“The Glance of Medusa: The Physiognomy of Mysticism” by Laszlo Foldenyi (translated by Jozefina Komporaly)

This book is a collection of Foldenyi’s essays on the common themes of transcendence, godliness, metaphysics, and myth. He introduces his own writings by quoting Heinrich von Kleist, “We would have to eat once more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence…. That is the final chapter in the history of the world.” Then Heidegger, “Ever since being got interpreted as Idea, thinking about the being of beings has been metaphysical, and metaphysics has been theological.” Foldenyi, himself, continues, “Traditional metaphysics is underpinned by a belief in a supposedly final and positive meaning, which meaning, by virtue of its very nature, also differentiates itself from everything that it invests with meaning. This traditional understanding of meaning, the abyss between Being and Be-ing, entices us with the prospect of a new world that, although available to all, can only be accessed if one renounces everything there is, and abandons what appears to be without meaning…. In lieu of an earthly, and hence fractured, Self-image, metaphysical thinking is fascinated by a solid and definitive, hence divine, Self-image…. Individuality is the endless reflection of mirrors reflecting one another, while, above all, actually reflecting the divine…. Human beings are doomed to metaphysics owing to their awareness of their own mortality.”

Foldenyi’s first essay is titled “Divine Experience and Divine Faith (Where the Bars of the Cross Intersect).” It begins with an epigraph from Nietzsche, “You go your own way of greatness; here no one shall sneak along after you! Your foot itself erased the path behind you, and above it stands written: impossibility.” Foldenyi begins by explaining mysticism, “The ‘personal encounter with God,’ known as the key characteristic of mysticism, is the seemingly moderate expression to convey the experience of mystics who have simultaneously lived a given moment (the moment of ‘conversion’) as deprivation and excessive fulfillment.” Heidegger asks, “Why are there beings at all, and why not nothing?” Foldenyi continues, “In the course of divine experience, what cannot be experienced becomes the subject of experience—excess appears within the parameters of moderation—while divine faith separates knowledge and experience, and differentiates moderation from excess…. Divine experience is intense, heated, momentary, and it makes no allowance for past or future, since it makes no allowance for time either…. Divine experience is incompatible with moderation…. In moments such as divine experience, when the individual breaks away from community and is all alone facing the incomprehensible, on the one hand, there are countless things to say, and, on the other, the mouth can barely utter anything.”

Many of Foldenyi’s other essays discuss juxtaposition and paradox. He is interested in the moment and the supremely personal. Foldenyi propounds, “Every live face conceals a mask—the mask of the impossible—into which existence as a whole is compressed, so that one can confront something that does not exist and yet is capable of subverting everything.” In another essay, he, again, discusses the concept of moderation, “The human being, by virtue of its sheer existence, is at the mercy of moderation, the limit and the world of order…. In moments of disruption, it becomes apparent that moderation is a prison, and, as its tenant, one is the prisoner of those who surpass existence altogether: Dike and Ananke; in other words, limitlessness and excess. Thus, one has to become limitless and immoderate in order to assess the totality of one’s own existence.” He quotes Heraclitus, “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way; so deep is its Law (Logos).”

In another essay, titled “The Impossible,” Foldenyi begins by quoting Plato’s uncle, Critias, “Nothing is certain, except that having been born we die, and that in life one cannot avoid disaster.” Foldenyi expands, “One experiences oneself as a banished God and, as a result, finds oneself bedazzled and tends to perceive life as a giant wound…. In unsettling moments, when one is touched by chaos and, having transcended everything, perceives oneself as the divine centre, it rightly feels that one has also become a victim of discord.” This is related to the concepts of Otherness and alienation. “In sacred moments, one gets to one’s inner self via the roundabout way of Otherness, initially moving away from oneself. Hence the expression ‘losing oneself’, since in such situations one is alienated from everything, including oneself…. Every historical period has encountered this alienation of the world from itself…. Relevant in this respect are the Gnostics, who interpreted alienation as a synonym for the so-called trans- or hypercosmic, and experienced an unsurmountable abyss between earthly existence and the alien and unknowable God in charge of this existence.” Getting back to Otherness, “The ‘Other’ is the expression of the impossibility that everything there is, mankind included, owes its origin to something that is not identical with itself. Every existence is charged with its own absence; in everything that there is, something Other is also inherently nestled…. Through existence, one is the depository of a ‘Being’ that guarantees all existence; at the same time, as an individual condemned to decay, one also has to endure the impossibility of this ‘Being’. The impossible, therefore, is not a noun, and is no equivalent to God, as proposed by theologians, or to Being, as perceived by ontologists…. The very usage of the word is misleading, since we are dealing with something that should not in fact be called impossible; a hyphen (-), free-standing brackets ( ) or three dots (…) would better illustrate this concept than words.” Foldenyi concludes by relating this explicitly back to the impossible, “One of the main aims of the European tradition starting with Plato and culminating with Christianity was to equip the individual to handle the temptation of the impossible…. Ideology teaches about the idea, or, to put it differently, about the sensorially visible…. By seeking an explanation for everything, ideologists find themselves attempting to leave aside the impossible, this defining characteristic of existence.” Friedrich Schleiermacher posits, “The more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stand forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite in you.”

Foldenyi concludes, in his essay “The Power of Now,” by riffing, once again, on the essence of life and its momentariness. “What could human life entail if not a unique moment in which the impossible ruptures and something becomes possible? This moment between birth and death is like lightning; a luminous source that suddenly shoots off into the body of darkness. It surpasses everything while it lasts, appears indestructible and timeless, and is destroyer and creator of time. And then it disappears, just as suddenly as it came about, annihilated by the same immeasurability that led to its birth…. While endowed with the gift of life, the individual also feels short-changed, a feeling for which mortality is the most eloquent proof.” We are all out there in this world, but all on our own for this ever-brief moment of time. “In extraordinary moments, it becomes obvious that there is no society to alleviate the burden of the fleetingness of human existence, and that one cannot rely on other in the end.”

“The Marginal Revolutionaries” by Janek Wasserman

This is a history of the Austrian School of economics, starting with Carl Menger and running through the non-Austrian Austrians, such as Israel Kirzner and Murray Rothbard. As such, it details the milieu of fin-de-siecle Vienna, as well as the mass emigration of economists from Austria in the 1930s, as fascism encroached. As a school, Austrian economics focuses on methodological individualism, subjective value, capital and the role of time in that process, uncertainty and the role of the entrepreneur, and, of course, marginal utility. Along with Walras and Jevons, in 1862, Menger rediscovered the marginal utility of value in contradistinction to the prevailing labor theory of value of the day. He explained, “Hence the value to this person of any portion of the whole available quantity of the good is equal to the importance to him of the satisfactions of least importance among those assured by the whole quantity and achieved with an equal portion.” His student Friedrich Wieser would simplify, “Simply put, the value of an individual unit [of a good] is determined by the least valuable of the economically permitted uses of that unit.”

Another student of Menger’s, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk added the role of time preference, particularly in reference to capital structure and roundabout methods of production. Bohm explained, “That roundabout methods lead to greater results than direct methods is one of the most important and fundamental propositions in the whole theory of production.” In doing so, he posited a reason for a natural rate of interest and the value of present money over future claims on money.  Wasserman also explains that Bohm was one of the first economists to give a prime role in the economy to the entrepreneur. “He defined the entrepreneur sociologically as the class of individuals engaged in speculative ventures. They earned their wealth not through the exploitation of labor or land but through their far-sighted commitment to the production of goods. Their dedication to roundabout production methods for future gain distinguished them from other market participants.”

Ludwig von Mises’ approach to all economics could be boiled down to just one a priori principle, the action axiom: all human action is rational and a purposeful consideration of means and ends. He wrote, “Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another.” This was his theory of praxeology, human action. “Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori.” The writer Edward Dolan summarized, “The Austrian method, simply put, is to spin out by verbal deductive reasoning the logical implications of a few fundamental axioms. First among the axioms is the fact of purposeful human action.”

One of Mises’ greatest contributions to business cycle theory was the non-neutral role of the money supply and inflation. Depending on where in the economy the new money was injected, it distorted relative prices, while not adding overall value. Money injection created artificially low interest rates, which precipitated boom and bust cycles, as entrepreneurs were mistakenly signaled into starting capital projects that the natural Wicksellian rate would not have warranted. Mises explained, “The moment must eventually come when no further extension of the circulation of fiduciary media is possible. Then the catastrophe occurs, and its consequences are the worse and the reaction against the bull tendency of the market the stronger, the longer the period during which the rate of interest on loans has been low below the natural rate of interest and the greater the extent to which roundabout processes of production that are not justified by the state of the capital market have been adopted.” Mises was also the Austrian School’s most vociferous critic of socialism. “Once society abandons free pricing of production goods rational production becomes impossible. Every step that leads away from private ownership of the means of production and the use of money is a step away from rational economic activity.”

Friedrich von Hayek stressed the impossibility of calculation in a socialist economy. Calculation of the value of goods is impossible without relative market prices. It is also impossible under socialism because individuals’ subjective values are constantly shifting. There is no objective data of value to compile. The division of knowledge, both technical and of subjective value, is dispersed throughout all of society. In a market economy, Hayek stated, “The spontaneous interaction of a number of people, each possessing only bits of knowledge, brings about a state of affairs in which prices correspond to costs.”

The modern Austrian School of economics is often conflated with the libertarian political persuasion. However, Austrian economists qua economists wanted to keep economics a value-free science. Israel Kirzner explains, “It is quite true that for many in the U.S. the term “Austrian economics” is synonymous with laissez-faire. And I suppose it happens to be true the Austrian economists are generally “in favor of” the free market. But it can, I believe, be maintained (at least I hope so) that Austrian economics by itself does not embody those judgments of value without which, I believe, a case for non-intervention cannot be built.”

“Stubborn Attachments” by Tyler Cowen

This is a book of moral philosophy, with an emphasis on political (or at least communal) issues. It is a treatise about values and what humanity, as a whole, needs to care about. As such, it is a forward looking book. Its aim is to influence humanity’s future. Cowen suggests, “there exists an objective right and an objective wrong. Relativism is a nonstarter.” However, while clearly not a moral relativist, he is a moral pluralist, perhaps in the traditions of Isaiah Berlin, Alexander Herzen, and Giambattista Vico. Cowen affirms, “I hold pluralism as a core moral intuition…. Pluralist theories are more plausible, postulating a variety of relevant values.” He states his philosophical starting points as “1. “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. 2. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. 3. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.”

Cowen’s theme, throughout this book, is that sustained economic growth should be an over-arching policy rule, except in extreme rights-based exceptions. He asks to “look for social processes which are ongoing, self-sustaining, and which create rising value over time.” His term “Wealth Plus” refers to basic measured GDP, plus values such as leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities. Cowen comes around to three major questions- “1. What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth? 2. What can we do to make our civilization more stable? 3. How should we deal with environmental problems?”

The simple reason that sustained economic growth is so important is that the mechanism of compounding is so powerful in adding to the betterment of all lives in society over time. “At a growth rate of ten percent per annum, as has been common in China, real per capita income doubles about once every seven years. At a much lower growth rate of one percent, such an improvement takes about sixty-nine years.” The growth of wealth, an end in itself, is also a means to other ends. “The more rapidly growing economy will, at some point, bring about much higher levels of human well-being—and other plural values—on a consistent basis…. If the gains to the future are significant and ongoing, those gains should eventually outweigh one-time costs by a significant degree, and they will likely carry along other plural values as well.” These gains might come in fits and starts, but, with a long enough time horizon, they can be assured and they will be massive. “When a higher rate of economic growth is at stake, the relevant comparisons become quite obvious after the passage of enough time…. At some point these cumulative benefits will be sufficiently robust to outweigh particular instances of irrational or misguided preferences.”

This rule favoring sustained economic growth should be tempered by human rights. “Rights—if we are going to believe in them at all—have to be tough and pretty close to absolute in importance if they are to survive as relevant to our comparisons.” There are some things that we just should never do, even in the name of higher growth. Rights, therefore, should be negative, not positive in nature. “Numerous violations of the rule or law may seem harmless enough, but enough of them can be dire once we consider the longer-run expectation and incentive effects.”

Cowen claims that we, in the present, do not value humanity in the distant future enough. With Derek Parfit, he wrote, “Why should costs and benefits receive less weight, simply because they are further in the future? When the future comes, these benefits and costs will be no less real.” The future cannot influence today’s decision makers and, therefore, is neglected. “When it comes to non-tradable and storable assets, markets do not reflect the preferences of currently unborn individuals…. Future generations cannot contract in today’s markets.” Time preference and discounting should be greatly reduced. The temporal distance of a human should be viewed with the same moral regard as the spatial distance of a human. However, “discounting for risk is justified in a way that discounting for the pure passage of time is not. If a future benefit is uncertain, we should discount that benefit accordingly because it may not arrive.”

Cowen makes the case that the further we look out into the time horizon the less wealth redistribution makes sense. “The case for redistribution would be stronger if the world were going to end in the near future. If the time horizon is extremely short, the benefits of continued higher growth will be choked off and the scope for compounding over time would be correspondingly limited…. A high degree of redistribution also makes sense in a lot of “lifeboat” settings…. [where] these examples typically involve an implicit assumption of a zero or negative rate of return on investment.” No one plans for the next generation’s wealth when drifting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To this end, Cowen feels, “the attitude of historical pessimism is therefore one of the most important critiques of my arguments. If historical pessimism holds true…. expected rates of return are negative.” Finally, Cowen compares the Solow model of growth with the increasing returns model. “Under the increasing returns model, a one-time negative shock harms the long-run rate of growth, which implies that we must take great care to avoid or limit each and every possible negative shock. The Solow model suggests a picture of greater resilience, since catch-up effects prevent each and every mistake from compounding over time…. Individuals who believe in the increasing returns model should be much more skeptical of non-growth enhancing redistribution than individuals who believe in the Solow catch-up model…. The key question is whether gains and losses compound over time or dwindle into longer-run insignificance.”

Cowen ends by addressing the uncertainty humanity faces as it confronts its more distant future. “We don’t know whether our actions today will in fact give rise to a better future…. The effects of our current actions are very hard to predict…. The epistemic critique suggests that the philosophic doctrine of consequentialism cannot be a useful guide to action because we hardly know anything about long-run consequences.” Therefore, “consequentialism is strongest when we pursue values that are high in absolute importance.” Cowen suggests this utmost value should be a very strong intuition towards sustainable growth. “Anything we try to do is floating in a sea of long-run radical uncertainty, so to speak. Only big, important upfront goals will, in reflective equilibrium, stand above the ever-present froth and allow the comparison to be more than a very rough one. Putting too many small goals at stake simply means that our moral intuitions will end up confused…. Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time horizons. Our attachment to particular means should therefore be highly tentative, highly uncertain, and radically contingent…. Our attitudes to others should therefore be accordingly tolerant…. There are many such opposing views, so even if yours is the best, you’re probably still wrong.”

“Effingers” by Gabriele Tergit (translated by Sophie Duvernoy)

This is an epic novel that spans four generations of a few branches of two Jewish families in Germany, intertwined by blood and marriage. The story begins in 1883 and continues to the tragic end of World Dar II. The Effinger pater familias is a watchmaker in Kragsheim in Bavaria. He marries his daughters off in the nearby countryside, but his sons leave to seek their fortunes on the road, in London, and in Berlin. Two marry sisters and into a family of wealthy Berlin bankers, the Oppners,  while setting up a manufacturing factory on the outskirts of the city, starting with screws and eventually producing cars, as the years go by. While two of the brothers from Berlin, Ludwig and Emmanuel work at a private bank, the third, Waldemar is a practicing lawyer, barred from a professorship because of his faith. A liberal, he has lost his religion, except culturally. “Instead of religion, we now have the laws of nature, which promise ever-greater happiness. Science is our religion. What you call eternal life, we call the permanence of matter…. Fear of God, and the belief that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the third and fourth generations, breed false morality, rather than an honest consideration of right and wrong. True morality can only come from true freedom.”

Emmanuel’s son, Theodor, like many of his generation and class, was a dilettante and aesthete, who preferred to gaze at art than be tutored at the family bank. “Theodor, who was seventeen and an apprentice at his father's firm, was in the process of tying his tie. He found their home life deeply distasteful. He was disgusted by these businessmen, their silly pastimes, their childish games, their idle tinkling on the piano, their dreadful hypocrisy in a time in which the struggle for existence was paramount, and the evolution of the species was the great philosophical topic of the era.”

Waldemar, urged on by his more liberal colleagues, is tempted to convert for his career, but quickly dismisses the notion. “I could imagine accepting baptism because I take the view that Christianity represents the evolution of the ancient religion of the Prophets into a milder, gentler ethics, centuries later. But the moment baptism confers material benefits, these considerations become irrelevant. It is morally repugnant that an act that should spring from one's deepest personal conviction can lead to professional advancement. They've put a premium on men who lack principles.”

The two Effinger sons, married into the Opener banking clan, could not be more different in disposition. “Karl probably wasn't saving a penny. Paul considered this a moral failing. Karl and Annette frivolously ignored the Effingers' age-old principle of saving money. The Effingers had always prayed, worked, and saved as much as possible for old age, hard times, and their children. But these people no longer believed in hard times. Paul felt this whole business went against everything his ancestors had taught him.” Theodor, now stuck in a loveless marriage but still consumed with art, reconsiders his life’s path, as well. “Here we are, the tired children of this fading century. We try to be good sons to our strong fathers, to lead their factories and banks and affairs of state. I'm only a subject, but even the man on the throne, the Kaiser, twirls his mustache, raises his baton, and thunders at the world, yet he secretly listens to refined, decadent counts who compose sweet songs. Hasn't a bohemian succeeded the bourgeois queen in England? I wanted to be healthy, productive, good, and strong. But what has that led to? All our efforts are futile; we've done the wrong thing. I will need to wear a mask—perhaps many. "We all must act; those who know it are wise." I will be good to Beatrice, that stupid, frigid child, and keep up appearances, buy paintings and be a good subject to the Kaiser.”

As nationalism, fascism, and socialism are on the rise worldwide, the true classical liberal is having hard time making it in the world. Nonetheless, Waldemar stays true to his beliefs and tries to caution the youth of his family. He cautions his grand-nephew, Erwin, “For half a century, we believed in Darwinism, that man is a product of his environment, in human progress. The world is now taking a disastrous turn toward pessimism. It now believes in the completely opaque concept of race, which is common currency among Pan-Slavists and Nietzschean blond beasts alike. It believes in the inevitable impoverishment of the masses through capitalist greed. We believed that fundamental ethical concepts were not up for discussion. But people have abandoned the desire for truth—they value self-interest and power instead. The will to power has led man beyond good and evil. Every worldview now considers itself infallible. And Zionism doesn't resist this new evil, and instead uses every argument of this dreadful new time for its own purposes. It's fighting on a false front. From the point of view of blood and extreme nationalism, antisemitism is justified.”

Waldemar gives words of wisdom to his grand-niece, Marianne, a socialist, as well, “Intellectuals are always unwanted. They must work to make themselves heard. But if you prefer to live in an ivory tower rather than be a speaker, a teacher, or a revolutionary, don't be surprised when the fools or the masses come to tear it down without knowing what they should build instead…. Socialism is only a better form of bureaucracy. It began as a religion, but now it's turned into social welfare. People can get excited about religion, but welfare? It's just collecting coupons, nothing more. Religion has moved on to communism.”

By 1933, Marianne has given up the socialist cause in the face of Hitler, turning, instead, to Zionism. Waldemar again cautions, while reminding her of her true Jewish and German heritage, “Where is our enthusiasm for equality, the same equality our ancestors upheld in ancient times, despite their hardship? We may be powerless, but we carry the knowledge of the injustice we have endured throughout history. This knowledge has ennobled our people for centuries and given it the unparalleled power of passive resistance. We are optimists. 'And God saw all he had made, and behold, it was good.' The secret to our immortality lies in our optimism and our commitment to peace. But across the world, optimistic, liberal ideas are dying. A mystical blood brotherhood is now considered more significant than the air you've breathed for thousands of years or the language you've spoken for centuries. The peaceful coexistence of people who are not all alike is considered intolerable. The facts are plain: The rule of law is gone. The man with better party connections is the man who is right. And what follows? Everyone who doesn't belong to the party is exterminated, and we're thrust back into the Stone Age…. Your grandfather fought on the barricades for the rights of the powerless in 1848, and I, my child, have devoted my life to the rights of individuals and peoples. I have never believed in a personal God, but I believe that the ethics of the prophets, indeed, of all world religions, are more important than ever today. A lie must be called a lie. That is the difference between those who worship power and those who believe in justice, between those who justify the persecution of other people with slogans, and those who fight for the laws of Sinai, no matter their people or nation. This is not the difference between today and tomorrow; this is eternal. It's the difference between Yahweh and Amalek.”

“The Methods of Ethics” by Henry Sidgwick

This treatise is Sidgwick’s attempt to reconcile intuitive ethics, egoistic hedonism, and utilitarianism with common sense morality. He begins by clarifying his terms, “I propose therefore to define Pleasure—when we are considering its “strict value” for purposes of quantitative comparison—as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is at least implicitly apprehended as desirable or—in cases of comparison—preferable.” Next, Sidgwick defines his purpose, “The question then remains, whether any general theory can be attained of the causes of pleasure and pain so certain and practically applicable that we may by its aid rise above the ambiguities and inconsistencies of common or sectarian opinion, no less than the shortcomings of the empirical-reflective method, and establish the Hedonistic art of life on a thoroughly scientific basis.”

Next, Sidgwick spells out his meaning of the utilitarian Good, “Each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him. I before observed that the duty of Benevolence as recognised by common sense seems to fall somewhat short of this. But I think it may be fairly urged in explanation of this that practically each man, even with a view to universal Good, ought chiefly to concern himself with promoting the good of a limited number of human beings, and that generally in proportion to the closeness of their connexion with him.”

After debating the pros and cons of each of the moral systems, Sidgwick makes up his mind, “I find that I arrive, in my search for really clear and certain ethical intuitions, at the fundamental principle of Utilitarianism…. Utilitarianism is thus presented as the final form into which Intuitionism tends to pass, when the demand for really self-evident first principles is rigorously pressed.” He continues by detailing principles that square utilitarianism with intuitionism: the axiom of justice/equity (similar cases deserve similar treatment), prudence (equal rational concern for all temporal parts of one's life), and rational benevolence (the good of any one individual is of no more importance than the good of any other). “In short, the only so-called Virtues which can be thought to be essentially and always such, and incapable of excess, are such qualities as Wisdom, Universal Benevolence, and (in a sense) Justice; of which the notions manifestly involve this notion of Good, supposed already determinate. Wisdom is insight into Good and the means to Good; Benevolence is exhibited in the purposive actions called “doing Good”: Justice (when regarded as essentially and always a Virtue) lies in distributing Good (or evil) impartially according to right rules.”

Finally, Sidgwick details some caveats to utilitarianism, “The doctrine that Universal Happiness is the ultimate standard must not be understood to imply that Universal Benevolence is the only right or always best motive of action. For, as we have before observed, it is not necessary that the end which gives the criterion of rightness should always be the end at which we consciously aim…. By Greatest Happiness is meant the greatest possible surplus of pleasure over pain.” He surmises that Common Sense morality might be the system that actually works best for the everyday affairs of the masses, “Common-Sense morality is really only adapted for ordinary men in ordinary circumstances—although it may still be expedient that these ordinary persons should regard it as absolutely and universally prescribed, since any other view of it may dangerously weaken its hold over their minds. So far as this is the case we must use the Utilitarian method to ascertain how far persons in special circumstances require a morality more specially adapted to them than Common Sense is willing to concede: and also how far men of peculiar physical or mental constitution ought to be exempted from ordinary rules.”

Sidgwick's conclusion leaves him flummoxed: he cannot rationally reconcile the claims of egoism (rational self-interest) with the claims of utilitarianism (universal good). Both rest on principles that appear self-evident, and reason alone cannot adjudicate between them. He calls this a fundamental contradiction at the heart of practical reason. Sidgwick’s most enduring contribution is not merely his refinement of utilitarianism, but his argument that ethics confronts a final unresolved tension between the rational pursuit of one’s own happiness and the equally rational demand to promote universal happiness impartially. This “dualism of practical reason” prevents the book from being a simple utilitarian victory lap. It is instead one of the great demonstrations of how difficult it is to ground morality in reason alone.

Furthermore, Sidgwick admits, “On Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to in the face of the world…. Similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric.”

“Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame” by Christopher Boehm

Boehm credits Darwin for speculating on the evolutionary origins of the human conscience from his very first thoughts on evolution in “On the Origin of Species” and the “Descent of Man”. Darwin, in fact, conducted a far-flung anthropological survey, across the British colonies, that proved that blushing to show shame was cross-culturally universal and, therefore, an intrinsic trait. However, culture does play on genes through group selection and sex selection and thus has effects on evolutionary biology. Humans evolved into egalitarian bands. This occurred primarily as proto-humans divvied up the meat from large animal kills: an activity that required large group cooperation and required all members of the group to be adequately nutritioned to contribute. Capital punishment of non-egalitarians had dire effects on aggressive gene selection, whether they be of bullies (alpha-males), cheats, or thieves. This had the effect of both a debilitation of aggressive responses and strengthening inhibitory controls in surviving genotypes. Through many generations genes that selected for altruism were selected for both by group selection, the groups with higher altruistic propensity outcompeted more selfish groups, and within group sex selection, as females picked the altruistic males within the group and aggressive individualists were labeled as deviants or effectively shamed into repressing their aggressive tendencies. In this way humans gradually developed a more mature conscience that valued empathy and group cohesion.

“The Matter With Things Volume 1: The Ways to Truth” By Iain McGilchrist

Much of this first volume is a rehash and update of the thesis of McGilchrist’s first book, “The Master and His Emissary” about the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the human brain. “The left hemisphere is, compared with the right hemisphere, unreliable in just about every way that matters. In terms of attention to the world, and its role in thereby constructing, and understanding, experience; in its inability to comprehend time, space and motion; in its lack of skill in conveying and interpreting emotion; in its (lack of a) sense of the body as a living inseparable part of the self; in the comparative weakness of its faculties for direct perception, for the evaluation of beliefs and for making judgments; and indeed in terms of its lesser intelligence (which means understanding): in all of these it is more vulnerable to falsehood, more likely to deceive us, than the right…. There is a tendency in the left hemisphere to turn from the business of dealing with experience towards the process of abstraction and representation…. The right hemisphere seems to be aware of its limitations, as well as of shades of meaning and degrees of truth; and it is more in touch with reality, while the left hemisphere prefers its theory about reality.” McGilchrist, throughout this volume, does always caution that both sides of the brain are important and necessary to processing the lived world most effectively, but it is clear which hemisphere he would prefer if forced to choose.

McGilchrist spends much of the rest of his time relaying how the human brain processes the truths of the world. “It would be irrational to suppose we are directly aware of more than a little of what exists. Why assume that our cognition is capable of more than a few limited forays into the vastness of reality?” For him, subjectivity and objectivity are not bright lines, but ones that may blur. “We can only know the world as our brains construe it; and in every brain there are at least two internally coherent versions of the world that conflict. Science must take this into account when it talks of objectivity.” He quotes Einstein, “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use.”

Much of this book is also a rebuke of scientific systems that attempt to mechanize the concepts of lived reality. For McGilchrist, a machine is a poor metaphor for the brain or for any living entity. “The left hemisphere's serial, analytic approach is better equipped to deal with a system that is closed, static, linear and predictable – like a machine; not one that is open, constantly flowing, becoming and changing, and ultimately complex and indeterminate – like life. In the left hemisphere's vision, things take priority over processes. It is good at understanding linear cause and effect, not so much reciprocal interaction, let alone a process of co-creation. It understands a whole as simply the assemblage of parts, and causation as from bottom up only, not from many directions at once within the whole. It is at home when it can follow procedures; less so when it comes to recognising new forms, or fields, at work. It prefers what is clearly defined, to what has imprecise boundaries. It doesn't see Gestalten, of which life provides the pre-eminent examples…. This allegiance to the left hemisphere is, then, another reason why, however efficacious biology may have become in terms of manipulating the world, its claims to truth should be treated with care.”

The preeminence of reason in modernity is another bugbear for McGilchrist. “It could be said that the trouble with Western philosophy began with Plato's foregrounding of logos. In the Greek world, as in most pre-modern cultures, there had always existed more than one way of acquiring an understanding of the world. The Greeks, let it not be forgotten, also gave birth to many of the most enduring myths by which we understand our relationship to the world, such as those of Oedipus, of Prometheus, of the gods of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. There was, and is, no conflict here. Indeed they distinguished two types of truth, mythos and logos; each was considered essential in its own proper field.” He quotes Karen Armstrong, “Logos (‘reason’) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logos was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment…. Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos…. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thought and behaviour…. A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.” McGilchrist expands, “Myths were archetypal, not incidental, truths, reflecting eternal patterns that we could recognise, but which could not, without diminishment, be translated into the everyday terms of logos…. Logic was invented in order to win arguments, not to take us closer to the truth. Mythoi by contrast were the ideals of men of action, weighty, performative, supportive of the truth…. This distinction between logos, the literal and the essentially decontextualised, on the one hand, and mythos, the metaphorical and essentially contextual, on the other, is not only grounded in, but maintained by, the difference between the two hemispheres…. Myths 'think themselves' in us all, without our being aware of it…. Something like Jung's collective unconscious may be acting by means of epigenetics, or by means we may as yet be able only to surmise…. One of the most important aspects of many experiences – such as the experience of love, of art of every kind, of the magnificence and beauty of the natural world, of ancient myths and narratives, of the solemnity of a religious ritual or of an ancient tradition—is that they require us to relinquish control. They speak of something much bigger than us, that cannot entirely be articulated; something ancient and enduring, which speaks, if it can be said to speak at all, through us, not just out of us.”

Metaphor is the means through which the brain processes reality, according to McGilchrist. “What we are talking about here is a type of essentially metaphorical understanding, of which myth, poetry, drama and ritual are all manifestations. In true metaphor the intention must remain implicit; spelling it out causes its richness and emotional impact to collapse, much as explaining a joke makes it fall flat, or paraphrasing a poem reduces it to a series of banalities…. We do not use metaphor to decorate, and therefore obscure, something best conveyed literally (although that would be how the left hemisphere sees it), but to bring to life a deeper and broader set of meanings than could be conveyed by literal language…. All understanding whatsoever is, at bottom, metaphorical…. Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and, as I say, those something elses in language eventually come back to bodily experience. There is nothing more fundamental in relation to which we can understand that…. Metaphor embodies thought and places it, where it belongs, in a living context. In this, it bridges the gap between language and the world, a gap entailed on us by the very nature of language.” He quotes Bryan Magee, “People who live most of their outer or inner lives in terms that are expressible in language – for example, people who live at the level of concepts, or in a world of ideas – are living a life in which everything is simplified and reduced, emptied of what makes it lived, purged of what makes it unique and theirs.” And Ortega y Gasset, “The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.”

McGilchrist speaks of how ancient man first saw his world through pictures, and then through insights and intuitions, before explicit reasoning through language. “Pre-modern cultures think in pictures, as well as using direct perception and sensory memory, patterns of smell, light and sound intuitively, in ways that we have lost…. When it comes to problem-solving, visual thinking is far more important than verbal: but, for this very reason, during problem-solving visual perception can get in the way of visual imagery. This may be one of the reasons that we close our eyes when working on a problem: closing the eyes to sight really does increase insight…. Having to verbalise impedes visual memory; it does so not only for faces, and visual image processing, but including things as basic as colour, as well as remembering and identifying tastes and pieces of music, which are obviously not primarily visual at all. Thinking out loud while solving a problem markedly impairs the ability to find solutions to problems using insight, though it has no effect on analytical problems.”

Finally, for McGilchrist, imagination is not just pure fantasy, but a way of seeing reality’s many possibilities. “Imagination is far from certain, of course; but the biggest mistake we could make would be never to trust it – never to believe in it – for fear of being mistaken. For truth requires imagination. It alone can put us in touch with aspects of reality to which our habits of thought have rendered us blind. It leads not to an escape from reality, but a sudden seeing into its depths, so that reality is for the first time truly present…. Our current perceptions are governed by past perceptions and preconceptions; yet these too are always influenced reciprocally, if more weakly, by the new perception, the new experience…. There is no such thing as perception without such ramifications, because we are not just creating a Cartesian representation of the world, but are involved in the process of the experiential world coming into being.”

“On the Calculation of Volume: Vol. II” by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara Haveland)

This novel continues the themes of Balle’s previous volume, heavy on pondering the philosophy of time and of self. The conceit of Tara repeating the day of November 18 again and again despite where she wanders in the world continues. “Time passes, but all it does is pour day after day into my world, it goes nowhere, it has no stops or stations, only this endless chain of days…. I feel out of sorts, superfluous, bedraggled, wrong. I am no longer Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller with an eye for detail and an instinct for collectable works. I am not Tara Selter at work. I am not a buyer for a company by the name of T. & T. Selter. She is no more…. It is the Tara Selter with a future who is gone. It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.”

Time, the lack of change, and the lack of seasons begins to take its toll on her psyche. “Maybe I should just go over to the enemy. Maybe I ought to just live with the world as it is and accept that there will never be an Oktoberfest, that there are no longer any festivals, no Christmas, no New Year, and that I will never again see winter or spring, no Easter, no summer. Only November and November. In any case, I’m not in the mood for festivities.” The quirks of her world confuse her. “The eighteenth of November is a loose world, I know, it is impossible to get a firm grip on it. It contains phones that stop working, empty memory sticks, passwords that have to be keyed in again and again, searches that disappear overnight. Each morning everything is gone and the eighteenth of November wakes up fresh and unused again.” But she survives and makes a new life for herself, the best life she can think to create. “That is how my days are spent. One after another, I wake up and roam around history. I can feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces.”

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai

Desai’s epic novel is a story about love’s triumphs and failures, a story cloaked in mystery, a story of rigid class divisions, a story of how ethnic stereotypes and rivalries destroy, a tale about the travails of immigration, and a tale of generational traumas and heartbreaks. It is a story of not knowing quite where one is from or where one is going in the modern globalized world. It takes place at the turn of the 21st century and flits back and forth primarily between India and America, with stops to Italy and Mexico in between. “One thing seemed certain: If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out.”

At the crux of the novel’s plot is that feeling immigrants have of being a part of two different worlds, but belonging to neither. “Sunny registered himself hypocritical, too, when he looked away from other Indians he saw on the street—Indians who were also avidly ignoring him, trying to make it in America by avoiding one another, better to be two Indians than three Indians. And better an Indian in New York than an Indian in India.” India, despite everything, however, always felt like one’s first home. “After a day when everything was at odds—full of obstacles and irritations—dusk in India felt always settled, ancient, a civilization that had come to fullness.”

Even the older generation, the ones who were children raised in the shadow of Partition, felt the tug and pull on their lives as well. “All of us Indians who are educated to be Westernized are fated to make the same journey. If we have any intelligence or any heart, we have to search for ourselves backward.” But for the youth straddling the 21st century, globalization had allowed for so much, yet also allowed for the  confusion only to grow. “Seeing her in her grandfather’s bungalow—with her eccentric father lecturing me on mystic poetry and her divorced aunt in a nightgown up to her neck and down to her toes, the bad-tempered cook chopping onions on the floor of a black kitchen lit by a candle—it was like walking into a book from the past. I don’t want to live in the present anymore, and I certainly don’t want to live in the future—it hurts my eyes just to look at what the world is becoming. So that only leaves the past, no matter its obscenities.” However, every coin has two sides. "Western psychology is no match for an Indian family. We are too slippery, we change shape, we don’t distinguish truth from lies. Lies are truth and truth are lies—you can’t pin us down.”

In the end, Desai’s novel is a story about searching for companionship in the modern world and the particular struggles for immigrants in navigating their path to love. “Maybe all you needed was to be loved once. It was too much to ask to be loved all the way through life, and you could return to the memory for sustenance.” Finding oneself, first, and then finding another becomes life’s impossible task. “The universe tries everything it can to prevent love. If one thing doesn’t work to keep two people apart, then it tries another. Darkness follows darkness, across geographies, across centuries. It has its own life, unspooling.”

“Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000-2000” by Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, and Guido Tabellini

This book is a comparative institutional analysis between the economies of China and Western Europe from 1000-2000 AD. As such, it paints in rather broad strokes. Still, some common themes resound. But first, some facts on the ground. “China’s population had grown from about 50 or 60 million in the early 700s AD to about 100 million toward the turn of the millennium. During the Northern Song period (960–1127 AD), population growth is estimated to have averaged around a rate of 0.87 percent per year…. The capital city of the Northern Song Empire, Kaifeng, had reached 1 million inhabitants…. [In contrast, the] European population in 1000 AD was about the same as in 200 AD…. Song China employed advanced agricultural techniques, including the use of new rice varieties, extensive irrigation systems, terrace farming, crop rotation, and fertilizers. Its canals and waterways supported an extensive trade network. Northern China was not only the world’s most populous trading area, it also produced large amounts of iron, much of it for military use…. The compass, gunpowder, and the printing press—that Francis Bacon famously coined as the major inventions of the millennium—all originated in China…. As early as the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), Chinese ships navigated to India and to East Africa…. Foreign trade was a major source of revenue, and the government issued paper money…. China had a strong and effective unitary state, while Europe was virtually stateless…. China was able to preserve its state infrastructure despite frequent and intense internal wars. The state had maintained its coercive capacity and was able to subordinate and force cooperation from Chinese elites…. During the Song Dynasty, central tax revenue is estimated to have approached one-tenth of the country’s total output, and it could support an army of about 1 million soldiers.”

How did the Great Reversal occur? First, more basic facts. “Around 1850, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in China was about one-fifth of that in Great Britain, one-fourth of the Netherlands’, and less than half of Italy’s…. Several European nation-states had developed sophisticated and inclusive political institutions and boasted significant state capacity, with tax revenues around 10 percent of national GDP in the second half of the nineteenth century…. By contrast, Chinese state capacity had declined, with tax revenues falling below 2 percent of GDP (Zhang 2022, p. 4), and political institutions remaining autocratic.” 

Mokyr et al. begin to tease out the why of this Great Reversal. “When nation-states finally began to emerge in the late Middle Ages, European rulers had to bargain with a plurality of local elites to earn their cooperation, leading to the formation of more inclusive political institutions. In China, despite frequent internal struggles, centralized and autocratic state infrastructure never disappeared…. In Europe, for example, innovators found it easier to escape censorship and the persecution of so-called heretics because sovereign states competed for intellectual and economic supremacy and were often in conflict with each other.… Scientists and innovators, when at risk of persecution, could flee to neighboring countries for refuge. In a similar vein, frequent wars forced emerging European states to invest in tax capacity (Gennaioli and Voth 2015) and in military technology (Hoffman, 2015), both of which accelerated the process of urbanization.”

One major area of difference between Western Europe and China was their system of ethics and morals. “A universalistic value system is one where altruism and moral sentiments are not very sensitive to social distance: moral beliefs are applied with similar strength in interactions with friends and strangers. By contrast, in a communitarian value system, altruism and moral sentiments are much stronger toward socially close people than toward strangers.”

Which moral system a community believes in has a large effect on their cultural and institutional development. “In China, cooperation was increasingly sustained by kin-based social networks, the clan being the prototypical organization. In Europe, a different kind of social organization gradually emerged among unrelated individuals…. We refer to these organizations as “corporations.” Examples of such corporations can be traced all the way to the Middle Ages and thereafter: fraternities, guilds, monastic and religious orders, universities and academic associations, self-governing cities, and the modern business corporation…. Chinese kin-based organizations and European corporations performed seemingly similar functions essential to the effective organization of social life: they shared risk, provided individual protection, facilitated market transactions, provided financing, organized education, provided religious services, settled disputes, and assisted the state in collecting taxes and providing military resources. Yet they differed in one key respect: with whom one cooperated. Chinese clans and lineages were associations of individuals who claimed to descend from a common patrilineal ancestor. European corporations were associations of individuals unrelated by kin, who got together for a specific purpose…. Chinese clans and lineages were multipurpose organizations: the same kin-based network provided a variety of local public goods and club goods: ancestral ceremonies and worship, risk sharing and protection, financing, dispute settlement, and so on. Many (but not all) European corporations were instead formed for a primary specific purpose…. Chinese kin-based organizations created a firm partition of society along the lines of mutually exclusive and ascriptive dynastic groups, which often competed with each other. For all intents and purposes, there were no exit options…. European society was formed by dense overlapping networks and associations, which fostered a cultural practice of cooperation and conflict resolution among unrelated individuals in a variety of domains…. Chinese clans were typically hierarchical organizations based on seniority…. European corporations, instead being associations of unrelated individuals, carefully regulated collective decisions through consensual practices.”

Mokyr et al. continue by stressing the cultural differences that influenced the interpersonal interactions within the societies of China and Western Europe. “During the Song Dynasty, neo-Confucianism became the dominant social and intellectual culture in China…. A series of doctrines governing both personal and public life, neo-Confucianism emphasized kin-based values as the basis of social order. Interpersonal relations, including cooperation, were to be governed by filial loyalty, strict gender hierarchy, and respect among relatives…. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, the Latin (Catholic) Church actively discouraged a variety of practices that had traditionally strengthened and consolidated kin networks, such as adoption, polygamy, concubinage, consanguineous marriage, and nonconsensual marriage. Violating these bans carried the threat of harsh punishment, including social sanction and religious excommunication…. These Church policies influenced the European family structure: the extended family gradually became less important and was replaced by the smaller nuclear family…. Christian culture, as elucidated by the Church, also strongly rejected the values associated with patrilineal descent groups and strengthened the commitment toward bilateral descent (i.e., from both parents), which was already part of the post-Roman Germanic tradition.”

The laws of China and Western Europe, themselves shaped by culture, in turn shaped the societies they governed in a self-reenforcing loop. “In China, where the state was stronger from the beginning, the legal system was designed top-down with two main goals: to maintain peace and stability and to govern the relations between the public administration and its subjects. Civil law played only a secondary role because commercial disputes were primarily resolved by clans through arbitration and compromise…. In Europe, by contrast, where the state was initially much weaker, the legal system had a bottom-up origin, and corporations influenced its evolution both on the demand and the supply side. The prevalence of impersonal exchange and contractual arrangements among unrelated individuals created a demand for external enforcement and well-functioning legal institutions, which provided the basis for the evolution of commercial and civil law. Legal principles first appeared in private contractual agreements within and between corporations. Over time, they evolved as best practices in communities of merchants…. First, the legal system defined and clarified the nature of corporations as separate legal entities and holders of specific rights…. Second, the emergence of legal institutions very early in European history coincided with the beginning of the formation of states. Their coevolution thus influenced how political institutions developed. The administration of justice and law enforcement was among the first functions performed by European sovereigns…. The legislative and executive sovereign authority would be limited by a preexisting body of law, and the courts would uphold the principle (if not the practice) of equality before the law. The early emergence of judicial state functions in Europe also explains the growing influence acquired by national parliaments.”

Furthermore, state capacity was wielded in different manners in China and Western Europe. “The Chinese state had a long tradition of relying on a powerful and effective central bureaucracy to fulfill its aims…. They were selected through a demanding civil service exam that required lengthy preparation and extensive training in Confucian doctrine. This meritocratic process had several advantages from the perspective of regime stability. It created a cohesive social group of talented administrators who shared a basic ethic and a very similar education, all with a large stake in preserving the regime…. [In Europe,] the Church deliberately enhanced European political fragmentation by strategically undermining the centralization of political powers between and within emerging nation-states…. Self-governing cities, too, exerted a key influence over the evolution of

European political institutions, enhancing the effects of political fragmentation. Like Chinese clans, autonomous cities in Europe—known as

“communes”—enforced tax collection and contributed to other aspects of

decentralized administration. Unlike Chinese clans, however, communes enjoyed exclusive control over their territories. This feature enhanced their bargaining power against sovereigns…. Sovereigns had to concede political rights to self-governing cities in exchange for the additional tax resources. Often, these political rights took the form of representation in national parliaments…. China too had large urban centers, but they had little autonomy and did not play an important role in decentralized state administration.”

Mokyr et al. discuss why the Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe. They stress that although many major advances first happened in England, it was a Europe-wide phenomenon, the rest of Western Europe was never far behind. “The Industrial Revolution was driven by a host of scientific and technological innovations. European corporations were at the heart of the creation and accumulation of knowledge, following centuries-old norms and traditions. Monasteries, universities, and later scientific societies—all corporate organizations—played a crucial role in creating the conditions that made the Industrial Revolution possible…. The polycentric nature of political power and competition among fragmented states allowed innovators to escape censorship and suppression. Second, the Catholic Church, despite its ambiguous and often inconsistent relationship with useful knowledge, on balance created conditions that proved conducive to technological progress…. [Third,] the state had conceded some manner of political representation to business interests, which limited state interference with wealth accumulation and the functioning of markets…. In China, by contrast, knowledge accumulation and education were largely controlled by the state administration…. Mandarins and other government officials largely controlled the market of ideas and the course of intellectual innovation. Moreover, the Chinese bureaucracy increasingly privileged the study of traditional Confucian doctrine, bent primarily on social peace and preserving regime stability…. European corporations contributed to economic progress in two additional ways. First, they facilitated the creation of thick and well-functioning financial markets and the diffusion of long-distance trade…. The second way that the corporation facilitated European industrialization was via its model for the organization of production. In a capitalist firm, investment decisions are made by capital owners who are also the residual claimants of the returns from investment, while labor earns a fixed wage. This organization of production creates strong incentives to invest in labor-saving innovations because the returns accrue to those who control the investment decisions.”

Finally, Mokyr et al. conclude by reasserting their broader thesis for how Western Europe was able to leapfrog China during the course of the second millennium. “Current cultural traits often reflect features of a more distant social and political environment. Our analysis of the Great Reversal points to another mechanism of cultural persistence and influence: the embedding of specific cultural traits into social organizations…. The effects of culture are not only direct; they are also mediated by social organizations that are complementary with specific cultural traits. Once in place, these social organizations are hard to dismantle, and they contribute to the spread and maintain the cultural foundations on which they are built…. The fundamental challenge of state formation is how to scale up cooperation from the local to the national level…. Scaling up cooperation among strangers poses new challenges and requires different social arrangements…. In Europe, peaceful resolution of internal political conflicts and the emergence of inclusive institutions were facilitated by social practices that encouraged cooperation among strangers.”