits with the discussion about war and morality.}

Let me start by showing my cards: for me, The Persians doesn’t really work as theatrical drama. It is the oldest extant play (472 BCE) and the only surviving classical play based in events real as opposed to mythological. It has been successfully updated several times and is still exceptional as a war play that generates great sympathy for the “enemy”.

So, why doesn’t The Persians work as theatre? [Read more →]

I’m reading Thomas Kuhn’s controversial classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn put forward, among other things, the suggestion that there not be any sense in which we can say that modern science puts us closer to the truth than Aristotelian and Ptolemaic science. Kuhn rejects the kind of foundationalist epistemology that claims we can have objective certainty about our knowledge. Since intellectuals were practically required to take a position on Kuhn in the several decades after he published, I’ve been flipping through the books on my shelf to see if I can make more sense out of discussions of Kuhn the second time through.

List night I pulled down Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and found that its one reference to Kuhn was simply dripping with disdain:

So psychologists like Freud are in an impossible halfway house between science, which does not admit the existence of the phenomena he wishes to explain [i.e. consciousness], and the unconscious, which is outside the jurisdiction of science. It is a choice, so Nietzsche compellingly insists, between science and psychology. Psychology is by that very fact the winner, since science is the product of the psyche. Scientists themselves are gradually being affected by this choice. Perhaps science is only a product of our culture, which we know is no better than any other. Is science true? One sees a bit of decay around the edges of its good conscience, formerly so robust. Books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are popular symptoms of this condition.

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 200.

Bloom is contemptuous of Kuhn and other thinkers that he takes to be relativists because he takes the desire for wisdom to be the starting point of philosophy, which is for him the only truly worthy way of life. Taking non-foundationalism as a starting point — a paradoxical position, perhaps — makes mush of the yearning for truth. If the transcendentals are out of reach, why strive? A large part of the rhetorical power of Closing comes from the series of insults in the early part of the book, which Bloom designed to evoke the passion he wants to see: You have no connection to literature! You have no heroes! Your taste in music disgusts me!

But the non-academic can make good use of non-foundational thinking without doing away with the hope for the Good, the True, the Beautiful. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my reading, it’s that a good grasp on the transcendentals is hard to come by. That is to say, real access to truth, if you can get it, is either the product of immense intellectual achievement or it’s a truly precious gift, a pearl of great price. For someone who doubts her access to truth and hasn’t formally joined an intellectual tradition, a non-foundational stance is actually good way to navigate our intellectual culture, where competing conceptions of the world offer radically different answers to the question of what the world’s really like. The non-foundational stance means that the searcher puts off the task of trying to find one way of talking that explains all the other ways of talking, and instead tries to understand different speakers in their own terms. If the searcher is reflective enough to be aware of her own tradition — and searchers should be reflective in this way — then she no longer has to consider those outsider her tradition to be fools, liars, or makers of drastic mistakes.

What’s the alternative? Bloom offers a ready-made intellectual history, into which the searcher is supposed to fit other thinkers until she has time to study them on her own. Bloom wants to convince us that any thinker we come across will fit somewhere in the frame, and that we can express their thoughts and expose their errors in the language that he offers. In my experience, non-scholars who take this approach set themselves up to terribly misunderstand thinkers that don’t fit easily in the frame. While a deep and careful study of a hard-to-understand thinker could conceivably yield a real understanding of what that thinker meant to say, the non-scholar probably doesn’t have the time for such a study, and ends up with a reduced image or a bad reading of, say, Sartre or Derrida.

It is better, I think, for the non-scholar to adopt the non-foundational stance when exploring the landscape of contemporary inquiry. The layman doesn’t have to take the position that truth is always, necessarily, and forever out of reach: her non-foundational stance can and should be combined with a sincere hope that somewhere out there somebody’s getting it right.

I just had to let you know how I feel:

The album version is also excellent:

Will has highlighted the growth of anti-Wilson sentiment on the left and the right. Writing in Democracy, Trygve Throntveit tries to counter the wave:

True, Wilson sometimes described himself as conservative. But Wilson’s understanding of conservatism bears little relation to modern conceptions. To him, it meant eschewing theory and taking experience–past, present, and most important, social–as one’s guide for responding to change. Essentially, it meant pragmatism. When, in 1910, his gubernatorial rival promised never to ignore “constitutional limitations” in serving the people’s needs, Wilson retorted that he would be “an unconstitutional Governor” who would do just that if circumstances demanded it. Three years later, he inaugurated his presidency by promising tariff reform, progressive taxation, expanded credit, and several other measures designed, as Cooper puts it, “to bring justice and protection to ordinary citizens” struggling with rapid economic change–and in 18 marathon months he pushed nearly all of them through Congress.

At the crest of anti-Wilson sentiment, a liberal magazine has published a defense of Wilson that is so thoroughly unconvincing it seems like a prank. How to explain that after years of claims that Bush assaulted the Constitution, liberals are now ready to praise Wilson’s willingness to shred it?

For Throntveit, the answer seems to be “pragmatism.” Discarding the constitution for pragmatic as opposed to ideological reasons is not only unobjectionable, but laudatory. This line of argument is a little eccentric, but its possible to see how it follows from the liberal love-affair with Sandra Day O’Connor. If a liberal jurist can shred the constitution for praiseworthy, non-ideological ends, why can’t the executive? Maybe we’re all doomed to love and hate Woodrow for the wrong reasons.