“The Final Pagan Generation” by Edward Watts

This book is a masterful look at the rise of Christianity and the end of paganism as seen through the eyes of the elites of the day. Did they realize at the time what transformative religious times they were living in? No. None could have imagined an Empire turned majority Christian. Most elites of the era were focused more on economic and political affairs and relegated religion to the back burner. Many early Christians, also, still held vestiges of pagan rituals and belief, while most pagans were willing to mix socially with the new Christian converts. “It was this generation’s faith in the foundations of the imperial system and their craving for stability that enabled Christian emperors to mount increasingly powerful challenges to established religious life.” No man changed the history of Christianity more than Emperor Constantine. It was he who, after himself converting, gave confiscated lands and wealth back to Christians, erected churches throughout the empire, gave Bishops judicial power, and exempted clergy from local taxes and duties. Still, the empire of his day was 80-85% pagan. A few centuries later animal sacrifice and gladiatorial games would be banned and most pagan temples sacked or converted to Christian churches. This shift was enabled by turbulent times, with multiple claimants to the Eastern and Western thrones often engaged in civil war, an expanding bureaucratic state replacing local administration in affairs, crippling tax burdens, and inflation running rampant. The pagan elites were caught unaware of the sea change beneath them as they cultivated the arts of language, rhetoric, and philosophy, while living in a bubble of intertwined social connections.

“Faces of Moderation” by Aurelian Craiutu

Craiutu’s book looks at the moderate mind in the political sphere. He suggests moderation is a temperament and not an ideology because “what is moderate in one context and period may significantly differ from what is moderate at another point in time.” Nonetheless, moderates share some features including “their belief in dialogue, their rejection of Manichaeism and ideological thinking, their embrace of trimming and eclecticism, and their opposition to extremism and fanaticism in all their forms.” These ideals are especially needed in the modern age where “reckless overconfidence came to be regarded as manly courage, while prudent hesitation and careful consideration of facts were deemed to be forms of treason or cowardice.” Modern politics has become a winner take-all battle, where the poles trade spoils and the middle is lost. This study in defense of the political moderate explains that moderation is not cowardice or opportunism, but a principled temperament which seeks to balance while being loyal to the truth. Craiutu profiles five very different thinkers, from the socialist left to the right, who chose to contest the battle of political ideas with a temper of moderation, instead of retreating into the realms of higher philosophy or aesthetics. 

Raymond Aron was disappointed by how the citizenry of post-WWII France possessed “increasing disregard for the rule of law and legality and their preference for emergency measures instead of laws.” Fascism and communism were the twin secular faiths that had been damaged, but not discarded, by the war. The existentialists were still proposing a new ethic of authenticity, which freed man from the chains of society and recovered his true human nature. “The most radical among them were even ready to purchase a distant and alluring redemption at a high price that implied the sacrifice of the present for the sake of an abstract, radiant, and uncertain future.” Aron feared his fellow citizens felt, “reform was boring and revolution exciting…. The myth of Revolution serves as a refuge for utopian intellectuals; it becomes the mysterious, unpredictable intercessor between the real and the ideal.” Aron was not willing to throw away popular beliefs, customs, and conventions that were tested by time. He was an Aristotelian who started from “what is” rather than “what ought to be”. Aron argued, “to think politically in a society one must make a simple but fundamental choice. This fundamental choice is either the acceptance of the kind of society in which we live, or its rejection…. From this fundamental choice flow decisions.” For Aron, politics, by its nature, was not pure and could not be judged with the moral clarity of religion or philosophy. He was opposed to the determinism of his day, espoused by both Marxism and scientism. History is “neither progress nor decadence, neither movement toward a final end nor the endless repetition of the same facts or the same cycles.” Humans had agency, but contingency also played a role in the future of men’s affairs. Every political situation “always allows for a margin of choice, but the margin is never unlimited.” Aron was also politically moderate because he feared his own fallibility. He was conscious of his limited knowledge, of the plurality of opinions, and was, therefore, cautious and skeptical. He declared, “I have chosen the society that accepts dialogue. As far as possible, this dialogue must be reasonable; but it accepts unleashed emotions, it accepts irrationality.”

Isaiah Berlin was a scholar of the Enlightenment, who was fascinated by Counter-Enlightenment figures. He claimed, “what is interesting is to read the enemy, because the enemy penetrates the defenses, the weak points, because what interests me is what is wrong with the ideas in which I believe- why it might be right to modify or even abandon them.” Nonetheless, he was firmly anti-monist, the idea that there was one single discoverable truth or answer, one Platonic ideal. There could be no synthesis of values that could be found rationally and no single path that headed to any final end. He deplored the definitive, the unambiguous, the universal. He posited, “if you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise.” However, this idea of treating humanity as an abstraction and present man as a mere steppingstone in the course of history resulted in “a terrible maiming of human beings…. political vivisection on an ever increasing scale…. the liberation of some only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one…. If there were a final solution, a final pattern in which society could be arranged, liberty would become a sin.” The alternative was pluralism where “human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and perpetual rivalry with one another.” Like Aron, Berlin viewed culture as providing unique understandings of the good life, virtue, and dignity and so there could be no universal scale on which to judge a particular society. However, his was not a cultural relativism, but an understanding of pluralism. Even within society, he defended this pluralism and with it, the minority. “What the age calls for is not (as we are so often told) more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organization. Rather it is the opposite- less Messianic ardour, more enlightened skepticism, more toleration of idiosyncrasies, more frequent ad hoc measures to achieve aims in the foreseeable future, more room for the attainment of their personal ends by individuals and by minorities whose tastes and beliefs find (whether rightly or wrongly must not matter) little response among the majority.” He felt that “democratic politics demand a sense of humility and the conviction that every form of power requires solid opposition and relentless correction…. [He believed] politics must start low and aim relatively low, by seeking first and foremost to reduce as much as possible the amount of suffering and violence in the world.” Again like Aron, Berlin was motivated in his humility by his own fallibility and the idea that “life’s fundamental diversity…. is the most powerful argument against utopianism or monism…. Life’s diversity, complexity, and murkiness must then be protected against those who have an excessive craving for unity, simplicity, clarity, and purity.”

Norberto Bobbio was a professor, and later a senator, on Italy’s socialist left, though never a full-blown Marxist. He was a pessimist by disposition, who, in his own words, was “unsuited to politics” and had an academic’s “typical professional deficiency, that of being an eternal doubter” with a “natural inclination to expect the worst.” He viewed the defining tension of the twentieth century as the struggle between liberty and equality. Bobbio viewed his politics as eclectic, that is, “looking at a problem from all sides [which] is an approach which is reflected at the practical level in political moderation.” He particularly was cautious about politics’ relationship to power. “The higher the ends, the greater the temptation will be to invoke dubious and ultimately violent means for achieving them.” He believed in a unified European culture that saw no national borders or line between East and West. “The fight against moral impediments is a struggle for the defense of the truth [and] the commitment of the men of culture is above all a commitment to the truth.” He condemned all censorship, falsification of facts, and spurious arguments even to achieve noble ends. As a moderate, he felt his task to be to “sow the seeds of doubt and not to gather certainties.” He was not interested in conflict with the opposition, but in true dialogue. “I learned to respect other people’s ideas. To pause before the secret of every conscience, to understand before arguing, and to argue before condemning.” He suggested “maximum openness, which is a form of mental generosity, toward the opposing set of values.” He preferred a “bad democracy” to a “good dictatorship”, seeing the value of pluralism and dissent. He preferred politics to interfere in the lives of the citizenry as little as possible. He claimed the lives of the masses “are lived out in most cases in areas which lie outside the one occupied by politics. [When the State begins to dominate society] it is a sign that the individual has been reduced to a cog in a car engine and has no clear idea of who the driver is and where he is driving.” Instead of “either-or” choices, he preferred “neither-nor” choices. He characterized his temperament as meek. But “unlike a submissive person who is often passive and abandons the struggle due to weakness, weariness, or fear, the meek never entirely yield and are neither inert or docile. They seek instead to curb and “repudiate the destructive life out of a sense of annoyance for the futility of its intended aims.””

Michael Oakeshott was a British academic, conservative in his politics, but bohemian in his personal affairs. He felt that “the business of a government [is] not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation.” He wanted to temper both radicalism and a zeal for perfectionism. He also rejected the materialism of capitalism as an end in and of itself. He believed greatness “cannot be derived from material wealth alone; the latter tends to foster bourgeois philistinism, intellectual mediocrity, conformity, and complacency, which characterizes the “middle mind” and the rationalist spirit.” Despite his conservatism, he ridiculed the ancient Greek philosophers who viewed nature as a normative yardstick and political activity as the mark of good citizenship. “The things political activity can achieve are often valuable, but I do not believe that they are ever the most valuable things in the communal life of a society.” He wanted a stable politics so that “artists, poets, and philosophers- the “salt of the earth”- should not be compelled to leave their lofty retreats in order to bring their wisdom down into the political realm.” Like Berlin, he was an anti-monist, who did not want to impose a uniform pattern of life or direct public activities to shape people for the good. He also did not believe that conservatism offered a full-fledged philosophy of life. Nonetheless, he viewed it as “a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be…. To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the super-abundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” At the same time, he claimed, “there is indeed no inconsistency in being conservative in politics and ‘radical’ in everything else.” He believed in Lord Halifax’s “character of a trimmer”, whose motto was “neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but each in his place and season.” The disposition of the trimmer was, “success he will observe with suspicion, and he will lend his support more readily to weakness than to power; he will dissent without dissidence; and approve without irrevocably committing himself. In opposition, he will not deny the value of what he opposes. Only its appropriateness; and his support carries with it only the judgement that what is supported is opportune.”

Adam Michnik was a Polish anti-Communist, who, alone in this study, had to practice moderation, instead of just preaching it. He was involved with both the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and Solidarity Movement in Communist Poland. As for his temperament, he claimed, “I think that ‘anti-authoritarian’ is the key word. We rebelled against different authorities, but the sense of rebellion was the common denominator.” Like the others in this study, he was cosmopolitan while being wedded to the particularities of his nation. He advised, “remain faithful to your national roots, but cultivate your permanent rootlessness.” The KOR’s strategy was not to seize the machine of power in Poland to affect change, but to change reality on the ground first, to the best of their limited ability within the confines of the oppressive Communist State. Jonathan Schell summarizes their philosophy as, “start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the pen. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” Michnik believed in the plurality of democracy, but he was no utopian idealist about what relief it would bring to Poland. “Democracy is not infallible because in all debates all are equal. That is why it lends itself to manipulation, and may be helpless against corruption. This is why, frequently, it chooses banality over excellence, shrewdness over nobility, empty promise over true competence. Democracy is a continuous articulation of particular interests, a diligent search for compromise among them, a marketplace of emotions, hatreds, and hopes; it is eternal imperfection, a mixture of sinfulness, saintliness, and monkey business.” Like Bobbio, Michnik believed in the primacy of dialogue. “The person of dialogue attempts to transform the enemy into an opponent and the opponent into a partner. An opponent is for him one who presents a challenge, who wants and asks to be understood. The person of dialogue believes that dialogue is the only way to be understood by others. So he makes an effort to look at the world through his opponent’s viewpoint, to “change hats with him,” and to “step into his shoes.”…. He does not shy away from defending his own arguments and is not afraid of the truth, but, invariably, he puts respect for human dignity first…. Each partner accepts that the dignity of the other is of immeasurable value. This presupposes the ability to strike a compromise, whenever possible, the readiness to admit that one is not in possession of the sole and complete [truth], and the willingness to accept somebody else’s reasoning and to change one’s own attitudes.” Michnik believed in the value of political tension. He confessed, “I would nevertheless be afraid to live in a world without conservative institutions and values. A world devoid of tradition would be nonsensical and anarchic. The human world should be constructed from a permanent conflict between conservatism and contestation; if either is absent from society, pluralism is destroyed.”

Craiutu suggests that when “thinking about politics or acting in the political sphere, one must start from the facts themselves and acknowledge that there are certain structural tensions between values and principles that cannot be fully solved or eliminated forever.” He quotes Leszek Kolakowski on the virtues of an inconsistent mind, “reasonable inconsistency does not seek to forge a synthesis between extremes, knowing it does not exist, since values as such exclude each other integrally. The real world of values is inconsistent; that is to say, it is made up of antagonistic elements.” Craiutu views the moderates in his study as embodying the ideals of Montaigne, “no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite to my own they may be…. When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath.” Craiutu sees in moderation a temperance, a humbleness, a humility, a recognition of fallibility and imperfectability that leads one to accept a world of incremental changes that gives space to plurality and differences of fundamental values and not just means. Craiutu ends by echoing Albert Camus’ words on principles, “if anyone…. still thinks heroically that one’s brother must die rather than one’s principles, I shall go no farther than to admire him from a distance. I am not of his stamp.”

“The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt

DeWitt had originally intended for the title of this book to be “The Seven Samurai” and interspersed throughout the novel you read excerpted scenes of Kurosawa’s classic, relayed by the characters. The two main characters are an Oxford-educated American single mom, struggling to make it financially, in early 1990’s London and her precocious young son, Ludo. The narrative begins with the mother, but soon rotates between the two. She has unorthodox child-rearing habits, which include teaching the child ancient Greek at age four ala James Mill, riding the Tube around in loops while studying to avoid paying the heating bill at her flat, and sitting in the National Portrait Gallery reading books all day. The child becomes quite the linguist and polymath, but eventually wants to find out who his father is. This is something his mother refuses. She feels that watching and re-watching “The Seven Samurai” will imbue the child with enough of the manly qualities. Without giving away much, the father’s identity turns out to be a disappointment to the boy and he starts a quest to find a better dad from semi-famous literati, academics, and artists in the London scene. The book is at once poignant and hilarious. Not having a kid myself, I imagine it to be a fine child-rearing manual in its own way- with do’s and don’ts aplenty. The quality of writing is superb throughout and the amount of research to include the level of detail in the book is tremendous. DeWitt studied classics at Oxford herself and so the book is littered with references to Homer and Lucretius. There is a short digression into the best way to teach a child ancient Greek, complete with practice exercises in Greek script, and a shorter digression into Japanese Kanji characters that fill up a page of text. She intersperses Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Italian- all without it feeling contrived. The pace is fast, as you journey with the boy and his mother through his adolescence as he tries to find some semblance of normality in a world he doesn’t quite fit into or understand. Typical of the boy’s adventures around London was this, “I could try the hunchbacked midget costume I had to wear when we went to see The Crying Game- but I thought I might have trouble getting into a bar even as a midget sensitive about his height.” More seriously, you can sense the anger and frustration in DeWitt’s prose amidst the humor. It is an anger at the conventional, anger at academia, anger at the publishing industry, and anger at those institutions deemed to be the modern sanctifiers of taste. As DeWitt writes in an afterward, “it’s much harder to imagine what one might have been with better chances, greater challenges. Since there is no age at which the opportunities offered Ludo are the norm, we don’t know whether he was a genius or not- only that he is an oddity in a society with very low expectations.”

“From Bacteria to Bach and Back- The Evolution of Minds” by Daniel Dennett

Dennett is a philosopher by profession, who has only dabbled in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Nonetheless, he has written the most complete and far-reaching book on cultural evolution since Joseph Heinrich’s “The Secret of Our Success”. Dennett carries on the mantle of Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes and pushes it further, but first he looks at the evolutionary origins of humanity and specifically our brains. Mutations in DNA almost never happen, it is a one in a billion type event, and still mutations are the backbone of all evolution. Furthermore, it is only the still-rarer “positive” mutations that will eventually survive and replicate. “In every generation, in every lineage, only some competitors manage to reproduce, and each descendent in the next generation is either just lucky or lucky-to-be-gifted in some way. The latter group was selected (for cause, you might say, but better would be for a reason). This process accounts for the accumulation of function by a process that blindly tracks reasons, creating things that have purposes but don’t need to know them.” This means that, though reasons exist, there are not necessarily corresponding “reasoners” or as Dennett puts it, in nature there most often is “competence without comprehension.” There maybe reasons for a behavior, but that does not mean that the organism doing the behaving is itself aware of those reasons- the reasons are free floating. Natural selection only requires “(i) variation in the characteristics of members of the population, (ii) which causes different rates of reproduction, and (iii) which is heritable.” Dennett continues with the evolution of the brain specifically. He stresses that unlike computers, to which they are often compared, brains are analog, brains are parallel (they execute millions of “computations” simultaneously), brains are carbon-based, but, most importantly, brains are alive (and therefore are subject to the laws of natural selection). A brain is “made of cells that are themselves autonomous little agents with agendas, chief of which is staying alive, which spawns further goals, such as finding work and finding allies.” Neurons are helped in this by their own plasticity, although they are specific, they are also mutable. Finally, Dennett is ready to explore memes, which are “culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication- that is, by natural selection” but are “transmitted perceptually, not genetically”. Foremost among all memes are words. They are the building blocks of all human culture. “Words are autonomous in some regards; they can migrate from language to language and occur in many different roles, public and private. A word, like a virus, is a minimal kind of agent: it wants to get itself said…. An informational thing doesn’t have a mind, of course, any more than a virus does, but, like a virus, it is designed (by evolution, mainly) to provoke and enhance its own replication, and every token it generates is one of its offspring…. Words are affordances that our brains are designed (by evolutionary processes) to pick up.” Importantly, while some of this is happening at the conscious level, a lot is happening imperceptibly and through no one’s design. “As a general rule of thumb, any artifact found in abundance and showing signs of use is a good whatever-it-is; following this rule, you can tell the good ones from the not so good ones without knowing exactly why the good ones are good.” Why are words so successful? “The capacity of language to direct attention to nonpresent things and circumstances is a huge enhancement.” It is what has separated humans from all other known living creatures. As David McFarland has argued, “communication is the only behavior that requires an organism to self-monitor its own control system.” Dennett also begins to tackle the idea of the “self” and the idea of consciousness. “Our access to our own thinking, and especially to the causation and dynamics of subpersonal parts, is really no better than our access to our digestive processes; we have to rely on the rather narrow and heavily edited channel that responds to incessant curiosity with user-friendly deliverances, only one step closer to the real me than the access to the real me that is enjoyed by my family and friends.” Rather than describing the state of consciousness as firmly black or white, Dennett proposes it is more shaded, while admitting, at this stage in neurobiology, it is very hard to know for sure. “We won’t have a complete science of consciousness until we can align our manifest-image identifications of mental states by their contents with scientific-image identifications of the subpersonal information structures and events that are causally responsible for generating the details of the user-illusion we take ourselves to operate in.” Culture, however, is beyond the realm of any one individual. It is the accumulated knowledge of the species at large. “The idea of distributed comprehension- the idea that we as a group might understand something that none of us individually could fully understand” is what human civilization rests upon. He quotes Alfred North Whitehead, “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.” It actually advances as we create further competences without comprehension. It advances with the division of knowledge and the division of labor. “This distribution of partial comprehension is not optional. The edifices of social construction that shape our lives in so many regards depend on our myopic confidence that their structure is sound and needs no attention from us.” This is a sprawling book and any summation can hardly do it justice. Much of its joy is in its many detours and asides. Dennett concludes be reminding us, “there is not just coevolution between memes and genes; there is codependence between our minds’ top-down reasoning abilities and the bottom-up uncomprehending talents of our animal brains.”

“Wittgenstein’s Nephew- A Novel” by Thomas Bernhard

This is more memoir than novel, if the author is to be believed. Bernhard was friends with Ludwig’s nephew, Paul. The book starts out when both are in the hospital, Bernhard in the pulmonary ward, recovering from a lung operation, and Wittgenstein in the mental ward, recovering from one of his many bouts with madness. It concludes at Wittgenstein’s death, with the author having missed the funeral and, as yet, still refusing to go to his friend’s gravesite. It is a chronicle of a friendship, with biting commentary on Viennese society, class, literature, and culture. It is laugh out loud funny at points, but has a haunting air of depression throughout. Wittgenstein seems a man lost in his age. He gradually loses his wealth and his aristocratic manner turns from eccentric to pathetic as time passes him by. Bernhard’s friendship is real, but aloof. He sees Wittgenstein as a character, as perhaps any good writer would. As Bernhard relates of his friend, “his head was full of opera, and as his life became progressively more dreadful- with increasing rapidity during his latter years- it too became an opera, a grand opera of course, which naturally had a tragic ending.”

“Decolonizing Anarchism” by Maia Ramnath

Ramnath’s book is heavy on slogans and post-modernist interpretations of the anti-colonial, anarchist struggle. It relies too heavily on terminology of revolution, such as propaganda of the deed. It does its best when detailing the historical narrative of India’s struggle for independence from British rule. Particularly, she deals in detail with the Bengali role as the intellectual spearhead of independence. The Swadeshi Movement, translated as “one’s own country”, that started in Bengal as a result of British partition, the Ghadar Party, started in America as an independence party for India, and the samitis and akharas, the religious associations and clubs, formed in Bengal to promote Indian nationalist culture all make appearances. Theoretically, she makes her point that while decolonization movements were explicitly nationalistic, they could also be seen as an anarchist launch point. The colonial project was the highest form of nationalism and any effort to destroy it was thus a step towards anarchy. The book fails in that she spends too much time trying to characterize the effort and put it within her narrative instead of letting the anti-colonial events speak for themselves in the historical record.

“Judgements on History and Historians” by Jacob Burckhardt (translated by Harry Zohn)

Burckhardt was a 19th century thinker with a strong conservative bent. He was Swiss, studied art in Germany at the Universities of Berlin and Bonn, then returned to Switzerland to teach at the University of Basel. He is considered one of the founding fathers of the disciplines of art history and cultural history. His areas of expertise were the Italian Renaissance and Classical Greece. This book is a collection of his lectures and notes. It spans the breath of world history from ancient Athens to his present day. He pontificates on religion, culture, art, warfare, and the great men who molded history. He predominantly looks at the evolution of western civilization and thought, but also digresses to comment on topics beyond, such as primitive culture, Egyptian primacy, Chinese inventions, and Islam. It is an eccentric and eclectic look at the progress of culture through the ages.

“A Shropshire Lad” by A.E. Housman

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book of poems in order from front to back. It helps that Housman’s work checks in at just over fifty pages. The fact that his poems have varied, funky rhyme schemes also helps sustain the interest. But the most wonderful part of his poems is how he can weave between the bucolic scenes of the English countryside of his youth to the horrors of war and what the average young men who were sent to the Crimean and Boer fronts must have felt. It is no wonder that it has been said that more WWI British infantrymen carried this book into the trenches with them than any other save the King James Bible. More than a few died with this slim treatise in the pocket of their uniforms.

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear)

This novella is so different from Tolstoy’s previous works. For one, it is short. Secondly, while his longer novels do somewhat delve into his characters’ states of mind, this story focuses almost exclusively on the mental world of Ivan Ilyich as he slowly decays into death. By starting the tale off at Ilyich’s funeral and then flashing back to his early healthy life, then focusing on his illness, suffering, anguish, and death, the plot leaves little suspense, but the psychological effects are the more greater felt. By first showing how little the people in his life, his family, his friends, and his colleagues end up caring about him, Tolstoy only isolates Ilyich even more in his final suffering. The questions of a life well lived and purpose and meaning culminate in an excruciating finale. 

“The Pursuit of Love” by Nancy Mitford

This is a tale of an eccentric aristocratic family, living between the ends of the First and Second World Wars, doing their best to grow up and change with the times. Mitford has taken most of the stories and details from her own aristocratic upbringing, putting together what today might be labeled autobiographical fiction. The novel is narrated by a poorer cousin, who spends her many holidays and hunting seasons on the Radlett estate, Alconleigh. In this novel, Mitford has re-christened her father, Uncle Mathew, who “had four magnificent bloodhounds, with which he used to hunt his children.” (It was more playfully eccentric than sadistic.) Aunt Sadie was the more loving, if also more clueless, of the pair. “Aunt Sadie, who so much disliked hearing about health that people often took her for a Christian Scientist, which, indeed, she might have become had she not disliked hearing about religion even more.” Like many aristocratic families, the Radletts did not live life on an even keel. “The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in the black waters of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives.”

When the jewel of the Radlett family, Linda, marries into a family of bankers, with the distinctly Teutonic family name, Kroesig, against her family’s wishes, it was bound not to be a fitting match. “For the first time in her life, she found herself face to face with the bourgeois attitude of mind…. The Kroesigs said notepaper, perfume, mirror and mantelpiece, they even invited her to call them Father and Mother…. Inwardly their spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellowmen, and with it they warded off evil. The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial quantities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory.” Linda’s next love was an idealist and a communist, schooled at Oxford. She reports to her cousin, “The worst of being a Communist is that the parties you may go to are—well—awfully funny and touching, but not very gay, and they’re always in such gloomy places…. Darling, I am being disloyal, but it is such heaven to have a chat after all these months. The comrades are sweet, but they never chat, they make speeches all the time.” The last love of Linda’s life was a French Duke, whom she met in Paris, who lived the life of a Casanova. His theory of the good life was “whatever one may be in politics, right, left, Fascist, Communist, society people are the only possible ones for friends…. Apart from the life of the intellect and the contemplative religious life, which few people are qualified to enjoy, what else is there to distinguish man from the animals but his social life?” The Radlett women produced their share of offspring, but children were never to get in the way of their life. During the Second World War, pregnant with her third child and with her two cousins equally pregnant, the novel’s narrator reports that the women “worked hard, mending and making and washing, doing any chores for Nanny rather than actually look after the children ourselves. I have seen too many children brought up without Nannies to think this at all desirable. In Oxford, the wives of progressive dons did it often as a matter of principle; they would gradually become morons themselves, while the children looked like slum children and behaved like barbarians.”

“Side Effects” by Adam Phillips

Phillips subject matter is varied, but, predictably, he always comes back around to the subconscious of the human mind and what makes us all tick inside. This collection of essays is set around the theme of what is most important to us is not always what is central to us. “Free association, what is said by the way, what is said as aside from the matter in hand, what is said ‘off topic’, is where the action of meaning and feeling is.” There is something about our means of communicating to each other when speaking that is special. Sometimes we let the cat out of the bag. And sometimes that cat is the most momentous of things. “The said cannot be unsaid in the way the written word can be revised.”

Trained as a psychoanalyst, Phillips subscribes to “Freud’s definition of the repressed: it is that which you cannot help but include; even if, or especially if, you include it by warding it off.” In his essay, “On Not Making It Up”, Phillips takes on the idea of subjective truth and memory. He wrestles with the psychologist William James’ notion that “the question about belief is not whether it is true but, rather, how would my life be better if I believed it?” The past is useful, indeed necessary, even if it is not real. Or rather, even if the past is not exactly the same past as it was when it was the present. “Truth is the name you will give to whatever turns out to have been good to believe.” Phillips goes on to wonder, “the issue of trauma can be stated quite simply: is a life interrupted by events, or are the interruptions the life?”

In Phillips’ “Two Lectures on Expectations”, he plays around with the ideas of first impressions and second thoughts. First impressions are really more about the subject than the object. “One’s first impressions are a (disguised) disclosure of one’s personal history…. It is as if, unbeknown to ourselves- that is, often quite unpredictably- our individual histories predispose us to respond in specific ways to specific signs…. These first impressions impress one because they make the past present in refigured form; these first impressions are history in the making.” Second thoughts, on the other hand, take time to develop and as such are much more well formed and polished. But are they any more reliable or true? And are they any more useful to our lives?

In his essay, “Paranoid Moderns”, Phillips takes on the individual’s struggle for relevance in modernity. “Modernism is more akin to a cumulative trauma, the trauma of secularization (the loss of a plot, a fear of a life without magic, the profitable displacing the meaningful.)” He posits that “paranoia is the self-cure for insignificance.” A world of contingency and luck is unsatisfying for the individual soul. Like a child, we crave to be the center of something (or rather everything). If there is no God, who is controlling the show? The show that one is the star of every single day. Historicism, communism, fascism, and other deterministic theories of history removed contingency as a fear from the individual psyche. It was all going to work out in the end, because that is the only way it could ever be. Luck and agency played no part. It was fate.

Phillips argues that the modern struggle for the individual is to find some meaning in life. “There was a time when people had a place and knew their place; and then there was a time, which we are still living in, when for various reasons they didn’t…. More and more people have to find a place in the world instead of simply inheriting one. Prestige is up for grabs. The project of the modern, unmoored, displaced individual is to find his value in the eyes of other people, and to resent this.” The fiction for us is to create meaning- to insist on being special. However, “people may be unique, but their uniqueness may be insignificant.”

“Landscape With Landscape” by Gerald Murnane

This book is ostensibly a collection of unrelated short stories and yet each story somehow leads into the next. In fact, the name of the following story is in each case embedded into the final pages of the previous one. Not that their plots, subject matter, or timeframe relate at all. This is the beauty and strangeness of Murnane’s fiction. He is a master of writing about writing. “I might even have told her that if I were a writer of a certain fashionable sort of fiction my standing at the supper table and saying those words to her could later have become part of a story of redoubled complexity, but that since I was a writer interested only in what was real, the scope of my question encompassed no one but my real self.” He is able to embed the narrator within the plot and extract him from the story at will. The narrator at once is describing his life, then will switch to pontificate about writing in general, all the while letting the reader know, in no uncertain terms, that what the reader is reading is only fiction, after all. Murnane’s writing weaves and nests story within story so skillfully that the craft of the writing is what impresses most in the end. “I try to make use of the notion that I am a character in a story that I tried to write twenty years ago, and that I could not finish that story because I cannot now imagine how I should have finished it.”

“The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter” by Joseph Henrich

This is a rare work in both scope and scale. It is a mix between anthropology, ethnography, economic history, and evolutionary biology, with elements of neuroscience and psychology, written by a former aerospace engineer. The breath of this book is immense and supremely rewarding. It is a life changing book on par with Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. It will change the way you think about yourself, our species, and how humanity has evolved. Henrich's theme is the interplay between cultural and physiological evolution and how both have shaped and have been shaped by the social animals that are humans. It seeks to explain how the often subconscious inheritance of our species played into later genetic evolutions, creating an animal with an enormous brain mass and more fat than muscle who, nonetheless, came to dominate every other animal on our planet. 

This book explains how the accumulation of knowledge over the centuries, embedded in culture, has allowed today's humans to stand on the expertise of the past to push towards greater heights. Aspects of our physiology, from our relatively short intestinal tracts to the shape of our teeth, were shaped by the invention of fire and cooked food. Lactose tolerance was another evolutionary response, developed by our domestication of cows and goats and their subsequent milking. The protective sickle cell gene mutation (when passed on by only one parent) only evolved in humans populating areas of Africa where mosquitoes carrying malaria were prevalent. The mutation spread locally because it was only evolutionarily adaptive in those specific areas. The totality of codependence between culture and biology that are revealed and explained in this book is mind blowing.