“When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamin Labatut (translated by Adrian Nathan West)

As with all books purporting to be historical fiction, one can either struggle with trying to decipher what is fact and what has been invented or one can just go along for the ride. Labatut, in the acknowledgements, reveals that the book veers more and more towards the speculative in its later chapters. Whatever you want to call this book, the whole is mystical and engrossing. It can be read in one sitting, but the scientific themes demand to be pondered at leisure.

Labatut describes the enigma of the Schwarzschild singularity, “At a certain distance from Schwarzschild’s idealized star, the equations of general relativity went mad: time froze, space coiled around itself like a serpent. At the center of that dying star, all mass became concentrated in a single point of infinite density…. With alarm, he realized that if his singularity were ever to exist, it would endure until the end of the universe. Its ideal conditions made it an eternal object that would neither grow nor diminish, but remain eternally as it was. Unlike all other things, it was immune to becoming and doubly inescapable: in the strange spatial geometry it generated, the singularity was located at both ends of time.” Schwarzschild, himself, mused, “Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe…. We would be faced with a fairyland geometry, a hall of mirrors whose horrifying perspectives would be more than the civilized mind could bear, as it abhors and flees from all it cannot comprehend…. We have reached the highest point of civilization. All that is left for us is to decay and fall.”

The main section of Labatut’s book focuses on the debate between Heisenberg and Schrodinger on the realities of quantum physics. However, Labatut begins with Louis de Broglie, who would pioneer the alternative pilot-wave theory. Labatut quotes at length from de Broglie’s dissertation defense, “For more than a century, we have divided earthly phenomena into two fields: atoms and particles of solid matter on the one hand, and the intangible waves of light, propagated through the sea of the luminous ether, on the other. But these two systems cannot remain separate; we must bring them together in a single theory that explains their multiple interactions…. We are talking here about the most precious object of physics, light, which allows us not only to see the forms of this world, but shows us the stars that adorn the spiral arms of the galaxy and the hidden heart of matter. But this object is not always singular—it is double. Light exists in two different ways. Thus, it transcends all the categories with which we have tried to encapsulate the myriad forms of nature. As wave and as particle, it inhabits two distinct orders and is possessed of identities as opposed as the two faces of Janus. Like that Roman god, it expresses the contradictory properties of what is discrete and what is continuous, what is local and what is spread out…. All matter is possessed of such dualism! Not only light but each of the atoms with which the godhead has constructed the universe is subject to this twofold nature.”

Labatut describes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and how his mentor, Niels Bohr, and he tried to reconcile Heisenberg’s convoluted mathematical matrices with Schrodinger’s elegantly simple equation in the Copenhagen Interpretation. “It is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.” Heisenberg had posited, “When we speak of the science of our era, we are talking about our relationship with nature, not as objective, detached observers, but as actors in a game between man and the world. Science can no longer confront reality in the same way. The method of analysing, explaining and classifying the world has become conscious of its own limitations: these arise from the fact that its interventions alter the objects it proposes to investigate. The light science shines on the world not only changes our vision of reality, but even the behaviour of its fundamental building blocks.” Einstein could not prove the Copenhagen Interpretation wrong, although he remained skeptical. “This theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts.” To the end, Einstein remained convinced, “God does not play dice with the universe!”

“Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks” by Chris Herring

This book might not have the most elegant prose in the world, but it does have more than a few juicy anecdotes about the 1990s Knicks. From Anthony Mason and Herb Williams to Anthony Bonner and Chris Childs, life on and off the court was colorful. “Mason had an odd fascination with lighting matches, then flicking them at whoever was around.” On the court, Will Purdue admitted, “I don’t want to use the word ‘fear,’ but there was always this thought in your mind that they might take things too far on any given play.” Greg Anthony summed it up, “We’d say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna win something tonight—we’re either gonna win the game, or win the fight.’”

It was astounding and heartbreaking to learn what precipitated the beginning of the end for Pat Riley with the Knicks. “Riley sent Dave Checketts an invoice for the $10,000 he spent for the players to gamble in Reno…. But then weeks went by. Then several months. Riley still hadn’t gotten his money—partly because, according to Checketts, no one at the Garden knew how to officially label the expense, which would be subject to the scrutiny of shareholders of a publicly traded company…. “He never forgot it. That stuck in his craw,” Checketts says of the delayed reimbursement. “If I knew what I know now, I would’ve just paid him back myself. Everything with Pat was black or white. In or out.”” On John Starks’ dismal Game 7 shooting performance in Houston, “Riley called not subbing Blackman in “the biggest mistake I ever made.” The coach has sent handwritten letters to Blackman over the years, but Blackman says he’s never written Riley back.” I can no longer muster much hatred for sports stars. I still despise Pat Riley with a passion. Tim Hardaway hates those 1990s Knicks too, “I hate them with all the hate that you can hate with. Can you hate more than that? If you can, I hate them more than that.”

“The Promise” by Damon Galgut

This novel is framed by four funerals involving a rural South African family from outside Pretoria, the Swarts, spanning the end of Apartheid. “We are the last outpost on this continent . . . If South Africa falls, Moscow will be drinking champagne . . . Let’s be clear about it, majority rule means communism…. My people are a valiant, durable bunch, they outlasted the British and they will outlast the kaffirs too. Afrikaners are a nation apart…. Don’t look at the house, think about the land. Useless ground, full of stones, you can do nothing with it. But it belongs to our family, nobody else, and there’s power in that.” The issue of land, ownership, and title will play a recurring role in Galgut’s novel. “This one has been working here for ever, since Anton was born. The things she must’ve seen and heard! It’s because they’re always around, like ghosts, you almost don’t notice them. But it’s a mistake to think the same applies in reverse, they’re always watching and listening, helping themselves and each other. They know all your secrets, everything about you, even the things other white people don’t know. The stains in your underwear, the holes in your socks. You have to get rid of them before they start to scheme.” Throughout the story, race is, obviously, the elephant in every room. “Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting casually about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!” Sport is the one thing that glues the new country together. “Boks versus the All Blacks, the eyes of other nations gazing hotly at us…. Even those who don’t like rugby, owing to whatever deficiency in their characters, are watching today…. When Mandela appears in the green Springbok rugby jersey to give the cup to Francois Pienaar, well, that’s something. That’s religious. The beefy Boer and the old terrorist shaking hands. Who could ever. My goodness.” In the end, however, this novel is also a story about a family just trying to endure and survive. “Once more, in the church, all of us, against our will. Times like these when the clan thickens, in numbers if not in loyalty, eyeing one another from our foxholes. The Swarts sticking together, mostly, though we’ve thinned out a lot by now, just a row of us in the first pew…. There is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don’t believe it then listen to us speak…. But enough, we are the rainbow nation, which is to say it’s a mixed and motley and mongrel assembly in the church today.”

“Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China” by Tao Jiang

This is a contemporary comparative analysis of the various moral-political systems of thought constructed by the most famous philosophers of the pre-Qin (xianqin) era. “The collapse of the normative Zhou order, which had represented the ideal of peace and prosperity, was the backdrop of all classical thinkers during the pre-Qin period. Almost all classical thinkers were trying to reconstitute such a lost order by appealing to ritual (or tradition), (human) nature, objective standards that included moral and penal codes, or some combination of these, in order to imagine, conceptualize, and construct a new world that was morally compelling and/or politically alluring.”

Jiang begins with Confucius. “The most important contribution by Confucius in Chinese history was his attempt to start formulating a coherent and compelling moral universe that could regulate personal virtues, familial-social relationships, and political governance, under the general rubric of Dao, the Way…. [The period] from the founding of Zhou in 1045 to the early ninth century BCE was [for Confucius] the epitome of culture and order, represented by wen and li, respectively, in the Analects, with the former referring to the cultural patterns of the Zhou and the latter to its ritual system.” Confucius claimed, “When human beings perform ritual, they put the things of the world in synchronization with the dao.” Jiang continues, “Ren, a homophone and cognate of human (ren), has been universally recognized as the singular moral virtue touted in the Analects.” Ren was a kind of meta-virtue, “frequently translated as humaneness, humanity, human-heartedness, authoritative or consummate conduct, virtue, or the Good.” Classical Chinese moral philosophy was concerned with the differences between particularist and universalist virtues, especially when the values of family and politics conflicted. Confucius tried to extend certain particularist familial virtues to the universal political sphere. “His focus was on the extension of familial sentiment of xiao ti to the more universalist sentiment of caring for people (ai ren).”

Mencius was a Confucian, who, nonetheless, formed his own unique moral project. “Between Confucius and Mencius the ground for reasoning shifted from a ritual- and tradition-based moral-political norm to a human-nature based one…. Mencius turned to (ethicized) human nature as the ground of moral reasoning and refashioning a humane world order. Essentially, the conceptual anchor of the Mencian political thought is human nature (xing), not institutional order (li)…. Ren, which is the singular virtue and moral ideal in the Analects, appears to have been “demoted” to one of four cardinal virtues, along with righteousness (yi), propriety (li), and wisdom (zhi), that are constitutive of the heavenly endowed human nature.” Furthermore, “whereas Confucius connects sacrifice with ren (humaneness) (Analects 15.9), Mencius associates sacrifice with yi (righteousness) (Mengzi 6A10)…. Like ren, yi also has two dimensions in the Mencius: familial and political. In the familial domain, it is understood as deference to one’s elder brother (4A27) or one’s elders (7A15); in the political arena, it refers to the virtue of a minister being fiercely loyal to his lord (1A1).” Jiang elaborates, “The extensionist Mencius operates on the assumption of congruity among desirable goods, whether material or moral, whereas the sacrificialist Mencius is much more clear-eyed about the tension involved among desirable goods, as well as that between the familial and political domains…. The more radical strand of Mencian thought… is premised upon the sacrificialist virtue of yi, as opposed to the extensionist virtue of ren.” Mencius claimed, “When the Way prevails in the world, the Way accompanies the gentleman (in all his conducts). When the Way does not prevail in the world, the gentleman follows the Way to the grave (or sacrifices himself to the Way).”

Mozi believed in a universalist moral-political project. “One of the greatest contributions of the Mohists to Chinese philosophy lies in their remarkable endeavor to move the gravity of philosophical reasoning from a debate focusing on personal intuitions or inclinations to one emphasizing objective criteria that are publicly accessible and defendable…. The Mohist Heaven is an omniscient, benevolent, and impartial supernatural agent…. For the Mohists, Heaven’s intent is not a primarily voluntarist concept, but rather a rational one. Heaven’s supremacy lies not in its arbitrariness and ultimate unintelligibility, but in its rationality and objectiveness which is universal and not biased in favor of the privileged…. The idea of jian ai is one of the most, if not the single most, fundamental moral teachings of Mozi…. Jian ai has been translated as universal love, universal care, concern for everybody, inclusive care, and impartial care…. Mohists embraced justice and impartiality, on the one hand, while advocating rather heavy-handed means to enforce universal standards of impartiality, on the other…. Youwei justice, a human vision of impartiality enshrined in the Mohist project, would require a high degree of socialization and socio-political engineering…. It was Mozi and the Mohists who vigorously applied the Golden Rule to ren and pushed Confucius’ idea of caring for the people to its logical conclusion of caring for all, often to the exasperation of later Confucians like Mencius who accused the Mohists of being unfilial (Mencius 3B/9).”

The Laoists also started from a universalist framework, but took it in a very different direction. “Normatively, wuwei is aligned with justice, impartiality, accommodations, and non-interference, whereas youwei is aligned with humaneness, partiality, differentiation, and interference. The Laoists were on the side of wuwei and its associated normative values…. Wuwei justice, touted in the Laozi, is naturally operative in the cosmos and, from this perspective, human effort is seen as disruptive to such an operation due to the inherent limitation of human knowledge, capability, and partialist inclinations…. Ideally for Laozi, justice should be left to Heaven as any human effort at justice would be too heavy-handed, on the one hand, while forcing humans to forsake naturally endowed human inclinations, on the other. Humans should aim at preserving our natural inclinations within the familial, kinship, or small local communal environment…. Laozi only recognized the familial as naturally human, making large societies undesirable and unnatural for humans.” Laozi stated, “The world is a sacred vessel (shen qi) and nothing should be done to it. Whoever does anything to it will ruin it; whoever lays hold of it will lose it (DDJ 29).”

Jiang explicitly compares the Laoist and Mohist conceptions of justice. “Whereas Mohist justice appeals to publicly articulated and uniformly applied standards, the Laoist justice operates in the darkness or in mystery; whereas the Mohist justice requires heavy intervention from leaders to impose uniform standards, the Laoist justice abhors such heavy-handedness; whereas the Mohist justice anticipates a large and unified political entity in their pursuit of universal justice, the Laoists call for small communities in order to save humanity from the onslaught of mass socialization and the corruption of the benign natural human inclinations in service to nefarious objectives while leaving the project of universal justice to Heaven/Dao since it is beyond human capacity…. For Laozi, the impartiality of Heaven and the partiality of human sentiments render the universalist ambition in the Mohist project untenable, since only Heaven is impartial and universal, whereas humans are not.”

Jiang refers to the Legalist School as the fajia thinkers. These thinkers were interested in constructing a universalist system, but their means would entail massive state intervention and blind deference from the people. “The fajia thinkers effort to formulate an impartial political order for the sake of all people points to the critical value of justice and impartiality in their political thought. Moreover, many of the fajia thinkers problematized personal virtues they considered to be at odds with the interest of the state and instead touted professional virtues of specialization and impersonal application of standards when an official was acting on behalf of the state…. What made Shen Dao’s call for the sagely emulation of nature radically different from Laozi’s was the former’s attempt to engineer the entire political apparatus so that it was modeled after the way nature was perceived to operate…. Shen Dao’s attitude toward human dispositions (qing), widely shared among the fajia thinkers, was that they should be taken as given, rather than obsessing over whether they can be reformed or not…. An effective political system is one that channels those dispositions for public good…. [The fajia thinkers’] ambitious and daring sociopolitical engineering of the entire human realm to model after the natural world was one of the most consequential developments in Chinese political history…. Fa in the Shenzi fragments focused on “the standards or laws instituted by the ruler” (2016, 46), whose “defining features is its fixity and lack of bias” (2016, 47)…. For Shen Dao, an enforced procedure, without bias or favors, was more important than the particular result it generated.” Shen Dao stated, “If one discards the Way and [its proper] techniques and gives up standards and measurements, seeking to understand all under heaven through the understanding of one man, whose understanding could be sufficient for this (Shenzi 107)?”

Zhuangzi was a Daoist, who lived towards the end of the Classical period. “Zhuangzi’s overarching intellectual project is that of personal freedom…. Zhuangist freedom is best understood as a critique of the Confucian (and by extension Mohist) way of structuring and ordering the world through rituals (and laws or standards in the case of Mohists)…. Zhuangzi stood out as someone who prioritized and privileged the personal over the familial and the political domains…. Zhuangzi tries to redeem the heartmind, attuning it to the Dao, so that it can be liberated from the ritually regulated lifeworld in the pursuit of personal freedom…. For Zhuangzi, personal freedom and ritual-based ethical norms were fundamentally incommensurable…. Whereas the Confucians are preoccupied with the imperative of humaneness and the Mohists with justice, the Zhuangists are resisting such an all-pervasive understanding of moral-political norms which are fundamentally relational in nature. Instead, the Zhuangists want to preserve a domain that is unregulated/undifferentiated (hundun) and open (tong) wherein one can roam freely (you).” In a passage in the Zhuangzi, he puts into the mouth of Confucius this distinction, “They [the Zhuangists] are the sort that roams beyond the guidelines (fangwai). I am the sort that roams within the guidelines (fangnei).” Zhuangzi stated, “The sage, taking Heaven as his model, values the genuine and is untrammeled by custom.”

Xunzi was a Confucian, who, nonetheless, incorporated aspects of Mohist and fajia thought into his philosophical system. He was most concerned with ritual and, compared to Confucius and Mencius, was more universalist and less beholden to particularist familial virtues. Along with other Confucians, however, Xunzi was concerned with cultivating and elevating personal humanist virtues, at least amongst the wise. “Xunzi touted the human qualities of distinction-making, righteousness, and community-building to counter disruptive human qualities, such as desires, competition, and chaos…. Xunzi highlighted the givenness of desire as well as its chaotic nature in the human condition, similar to views about human nature by the early fajia thinkers, but he saw ritual as the most effective way to cope with such a condition in bringing about orderliness through making right distinction, distribution, and division in the constitution of a flourishing human community that emulates the cosmic order characterized as hierarchical and constant…. Xunzi could no longer take for granted that there was a Heaven that cared about human affairs or that humans should model themselves after Heaven in search for solutions to the deepening moral, social, and political crises. Instead, he made a powerful case that humans were completely responsible for their own world. His rejection of human nature as a source of moral-political order was part of his effort to maintain a link between the heavenly and the human due to his understanding of human nature as given by Heaven and the indifference of Heaven to human affairs….. Xunzi’s ritual is the synthesis of these heavenly and humanly attributes, the product of the sagely deliberate efforts, that result in the establishment of a moral order. This synthesized moral order (li) is characterized by orderliness (zhi), humaneness (ren), rightness (yi), hierarchy (fen), taking positive attributes from the Heavenly (orderliness and hierarchy) and the humanly (humaneness and rightness). Such a ritual-based moral order represents the ideal of humane justice in Xunzi’s formation…. The nourishing function of ritual is front and center in Xunzi’s conception of ritual.” Xunzi claimed, “Heaven does not stop producing winter because humans dislike cold, Earth does not stop being broad because humans dislike huge distances, and the gentleman does not cease his conduct because of the chatter of petty men…. The gentleman makes his way based on what is constant, whereas the petty man calculates what he can accomplish.” Furthermore, Xunzi advised, “The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.”

Jiang closes with the paramount fajia thinker, Han Feizi, who lived just before the consolidation of the warring states into a unified empire by the Qin. Han Feizi incorporated Mohist ideas of a universalist Heaven with previous fajia thought on the role of the State, its ruler, its ministers, and its bureaucracy. “The fajia thinkers, including Han Feizi, believed that there was no moral solution to the crisis at hand due to tensions or even conflicts among moral ideals, on the one hand, and the failure of moral education in inculcating even those non-disputed moral virtues, on the other. Furthermore, the fajia thinkers saw morals as politically irrelevant at best and politically disruptive or subversive at worst. For them, morals were little more than the facade employed by cunning people, especially powerful ones in proximity to the ruler, to obfuscate their selfishness by appealing to high-sounding ideals…. A political order should not be built on the ideal of a morally perfect sage because the source of political authority should not derive from moral virtues of a ruler at all…. The virtues touted in Han Feizi’s philosophy in a ruler were humility and self-constraint, rather than benevolence and righteousness…. The highest moral value in Han Feizi’s philosophy was the institutional virtue of impartiality. Han Feizi claimed, “Hardly ten men of true integrity and good faith can be found today, and yet the offices of the state number in the hundreds. If they must be filled by men of integrity and good faith, then there will never be enough men to go around…. Therefore the way of the enlightened ruler is to unify the laws instead of seeking wise men.”

Jiang concludes historically, with how these competing philosophies were merged and practically implemented across Chinese imperial rule, “Confucianism, with its accommodationist philosophical disposition and partialist moral orientation, was best positioned, politically and intellectually, to deal with the universal state that was set up to operate on the fajia impersonal and bureaucratic framework under mostly mediocre and often deeply flawed rulers.”

“On Getting Better” by Adam Phillips

This collection of essays by Phillips is a companion to his collection “On Wanting to Change.” In these writings, Phillips focuses on what it would mean to be cured. He begins provocatively, “Clearly any politics not bent on improving society would not be politics, but would a personal life not bent on self-improvement not be a life, or at least not a life worth taking seriously?” Phillips suggests a psychoanalytic answer, “The cure here, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is the cure of an inhibition…. To be cured, then, is to be leading one’s preferred life.” However, satisfaction, as opposed to pleasure, is a culturally mediated phenomenon. “What is acculturation if not the formulation, tacitly or otherwise, of the individual’s aims and objectives?” The real problem for the analysand might be her own self-cure. “If the patient is suffering from their self-cure then it might be the wish for the cure that they are suffering from. Not that they have, as it were, found the wrong cure, but that the idea of cure has waylaid them. They have sought solutions as a way of taking insufficient interest in their problems.” Roger Money-Kyrle makes the claim, “The primary aim of psychoanalysis, in opposition to the avowed aim of all other therapeutic methods, is not to cure but to make conscious.” Following in the vein of William James and the American pragmatists, Phillips suggests, “The truth of our desire — if that is a useful way of talking — can only ever be an experiment and a risk. Psychoanalysis suggests that knowing and wanting don’t necessarily go together.” He continues, “Here in brief is James’s credo: replace the divine with the human wherever necessary and useful; believe and consider true whatever you need to believe, even God, in order to be the person you want to be; and be mindful, and admiring where you can, of the preceding generations that give you a language — the only language you have — to make a new language out of…. The pragmatically open-minded would never close their minds.” In the end, however, “without objects of desire, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.”

“On What Matters: Volume 3” by Derek Parfit

This is the final volume in Parfit’s posthumously published treatise. He begins by defending the concept of objective normative moral truths. “There are some normative truths which can be plausibly claimed to be natural facts…. These truths are naturalistic facts in the sense that they might be empirically discovered…. No such claims apply, I believe, to reason-involving normative truths…. These truths cannot be explained in naturalistic terms, nor could we have empirical evidence for or against our beliefs in these truths.” Similarly to mathematical truths, Parfit believes in the reality of these moral truths. “In the meta-ethical debates of the last seventy years, few people have suggested, and then only briefly, that there are any such non-ontological non-natural truths.”

Parfit believes that these normative moral truths are what matters. “When I claim that some things matter in the purely normative reason-implying sense, I don’t claim to be describing what most people believe…. I claim that if, as I believe, we have such reasons, these are the reasons that are most important…. Non-Naturalists like me believe, some things matter in the purely normative reason-implying sense…. What matters depends in part on the sense in which things matter. It also matters in which sense things matter, since some ways of mattering matter less. Things may matter, we can add, in more than one sense.”

Finding out what objectively matters is of utmost importance. “We could not discover how it would be best to live unless there are some truths that we might discover…. On this view, epistemic reasons are facts that count in favour of having some belief…. I believe this concept of normative reason cannot be helpfully analysed in other terms. We should expect that some concepts are too fundamental to be helpfully analysed…. We have such reasons to try to do various things that are in themselves worth doing, such as discovering truths, creating or preserving beauty, and achieving several other good and worthwhile aims.”

Parfit spends a good deal of all three volumes trying to square Kantian Deontology with both Act and Rule Consequentialism. “We should not assume Consequentialists must accept some view about well-being that is either purely hedonistic, or claims that our well-being consists only in the fulfillment of some of our desires. Consequentialists can believe that there are other ways in which our lives can go better or worse for us…. On this view, if we are morally bad and act wrongly, these facts would not merely cause our lives to go worse, but would be in themselves ways in which our lives would go worse…. The goodness of outcomes can depend in part on whether our acts are right or wrong…. We are not claiming both that the wrongness of these acts makes them bad and that their badness makes them wrong. We are claiming that the deontic badness of these wrong acts makes these people’s lives go non-deontically worse.”

Parfit believes he can square Sidgwick’s Common Sense Morality with a form of Rule and Motive Consequentialism. “I believe that things would on the whole go better if, rather than always wanting and trying to act in optimific ways, we had certain other motives and tried to follow certain other rules…. When some act would affect the well-being of very many people, these effects may make this act either morally required, or wrong, even if the effects on each person would be very small and might be imperceptible…. Imperceptible amounts of pain, and other such harms, seem to most of us to be below any plausible threshold of moral significance. If we are Rule Consequentialists, however, we deny that each of these acts is made to be wrong by this act’s effects. These acts are wrong, we believe, when and because they are condemned by optimific rules. Whether some rule is optimific depends on whether things would on the whole go better if most of us, or many of us, accepted and tried to follow this rule…. We ought to act on the principles or rules that are optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable…. We could then more justifiably believe that there are some objective irreducibly normative truths, some of which are moral truths.”

Parfit concludes, “Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may only be just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine…. If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would have given us all, including those who suffered most, reasons to glad that the Universe exists.”

“On Wanting to Change” by Adam Phillips

This collection of essays by Phillips focuses on the idea of conversion. “Conversion was once the profoundest instance of personal and cultural change.” While Phillips begins by discussing the religious, he also parses the concept in its secular contexts. “Both psychoanalysis and American Pragmatism are driven by a desire to help the individual keep things moving…. They promote — American Pragmatism far more than psychoanalysis — the strangely radical, modern political idea that how we want to change can have something to do with how we do change. Change as choice rather than fate. Change as something we make…. We are the only animals for whom radical change can be an object of desire…. What haunts all religions — and then all secular therapies — is that the wish for change may be in excess of the capacity for change.”

Phillips delves into the psychoanalysis. “Conversion, that is to say — in its psychoanalytic version — is a way of not having to change. It is the way the individual sustains the desires that sustain her…. We never change, we convert…. It was indeed the seminal observation from which psychoanalysis developed — that feelings and desires could be converted into their opposite, into apparently unrelated ideas, into physical symptoms…. Conversion, then, in its psychoanalytic sense, is a cover story…. It is a reconfiguring rather than a radical transformation. Indeed, conversion is in the service of sustaining the very thing that is supposedly being replaced.”

Phillips views conversion as opposed to education. It is a closing off of paths and possibilities. “It is, I think, integral to liberal societies to assume that education and conversion are distinct, if not actually at odds with each other…. Conversion tends to be a cure for scepticism; a narrowing of the mind that frees the mind…. Conversion is a conversation that has failed…. Conversion depends on a supposedly known outcome…. Perhaps the opposite of conversion is experiment.” 

A conversion often seeks to simplify the ambiguities raised throughout one’s life. “Conversion experiences, at their most minimal, minimise, or at least regulate, what are felt to be the essential and most paralysing contradictions of a divided self.” However, what was there before never completely goes away. “In conversion experiences there has to be something there to be converted; the new can only be made out of the old…. The key, as it were, to conversion is whatever it is in someone that resists conversion. Conversion after all may change everything by keeping everything the same…. People are also what you can’t make of them, or make them into. We are, too, the conversions we have resisted; and indeed the conversions we are tempted by.”

Conversion is the end point. “Conversion proposes the kind of change that makes other or future forms of change unthinkable. It is the kind of change that renders all future change redundant…. Conversion experiences must, by definition, dispel scepticism. Ultimately it is doubt that has to be converted.” The tension of conversion is the tension of living within civilization. “The Freudian individual is a convert: converted by acculturation to acculturation: converted both to civilization and to being one of its discontents.” The struggle is life. “It has been difficult for us to find pleasures that are sufficiently sustaining; pleasures that convince us, so to speak, that our lives are worth the suffering.”

“Phaedrus” by Plato (translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff)

This dialogue begins with a discourse on love, with Phaedrus recounting a speech by Lysias about love’s defects, then Socrates responding with a speech of his own. The dialogue then moves to a discussion on the merits and truths of oratory and writing, in general, before concluding. As Phaedrus recounts, “Lysias argues that it is better to give your favors to someone who does not love you than to someone who does.” Socrates’ speech meanders before getting to the theme of love. First he suggests, “each of us is ruled by two principles which we follow wherever they lead: one is our inborn desire for pleasures, the other is our acquired judgement that pursues what is best…. Now when judgement is in control and leads us by reasoning toward what is best, that sort of self-control is called ‘being in your right mind’; but when desire takes command in us and drags us without reasoning toward pleasure, then its command is known as ‘outrageousness’.” Socrates then goes on to define love, specifically, “the unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, its force reinforced by its kindred desires for beauty in human bodies—this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the words for force (rhome) and is called eros.” Socrates goes on to describe the blinding nature of being in love, “it [the soul] forgets mother and brothers and friends entirely and doesn’t care at all if it loses its wealth through neglect. And as for proper and decorous behavior, in which it used to take pride, the soul despises the whole business. Why, it is even willing to sleep like a slave, anywhere, as near to the object of its longing as it is allowed to get! That is because in addition to its reverence for one who has such beauty, the soul has discovered that the boy is the only doctor for all that terrible pain. This is the experience we humans call love.” However, Socrates points out that madness is sometimes beneficial to the soul, but only when provided by the gods. “In fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god…. If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.” It is left as questionable if madness is too high a price for the soul to pay, whether in poetry or in love.

Phaedrus and Socrates shift gears towards the end of their dialogue and begin to discuss the merits of rhetoric. Socrates responds that rhetoric is useless and empty without a firm basis in philosophy. “The reason they [orators] cannot define rhetoric is that they are ignorant of dialectic. It is their ignorance that makes them think they have discovered what rhetoric is when they have mastered only what it is necessary to learn as preliminaries…. We need to determine the nature of something—of the body in medicine, of the soul in rhetoric. Otherwise, all we’ll have will be an empirical and artless practice.” Socrates goes on to emphasize that true knowledge cannot be written down in permanence. First, Socrates channels the spirit of Ammon-Ra speaking to Thoth, the inventor and god of writing, “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention [of writing] will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” Then Socrates, in his own voice, goes on to state that written philosophy cannot truly teach those who are still ignorant. “Those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant…. Otherwise, how could they possibly think that words written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?” Plato, through Socrates, seems to be warning us to take his own dialogues with a grain of salt. Are his own writings, as well, only valuable to those with a previous understanding of their obscure truths? Socrates does seem to caution about the spreading of philosophy to the uninitiated, only through the written word. “When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.” Socrates ends this dialogue by recapping the basic foundations one needs to first master, before being able to speak wisely. “First, you must know the truth concerning everything you are speaking or writing about; you must learn how to define each thing in itself; and, having defined it, you must know how to divide it into kinds until you reach something indivisible. Second, you must understand the nature of the soul, along the same lines; you must determine which kind of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul, prepare and arrange your speech accordingly, and offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one. Then, and only then, will you be able to use speech artfully, to the extent that its nature allows it to be used that way, either in order to teach or in order to persuade.”

“New Science” by Giambattista Vico (translated by David March)

This is a dense tome, often filled with digressions and repetition. It is well worth the read, however. Some scholars regard it as the first book methodologically dealing with cultural studies and sociology. Vico believed in cultural pluralism and that one needed to be fully immersed within a society, its time and place, in order to be able to comprehend its history. “For when nations first became aware of their origins, and scholars first studied them, they judged them according to the enlightenment, refinement, and magnificence of their age, when in fact by their very nature these origins must rather have been small, crude, and obscure…. [Scholars are] incapable of entering into the vast imaginative powers of the earliest people. Their minds were in no way abstract, refined, or intellectualized; rather, they were completely sunk in their senses, numbed by their passions, and buried in their bodies.” Unique geographical circumstances were just as important as age in molding different cultures. “Different climates clearly produce peoples with different natures and different customs, and these in turn produce different languages. Nations with different natures view what is necessary and useful to human life under different aspects. This produces different and even opposite customs.”

In this book, Vico tries nothing less than to dissect the progression of western civilization. But he also puts forth the theme of recurring cycles of history. “At first, people desire to throw off oppression and seek equality: witness the plebeians living in aristocracies, which eventually become democracies. Next, they strive to surpass their peers: witness the plebeians in democracies which are corrupted and become oligarchies. Finally, they seek to place themselves above the laws: witness the anarchy of uncontrolled democracies. These are in fact the worst form of tyranny, since there are as many tyrants as there are bold and dissolute persons in the cities. At this point, the plebeians become aware of their ills and as a remedy seek to save themselves under a monarchy.”

The book’s third edition was published in 1744. Much of the minutia in the book has been disproven and is out of date. But Vico’s general pronouncements for the patterns of society still ring true. Vico covers history, culture, mythology, philosophy, philology, etymology, archaeology, and more. “My New Science is a history of human ideas, which forms the basis for constructing a metaphysics of the human mind…. Metaphysics began when the first men began to think in human fashion, and not when philosophers began to reflect on human ideas.” This is a religious work that seeks to explain pagan origins and history with care and respect for the truth.

Vico begins by discussing the ancients use of poetry, myth, and archetypes. “The first peoples of pagan antiquity were, by a demonstrable necessity of their nature, poets who spoke by means of poetic symbols…. Their symbols were certain imaginative general categories, or archetypes…. We find, then, that the divine and heroic symbols were true myths, or true mythical speech…. These archetypes—which is what myths are in essence—were created by people endowed with vigorous imaginations but feeble powers of reasoning. So they prove to be true poetic statements, which are feelings clothed in powerful passions, and thus filled with sublimity and arousing wonder.” Vico later expounds on myth, “These myths are ideal truths, since they truly conform to the merit of the figures they celebrate. And if they are sometimes false in fact, it is only to the extent that they inadequately recognize such merit. Indeed, if we consider the question carefully, poetic truth is metaphysical truth; and any physical truth which does not conform to it must be judged false.”

Vico lays down a series of axioms, which expound his central thesis. “If philosophy is to benefit humankind, it must raise and support us as frail and fallen beings, rather than strip us of our nature or abandon us in our corruption…. The Stoics…. tell us to mortify our senses; and the Epicureans…. make them the rule of life. Both of them deny providence. The Stoics let themselves be dragged by fate; whereas the Epicureans abandon themselves to chance…. By contrast, this axiom admits to our school the political philosophers, especially the Platonists. For they agree with all legislators on three principle points: that divine providence exists, that human emotions should be moderated to become human virtues, and that human souls are immortal. This axiom thus offers us the three central principles of my New Science: providence, marriage, and burial…. Philosophy considers people as they should be…. Legislation considers people as they really are, in order to direct them to good purposes in society. Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which plague the entire human race, it creates armies, trade, and courts, which form might, affluence, and wisdom of commonwealths. Thus, from three great vices, which otherwise would certainly destroy all the people of the earth, legislation creates civil happiness.”

Vico reveals how poetry must have preceded philosophy. “Imagination is simply expanded or compounded memory… the vividness of the poetic images which the world must have formed in its early childhood…. All the arts serving human need, advantage, comfort, and, to a great extent, even pleasure were invented in the poetic centuries, before philosophers appeared. For the arts are simply imitations of nature and are, in a certain sense, concrete poetry…. People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind.” Vico feels that poetry expressed for the masses what philosophy was later able to codify for the elite. “Everything that the poets sensed in their popular wisdom was later understood by the philosophers in their esoteric wisdom. We may say, then, that the poets were the sense of mankind, and the philosophers its intellect.” In Greek, poet means creator. Vico asserts that Greek poets had three tasks: “(1) to invent sublime myths which are suited to the popular understanding; (2) to excite to ecstasy so that poetry attains its purpose; and this purpose is (3) to teach the masses to act virtuously, just as the poets have taught themselves.”

Vico also returns to the cultural specificity in early poems and myth. “Languages are more beautiful as they are richer in condensed heroic figures of speech. They are more beautiful as they are vivid; and they are more vivid as they are truer and more faithful to their origins…. Human nature determined the creation of poetic style before prose style, just as human nature determined the creation of mythical and imaginative universals before rational and philosophical universals, which were the product of discourse in prose…. Poetic sublimity always contains popular elements…. By the very nature of poetry, it is impossible for anyone to be both a sublime poet and a sublime metaphysician. For metaphysics draws the mind away from the senses, while the poetic faculty sinks the whole mind into them. Metaphysics rises above universals, while the poetic faculty plunges deep into particulars.”

Vico also relates poetry with history. “History was born first, and poetry later. For history is a direct expression of the truth, while poetry is an imitation of the truth…. Poetic archetypes which are the essence of myths, were created by primitive people because their nature was incapable of abstracting forms and properties. As a result, they represent the manner of thinking of entire peoples as expressed within the natural limits of their barbarism…. Aristotle observes that people with limited ideas generalize particulars into maxims…. All ancient secular histories have their origin in myth…. The earliest Roman history was written by poets.”

Vico then stresses that all the Homeric myths contain archetypes. “Myths which had originally been direct and proper reached Homer in a corrupt and indecorous form…. The Greeks assigned to Achilles, who is the principal subject of the Iliad, all the qualities of heroic virtue, and all the emotions and behaviour which spring from these qualities. (Describing Achilles, Horace summarizes these qualities as a quick temper, fastidiousness, irascibility, implacability, violence, and the judging of right by might.) And the Greeks assigned to Ulysses, the principal subject of the Odyssey, all the properties of heroic wisdom, namely, caution, patience, dissimulation, duplicity, deception, and a combination of regard for words with an indifference to deeds which leads others into error and self-deception. Thus, the Greeks assigned to both archetypes the deeds appropriate to each particular hero.”

Much of this book contains Vico’s interpretations of pagan myths, digging for what they reveal about the origins of civil society and the creation of nation states. One particularly illuminating passage is where Vico discusses the aristocratic nature of the Greek goddess Athena, whom the Romans later named Minerva. “Two passages in Homer prove that Minerva signified the armed aristocratic orders. (1) In the contest of the gods, Minerva hurls a stone and wounds Mars, who is an archetype of the plebeians who serve the heroes in war. (2) Later, she seeks to conspire against Jupiter. This is typically aristocratic behaviour, since in aristocracies lords often plan in secret to eliminate rulers who aspire to tyranny. It is only in aristocratic ages that we read of statues erected to tyrannicides, who would would have been thought traitors, if they had lived under monarchies.” Vico does this time and again: a deep read into myth to come up with his own unique interpretation. He pulls out the esoteric truth obscured by years of story layered on top.

A second example of Vico’s textual analysis: “Corsair raids were symbolized by bulls: witness Jupiter abducting Europa, and the Minotaur or bull of Minos abducting youths and maidens from the coast of Attica. (By the same token, sails came to be called ‘the horns of ships’, an expression used by Virgil.)… Theseus must be an archetype of the Athenian youths who, under the law of force practiced on them by Minos, are devoured by his Minotaur, the bull symbolizing the pirate ship. And Ariadne, who represents the art of seafaring, teaches Theseus to use the thread of navigation to escape from the labyrinth of Daedalus. For although labyrinths later became elegant playgrounds in royal villas, the first labyrinth represented the Aegean Sea as it winds among many islands.”

Later Vico goes on to suggest that the historic Homer was not a single man, but that the true Homer was, in fact, all of Greek antiquity itself. “No placid, refined, or meek philosopher could have naturally produced Homer’s statements, similes, and descriptions…. Homer was an idea or heroic archetype of the Greeks who recounted their history in song…. In this sense, Homer composed the Iliad in his youth, when Greece was young and therefore burning with sublime passions, like pride, anger, and thirst for revenge…. In turn, Homer wrote the Odyssey in old age, when the spirits of Greece had been somewhat cooled by reflection, which is the mother of prudence. This older Greece admired Ulysses, the hero of wisdom. In the time of Homer’s youth, the peoples of Greece took pleasure in coarseness, boorishness, ferocity, savagery, and atrocity. In the time of his old age, they delighted in the luxuries of Alcinous, the sensuality of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the Sirens, and the recreations of the suitors, and their attempts (or rather, their siege and assaults) on Penelope’s chastity…. Homer of the Iliad was from northeastern Greece, since he sang the Trojan War as fought in his country. And the Homer of the Odyssey was from southwestern Greece, since he sang of Ulysses, whose kingdom was in that region.”

Vico finally returns to his attempt to depict the natural course of nations. Vico believed that the natural progression of society was from aristocracy, to democracy, and, finally, to monarchy. He begins by detailing the stages of human nature. “The first human nature was a poetic or creative nature produced by the powerful illusions of the imagination, which is most vigorous in peoples whose powers of reasoning are weakest…. First, religion is the only means powerful enough to restrain the savagery of entire peoples. Second, religions prosper when they are deeply revered by the religious leaders themselves…. The second human nature was a heroic nature, based on the heroes’ belief in their own divine origin…. Although they were born human, they justly thought that their heroic status gave them a natural nobility which made them rulers of the human race…. The third nature was the truly human or civilized nature, which is intelligent, and hence moderate, benign, and reasonable. This nature is guided by the laws of conscience, reason, and duty.” Vico goes on by explicating the natural law of nations. He states that all historians ought to recognize the “eternal and natural ‘royal law’, by which the free power of a state, because it is free, must be realized. As the nobles cede power, the people acquire it, and so become free; and as free people cede power, kings acquire it, and so become monarchs. Hence, just as the natural law of philosophers and moral theologians is a law of reason, so the natural law of nations is a law of self-interest and force…. Since both democracies and monarchies are human governments they are readily interchangeable; but our civil nature makes a reversion to aristocracy nearly impossible… for once the plebeians perceive that they are equal in nature with the nobles, they naturally cannot tolerate inequality in civil law, especially when they can obtain equality in democracies or monarchies.” Vico critiques the end of democracy in Rome. “When democracy grew corrupt, so did philosophy, which sank into skepticism. Learned fools took to maligning the truth. And false eloquence arose, prepared to argue opposite sides of a cause with equal force. People now misused eloquence, as did the plebeian tribunes at Rome. And the citizens, being no longer content with wealth as a source of order, resolved to use it as a source of power.”

Vico ends by presciently speculating on a degenerating demos in general. “But if people are rotting in this fatal civil malady, and can neither accept a native monarch, nor tolerate the conquest and protection of a superior nation, then providence may administer an extreme remedy to their extreme illness. Like beasts, such people are accustomed to think of nothing but their own personal advantage, and in their extreme fastidiousness, or rather pride, they are filled with bestial rage and resentment at the least provocation. Although their bodies are densely crowded together, they live like monstrous beasts in the utter solitude of their private wills and desires. Not even two of them can agree, because each pursues his own pleasure and caprice…. Decadent peoples practice ignoble savagery, and use flattery and embraces to plot against the life and fortunes of their intimates and friends…. If peoples lose their religion, nothing remains to keep them living in society. They have no shield for their defence, no basis for their decisions, no foundation for their stability, and no form by which to exist in the world…. Unless one is pious, one cannot be truly wise.”

“The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Graeber was an anarchist and anthropologist, who just passed away, and Wengrow is an archaeologist. They combined to write this big book that seeks to overturn much of the commonly assumed narrative of humanity’s progress through the ages. Graeber and Wengrow make a convincing case against the Whig theory of linear history. “Most people who write history on a grand scale seem to have decided that, as a species, we are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves.” Instead, Graeber and Wengrow argue that humanity’s evolution was full of contingency and active choices made at individual points of time by actual humans, not a preordained path through successive stages of development. “There is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian — or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents, or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even laws of history.”

Graeber and Wengrow first deal with the history of inequality. “‘The origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve…. The terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World…. What we’re going to suggest is that American intellectuals — we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas — actually played a role in this conceptual revolution.”

Graeber and Wengrow begin way back. “What the existence of similar patterns in the Paleolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities…. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.” Graeber and Wengrow suggest that social groups, throughout prehistory, consciously divided their politics, often as seasonal changes demanded and, often, with checks and balances and/or polycentric spheres of order to regulate and curb grabs for power. Some “had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced political systems’ could never possibly emerge.”

Graeber and Wengrow give agency to the prehistoric humans who made active choices about how to organize their own social lives. “One important factor would seem to be the gradual division of human societies into what are sometimes referred to as ‘culture areas’; that is, the process by which neighboring groups began defining themselves against each other and, typically, exaggerating their differences. Identity came to be seen as a value in itself, setting in motion processes of cultural schismogenesis…. It is among such Mesolithic populations that we often find not just the multiplication of distinct culture areas, but also the first clear archaeological indications of communities divided into permanent ranks, sometimes accompanied by interpersonal violence, even warfare. In some cases, this may have already meant the stratification of households into aristocrats, commoners and slaves…. [But] periods of intense inter-group violence alternate with periods of peace, often lasting centuries, in which there is little or no evidence for destructive conflict of any kind. War did not become a constant of human life after the adoption of farming; indeed long periods of time exist in which it appears to have been successfully abolished. Yet, it had a stubborn tendency to reappear, if only many generations later.” Graeber and Wengrow describe an alternative that was also lived by some prehistoric peoples for centuries. “The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors.”

Graeber and Wengrow insist that it is also important to realize what actual hunter-forager societies were not. They were not filled with Rousseau’s noble savage, living in a state of paradise, free from want. “Since there was no Eden-like state from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of social rank, inequality or private property.” Graeber and Wengrow, again and again, hammer the empirical case for diversity and experimentation among the plethora of populations spanning the globe.

Currently, there are huge gaps in our early history as a species. In “northern Syria, the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC. Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC — that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken…. We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation.”

Graeber and Wengrow cite play both as a discovery tool and as a keeper of knowledge. “For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems.” Social realities, for much of prehistory, were fluid. Graeber and Wengrow suggest that the first urban zones could have shrunken from more remote cultural commonalities. “We are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities — but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.” Graeber and Wengrow make the case that some kind of authority was often first established using some combination of styles of power. “Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma.” The control of violence, the control and dissemination of information, and individual personality are used as bases for political power grabs. “Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together.” There was nothing magical or necessary about the formation of the State. “Cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power…. If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.”

What might have finally brought about the need to domesticate crops on a massive scale? When did the masses stop simply laughing and walking away from their leaders? Graeber and Wengrow have a guess, “Do ancestors get hungry? And if so, what do they eat? For whatever reasons, the answer that gained traction across the Nile valley around 3500 BC was that ancestors do indeed get hungry, and what they required was something which, at that time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious form of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages. It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming — though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile — was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead…. It was not ecological circumstances but the social requirement to provide bread and beer on ceremonial occasions that allowed such divisions to become entrenched. This was not just a matter of access to sufficient quantities of arable land, but also the means to maintain ploughs and oxen — another introduction of the late fourth millennium BC.”

Graeber and Wengrow insist that the path of human history was contingent, not preordained. We, as a species, made choices and we can do so again. “What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken? After all, those things really did exist…. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating those scales; to reminding us that people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia.”