“Demons” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is not one of Dostoevsky's better known novels, but I became intrigued by it because of its associations with the anarchist circles operating in Russia during the 19th century. In fact, Dostoevsky was inspired by a real political murder in Russia, which took place in 1869 and wrote this novel partly as a protest against what he saw as the over-materialistic sentiments of some communists and anarchists. Although total fiction, the plot references famous anarchists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Herzen. The tale itself is at the same time horrid and laugh-out-loud funny, with grizzly violence mingling freely with strange anecdotes and insane circumstances. There are devious conspirators, haughty aristocrats, silly academics, bungling provincial administrators, newly liberated serfs, lowdown thieves and all sorts of other riffraff all thrown together in the strange brew of small town Russia. As the plot moves, it is unclear if there is a criminal mastermind or other unseen dark forces as the conspiracy and violence pushes itself along seemingly uncontrollably. The real “demons” turn out to be the new ideas circulating at the time throughout Russia- idealism, rationalism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, and, above all, atheism.

“Relentless Strike- The Secret History of JSOC” by Sean Naylor

This book is the unauthorized account of the creation of an integrated Special Operations Command in the wake of the Iranian hostage rescue disaster (Operation Eagle Claw) through the killings of Bin Laden and Awlaki. The fact that so many in the upper echelons of the military were outraged that so many operators talked to Naylor should be reason enough to read this book. It reads like a page-turner, detailing just about every major action that has involved Delta, the Seals, and the Rangers. Even if you know the difference between Special Operations and Special Forces, this book will give you insight into the minutia of the likes of The Army of Northern Virginia (Task Force Orange) and DevGru never before collected. The book also does a great job of detailing both the personalities of people who shaped JSOC from Marcinko to McRaven, as well as the institutional structures and relationships between units, branches, and across agencies that hindered or fostered mission success. The involvement of politics and politicians (including career flag officers) is at the same time the most illuminating and disheartening aspect of the story. Although sourced mainly anonymously, the rigorous footnotes and multiplicity of accounts lets one judge for himself the veracity of each detail. The book is indispensable reading for those who want to learn the nuts and bolts of what has happened in the name of the Global War on Terror and lessons to be learned for the future in a “war” that might never end and on a “battlefield” that includes every inch of the globe.

“Two Arabs, A Berber, And a Jew” by Lawrence Rosen

Rosen is an anthropologist who visited the town of Sefrou, just south of Fez, off and on over the course of forty years. The book is divided into four biographies, which shed light on the changing culture of Morocco as Rosen hears firsthand from his subjects on how the country changed from a Sultanate, to a French colony, and finally to an independent nation. “Sefrou as their place, is experienced differently and indeed differentially by each, yet all recognize it as vital to who they are. Located fifteen miles south of Fez on the edge of the Middle Atlas Mountains, it has grown from a small city of 3,000 (half of them Jewish) before the turn of the twentieth century, to some 25,000 when [Rosen] arrived in the mid-1960s, to some 80,000 at present.” The first biography is of Haj Hamed Britel, who born in the late 19th century, had been raised under the Sultanate. The Sultan held his grip on power by moving his capital routinely between Fez, Marrakech, Meknes, and Rabat, while appointing caids to administer local affairs on his behalf. He had to balance a world of tribal intrigues and  multiple discordant webs of characters. Moroccan history is defined not by events and the passage of time, but by personalities and connections. For Haj, “causation was always traced to some sentient being- to God, a person, an animal, or a spirit; things do not so much make things happen.” The Moroccan identity is composed of a man and his relationships. Moroccans see society as held together by a series of knots, like a loom, and disorder (fitna) occurs when these bonds of obligation break down. Members of different tribes would often seal agreements by trading one another their turbans in a show of trust and respect. There would also have to be a balance of power in society, modulated by an ever-changing web of alliances. An Arab saying is, “certitude divides, uncertainty unites.”

The next Arab in Rosen’s study is Yaghnik Driss, a man with one foot in Sefrou and one in Fez, where his father was born. “For Moroccans the place from which one originates conveys much more than mere geography: it says a great deal about the customs one employs in dealing with others, the expectations one harbors about others, and that whole complex of everyday habits- from the smallest item of politesse to the implications of a turn of phrase for one’s religious sensibilities.” Time is all relative, because “the Quran does not use time as the predominant vehicle for revealing truth. Instead we are shown aspects of things, facets of people, angles of situations…. The word for knowledge is the second most frequently used word in the Quran after the name of God.” Culture and religion are intimately tied. It is posited that bargaining is so important, because “the Prophet himself is said to have bargained with God as to the requisite number of daily prayers, ultimately getting Him down from fifty to just five.” Islam also creates an oral culture- the  tradition is that, for the most learned, the Quran is memorized, recited, and inscribed in their heart. What is not explicitly forbidden by the Quran is not only permitted, but becomes an integral part of the whole culture of localized Islam. “The powerfully inclusive mentality of Islam allows local variation as Islam, not as something in contradistinction to it, a fact that has no doubt contributed to its spread into many parts of the world.”

The Berber described in the book is Hussein ou Muhammad Qadir, a merchant whose fortunes dramatically rose during the course of Rosen’s time with him. The Berbers saw themselves as the original Moroccans, maintained their own language, and tended to live in the rural areas of the Atlas Mountains. Today, even with intermarriage prevalent, over 45% of Moroccans speak Berber as well as Arabic. Berbers, although tribal, always maintained both social and business ties with Arabs and, particularly, Jews within their communities. A common Moroccan proverb is, “Your neighbor who is close is more important then your kinsman who is far away.” In Berber communities, ties and relationships are also paramount. Often times one has to travel far and wide up and down unfamiliar countryside selling sheep and other wares, so Berbers rely on trust and trade to make money and travel safely. “Corruption is the failure to share with those whom you have formed ties of dependence whatever largesse comes your way…. Corruption is our form of democracy…. If some big man says do such and such, but I can pay someone below him not to do it, is that not a check on the big man’s power? And isn’t democracy all about keeping big men from having too much power over you?”

Shimon Benizri is the Jew of Rosen’s study, a man who viewed himself equally as both Arab and Jew, even after the ramifications of the War of 1967 eventually forced him to abandon Morocco for a new home in Israel. Jews had lived in some numbers in Morocco since Phoenician times, another influx arriving with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, and yet many more immigrating after their expulsion from Andalusia in 1492. They tended to live on caravan routes and relied on a local Berber or Arab big man for protection within their community and in dealing with other traders. They survived and prospered, despite the occasional pogroms and the jizya tax they had to pay to the Sultan as unbelievers. Jews were allowed to elect their own internal leader, the Nagid, who dealt with local authorities and established internal security within each city’s Mellah, the ghetto. During World War II, Jews in Morocco were explicitly protected from both the Nazis and the Vichy French. The Sultan himself reportedly told the Axis powers, “I in no way approve of the new anti-Semitic laws and I refuse to be associated with any measure of which I disapprove. I wish to inform you that, as in the past, the Jews remain under my protection and I refuse to allow any distinction to be made among my subjects.” Eventually, however, after the creation of Israel, the numerous Arab wars, and Morocco’s own independence, 90% of Moroccan Jews fled to Israel and, by the time of Benizris’ arrival, one in every six Jews in Israel was actually from Morocco. Rosen’s book is an attempt to capture the history of Morocco by looking back from today’s time of increasing urbanization, modernization, and globalization. Today, “the urban corridor that runs from Kenitra through Rabat and Casablanca to El Jedida, [is] where 61 percent of the nation’s urban population, 80 percent of its permanent jobs, and 53 percent of its tourism are to be found.” With this massive internal migration social bonds are fraying and traditional mores are fading. “Moroccans…. commonly inquire as to one another’s asel, the place of one’s “origins,” that supplies both the sources of one’s knowledge and the conventions used to form attachments to others.” The book uses these four men as a lens to view different aspects of Moroccan culture that together form an intricately united web. Rosen seeks to hold dignity to the North African saying, “when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”

“Covenant and Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption” by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

This is the second book in a series of essays on the Torah. He recounts the parashas in the Book of Exodus and gives interpretations for what they might mean for a modern life. The fundamental difference between Genesis and Exodus is the transformation of the Jewish people from a family into a nation. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph were family patriarchs, leaders of their family, whereas Moses became the leader of a people, their prophet, and Aaron, their priest. Sacks offers opinions on quandaries such as the meaning of prayer in the modern age, abortion rights, the 2008 financial crisis, and even cloning.  Some themes that repeat throughout his interpretations of the parashas are that all men alike are supposed to be learned- literate and knowledgable about the law, that doubt and missteps are often hidden opportunities that can have an illuminating effect, and that outside appearances are often deceiving, so it is most important to judge a man by his presence within. Sacks speaks to themes of morality and character that arise from a Jewish interpretation of Scripture, but that all men can profit from.

“The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt

This is a book about the foundations of moral psychology. Although its basis is psychological principles, it moves beyond the individual human mind. It relies heavily on concepts brought in from evolutionary biology, philosophy, and sociology. Morals are something that evolved over time to help the human species survive. They are foremost intuitive, with the reasoning behind them often happening post hoc. Haidt separates morals into six oppositional matrices: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/domination. Humans, to some degree or another, judge other humans by how their actions conform to these principles.

Humans are intrinsically social animals. Even though evolutionarily we have been bred to be selfish (on the genetic level at least), through group selection humans have also evolved to cooperate well in groups. Those humans that were able to form successful groups beyond kinship bonds were able to out compete other groups and, therefore, their genes multiplied. Haidt posits that in that way we are ninety percent ape and ten percent bee. Unlike our ape relatives, humans are alone among primates in being able to convey shared intentionality. This created a common understanding amongst the group and an ability to punish deviants who strayed from group norms.

Genetic and cultural evolution also reacted with each other over generations to breed a more social human. “Our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness, carried on even into adulthood.” It is useless to look for the positive aspects of religion on an individual level just as it would be useless to look at the actions of an individual bee without relation to its hive. Religion acted as a way to create social ties far beyond kinship networks. It engendered trust between strangers, created group cohesion, and was effective in punishing free riders. This book looks at human morality descriptively, not normatively. It does not hope for the dawning of a new moral man, but looks at how humans have actually evolved over the centuries and how their evolving moral compass has helped them achieve reproductive success. 

“Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” by Adam Phillips

This is billed as a biography of Freud’s early years as part of the Jewish Lives series, but it could just as easily be seen as the biography of the invention of psychoanalysis. Freud first used the term in 1896 and the description, the “talking cure” was coined by one of his patient’s soon after. Freud saw psychoanalysis as a way of sifting through and interpreting the facts of one’s life. As he said, “the facts in psychoanalysis have a habit of being rather more complicated than we like.” That we is rather ambiguous. It could refer to the patient, to the analyst, or, most probably, to both. Freud both wanted to dig for what was buried beneath the surface in a life and to see life’s apparent events in a fresh light. Phillips contends that Freud “will show us how ingenious we are at not knowing ourselves, and how knowing ourselves- or the ways in which we have been taught to know ourselves, not least through the conventions of biography and autobiography- has become the problem rather than the solution.” Freud never trusted biography. He felt it was bound to say more about the proclivities of the author than the subject. In any case, public stories are always the most fictionalized. And so, Philips smirkishly warns us that maybe we should take this whole project with a grain of salt. “From a psychoanalytic point of view modern people were as much the survivors of their history as they were the makers of it. We make histories so as not to perish of the truth…. Our fears of the external world are second only to our fears of the internal world of memory and desire.” Self-knowledge abuts upon self-experience and often one transforms the other (or both). The interruptions in life are most often the most meaningful parts of it. “Partly because the past so insistently informs the present- our seeing the present in terms of the past is what [Freud] will call “transference”- but also because our reconstructions of the past are inspired by our desires for, and fears about, the future.” The truths are revealed in the repetitions in people’s lives. The things that they could not help but avoid getting away from, despite themselves. “People grow into their past more than they grow out of it.”

Humans are social animals. People need each other, but that is also what breeds their discontentment. “If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us. The source of pleasure is the source of pain.” Modern civilization only intensifies these feelings. “Originality is trying to be like everyone else and failing…. Originality and assimilation are inextricable.” There is always a pull and a push between the Self and Society. “Freud’s seemingly unconscious assumption that other people were a threat to the specialness of the self, not that the specialness of the self was itself the greater threat would turn out to be one of the (ultimately controversial and divisive) foundations of psychoanalysis.” Was it the public or private Self that one could never escape from? Adapting to one’s culture led to “the individual’s inescapable difference from himself; the double life of who one wants to be, and to be seen as, and the other person one keeps being.” After all, what was a cure but that which society expects one to be?

Dreams bridge the past, the present, and the future. “The dreamer tells himself secrets at night about what he wants (like an informer, spying on his past; and particularly on the unmet needs of his past.)” Everyone is an artist in his dreams. The past is never real. It is subjective, a telling of tales weaved to resemble some notion of reality. “After all, what could a history of one’s life be, but a history of one’s needs and wants, and the inevitable conflicts around them?” Each human is lost in a hostile world. Life is “what one makes of what one is forced by.” Dreams are the language we are trained to forget. They are the language of the forbidden. “The forbidden was too disturbing because it was too alluring.” The dream was always addressed to the dreamer. “The dream, like the joke, reveals people, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to be in hiding; consciously in hiding from disapproving others, but unconsciously in hiding from themselves. Or rather, in hiding from the part of themselves that has wanted to fully identify with the hostile, oppressing voices in their culture…. This too Freud was beginning to discover: how thorough and destructive socialization can be.” Modernity required a certain kind of self-defense in the individual, a mask from reality. “Freud was discovering how modern people endangered themselves by the ways in which they protected themselves. Each of the so-called mechanisms of defense was an unconscious form of self-blinding; ways of occluding a piece of reality.” The stories we believe are the stories we need to survive. “The Romantic myth of the suffering artist has been transformed, by Freud, into the story of everyone.” If science is about the search for truth, is psychoanalysis a search for fictions or a debunking of myths? For Freud, there was always a search for respectability in his self-promotion of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was to be the rational method for examining the irrational. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance” by Daisy Hay

This book is a joint biography of Benjamin Disraeli and his wife, Mary Anne. This is probably only of interest to fans of Victorian England, British politics, or the wives of political figures. Its new contribution is primarily showing Disraeli’s rise to power through the lens of his wife. It gives detail about the home life, backroom jockeying, and social responsibilities of an upperclass politician, who by necessity is always on the verge of debtor’s prison, living beyond his means. Its other area of originality is delving into Disraeli’s substantial literary career in depth.

“Battling the Gods” by Tim Whitmarsh

Whitmarsh argues that atheism did not begin with the Enlightenment thinkers, but had been around as a philosophy since before the Abrahamic religions. He points to the traditions of ancient Greece. As early as the mid-sixth century BC, Anaximander, shunning the traditional creation myths, believed that all life started in water, moved to land, and eventually evolved to become human. Xenophanes, describing the anthropomorphic nature of the Olympian gods, suggested, “now if cows, horses, or lions had hands, and were able to draw with those hands and create things as humans do, horses would draw gods in the form of horses, and cows in the form of cows, and create bodies just like they had.” Democritus founded the tradition of atomism, the belief that the entire universe was composed of tiny indestructible particles of matter amidst an empty void. Prodicus proposed that it was the first human inventors who were once viewed as gods, so that “they treated as gods those who discovered certain nourishing foodstuffs, so that the inventor of wine was worshipped as Dionysus, that of bread as Demeter, those of shipping as Castor and Pollux.” He stated emphatically, “the gods of popular belief do not exist, nor do they have knowledge.” 

In the classical period of Greece, playwrights like Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides poked fun at and indirectly questioned the gods’ existence. This had to be done in a circumspect fashion. After all, in classical Athens, Socrates had been condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles has the chorus say, “if divine predictions do not come true, then the gods are not in control of the universe and what need is there to worship them?” In another play, Euripides has Heracles state, “I do not believe that the gods enjoy illicit unions, or that they chain each other up [in reference to the myth where Hephaestus catches his wife Aphrodite and Ares having an affair]; I do not think, nor will I ever be persuaded, that one god can be master over another. A god has no need of anything, if he is truly a god. These are the wretched tales of singers.” In another of his plays, Bellerophon, Euripides has the title character question, “I reckon that tyrants kill very many people and deprive them of their property and break their oaths to sack cities; and despite this they prosper more than those who live piously in peace every day. I know too of small cities that revere the gods which are subject to larger, more impious ones overcome as they are by a more numerous army.” 

In the later Hellenistic era, philosophy became even more of a direct rival to religiosity. The skeptic, Carneades, suggested it was impossible for the gods to be moral since to be moral you have to be capable of also doing wrong. He also questioned whether the gods could be just since, “a perfect god simply would not have the option of taking the unjust path.” Sextus, another skeptic, suggested, “the gods exist no more than they do not.” The Epicureans had a complicated relationship with the gods. Living just outside Athens following the trial of Socrates, it made sense for Epicurus to pretend to heed the common myths. However, most contemporaries regarded him as an atheist. The Hebrew word for atheist, apikoros, is derived from their word for Epicurean. In general, Epicureans moralized, “Gods did not create the universe, nor do they order it. We can understand nature only if we grasp the physical laws of the world. And when it comes to the way that human beings live their lives, we must take responsibility for all of our choices and not hide behind excuses of external compulsion.” Epicureans were also atomists and they squared away their reluctant belief in the gods by claiming that there were an infinite plurality of universes. 

Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean poet, described thus man’s relationship with the gods, “here is another thing that you should not possibly believe: that the sacred abodes of the gods exist in any part of the world. For the nature of the gods, which is super-fine and far removed from our senses, is dimly seen by the mind; and since it eludes the touch and pressure of the hands, it cannot touch anything that we can touch (for anything that cannot be touched cannot itself touch). For this reason, their abodes must be different to our abodes.” Another Roman, Lucian, was a cynic who used humor to poke fun at the concept of gods. He asked if the gods were all-powerful why did they need human offerings? And why were they so greedy as to seek vengeance on those humans who failed to sacrifice? In his play Lucian has Zeus worry, “if people are persuaded that there are no gods at all, or that we have no thought for humans, we shall go without sacrifices, presents, and honors on earth, and will sit idly in heaven beset by famine.” 

Whitmarsh expertly shows that atheism was not a modern invention, but was rife in ancient Greece and Rome. Although it was later obscured by the forceful rise of Christianity and only “rediscovered” by Enlightenment thinkers, there was always a tradition in the western world of thinkers who questioned the authority and existence of the gods.

“Phishing For Phools” by George Akerloff and Robert Shiller

I have rarely been so disappointed by a book with such a promising premise, written by two Nobel laureates. In the tradition of Kahneman (“Thinking, Fast and Slow”), Tversky, and Sunstein and Thaler (“Nudge”), these authors suggest, plausibly, that humans often do not do what is in their longterm best interests. They go on to posit that unscrupulous actors in the market are able to manipulate outcomes that serve their interests to the detriment of their clients and society at large. Unfortunately, when the authors get to examples such as junk food, credit default swaps, used cars, credit cards, and junk bonds they blame the “too free” market and not the selective enforcement of existing laws by the government. Most of their market failures would be solved by simply enforcing the laws of fraud already on the books. When actions are not illegal, such as high interest rates on payday loans, the authors apply great hubris to claim that even though actors reveal their wants through actions, these actions are not their true wants after all. It is as if the authors are unaware of or feel they are above the subjective valuation of individual actors interacting in a complex society. It is a slippery slope to a nanny state (or worse) where people are protected from themselves for their own good, of course.

“The Sellout” by Paul Beatty

This book is laugh out loud funny at many points, even when you know you shouldn’t be laughing. It has elements that are so far fetched, yet its main themes ring true. It is social commentary at heart, dressed in the most comic style. A novel about a black guy who surfs, was homeschooled by his suicide councilor/black power preaching/psychology professor dad alone (“my father said he never panicked when someone from the neighborhood tried to hang themselves, because, “for the life of them, black people can’t tie knots for shit.””), owns a farm in the middle of Los Angeles (“so I chose to specialize in the plant life that had the most cultural relevance to me- watermelon and weed.”), loves Kafka and quoting Latin (“semper fi, semper funky”), rides a horse around town, has a bus driving girlfriend who is married to a gangster rapper turned sitcom actor, and gets stuck owning a slave who used to be a child actor on the “Little Rascals” (“sometimes work consisted of donning a shiny pair of emerald green and pink silks, holding a gas lamp at arm’s length, and posing in my front yard as a life-size lawn jockey”) is not the most true to life plot scenario. The story holds together loosely, but the book is mainly a racial commentary dressed in joke after joke. It worked as a novel only because the pace of jokes was funny enough to sustain the action. The plot was ridiculous, but it never took itself too seriously, until the concluding twenty pages or so when it tried to wrap up with something to say. It makes one think of how far race relations have come in America and how far they still have to go. “Regardless of your income level, the old adage of having to be twice as good as the white man, half as good as the Chinese guy, and four times as good as the last Negro the supervisor hired before you still holds true.” 

“Moral Tribes” by Joshua Greene

This is a work of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology, and cultural evolution. Greene strives to ask- what are morals, how did they evolve, and can we come up with a meta-universal morality to govern all of humanity. The first thing to realize it that “our values may color our views of the facts.” Given that we all have different values, yet we all strive to cooperate with one another, we must come up with some sort of meta-morality to live peaceably, for “morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.” Even for extreme individualists, “the most basic form of decency, nonaggression, is a form of cooperation, and not to be taken for granted- in our species or any other.” However, our moral instincts evolved to survive within groups, within known personal connections, not between anonymous groups. “As morality is a biological adaptation, it evolved not only as a device for putting Us ahead of Me, but as a device for putting Us ahead of Them.” Within groups we care very much about how we are perceived, our reputations. “Humans spend about 65 percent of their conversation time talking about the good and bad deeds of other humans.” We have evolved to gossip. But we also care more about how people we perceive to be close to us behave than we do about complete strangers. We see how people look, dress, eat, talk, etc…. Those who we think should act like us, we judge more harshly when they do not behave according to preconceived norms. But we also let them into our moral circle. In many behavioral experiments, “people favored in-group members even when group assignments were explicitly made random.” We like Us. The flip-side of the coin is that “altruism within groups could not have evolved without hostility between groups.”

Greene suggests that utilitarianism is the best judge to get past these conflicting morals. “Consequentialism says that consequences- “results” as a pragmatist might say- are the only things that ultimately matter…. One’s happiness is the overall quality of one’s experience, and to value happiness is to value everything that improves the quality of experience, for oneself and for others.” Greene, while wanting to spread a meta-morality, has no delusions about why morality is of import, “the function of morality…. like that of all biological adaptations, is to spread genetic material.” That is where the problem lies in our parochial morality, too narrow for a meta lens, “we should expect our moral intuitions to be, on the whole, more selfish and more tribalistic than utilitarianism prescribes…. our capacity for empathy evolved to facilitate cooperation- not universally, but with specific individuals.” There are those we deem as part of us, part of our tribe. The challenge is to expand this tribe to all of humanity. “One can’t resolve tribal disagreements by appeal to virtues, because one tribe’s virtues are another tribe’s vices- if not in general, then at least when tribes disagree.” Greene seeks to use a system of “common currency” when our tribal moralities conflict. This is, obviously, easier said than done. By recognizing that tribalism is altruistic at one level, but selfish at the group level, however, we at least have a start. His main theme is that although morality serves in uniting I and Us, it creates Us versus Them. Utilitarianism is his attempt to justify an objective meta-morality reasoning that can transcend that larger divide. He does not completely succeed in making his case for a universal morality, but posits many interesting dilemmas on his way through the muddle.

“The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It… Every Time” by Maria Konnikova

This is yet another breezy book that relies heavily on behavioral economic concepts. Con artists rely on the status quo bias, the optimism bias, loss aversion, and anchoring effects to make people act like suckers. Everybody thinks that they are above average and take credit for their own good circumstances, while explaining away their bad events as bad luck. Con artists know all these biases and they rely on psychology to manipulate others to get what they want. There is always a grain of truth in every scam. That’s what makes them so effective. Con artists are not sociopaths or psychopaths. They know right from wrong, exactly what they are doing, and that is how they are able to skillfully manipulate other’s emotions. This book details familiar scams like John Law’s Mississippi bubble, Charles Ponzi’s scheme, and Bernie Madoff. More interestingly, it relates how people such as evangelical preachers, realtors, and car salesmen use the same psychological tricks as these hucksters in everyday legal interactions.

“The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll

The subtitle of this book could be: a physicist, who is extremely knowledgable with the general sciences, tries to explain life, the universe, and other big questions using empirics and without resorting to metaphysics or mysticism. Carroll sets out to explain the “big picture” in short chapters that each deal with a small part of science, gradually building in theme, to tackle life’s biggest mysteries. He sees the world through the lens of poetic naturalism. “Poetic naturalism is “poetic” because there are different stories we can tell about the world, many capturing some aspects of reality, and all useful in their appropriate context.” It is a filter to see the world on my levels- each correct in their own specific domain. A few themes run throughout the book. The first is that Core Theory can adequately and completely explain our physical world. “Almost all of human experience is accounted for by a very small number of ingredients. The various atomic nuclei that we find in the elements of the periodic table; the electrons that swirl around them; and two long-range forces through which they all interact, gravity and electromagnetism…. A field is kind of the opposite of a particle; while a particle has a specific location in space, a field is something that stretches all throughout space, taking on some particular value at every point… And what are the fields made of? There isn’t any such thing. The fields are the stuff that everything else is made of.” A second area which is at once the most confusing and most profound is quantum mechanics. He quotes the physicist Richard Feynman, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Carroll does his best in explaining to the layman. “The reason we observe only certain wavelengths in the emitted light is that the electrons are not gently spiraling inward but spontaneously leaping from one allowed orbit to another, emitting a packet of light to make up the difference in energy between them. The electron is doing “quantum jumps.”.… In quantum mechanics, the state of a system is a superposition of all the possible measurement outcomes, known as the “wave function” of the system. The wave function is a combination of every result you could get by doing an observation, with different weights for each possibility…. Quantum mechanics tells us the probability that, upon observing a quantum system with a specified wave function, we will see any particular outcome.” At the quantum level of analysis everything becomes so micro that macro phenomenon all become, in the end, wave functions. “Not only does the deepest layer of reality not consist of things like “oceans” and “mountains”; it doesn’t even consist of things like “electrons” and “photons.” It’s just the quantum wave function.” In all his speculations Carroll relies heavily on Bayesian reasoning to adjust his credences of likely outcomes based on his priors and any new available information. As such, he always believes “simple theories should be given larger priors than complicated ones” and “evidence that favors one alternative automatically disfavors others” and, therefore, “the credence we assign to a theory should go down every time we make observations that are more probable in competing theories.” Using these tools, Carroll systematically tackles the origins of the universe, entropy and the arrow of time, the nature of memories, what is reality, the limits of knowledge, evolution, the existence of God, and the nature of the self- including free will, the boundaries of life and death, consciousness, the existence of the soul, and mental versus physical properties. This is an amazing book that uses all of the available tools of modern science to demystify some of life’s biggest challenges that have stumped scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike.

“Modernity and Its Discontents” by Steven B. Smith

Professor Smith is one of the most popular lecturers at Yale and in writing his tone is at once scholarly and accessible. His short essays on some of political philosophy and literature’s most notable authors are filled with revelations, new interpretations, and often a tangential focus that serves to illuminate an overlooked facet of these well-known figures. Each essay is complete by itself, but together they paint a compellingly varied picture of the proponents of modernity and the inevitable backlash against this modernizing effort. Smith affirms that “to be modern means to take affairs into our own hands, to achieve through our unaided efforts what in the past had been consigned to the province of wish, prayer, or even the endless cycle of history.” It was not only purposeful, but universal and progressing ever-forward (in the manner of the Whig theory of history). Thus, there was even a sense of inevitability to the whole modernity project. “The Counter-Enlightenment, by contrast, insisted on the variety of distinct national cultures, conceived as organic bodies that develop according to their own internal principles, or what Montesquieu referred to as “the general spirit of a nation” that shapes its distinctive laws, customs, and institutions.” Modernity went beyond the 18th century Enlightenment to encompass the bourgeois ethos, democracy, science, positivism, historicism, and universalism, while pushing aside, if not entirely dismissing, revelation, custom, and particularity. 

While Smith views Machiavelli as the first modern thinker, he finds Descartes proposition, “not to believe too firmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom” best encapsulated the spirit of modernity. Smith goes on to expound the difference between the mode of Cartesian philosophy compared to that of the pre-moderns, “His question seems to be not the ancient one “Which way of life is best?” but the existential one “What should I do with my life?”” For Descartes it is a personal project: one of self-mastery. Virtue is dependent on the will alone and his prime virtue is generosity. “Generosity consists in the power over the passions of hatred, fear, anger, and envy because such emotions show an unworthy dependence on the opinion of others.” In a knock on the Stoics, Descartes reveals, “the defects of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions…. I cannot hope to approach truth except by departing from the paths they have followed. That is why I shall be obliged to write just as if I were considering a topic that no one had dealt with before me.”

What Descartes did for philosophy in general Hobbes did in modernizing political philosophy. His social contract firmly rested on natural law. Despite contemporary claims, he was not an atheist. Far from it. He just wanted to make the spiritual authority subservient to the temporal authority. His project was not separation of Church and State, but Church in service of the State. “Hobbes instrumentalized religion, depriving it of the power of truth and revelation, and turning it entirely into a thing of human making.” Hobbes himself wrote, “seeing there are no signs nor fruit of religion but in man only, there is no cause to doubt that the seed of religion is also only in man.” For Hobbes both reason and revelation had their place, but where faith was personal, force was political. Man must have “the ability to live with uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Carl Schmitt would later write, “Hobbes’ leviathan, a combination of god and man, animal and machine, is the mortal god who brings to man peace and security.” At the same time, Hobbes put unprecedented emphasis on the natural rights of each individual, as opposed to his natural duties and obligations. This was not the aristocratic ethic of chivalry and immortality, but a modern bourgeois middling morality, which sought peace, at any price, through mutual fear and distrust. Hobbes has been called the first political Epicurean for, like Lucretius, he believed in the primacy of fear, particularly the fear of death, but he then gave it his own particular political solution. “It is the continual edginess, restlessness, and unease that would become the hallmark not so much of human nature as of modernity. Hobbes’s new morality is essentially bourgeois morality, the morality of striving, self-making, and independence without even the surviving remnant of Descartes’s Stoic self-sufficiency. It is the antithesis of the ethic of glory, honor, and magnanimity celebrated by the ancients. Not the desire for fame but the continuous desire to escape fear becomes the primary goad to action.” 

Spinoza also took this modern tact of trying to separate faith and reason, instead of trying to reconcile them. Like Hobbes, his distrust for the clergy made him want to place religion under the temporal authority, instead of separating Church and State. There would be outward religion, but only inward conscience, which no man could legislate. He sought a state religion in order to limit, define, and restrict it. 

Benjamin Franklin was perhaps the most famous example of how Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic first took hold and was idealized in colonial America. In Franklin’s mind, “the earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling.” Franklin was also a practical man- like Bacon before him, he favored empiricism over dogmatism. And like Hume, he believed reason should be a slave to the passions, “so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” 

Kant is arguably the first modern liberal. He was thoroughly internationalist- stressing the global nature of politics, beyond the interests of the nation-state, as well as its moral dimensions. He believed in the ever-advancing nature of morality, both rights and duties, leading to progressively higher levels of humanity itself. His primal right was “the right to be treated with equal concern and respect.” His categorical imperative stressed “the duty to perform the action [that] has no end other than the fulfillment of the duty itself…. Only if my action- or the principle informing my action- can be universalized so that it applies to anyone in similar circumstances can an action be said to conform to the moral law…. The formula for this universalization of the law demands only one thing, that we treat people as ends and never as means.” For Kant this was a moral and not a political or religious imperative. “Kant made clear that a good will is entirely the work of the individual. No one can coerce a good will, suggesting a strict separation between the moral realm and the legal realm.” Kant meant what he said about ends and means, “let justice prevail though the world may perish.” 

Hegel’s greatest contribution to the project of modernity was pointing out the distinction between civil society and the State. Civil society was not a place to inculcate the virtues for politics, but was to remain apart from it. Hegel, presaging Elinor Ostrom, saw multiple layers of society which the individual inhabited simultaneously, “the concrete person who, as a particular person, as a totality of needs and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness, is his own end, is one principle of civil society…. Civil society is the [stage of] differences between the family and the state…. The creation of civil society belongs to the modern world, which for the first time allows all determinations of the Idea to attain their rights…. In civil society each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him…. The right of the subject’s particularity to find satisfaction, or to put it differently, the right of subjective freedom, is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age.” Hegel also sees this respect for individuality as a unique gift of Christian revelation. “Whole continents, Africa and the East have never had this Idea and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth…. or by strength of character, education, or philosophy…. that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God’s mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.” Modernity was so powerful because it allowed for the free expression of this individuality. Hegel felt, “the principle of modern states has enormous strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity.” For the first time in history, the highest command of justice was “be a person and respect others as persons.” 

Smith does not view modernity’s discontents as totally reactionary. Instead, the flaws of the Enlightenment are corrected by thinkers who wish to mold the world to man as he is, rather than how we might wish him to be. Rousseau would seem to some an odd choice to start this pushback against modernity for anyone only familiar with his Social Contract, which espoused universal values. But Rousseau originally gained fame for his First Discourse, an essay in which he claimed that the arts and sciences had a detrimental effect on the refinement of morals in France. “We have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, and painters, [but] we no longer have citizens.” The arts, sciences, and philosophy might be advantageous on the individual level, but it was corrupting for society as a whole. Furthermore, what was good for one society might be poison for another. Universal civilization had replaced individual culture. “Rousseau’s argument is that every society is based on a delicate network of opinions, morals, habits, and customs and that any alteration in one aspect of society is bound to have consequences- often dangerous and unforeseen consequences- in others.” The French philosophes, in their hubris, had lost the particularity of man. Striking back against D’Alembert, Rousseau intoned, “man is one; I admit it! But man modified by religions, governments, laws, customs, prejudices, and climates becomes so different from himself that one ought not to seek among us for what is good for men in general, but only what is good for them in this time or that country.” In fact, Rousseau was the first proponent of the modern nation-state as a natural grouping. “The patriotic spirit is an exclusive spirit which makes us look on everyone but our fellow citizens as strangers, and almost as enemies.” 

Tocqueville generally viewed America’s experiment with democracy in a positive light. However, as an outsider he was able to see the defects in its constitutional system, well before they fully emerged a century later. Firstly, he was worried about the tyranny of the majority. He observed, “I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.” This was not because of any formal political restrictions, but fear of stepping out of line ending in social exclusion and ostracism. “Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul, and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.” Secondly, Tocqueville was not concerned with the enlargement of the State per se, but the rise of the administrative bureaucracy and with it its centralizing spirit. Man would be lulled to sleep and allow the creep of the all-controlling State in without protest, for he would be concerned with more pressing aspects of his life. “The pursuit of interest was deemed to exercise a tranquilizing effect on society and on human behavior generally. The passions were seen as wild and irrational, while interests were calm, gentle, even placid. A society devoted to moneymaking, as opposed to the aristocratic practices like war, was described by such metaphors as “polishing,” “refining,” and “softening” morals. A society dominated by the pursuit of interest could be counted upon to be less grand, noble, and heroic but more peaceful, prosperous, and secure.” Tocqueville warned that, “the taste for material enjoyments develops…. more rapidly than enlightenment and the habits of freedom…. Preoccupied with the sole care of making a fortune, they no longer perceive the tight bond that unites the particular fortune of each of them to the prosperity of all. There is no need to tear from such citizens the rights they possess; they themselves willingly allow them to escape. The exercise of the political duties appears to them a distressing contretemps that distracts them from their industry.” 

Flaubert is Smith’s example of the artist who decries modern morals and retreats into his art. He disdains the common, the average, the modern. George Armstrong Kelly described Flaubert’s ethic as Parnassian liberalism: “It is a fairly unbudging doctrine insofar as it consents or contrives to make this sacrifice honorably, rather than striking bargains with political forces that would control and denature it. On the other hand, it is this obstinacy that makes it suspect and even reprehensible to the democratic mentality. It is suspect not only because it questions the wisdom of popular government, but because it is ‘critical,’ ironical, and elitist- holding at the extreme that, in a world of perverse or prolific ‘truths,’ a world of opinion, faith must be constructed from intelligence, if there is to be faith at all, and that faith must be nimble enough to shift with intelligence.” Flaubert, himself, put his temper more succinctly, “Axiom: Hatred of the Bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue.” 

There were some anti-moderns who were outright reactionaries. First among them was Joseph de Maistre, who wished to return France to the regime of throne and alter. He also stressed the particularity of man, “in my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he in unknown to me.” Similarly, Nietzsche derides the “last man” who has traded the ancient virtues of love, creativity, and longing for the comforts of peace, security, and happiness. Heidegger writes of “das Man”, the impersonal “they” or “anyone” who form the anonymous “great mass” in the cities, living inauthentic lives devoid of “Self”. Georges Sorel sees virtue in the non-rational impulse back towards myth. “Myths are not simply forms of false consciousness. Throughout history, myths have given expression to people’s collective aspirations. They start not from the individual but from the group and typically exalt the family, armies, communities, and other traditional modes of association.” Myths “are not descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act.” Carl Schmitt believed that the national myth was the strongest of myths, even stronger than the class myth. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy…. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specifically intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.” 

Unlike these reactionaries, Isaiah Berlin was a liberal through and through. However, he espoused a negative concept of liberty, which meant a freedom from external control, and that was as far as he went. “There is an unbreakable link between the rationalist view that there are moral truths and the desire to educate, coerce, or force other persons to accept them. The doctrine of positive liberty may begin with a desire to be my own master, but it invariably ends with the attempt to impose such doctrines on others.” Berlin found the slippery slope inevitable. “The rationalist argument, with its assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logically valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible from an ethical doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-perfection to an authoritarian State obedient to the directives of an elite of Platonic guardians.” Indeed, he was no universalist, but a pluralist. However, he thoroughly rejected the label of moral relativist, which takes values as incommensurable.  Instead, he accepted moral diversity, while also accepting objective modes of judging humanity. “If as I believe the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict- and of tragedy- can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.” 

Leo Strauss struck back against modernity’s twin shibboleths of historicism and positivism. He criticized “a historicism that implied progress without a fixed frame of reference to recognize progress, and a scientism that lost contact with phenomena, proclaimed itself normless, and fell into a dilemma of skepticism and dogmatism.” He did not dispute the great contributions of science and its place in the modern world. What he rejected was positivism’s belief that modern science was the highest, if not the only, form of human knowledge. “Whatever the significance of natural modern science may be, it cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible. Classical political philosophy viewed man in a different light. It was originated by Socrates. And Socrates was so far from being committed to a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledge of ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of the truth, of the whole.” Strauss’ life’s mission was not so much to figure out the answers, but to reaffirm the questions that philosophy should answer. He viewed philosophy as a quest for categorical, not particular, knowledge. It was knowing what one did not know, pecking around the edges, finding knowledge’s limits, and to anticipate life's difficulties. "Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without being inclined towards a solution, toward one or the other of the very typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom, but only quest for wisdom, the evidence for all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born.” Harking back to Hobbes and Spinoza, Strauss found the most serious challenge to philosophy in divine revelation. Similarly, instead of trying to impossibly reconcile the two, he separated the spheres of reason and revelation into his Athens and Jerusalem- two incompatible modes of morality to judge the economy of human life. “Man cannot live without light, guidance, knowledge; only through knowledge of the good can he find the good that he needs. The fundamental question, therefore, is whether men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided efforts of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation. No alternative is more fundamental than this: guidance or divine guidance.” Strauss firmly came out for the former, but his life’s work was making the strongest possible case for the latter, before, in the end, refuting it for the yet unsatisfying life of philosophy. 

Smith ends his section on modernity’s discontents with two novels, Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The protagonists in both tales are men who are living in a world that has passed them by. They are firmly men of a bygone age. Don Fabrizio is an aging aristocrat whose family has run out of money and whose nephew has to make a marriage match with a nouveau riche merchant’s daughter in order to prolong the family fortune. His nephew puts the spirit of the times succinctly, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Don Fabrizio understands this, but he also understands he is not the man to do it. He observes, “the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, less still wanting to make, any move toward saving it.” This is not because he does not have the mind for it, indeed he is an amateur mathematician and astronomer of renown. Yet, as for the family business, he treats it with “a kind of contemptuous indifference about matters he considered low.” In the end, Fabrizio finds himself, “swung between the old world and the new. I find myself ill at ease in both.” Bellow’s Sammler is a seventy-year-old Holocaust survivor, who has settled in New York City with his nephew. He had studied at Oxford, spent time with the Bloomsbury Circle, but eventually returned to Poland just in time for Hitler’s invasion. Now in New York, he spends his days wandering the streets deep in contemplation. Sammler states, “I think I am an Oriental. I am content to sit here on the West Side, and watch, and admire these gorgeous Faustian departures for the other worlds.” Later, Bellow puts this criticism of Bernard Shaw into his mouth, “poor boys have become rich and powerful. Dickens, rich. Shaw, also. He boasted that reading Karl Marx made a man out of him. I don’t know about that, but Marxism for the great public made him a millionaire. If you wrote for an elite like Proust, you did not become rich, but if your theme was social justice and your ideas were radical you were rewarded by wealth, fame, and influence.” Perhaps, that is an appropriately succinct critique of the democratic age of modernity. The shift to modernity has been a transition from the age of the hero to the age of the mass man. Instead of boldness, we have average. Smith is not one to wholeheartedly agree with all this pessimism. He views modernity as “not a problem to be overcome but a challenge to be met.” His view was that these critics’ “task was to discover the deeper resources built up within Western tradition- the aristocratic Middle Ages for Tocqueville, German romanticism for Berlin, Greek philosophy for Strauss- by which to augment the Enlightenment and provide materials that could better sustain the theory and practice of liberal democracy.” These discontents did not want to tear down the edifice of modernity, but in their very critiques to buttress its walls to make modernity’s case all the stronger, placed on firmer ground.