“Aeneid Book VI” by Virgil (translated by Seamus Heaney)

This was a labor of love by the recently deceased poet. Heaney had translated the Aeneid years before, in college, and it had remained close to his heart. The rudiments of this project of translation began as a jumping-off point for his poem, “Route 100”, dedicated to the birth of his first granddaughter, which loosely mimics Aeneas’ descent into the underworld, but in Ireland. Both poems conclude with the (re)birth of souls in the upper world or, in Heaney’s case, the birth of his granddaughter. Working on his original poem spurred Heaney to make a proper translation of Book VI, his college Latin teacher’s favorite book in the Aeneid. This is not a literal translation, nor does it try for iambic pentameter. It takes the flow, gist, and rhythm of Virgil’s original and sets it to modern English verse. As per Heaney, he uses simple words when simple words will do, interspersed with a doozy for effect. It is sparse, beautiful, and magical, conveying the essence of Virgil in new poetical form.

“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 Victorians and Ancient Greece” by Richard Jenkyns

Jenkyns is an Oxford fellow, well versed in his ancient Greek and Latin originals, but also British literature and history. The book begins with the initiation of Greek revival architecture in the England of the 18th century following the “rediscovery” of Athens from within the Ottoman domain. Ionic, doric, and corinthian columns soon became the vogue. Many Victorians saw clear lines of descent from Greek democracy and liberty to their pinnacle in Albion. John Stuart Mill even suggested, “that battle of Marathon even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.” Oscar Wilde recommended skipping from ancient Athens past the next couple thousand years to Victorian England, “whatever…. is modern…. we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is anachronism is due to medievalism.” And it was primarily Greek tragedy and poetry that captivated the hearts of so many Victorian writers. In fact, poets from Byron to Tennyson to Arnold to Shelley despaired in writing their own epics for perfection had already been reached, to be unmatched, by Homer. Roman history, poetry, and literature were viewed as poor copies of the Greek originals (as Virgil and Cicero would have readily acknowledged). Even the Aeneid was poor copy of the Greek master. Gladstone remarked, “Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by lamplight… from Virgil back to Homer is a greater distance, than from Homer back to life.”

The Victorians were also fond of their dichotomies- the rugged, industrious North contrasting with the languid, pleasant South and the aesthetics of Athens contrasting with the spirituality of Jerusalem. However, Victorians also strained to place the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides into their world as pre-Christians, who either espoused proto-Christian morals or at least presaged the way for the Christian epoch. There was many a Victorian vicar who knew his Prometheus Bound, his Oedipus and his Medea, as well as his New Testament. Cardinal Newman went so far as to suggest, “pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology…. were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets.” Even in myth, Victorian believers strained for connections. Alford, when thinking of Prometheus, claimed, “this benefactor of human kind…. thus crucified on high- bears he not a dim resemblance to the One other whom we know?” Gladstone compared Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades to the Holy Trinity.

Novels of the period were often interspersed with ancient Greek in their original alphabet. It was a mark of sophistication, but also a common way to denote good breeding in a character. One of George Eliot’s characters declares, “No man is held worthy of the name of scholar who has merely the …. derivative literature of the Latins;…. the Romans themselves…. frankly replenished their urns at the fountainhead.” Victorians were also fond of Greek sculpture, in no small part because of their nakedness. They found in them something safely erotic, but also simple and childlike. S. C. Hall suggested that “French nudes looked as if they had taken their clothes off, Greek ones as if they had never thought of clothes.” But it was Homer and Plato who towered above the rest in the Victorian imagination. On the Albert Memorial it is Homer, not Shakespeare, who is given pride of place. Mathew Arnold claimed, “Homer has not Shakespeare’s variations: Homer always composes as Shakespeare composes at his best.” From radicals like Shaw to Whigs like Macauley to arch-Tories like Carlyle the verdict was the same.

Until the Victorians, Aristotle had commanded the high ground in Oxbridge philosophy. He was clearheaded and rational. However, the Romantics did much to tilt the scales towards Plato and along with him Socrates. When an Italian peasant asked Symonds, “who was Socrates?” He replied, “he was the Jesus Christ of Greece.” Arch-Anglican Thomas Arnold did his best to place Plato in the pantheon of the prophets, “not the wildest extravagance of atheistic wickedness in modern times can go further than the sophists of Greece went…. whatever audacity can dare…. to make the words “good” and “evil” change their meaning, has already been tried in the days of Plato, and by his eloquence…. and faith unshaken, has been put to shame.” Even the agnostic John Stuart Mill suggested, “Christ did not argue about virtue, but commanded it; Plato, when he argues about it, argues for the most part inconclusively, but he resembles Christ in the love which he inspires for it, and in the stern resolution never to swerve from it.” It is not so much Plato’s conclusions, but his method that appealed to questioning Victorians such as Mill. “I have ever felt that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavored to practice Plato’s mode of investigation, than to those distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions.” Victorians, even as their empire grew abroad to resemble Rome, sought at home to emulate the liberty, democracy, and love of literature and learning they so admired in ancient Greece. 

“Shantaram” by Gregory David Roberts

A fun novel about Bombay in the 1980s. It gives the flavor of India- a side of the country few ever see from the slums, to the Mafia, brothels, and prisons. The book is loosely autobiographical and its rich detail lends authenticity to an amazing tale. There is violence, sex, friendship, death, betrayal, and honor. One could say that one of the characters is the city of Bombay itself, but the poly ranges to Indian village life and the mountains of Afghanistan. A true page turner with a little cultural knowledge mixed in with the fast paced plot.

“The Beast in the Nursery” by Adam Phillips

I would not recommend this book to any of my friends with young children. It might seriously disturb them. On the other hand, it might also enlighten. Freud claimed, “if children could follow the hints given by the excitation of the penis they would get a little nearer to the solution of the problem” of how to best navigate the mysteries of growing into a successful adult. In another essay, Freud propounded, “no one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” Phillips does not dwell on all things Oedipal, yet, as in all psychoanalysis, it lurks in the recesses of the mind.

This book is about the struggles with and conflicts in growing up- what we have to give up and what we, unfortunately, leave behind. We are told that “being realistic is a better guarantee of pleasure” and that “morality is the way we set limits on wanting,” but we don’t want to kill that inner child for “inspiration is the best word we have for appetite, and that appetite is the best thing we have going for us.” In the end, “lives are only livable if they give pleasure: that is, if we can renew our pleasures, remember their intensities.” We are told or we figure out as children that there is a natural progression in life. We are not fully humans until we become adults. Children are in search of the missing, what will complete them. But as we age we learn we must all make sacrifices, that we are not the center of the universe, and that we must settle, for not all our wishes will become fulfilled. “People come for psychoanalysis when they are feeling under-nourished, and this is because- depending on one’s psychoanalytic preferences- either what they have been given wasn’t good enough, so they couldn’t do enough with it, or because there is something wrong with their capacity for transformation…. We are interested in things despite ourselves.” To grow up is to learn to live with disappointment. “Wishing is the sign of loss; wanting things to be otherwise because they are not as they are supposed to be. For the child to live his curiosity is itself an acknowledgement of loss, of wanting as the sign of life…. We are the animals for whom something is missing and for whom what is missing is always privileged. What is absent, ironically, is what is there for us to be interested in.” Growing up also often means settling. “Education, Freud implies, teaches the child either to lose interest in what matters most to her or to compromise that interest.” What is lost on the child is that she too has something unique to offer to the world as is. The child is not merely waiting to become an adult. One could say that an adult is a child who has become stale and calcified. “If you know too well how to do something, you’re less likely to fall into originality.” The adult can try to teach, but only the child can learn. “Children’s self-education [is] about what they learned despite the adults, not because of them…. From an unknowable (unconscious) set of criteria a person, unbeknown even to himself, picks out and transforms the bits he wants; the bits that can be used in the hidden projects of unconscious desire.” Learning about the world is a mysterious process that one is constantly involved in and what is unconsciously absorbed is often more lasting than what is learned through effort.

Phillips suggests the best kind of learning is done by simply taking a hint. But “the useful hint is, more often than not, not intended as such.” It is often the case that we do most of our teaching when we never even intend it- or, at least, not how we intend it. “We might make our words smell as nice as they can, but they will go into the world and be made use of sometimes beyond our wildest intentions. They will fuel that dreamwork of everyday life called gossip. They will evoke idiosyncratic personal histories- what we call associations- in their listeners.” Life is a continuous project, but it is not always linear. But we are always growing up (or growing somewhere, at least). But as we are growing into something, we must also be growing out of something. And that loss can be acute. “How could growing up be anything but an adaptation to something other than oneself, and therefore a disillusionment?…. Something essential is lost, or at least attenuated, in the process of growing up. Whether it is called vision or imagination or vitality or hope, lives are considered to erode over time.” As we grow we learn to accept life, to accept compromise. But what we cannot compromise on, what we will not compromise on, are our morals. “It is from our discontents that we can infer our ideals…. Our unofficial, more idiosyncratic morality is only available, so to speak, through humiliation. Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you ultimately value, that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged- what makes you feel truly diminished- and I will tell you what you believe or what you want to believe about yourself.” In the process of growing up the child’s pleasures turn into the adult’s ideals. “Freud is not saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. That the values and ambitions- the representations- of the adult are an obscured picture of the passions and conflicts and curiosities of childhood. (So the wish to be rich, for example, becomes a fantasy of uninhibited access, or of being exempt from dependent need.)” What is the underlying need that is being superficially satisfied by wealth? What fears do riches satisfy? Self-sufficiency? Adulthood? Growing up? Growing old? “There is an inevitable element of humiliation in simply being a child, though the child’s relative helplessness can be more or less exploited by the parents; the child is not sufficient unto himself, he cannot bring himself up…. Compliance is always experienced by the child as demeaning (sadomasochism is the trick by which adults make compliance and domination bearable by making them sexually exciting.)”

In the end, do we ever really grow up? Is it healthy to do so? “What children supposedly suffer from is not being what they think of as adults; and adulthood becomes the afterlife for children, which means a growing acquaintance with the unappeasable nature of desire…. Growing up, in other words, is not so much acquiring a more realistic sense of ourselves, but rather the process of forgetting our earliest entitlements.” However, the really interesting question for Freud was quite the opposite of growing up, “why is it that adults are more like children than they want to be?”

“The Story of a New Name” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the second novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It starts where the first novel ended and continues to follow the two girls’ friendship from Lila’s wedding day into their adulthood. Again, Lina narrates the story, but Lila figures as the center of her world. Lila has married young and moved up in the world. Not only is she a married woman, she is rich, at least by the old neighborhood’s standards. Her husband, Stefano, already owns two groceries and has just invested in a shoe factory in which Lila’s father and brother design their own brand. But the Solara brothers, with ties to the Naples mafia, are intimately involved as well. They seem to have their tentacles wrapped around every business opportunity in Naples, legal and illegal. By the novel’s end, Lila’s life has been turned upside down. Lila, despite being recognized as brilliant, quit school after eighth grade. Lina, meanwhile, through hard work and perseverance, is struggling her way through high school, learning to speak Italian without dialect, reading a daily newspaper for the first time, and is being introduced to people outside of the old neighborhood. The novel’s plot involves betrayals, love triangles, and much soul searching and inner angst. By the end of the novel Lila and Lena’s relationship has gotten even tighter and has become much more complicated. Lena has left Naples for Pisa, where she graduated from college, has become engaged to a bookworm philologist, and has had a semi-autobiographical novel published with the help of her fiancé’s mother. She has grown apart from the old neighborhood, but has she managed to truly escape it for good?

“The Moral Economy” by Samuel Bowles

Bowles wants to take down the idea that homo economicus rules. Of course, behavioral economics (as well as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and the other social sciences) have already posited that man does not always act in his longterm monetary self-interest alone. This might be because of lack of information, because of framing issues, time preference, or because of altruism. Nonetheless, the starting assumption in economics is that it is often best to think of man as a rational actor acting in his own best interest. Therefore, when designing a form of governance it is best to assume that men are selfish, acting for their own gain over the general weal. What is best is to restrain their motives and channel their selfish individual desires in a better direction for the group as a whole: to create a Constitution for knaves. Political theorists from Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and James Madison felt that it was better to design a system based on the assumption man acted more as knaves than as angels. Bowles suggests, “what the classical economists (and most economists since) missed is the possibility that moral and other prosocial behavior would be affected- perhaps adversely- by incentive-based policies designed to harness self-interest.” Are incentives and morals additively separate as basic economics suggests or is Bowles onto something? Can we separate moral and economic worth? Do economic incentives, in fact, change people’s moral calculus? Does putting a price on something (be it a fine or a reward) change how an issue is framed? Does the moral sphere of society get crowded out by the economic sphere? The bottomline: if you put a price on something, make sure you are willing to accept it when someone is willing to pay it.

“Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist” by Robert Travers

A memoir by an amazing evolutionary biologist. You get some of his life’s work primarily studying lizards in Jamaica, but for much more of the book you get a bunch of crazy stories, from smoking ganga with Peter Tosh backstage at his concert in Sanders Theater while Travers was a professor at Harvard, to almost getting killed by a machete wielding burglar in Kingston, to Travers’ bouts fighting insanity in mental asylums while in college and after, to chasing away hyenas from pack dog kills in the Serengeti with a Land Rover, to getting mugged outside a brothel in Jamaica, to comforting Jane Goodall when her favorite chimp dies in a jungle stream. The book reads like a catalogue of near-death experiences told with humor.

“Buddenbrooks” by Thomas Mann (translated by John E. Woods)

This epic, along with “The Magic Mountain”, won Mann the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. It details four generations of an upperclass merchant family, the Buddenbrooks. The novel’s subtitle is “The Decline of a Family” and the story details the slow withering of a once proud family. Throughout the course of the book there are births, christenings, marriages, affairs, divorces, and deaths, ups and downs in business and politics, both happiness and tears, but the general mood is one of a gradual, yet inevitable, degeneration of the family. The backdrop is a small town near Hamburg, close to the Baltic Sea. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this family witnesses the militarism of Napoleon, the European Revolutions of 1848, and the Franco-Prussian War. Its members witness the unification of Germany, through Bismarck, along with the democratization and liberalization of the town, as the lower classes strive for their rights and dues. As wealthy grain merchants, the family’s fortunes ebb and flow with the times, but they are always amongst the upper crust of the town. The original pater familias was a simple businessman, the next generation’s became the consul to Holland, and the last was elected as a town senator. Throughout there are family disputes, rivalries with other business families, illnesses, deaths, along with loves gained, lost, and forlorn. The story is distinctly German. Religion and the Protestant ethic play prime parts in the tale, as duty, faith, and honor crop up over and over again. The book is, at heart, a tragedy about a family that lives by a code that has become a relic with the new Enlightened commercial age. Proud and wealthy, still, the Buddenbrooks cannot adapt with the times and become resigned to be swept into the dustbin of history as an irrelevancy- a family rotting with decay. 

“Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy” by Frank McLynn

I knew this was going to be a detailed book when over fifty pages in McLynn hadn’t even mentioned one individual person or even a tribe. Instead, he spent time detailing the peculiarities of nature in the steppe region. The Gobi desert, the mountains, the lakes and rivers that made the terrain formidable. For a nomadic peoples the areas where horses, camels, goats, sheep, yak, bison, and cattle could survive during the harsh winters were of utmost importance. Finally, he began to describe the clans of the steppe from the Mongols where Temujin would emerge to the many other ethnicities, from the Chinese Jin, the Uighers, the Tartars, the Ongud, the Kereit, the Naiman, the Merkit, the Cuman, and other minor tribes who encompassed the steppe region.

It was no sure thing that Temujin would become Genghis Khan. He was born into a poor sub-tribe and numerous times escaped execution, starvation, and battle wounds by the closest of hairs. However, time and time again he escaped formidable odds to survive. He was a great warrior, but also a great strategist, and also a deviously cunning foe. He also knew how to delegate and choose his subordinates. He played off opponents against each other, retreated when he didn’t have the numbers, pushed the advantage when he sensed weakness, married off friends into alliances, allied with enemies to defeat common foes, forgave his bitterest rivals when the time was right, and brutally executed enemies when he had the upper hand. Perhaps, his most creative innovation was the breaking down aristocratic lines to form a society based on groupings of the decimal system that gave leadership roles based on meritocratic worth, regardless of ethnicity or age. He united what was once the many disparate peoples of the steppe into one united Mongol “race”. From there he systemically turned his war machine outside the steppe, first towards the Jin in China and then against the Islamic Khwarezmian Empire, who ruled from the Caspian sea to modern Afghanistan and (nominally) Iraq, and finally back to western China to destroy the Hsi Hsia Empire. Perhaps Genghis Khan’s greatest legacy was that his realm was the only “great man’s empire” to actually expand after his death. His third son, Ogedei, was named the next Khaghan, but his other son’s were given divided shares of the empire to rule under him as governors.

The Mongols were vicious warriors who often killed every last man, woman, and child in the towns they conquered. Mass rape, torture, and the slitting of fetuses from pregnant women were not uncommon. However, they also invented and improved on forms of warfare. For one, they often took the best artisans and military engineers from those they conquered and coopted them into their army. Therefore, they added Chinese siege weapons as well as river fording floats to their repertoire. The feigned retreat, the dispersal and lightening fast reuniting of the flanks of their formations, the use of prisoners as the vanguard of siege batteries (and human fodder), and the use of subterfuge in negotiations with towns considering surrender were all Mongol specialities. And throughout the centuries, even as they became more sedentary and accustomed to the finer delicacies of food and drink, their armies could still withstand tremendous hardships, forced marches, and bitter weather to make sure that they were always attacking the enemy at the time and on the ground of their choosing, creating strategic advantage despite most often their large numerical inferiority.

The culture of warfare was so engrained in the Mongols that it was able to survive the death of Genghis. Ogedei’s first campaigns were to destroy what was left of the Jin Empire in northern China and to repacify Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps the Mongol Empire’s most impressive feat was the establishment of their postal/courier service, the yam, established by Genghis, expanded by Ogedai, and reaching its apogee under Qubilai. At its peak the yam had over 10,000 staging posts for over 200,000 horses. A rider could be expected to ride over 250 miles a day and at night was accompanied by runners with torches between staging posts to supplement the moonlight. The yam was a unifying force that was also integral for tax collection. By 1230’s Ogedei had to deal with the fracturing of his own empire as his brothers and their sons vied for more power and riches. His solution was ever more war- this time with the principalities of the Rus. By 1241, the Mongols had conquered the entire western steppe, all of Russia including the great southern city of Kiev, the great northern city of Novgorod, and what was then the small village of Moscow, and were firmly entrenched in eastern Poland and Hungary. However, after reaching the border of Western Europe within a couple of years the Mongols would withdraw back to the steppes. Internecine fighting finally broke into the open with the Golden Horde faction taking control of Russia and the western steppe for the next two hundred years, while the official Khaghan in Mongolia would focus on defeating the Song in southern China, eventually ruled by Qubilai in what would become the Yuan Dynasty by 1279. The Chagatai Khanate would carve out central Asia- most of the modern Stans and parts of modern Mongolia, China, India, and Russia, while the Ilkhanate founded in 1256 would encompass eastern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Armenia, and some of the other modern Stans. Genghis’ empire had finally split into four, but not before reaching a land mass covering twelve million contiguous square miles, bigger than North America or Africa.

“The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker

At the heart of Pinker’s book is the debate of how much of the human mind is a tabula rasa and how much of human nature is imprinted upon us before birth. Pinker’s core argument is that although both nature and nurture play their parts, nature has gotten the short end of the stick. Social scientists have tried to imagine the mind as a blank slate for their own moral and political purposes. If nothing is innate than anything is possible. We are all born equal. Pinker suggests this does a disservice to science, the truth, and can skew morality in unintended ways. Saying people have different innate capabilities in no way diminishes the need to treat all people equitably. Some ethics are cultural artifacts, but others cross most cultures and seem to be expressed in babies even before they can speak. All human societies put a primacy on familial ties, communal sharing is limited in scope to kinship bonds at first, dominance and violence is displayed in threat if not in fact, and there is in-group vs. out-group rivalry. In fact, the only people who seem to not possess certain universal morals are ones whose brains have been damaged at birth or by an accident. Innate imprinting can also explain different deviant behaviors without excusing them. Evolutionary dispositions are not written in stone.

Humanity's moral circle has expanded over time. Pinker makes the case that humans have evolved to be less and less violent with every generation. These are adaptive techniques to increase the chance of reproductive success. Humans, more so than bonobos and chimpanzees, developed effective strategies to punish alpha (male) bullies and so the brain has evolved to become more social. Free will can still exist in a world where genes largely determine intelligence and even personality. Twin studies and adoption studies have shown that genetic resemblance can account for half of intelligence, personality, and life outcome similarities, while living in the same household accounts for close to zero. Non-shared experience, most importantly peer relationships, account for most of the rest. The fact that humans are born with innate capabilities and desires might mean we can not be molded like putty to the whims of social engineers, but it in no way reduces the imperative to treat every human equally, with the same moral and ethical compass.

“Ties” by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

This short novel was translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri. It is the story of a dysfunctional family, told by three narrators. The story begins with the revelation of an affair that ruins a marriage and a family. The superficial “tie” in the story is the unusual way the father has taught his son to tie his shoelaces. The subconscious ties that run throughout the book, however, are the ties that bond and break a family- the promises that you make and sometimes fail to keep when you start on the project of creating a family unit. The novel deals with conjugal love, parental love, filial love, and sibling love. Scars and resentments build, old secrets surface, and revenge is sought and found. The story is tightly written. You can feel the pain and emotion building as more and more is revealed. The author is supposedly the husband of Elena Ferrante. Although it takes place in Naples and Rome, it is more a story of the human condition than a distinctly Italian tale. It a story of love lost, sacrifices made, and family bonds that can be strained, but never broken, for better or for worse. 

“Specialization and Trade: A Reintroduction to Economics” by Arnold Kling

Kling starts by making the case for why the social sciences are so different from the hard sciences. “First, more causal factors are at work in economics than in physical science. Second, although physical relationships are relatively stable, the economy evolves rapidly, including evolution in response to government’s attempts at regulation.” Instead of falsifiable facts, economics operates on “frameworks of interpretation” in which one “single anomaly does not lead someone to abandon an interpretative framework.” There are no controlled experiments for the economy as a whole and so multiple causal facts influence economics in the real world. 

No one in today’s world is self-sufficient and that is a good thing. Because of specialization the economic pie has been able to grow beyond any single human’s capabilities to satisfy his own wants. Trade is the other side to the specialization coin. Since we no longer produce all that we need, we must trade for those things. “When the value of different tasks can be isolated, specialization will tend to take place between firms, coordinated by the price system. When the value of a particular task is difficult to measure, because its value varies a great deal depending on how it is combined with other tasks, specialization will tend to take place within the firm, governed by instructions.” 

Kling tries to move beyond looking at the whole national economy as one giant GDP factory with homogenous lumps of labor and capital. “A job does not consist of producing a fraction of generic output.” Instead, he describes an economy moved by “patterns of sustainable specialization and trade”, which are constantly evolving slowly. This is a world full of Schumpeterian creative destruction. “Substitution takes place on the basis of existing technology. Innovation represents the successful implementation of new methods of production or new means of satisfying consumer wants.” 

Another big piece of the modern economy is financial intermediation. “If trade entails trust among strangers, then financial intermediation entails trust over time.” Destruction in trust in financial intermediaries can be so destructive because of the role they play in facilitating business production across a number of otherwise unrelated industries. “With specialized, roundabout production, financial intermediation is embedded in every business. If financial intermediaries must shrink because of a sudden loss of reputation, then that could disrupt many patterns of specialization and trade, and it could lengthen the time it takes for new patterns to emerge…. That does not mean that all economic fluctuations originate in the financial sector. Instead, it could be that shifts that take place elsewhere are amplified as they hit the financial sector.”

Kling also makes a couple of tangential points which are worth pondering. Kling does not minimize the role of government in facilitating business. However, he emphasizes the roles of ever-fluctuating prices in gaining the specialized knowledge necessary for sustainable patterns of growth.  “Competition and reputation are a form of decentralized regulation.” In the realm of sustainability, he quotes Solow, “it is an obligation to conduct ourselves so that we leave to the future the option or the capacity to be as well off as we are… Sustainability is an injunction not to satisfy ourselves by impoverishing our successors.” Again, however, Kling sees the price system as the best means of accomplishing this goal, “if two methods of producing a given output exist, the market will select the method that uses the fewest resources when those resources are valued at market prices,” with the huge caveat that, “market prices reflect costs only when resources are owned and priced.” He cites the successful achievements of reducing water and chemical use, such as nitrates, in America even as agricultural yields have grown, as well as the reforestation of most of Western Europe and America in the latter twentieth century, due to efficiencies in paper production and substitutions in ship and home building. For a short book, Kling packs it in with contentious big ideas and unorthodox viewpoints, but he certainly makes you think about an alternative framework for viewing macroeconomics.

“My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the first of four books in the anonymous author’s Neapolitan Novels quartet. I cannot recommend this book enough. It details the intertwined lives of two young girls growing up on the streets of a lower class Naples neighborhood infested by the Camorra, as well as your run of the mill street thugs. The style of writing has been compared to Knausgaard in its detail, but I find Ferrante incomparably more readable. The psychological aspects of the friendship of two young women as they struggle with adolescence amid their toxic milieu add vibrancy to the most mundane of everyday occurrences. Lina is the homely, bookish narrator, somewhat in awe of her friend. Lila is the radiant star pupil, who also enchants with her rare beauty. She dominates and captivates Lina, who dutifully plays second fiddle in their friendship. There are rivalries between the two in school and in romance, but, through all their trials, there is a bond of love that endures. The quality of each and every sentence is impressive, reminding one of verse written as prose (if that makes any sense). This is a gripping tale as lovely for its descriptions as its story.

“Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson

Today the world is so demarcated by the distinct borders of nation-states that it seems that it was always so. Since WWII every successful revolution has been defined in nationalistic terms. Today, most people, even before race or religion, think of themselves as belonging to a particular nationality. “Members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

Before the 18th century, the communities of religion and empire played a much larger role in defining one’s identity. Religions transcended borders, uniting people of different ethnicities. Emperors and kings had subjects, not citizens, and the kingdoms were organized with a distinct center of power that radiated outward with loose, mutable boundaries. The kingdom’s affairs were the king’s, not his subjects’, concern. Rulers often came from another land brought in through marriage, the court language was often foreign to the locality, and most wars were fought with mercenaries with little impact on the peasantry. Everyday language was spoken, but only for the elite was it written and often not in the vernacular tongue. “77% of the books printed before 1500 were still in Latin.” However, that was all changing. The gradual use of the printing press to unite the lower classes in a standardized language did much to unite a locality, even within the smaller communities of larger empires. Newspapers were unifying events, repeated every day. Reading the local paper became a communal act. “If manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore, print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination.” And as the printers sought profits through newer markets, more and more people were pulled into the web of the local vernacular. Where people still spoke in distinct regional dialects, a unifying written language was slowly established. “Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.”

Particularly in the peripheries of the empire, in the colonies, a new elite was forming, not beholden or belonging to the kingdom’s center. Often these would be creole descendants of the first immigrants or coopted native nobles. There was a glass ceiling to their rise, however, and that boundary was the colonial borders, distinct from the empire’s vaster domain. “No matter how Anglicized a Pal became, he was always barred from movement outside its perimeter- laterally, say, to the Gold Coast or Hong Kong, and vertically to the metropole. ‘Completely estranged from the society of his own people’ he might be, but he was under life sentence to serve them…. No one in their right mind would deny the profoundly racist character of nineteenth-century English imperialism. But the Pals also existed in the white colonies- Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa.” This phenomenon of locals and creoles being trapped even within their own empire also happened in the Spanish American colonies and gave both of these empires unofficial internal borders, compounded by unique customs, geography, and economies. Schooling also set up a distinct tract of homogenization among the younger local elites. “Government schools formed a colossal, highly rationalized, tightly centralized hierarchy, structurally analogous to the state bureaucracy itself. Uniform textbooks, standardized diplomas and teaching certificates, a strictly regulated gradation of age-groups, classes and instructional materials, in themselves created a self-contained, coherent universe of experience. But no less was the hierarchy’s geography. Standardized elementary schools came to be scattered about in villages and small townships of the colony; junior and senior middle-schools in larger towns and provincial centres; while tertiary education (the pyramid’s apex) was confined to the colonial capital.” Similar to religious pilgrimage, students were set on a path where disparate elites from all over the colonial realm were homogenized and instructed to mimic the ways of the home country. However, the colonial capital was their summit, they were expected to go no further, that was the end of their journey. Royal governors and senior clergy were sent from the metropole to lord over a vast bureaucracy of elite locals, who saw themselves as distinct from the natives, but also from their home country.

Anderson makes the case that three institutions: the census, the map, and the museum, all proliferating in the nineteenth century, also gave locals a greater sense of particular community within the larger whole. When the creole revolutions did happen, it was not for control of the whole empire, like in wars of the past, but simply to break away. They did not seek to conquer the old metropole, but to form their own capital equal to it, a new parallel center of power. 

“Russian Thinkers” by Isaiah Berlin

Berlin was one of the most meticulous thinkers of the twentieth century. He was liberal, moderate, and thorough, all while seeking the truth. He combed other thinkers’ writings and interpreted them with his best intentions. His own writings were erudite without being overly academic. Berlin brings that style to this collection of essays on some of the foremost thinkers of nineteenth century Russia. Russia was profoundly affected by the liberal movements of the early nineteenth century and the counter-revolution that came from the uprisings in western Europe in 1848. Although Russia’s radicals did not rise up themselves, Tsar Nicholas I’s subsequent crackdown on intellectualism, liberalism, and free thought had profound consequences on the development of the country. 

Berlin’s best known essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, is a rumination on Leo Tolstoy’s view of history. Berlin summarizes the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin supposes that Tolstoy’s quest in life was to discover that one all-encompassing purpose for being, but that Tolstoy was better being the fox, dissecting all the ills of his Russian contemporaries. Tolstoy often wrote about those “proklyatye voprosy” (those accursed questions)- the central and moral issues of the day, which every honest Russian was forced to grapple with and whose answers could only be found, according to Tolstoy, in history, not in science and reason. As Tolstoy wrote, “to write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.” Philosophy could only be understood through the prism of concrete, lived history. However, his meaning of history was not the kind we learn about in school. It was intensely personal. “History, as it is normally written, usually represents ‘political’- public- events as the most important, while spiritual- ‘inner’- events are largely forgotten; yet prima facie it is they- the ‘inner’ events- that are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings; they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of; hence the routine political historians are talking shallow nonsense.” Tolstoy objected to determinism, positivism, and scientism because he believed in the will of the spirit. “If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.” As such, he was vehemently opposed to the Whig theory of history, as well as the Great Man theory of history. “The higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon history.” Only looking back on public history, using hindsight, failing to see all the contingency, randomness, and luck involved, do these great men seem integral in shaping the course of events. Tolstoy, greatly influenced by Schopenhauer in his later life, believed, “that man suffers much because he seeks too much, [he] is foolishly ambitious and grotesquely overestimates his capacities.” Tolstoy also reacted “against liberal optimism concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress…. Tolstoy rejected political reform because he believed ultimate regeneration could come only from within, and that the inner life was lived truly only in the untouched depths of the mass of the people…. Tolstoy, at least, does not go to the length of denying the efficacy of physics in its own sphere; but he thinks this sphere trivial in comparison with what is permanently out of reach of science- the social, moral, political, spiritual worlds, which cannot be sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the proportion in them of ‘submerged’, uninspectable life is too high.” 

While Tolstoy struggled with his role as part of the landed nobility in changing times, Alexander Herzen actually renounced his place in society- all in the name of liberalism. "Since the age of thirteen.... I have served one idea, marched under one banner- war against all imposed authority- against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual. I would like to go on with my little guerrilla war- like a real Cossack- auf eigene Faust (on my own initiative)- as the Germans say.” The value of the individual was the single idea that he would propound again and again in his writings. Like Tolstoy, he was opposed to the positivism and scientism espoused by most liberals of his day. His own ethical and philosophical beliefs stated, “that nature obeys no plan, that history follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula, can, in principle, solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty- of actual individuals, in specific times and places- is an absolute value; that a minimum area of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in the name of abstractions or general principles so freely bandied by the great thinkers of this or any age, such as eternal salvation, or history, or humanity, or progress, still less the State or the Church or the proletariat.” He was a socialist, but one who was uncomfortable with the collectivist schemes of either Bakunin (who was a friend) or Marx. Herzen was no friend of the people in the abstract. The masses “are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power; they are offended by those who stand alone. By equality they understand equality of oppression…. They want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not, like the present one against it. But to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads.” Herzen also believed in the concrete wellbeing of individuals in the now, not in some far off distant utopia. “Do you truly want to condemn human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on…. or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge…. with humble words ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag?” He also stated that man “wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the unconscious midwife of the future…. Why is belief in God [and] the Kingdom of Heaven silly, whereas belief in earthly Utopias is not silly?” Herzen, like Tolstoy, believed that true salvation for the individual was only possible by self-reflection. “If only people wanted…. instead of liberating humanity, to liberate themselves, they would do much for…. the liberation of man.” 

Perhaps no intellectual was more greatly admired by his liberal peers than Vissarion Belinsky. He did not come from aristocratic stock- the son of a poor naval doctor. As a writer he was a critic, a pamphleteer, and essayist, who did not leave a grand treatise to posterity. He died young, at the age of thirty-seven, but his memory would inspire his contemporaries well beyond his death. His moral weight and sense of purpose was so strong as to inspire a generation of radicals with his ideas. “All serious questions to Belinsky were always, in the end, moral questions: about what it is that is wholly valuable and worth pursuing for its own sake.” He came from a group of Russian writers who believed that their works had to have moral worth. They had to be expressions of professed ideals, not merely aesthetic fancy. Their words were their very essence of being. “Books and ideas to Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with the most devastating violence…. To the end of his days he believed that art- and in particular literature- gave the truth to those who sought it; that the purer the artistic impulse- the more purely artistic the work- the clearer and profounder the truth revealed; and he remained faithful to the romantic doctrine that the best and least alloyed art was necessarily the expression not merely of the individual artist but always of a milieu, a culture, a nation, whose voice, conscious and unconscious, that artist was, a function without which he became trivial and worthless, and in the context of which alone his own personality possessed any significance.” As with Tolstoy and Herzen, Belinsky was no fan of scientism and materialism. “Life on earth, material existence, above all politics, was repulsive but fortunately unimportant.” Like Herzen, he was also a socialist individualist and also against the mass-man. “Be social or die! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that genius on earth should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the mud?” Like Bakunin, he was no fan of religion and particularly the Orthodox Church. “In the words God and religion I see only black darkness, chains and the knout.” Belinsky sought only one thing in his life- personal truth- and he struggled and died in his quest for it. 

Ivan Turgenev is perhaps the most ambivalent of the Russian intellectuals. He thought of himself as a liberal and even firmly tried to ingratiate himself with the younger radicals and anarchists of his day. But they found his novels reactionary, while the reactionaries found them too liberal. He was a friend of Belinsky and lived his life trying to emulate the ideals and search for truth that his friend embodied. However, his opinions on art and literature were that they should not serve as beacons of morality in the way Belinsky professed. Berlin opines that Turgenev, “loved every manifestation of art and beauty as deeply as anyone has ever done. The conscious use of art for ends extraneous to itself, ideological, didactic, or utilitarian, and especially as a deliberate weapon in the class war, as demanded by the radicals of the 1860s, was detestable to him.” Henry James would say of him, “he felt and understood the opposite sides of life.” Berlin summarizes the conflicted soul that grounded away at Turgenev, “all his life he wished to march with the progressives, with the party of liberty and protest. But, in the end, he could not bring himself to accept their brutal contempt for art, civilized behaviour, for everything that he held dear in European culture. He hated their dogmatism, their arrogance, their destructiveness, their appalling ignorance of life.” Turgenev himself states of his moral compass, “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above. I oppose revolution in principle.” At the same time he felt, “it was always better to be with the persecuted than with the persecutors.” His guiding principle was that “one must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.”

The Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century interacted with their western European cohorts even though their own ideas lagged somewhat behind. They could not rouse the masses and, for the most part, did not even try. Belinsky opined, “the people feel the need of potatoes, but none whatever of a constitution- that is desired only be educated townspeople who are quite powerless.” They believed in progress, but not in the name of some distant abstraction. These intellectuals believed of their fellows, “men are not simple enough, human lives and relationships too complex for standard formulae and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal, be the motives for doing it ever so lofty, always lead in the end to a terrible maiming of human beings.” Given the revolutions which were to occur in twentieth century Russia, this was perhaps a modest and prescient admission.

“Two Cheers for Anarchism” by James C. Scott

Scott is a professor at Yale, not your typical anarchist breeding ground. Studying marginalized primitive societies living between modern nation states, he realized how much of society evolves between the cracks of formal government. Studying revolutionary history, he came to the conclusion that in every historical revolution it was the State that had always ended up eventually expanding in either scope or scale politically, usually both. “The more highly planned, regulated, and formal a social or economic order is, the more likely it is to be parasitic on informal processes that the formal scheme does not recognize and without which it could not continue to exist.” The State becomes an appropriator, an arbiter, not an innovator. Channeling Hobbes, he suggests, “Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.”

How is the individual to fight back? Scott initially suggests small scale, barely noticeable, jabs at the regime. Living in a just-unified Germany in 1989, he suggested its citizens drive five miles over the speed limit, jaywalk at a crosswalk at midnight, because, “one day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality…. You have to be ready.” More seriously, in Albert Hirschman’s words exit is often better (or at least less risky) than voice for the small fry. “Desertion is a lower-risk alternative to mutiny, squatting a lower-risk alternative to a land invasion, poaching a lower-risk alternative to open assertion of rights to timber, game, or fish.” Over time “this ‘ceded space of disobedience’ is, as it were, seized and becomes occupied territory.”

Another zone of conflict is between standardization vs. the vernacular. From city planning to forestry growth, top down planning has nudged its way past local understanding. “The fatal assumption [is that in] any such activity there is only one thing going on, and the objective of planning is to maximize the efficiency of its delivery.” Another mistake is equating visual order with functional order. Central planning assumes too much- too much of the knowledge that is diffused, tacit, generational, and implied. Setting up “best practices”, “harmonization”, and international standards removes the core of local knowledge and particular circumstance- the imbedded proclivities and limitations of that situation. One of the biggest errors of progress is the standardization of the human being. Whether through the factory system, the collective farm, or the public school we seek to create the basic components for the replaceable man. On the other hand, “small property has the means to elude the state’s control: small property is hard to monitor, tax, or police; it resists regulation and enforcement by the very complexity, variety, and mobility of its activities.” That is one reason the enemy of modern States have been migrant laborers, nomads, itinerant salesmen, pastoralists, and gypsies. In fact, the individual has often fought and given up income and wealth for his freedom and autonomy- the small stakeholder who resists becoming a tenant farmer or factory hand at any price.

However, the tide is against the holdout. The State is winning. As Robin Hanson has documented, “workers in rich nations today accept far more explicit dominance and ranking at work than most foragers and farmers would have accepted.” Today it is easier for the State to kill the autonomous individual to create a cog in their machine- all for his own good, of course, just as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “killed the Indian to save the man”- all in the interest of progress. The technocrat’s dream has no place for the value of choice for choice’s own sake or for the dignity of uniqueness. To use Sartre’s words, it is a world devoid of contingency: where costs and benefits are objectively preordained, everything of worth has a monetary price, and value systems are ascertained from above, instead of by the subjective human preferences revealed through action.

“Capitalism Without Capital” by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake

This is a book about the intangible economy and how big a role it now plays in the total economy. This is vitally important today as “conventional accounting practice is to not measure intangible investment as creating a long-lived capital asset.” However, investments in ideas, knowledge, aesthetics, networks, and organizational structures make up more and more of the current economy. As far back as the mid-1990s, in the United States, intangible investments overtook tangible investments, in terms of total dollars invested. The most common intangible investments include brands, software, databases, R&D, design, marketing, organizational capital, training, and intellectual property rights. These are often difficult to measure because quality improvements are hard to compute and many of the work happens “in-house”, so a dollar value is hard to calculate.

The authors point to four properties that make intangibles unique. 1) Scalability- “intangibles do not have to obey the same set of physical laws [as tangible investments]: they can generally be used again and again.” Scalability is increased by network effects. This often leads to industry concentration and winner-takes-all markets, where the monetary rewards for being second best are meager. 2) Sunkenness- investing in intangibles often means sunk costs. “It’s hard to recoup the money spent on setting up a sales force or on building an unsuccessful business unit or brand. Physical assets are often much easier to sell, even if they are quite specialized.” Intangibles are more likely to be firm specific. “Investments with high irrecoverable costs can be difficult to finance, especially with debt.” Intangibles do not make good collateral. Markets also have a hard time trading them because they are uniquely valuable to only one firm. 3) Spillover- “It is sometimes hard for the original investor to appropriate the benefits of intangible investment.” Often, it is another company that reaps the rewards of someone else’s initial idea by copying it, modifying it, scaling it up, or marketing it better. Ideas are non-rival and non-excludable (except through IP) so, in a sense, limitless. Therefore, they can be appropriated by others for their own use. Companies must spend time through secrecy, the law, or being first to market to make sure any competitors find it hard to copy them. 4) Synergies- combinations of ideas are often more important than any single new invention alone. “Technological innovation [is] “combinatorial.” That is to say, any given technology depends on the bringing together of already-existing ideas.” Intangible innovation, unlike tangible investment, brings together ideas that are not expended and used up, making the potential for synergies higher.

In general, intangible investment tends to be more uncertain. Due to sunk costs, investments could amount to nothing, but, due to scale, one can also hit a home run. Intangibles help lead to a superstar economy where a few concentrated firms reap most of the benefits. However, being a “fast-follower” can sometimes be more profitable than being first to market. The intangible economy can also lead to greater rent-seeking as companies use resources to lobby legislatures to defend their territory and keep competitors from imitating them. Company management has become even more vital in the intangible economy. “It involves designing new ways of working, developing hierarchies within firms, and putting in place software and systems to manage them.” Information flows more easily within an organization and so the manager has even more authority to delegate and does not rely on the autonomy of the worker. Knowledge is often process-specific and tacit. Often, new inventions and systems have to be combined correctly with proper physical assets before a company is able to reap gains. “New technological infrastructure is most useful in conjunction with new ways of working and without these new ways of working might not be very useful at all…. Nearly forty years after the development of the first central electrical power plant, still only slightly more than 50 percent of factory mechanical-drive capacity had been electrified.” The manufacturing industry’s organizational management needed time to catch up and create a new factory model to be paired with the new invention before gains were created. The intangible economy often requires systemic innovation. Electric car innovation would be worthless without a system of charging stations and added innovations in both electricity production and battery storage. It is the whole package and its network effects that often lead to success. “Systems innovation relies on leadership: the ability to convince other organizations, networks of partners, and even competitors to do what the systems innovator wants.” Financing the intangible economy is also a challenge. “Even those intangibles that can be sold, like patents or copyrights, present problems to creditors: they are typically difficult to value because a patent or a copyright is unique.” Debt/equity ratios of industries heavy on intangibles tend to skew equity heavy. “Current regulation disallows (almost all) intangible assets as part of capital reserves that banks must hold.” Tax systems also currently favor debt over equity, due to tax write-offs on interest, but not equity capital. Due to accounting rules about expensing versus capitalization, managers are also sometimes reluctant to invest more in R&D for fear that it will hurt short-term stock prices. This book neatly outlines some of the features of the intangible economy. It explains some of its unique characteristics, why intangibles are likely to grow even more in the future, and some of the hurdles faced as these shifts occur.

“Philosophical Investigations” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein

This is a puzzling book on the face of it. Ostensibly, it is a collection of aphorisms, published posthumously. However, the aphorisms have a coherence to them. Wittgenstein is still concerned with language, the meanings of words, and how individuals use language to communicate between one another. The book also gets at what Wittgenstein really believes philosophy is all about in the first place. One doesn’t always know when Wittgenstein is making a profound statement and when he is not being entirely serious with the reader. Each aphorism requires time and meditation and one still cannot help but feel that one has not come away with all that there is to offer. Wittgenstein asks himself rhetorically, “What is your aim in philosophy? - To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” But he makes this no easy task. The reader is asked to go on a journey with him that is not straight and, in fact, may contain numerous dead ends or, at least, side trips. In fact, Wittgenstein admits early on, “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”

The book’s aphorisms are about what Wittgenstein does not say as much as it is about what he does. He questions the nature of our shared reality- our space, our language, our feelings, our thoughts, our customs, our culture. Much of Wittgenstein’s time is spent on language and the meaning of words. “Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.” And later, “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” He spends much time on language as a tool for communication as well as language as a tool for thought. Both uses of language play into the meanings that we ascribe to words and to the ideas that they generate. “We may indeed imagine naming to be some remarkable mental act, as it were the baptism of an object.” He goes on about the power of naming, ““what the names in language signify must be indestructible, for it must be possible to describe the state of affairs in which everything destructible is destroyed. And this description will contain words; and what corresponds to these cannot in that case be destroyed, for otherwise the words would have no meaning.” I must not saw off the branch in which I am sitting.” Wittgenstein is leading us, without telling us. This method leads the mind to wander, but often into fertile territory of one’s own.

Wittgenstein is often concerned with the rules: rules of language, rules of philosophy, and, even, the rules of life. “Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each.” He is always dancing around the nature of philosophy. “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For whatever may be hidden is no interest to us. The name “philosophy” might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.” It is hard to tell whether Wittgenstein is describing the challenges of philosophy or its underlying simplicity when done correctly. “When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this.” He seems to view the doing of philosophy, in many ways, as a uniquely private affair. At best, one can seek some guidance, but the heavy lifting must be one’s own. True philosophical thinking is methodical and painstakingly precise. “Philosophy only states what everyone concedes to it.” Wittgenstein’s aphorisms often take the form of riddles. “Does everything that we do not find conspicuous make an impression of inconspicuousness? Does what is ordinary always make the impression of ordinariness?” One cannot simply read each aphorism and breeze along. His statements must be wrestled with and chewed over. This is a book from which two readers are bound to come away with two very different impressions, because the reader is forced to do so much of the work himself. 

“The Tides of Mind” by David Gelernter

This is a book on how the mind, as opposed to the brain, works. It is about thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, and dreams. Gelernter’s thesis is that the human mind’s journey proceeds on a spectrum, as we humans progress throughout our day. “The role of emotion in thought, our use of memory, the nature of understanding, the quality of consciousness- all change continuously throughout the day, as we sweep down a spectrum that is crucial to nearly everything about the mind and thought and consciousness…. As we descend from the top, our gift for abstraction and reasoning fades while sensation and emotion begin to bloom cautiously and then grow lusher and brighter.” He points specifically to the role of memory, which transforms from becoming an information source to a retriever of stories, fragments, and anecdotes, all as we move down-spectrum. “Memory’s tasks go far beyond supplying reminiscences and facts. Memory is a pattern recognizer, discovering and supplying us with the knowledge of patterns we need in order to get through the day.” Furthermore, memory acts like a kind of mental shorthand. “When many separate memories are largely the same, we tend to forget the little differences and blend those memories together into one abstract, heavyweight memory.”

Mind is not pure thought. It combines the brain and the body. We not only think, but we feel through our minds. “The mind is consciousness and memory. Consciousness deals only with now; memory, with not-now, with the past. I can think consciously about the past or the future, but I can experience only the present moment and no other.” Gelernter breaks the spectrum down into three states, but these states are not distinct- they blur and we can float in and out between them. “The act of thinking about, of stepping back and examining myself and my sensations, comes more naturally up-spectrum than down…. We rarely give way to emotion. We focus on our plans, goals, surroundings. Early mornings are rarely the time for storms of rage or despair. Nor are we normally at our wittiest or most engaging at breakfast.” At this point in the spectrum the mind is conducive to abstract thought. “Abstraction means skipping detail and special cases. High analytic intelligence, high IQ, makes you quick. You are quick because you wield abstractions confidently and use them at the highest level…. Abstraction is the defining procedure of the rational mind.” Furthermore, memory serves a distinct purpose. “The conscious mind is in charge and uses memory as a tool. Memory is kept on a short leash and is not allowed to wander. The conscious mind makes focused, specific queries to memory and gets information back..”

The middle part of the spectrum is where your creative mind gets free reign. “Creative problem solving centers on discovering and using a new analogy, and that equals recollection plus reflection.” This is when emotion starts to creep into the mind. “The mind’s most effective essence summarizer is emotion. Two objects, persons, or events that are wholly unlike on the surface might make me feel the same way- or basically the same. And that similar feeling suggests, in turn, that these two must have something in common…. But we rarely decide how an event makes us feel; we just feel that way. The event presses our keys, registers directly on our feelings. Human emotions are essence summarizers. They take us directly from a real-world situation to a particular emotion that captures, for us, the essence of the situation.” That is how we make leaps of thought and analogies between disparate things. We create patterns through emotion. 

“The bottom of the spectrum is no place for self-awareness. It is a place where being drives out reflection.” There are three states associated with down-spectrum in which we exhibit similar tendencies: daydreaming, sleep-onset thought, and night-dreaming. “Day-dreaming keeps reminding us of our current concerns…. The concerns it comes back to most are those emotionally most important to us.” By the time we dream we are completely down-spectrum. “Dreaming is first and foremost recollection- not creating, but reexperiencing, memories…. Every night we experience, in dreams, sensation or emotion so vivid as to occupy our minds almost completely and leave us no space, or not much, for self-awareness or reflection or making memories…. When we hallucinate, we don’t just recall the memory; we reexperience it. We reenter the experience instead of merely inspecting it from outside. A hallucinated recollection is clearly more involving, enveloping, and attention-grabbing than a typical recollection.” Furthermore, dreams do not exist in the ordinary, linear flow of life. In that way, they suspend time. “We have no consistent, continuous measure of time that reaches into our dreams. Each dream inhabits its own separate world, with its own separate clock.” However, dreams are not disconnected from our waking world entirely. In fact, they are intimately intertwined with our reality as we subjectively have perceived it. “Dreaming is remembering, unconstrained. Ideas and speculations appear too, expressed in visual form, but remembering dominates dreams…. We start with recent memories and work our way back. In the process, we discover what truly interests or worries us. We are good at rejecting unpleasant thoughts, keeping them out of waking consciousness. Even in dreams we never surrender completely; dreams tend to be haunted by “dysphoria,” unfocused unhappiness…. Why do dreams predict the future? Because they tell us truths we know but are not brave enough to acknowledge. They don’t so much foretell the future as remind us what it was always going to be.” 

Gelernter ends his discussion by relating his spectrum theory to children. He suggests just as adults move from up-spectrum to down during the course of each day, a person’s childhood is actually an effort to move from down-spectrum gradually up: from a baby, to a toddler, through adolescence, and ending at adulthood. In the womb you are just in a state of being, with little to no outside stimuli. Then, “infants are perfect candidates for overconsciousness- consciousness burn, in which we are overwhelmed by sensory or emotional data and have no attention to spare on the recollections that form automatically within memory. Accordingly, these new memories are never hardened, never consolidated- and most can’t survive.” Infants are living their days in a dream state- so enthralled with being that they cannot process specific memory. “There is every reason to believe that infants’ conscious experience has an intensity, unexpectedness, magic, and mystery…. Unrealistic, illogical, or magical thought is a child’s first guess at how things are…. Children are famous for curiosity and asking questions. But they can make do without answers.” Even as they progress, “strongly related to short attention spans is the small child’s tendency to concentrate on local neighborhoods, not on global or overall consistency.” Abstract reasoning is still beyond them. Gelernter suggests that it is healthy and natural to transition between the conscious and emotional states of mind. “To reason is human. To long for our minds to be flooded with powerful emotion, so that we can only feel and can’t think, so that we can’t reason, is also human. We long for pure experience. We long to lay down the burden of reason…. for an occasional rest period. Reasoning is the crown jewel of human achievement, but it is hard work.”

“The Maias” by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This novel, set in nineteenth century Portugal, transports one back to a different age at the tail end of nobility, chivalry, and honor. It is a tale of three generations of one of the richest families in Portugal, the Maias. The grandfather, Afonso, represents the old aristocracy: learned, simple, honorable, pious, and noble. The son is a romantic, who commits to a tragic marriage, and, finally, commits suicide in a valiant display of despair and honor. He leaves Afonso to raise a grandson, Carlos, who grows up educated, modern, athletic, literary, scientific, cosmopolitan, but above all, a dandy. The novel depicts scenes of upperclass life in Portugal from the artistic, political, religious, and landed classes. There is a bit of philosophy, a bit of poetry, and social commentary in general. The plot is at turns humorous, romantic, tragic, and didactic. The author leads one gently along, showing off a Portugal that is at once modernizing and in moral decline. The age is both one of urgency and flippancy. Contradictions abound. Tragedy is all but inevitable for both the family of the Maias and for Portugese society at large.

“On Balance” by Adam Phillips

The unifying theme of this collection of essays is living a balanced life (and why that might not always be such a good idea). After all, is not an abundance of love, an abundance of pleasure, and an abundance of joy always all for the better? Perhaps not. However, Phillips provocatively posits, “perhaps only the road of excess can teach us when enough is enough.” 

In his essay, “Children Behaving Badly” he describes the interactions between parent and child and what happiness means to them both. Simply put, “children get pleasure from things that adults don’t want them to get pleasure from.” On the other hand, parents, unhealthily, try to live vicariously through their children. We push them into the lives we dreamed of, but never could attain. “We don’t, for example, want to burden our children with having to be happy because we can’t be, and because if they are happy we parents…. can feel better about ourselves; which casts our children as anti-depressants.” And this is where balance comes into play. Perhaps it is unreasonable to believe that a goal for life should be happiness anyway. “It is unrealistic- and by ‘unrealistic’ I mean it is a demand that cannot be met- to assume that if all goes well in a child’s life he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn’t make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child.” A child has to work out their own way through life. And that will be painful, fitful, and sometimes unbalanced. “The adolescent is the person who needs to experiment with self-betrayal; is the person who needs to find out what it is, or what it might be, to betray oneself. Which is not what it means to break the rules, but what it means to break the rules that are of special, of essential, value to oneself. And in order to do this you have to find out what these rules are. So-called delinquent behaviour is the unconscious attempt to find the rules that really matter to the individual.” The most important values are the one’s you believe in because you have once transgressed them. Childhood is not the time for balance. It is the time for experimentation, for trial and error. 

In another essay, “Negative Capabilities”, Phillips deals with the issue of helplessness. “Helplessness is more often than not assumed to be a problem (what we are suffering from) rather than a pleasure (a strength or a virtue).” Phillips makes the case that helplessness is the default state of human affairs, especially for a properly functioning social animal. It should not be a state of discomfort (or at least pain). “The experience of helplessness…. can make us sacrifice our lives, can lure us into a nihilistic pact: if you give up on the experience of satisfaction, you can be protected.” Helplessness is not hopelessness. “‘Satisfaction’ is the word, the experience, that links what we have learned to call our desire and our obligation.” Is it also a state of balance? “The only problem with desire is that it involves frustration; and frustration, whatever else it is, is an acknowledgement of incapacity…. Incomplete satisfaction is our fate, but there are individuals for whom the only project is complete satisfaction…. It is not desiring per se that is the problem, it is being able to bear, and bear with, the inevitable repetition of incomplete satisfaction.” What Phillips suggests is that we, as adults, need to get over our feeling of disorientation in the world. “Only children have homes; and an adult who feels at home in the world is out of touch with reality. Growing up means needing a map. Children shouldn’t feel lost; adults should feel lost because that is what they are…. The one thing family can’t prepare you for is life outside the family.” Life’s obligations often lead to life’s biggest regrets. People hardly ever regret fulfilling their true desires. “People suffer from not having been able to take chances; that for reasons of which they were unconscious they couldn’t use what happened to them for the satisfactions they were seeking.” Sometimes, rather than the safe and middling life, one has to put oneself out on the ledge and even fall in order to reach for greatness. “Mistakes can work, that naivety makes extraordinary things possible whereas worldliness, the making of good deals, can secure your survival, but not grant you undreamed-of success.” In the end Phillips suggests, “what we learn from our mistakes is that we shall go on making them.”