“Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson

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

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

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

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

“Russian Thinkers” by Isaiah Berlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two Cheers for Anarchism” by James C. Scott

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

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

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

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

“Capitalism Without Capital” by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake

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

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

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

“Philosophical Investigations” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein

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

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

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

“The Tides of Mind” by David Gelernter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On Balance” by Adam Phillips

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

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

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

“Narconomics” by Tom Wainwright

Wainwright is a reporter for the Economist magazine who tries to look at the illegal drug trade as any other business. He goes through different illegal drug markets applying the same logic as an economics or business school professor. He explains that tattoos are required in many gangs because it essentially keeps the foot soldiers from bolting to rivals if the pay or lifestyle is better. He claims increasing the border crossings between America and Mexico would decrease violence as the incentives to control the chokeholds of drug crossings decrease. He describes Mexican cartels offshoring to Guatemala and Honduras as the minimum wage and standard of living in Mexico has increased after NAFTA. He details how the Zetas were able to expand throughout Central America so quickly after breaking from the Gulf Cartel by setting up franchises. By pairing up with existing small time thugs in various Latin American cities they had built-in local information and networks. The Zetas provided the paramilitary training, and often the drugs and the guns, and they would take a small cut of each local operation. This was a light book about a heavy subject, which teaches that the iron laws of economics apply in black markets as they do in legal ones.

“Han Feizi- Basic Writings” translated by Burton Watson

Han Feizi was the most prominent scholar in the Legalist School of thought in the Warring States period of 3rd century BC China. I found him to be an awful man combining the worst in the traditions of Confucius and Lao Tzu. He unabashedly expounds the primacy of the State above all else, combined with a nihilistic morality. Furthermore, his advice to the Ruler advocates no principles save maintenance and promulgation of power alone. To that end, he advises the Ruler to keep his subjects in ignorance, to turn his ministers and civil servants against each other, and to always hide his true motives. Often described as the Machiavelli of his time, similarly to him it is tough to ascertain how much of Han Feizi’s writings he himself actually believed and how much was written to ingratiate himself with his Ruler for personal gain or survival. I tried to read it with a Straussian take on possible hidden meanings beyond the actual words espoused. The fact that he is Xi Jinping’s favorite political theorist does not bode well for China’s march towards progress or its neighbors’ peace and prosperity.

“The Dawn of Christianity: People and Gods in a Time of Magic and Miracles” by Robert Knapp

This is a book about the historical beginnings of Christianity and how early Christians interacted with the Jews and polytheists in their midsts. As such, the book begins well before the birth of Jesus with how Jews in Judea related with one another and with the polytheist establishment around them. The Jews were perhaps the oldest monotheistic peoples. They had already been around the Middle East for centuries when Solomon built the first temple in Jerusalem around 950 B.C.. After the breakup of their kingdom into a northern and southern portion, the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom in 722 B.C. and took ten of the twelve tribes into exile. The southern kingdom, comprised of the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, survived. Knapp makes the contention that, although the Jews were monotheistic, at first they only saw Yahweh as a special protector, while other, lesser gods also engaged with humans in the natural world. This conception of the divine gradually gave way to a more universal Yahweh, but, nonetheless, still within a world with other supernatural powers. In fact, to all ancient peoples, there was no “natural” sphere distinct from a “supernatural”, but the two intermingled freely on earth. For Jews, the cult center was the temple in Jerusalem, with the diaspora making regular pilgrimages for major festivals. During the second temple period, as many as 200,000 pilgrims often gathered for the biggest festivals, such as the Festival of the Unleavened Bread. These gatherings often created raucous, drunken mobs in Jerusalem, which made the city elites nervous, both Jewish and Roman alike. 

As Judaism progressed through history one idea that morphed was the concept of justice. Yahweh’s promise for glorious vindication for the righteous was no longer expected in one’s own lifetime, but in an unspecified future. This “explained the contradiction between Yahweh’s promises to favour his people and his dereliction in present circumstances.” This concept of delayed justice was novel for any religion of the day. Polytheist deities affected the lives of humans in the here and now, if at all. The idea of a prophet, who spoke directly with god and without the intermediation of the priests, was also crucial to Judaism. Moses, himself, declared that the Lord said to him, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command them. I myself will call to account anyone who does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name.” Practically, this direct communication with the divine was often a check on the Jewish elites of the day, calling into account their earthly vices when they contradicted the people’s conception of justice. The idea of a personal justice, as opposed to justice for all God’s people, also gained ground, particularly following the destruction of the first temple by the babylonians in 587 B.C.. Jeremiah proclaimed, “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.” The two conceptions of communication with God: the personal and at the community level were often in tension. “Right relationship with Yahweh relied on two things: strict community adherence to cultic practice through the priests and individual relationship to Yahweh through ethically and socially approved action. Political action was not important.” Following the Babylonian exile, the written Torah coalesced and received preeminence as an anchor of the people with the loss of the temple, its priests, and the king. The Torah, the prophets, and the psalms encouraged the people to make their own decisions about how to act righteously on earth without the need for a priesthood. Finally, the concept of resurrection of the dead as reward and punishment in the afterlife was important in the Jewish tradition. The Book of Daniel expressed, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.”

Jews were divided into many sects, which to some degree or another often incorporated some of the habits of the polytheists whom they lived among. The Jews were always in the minority and sometimes to blend in, to gain favor, or just to hedge their bets they incorporated aspects of polytheism into their spiritual routines. The Essenes, Therapeutae, Pharisees, and Sadducees were among the largest groups. These sects fought with each other, both in scriptural debates and physically. Some groups were exiled from Jerusalem, while others were stoned as blasphemers. The Essenes and Therapeutae tended to live in isolated communes and had strict vows and admission policies. The Sadducees, were descended from the priests and thus saw a preeminent role for priests in interpreting every detail of daily life, including politics. The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in a more personal relationship with the Torah. They kept themselves separate from the impurities of the city, while remaining within the larger community. “In the political realm the Sadducees felt that the high priest representing the whole people should be the effective ruler in a theocratic, centralised nation, while the Pharisees felt that the people themselves as a whole were the essence of Yahweh’s nation.” Alone among the sects, Sadducees believed Yahweh applied justice only in the present world and did not believe in life after death or a soul that lasted beyond the body. Following the destruction of the second temple the Sadducees would effectively disappear, while the Pharisees would gradually develop into the rabbinic faith. There were also cults such as the Zealots and Sicarii that proactively assassinated those Jews they deemed to be impure, blasphemers, or those who collaborated with the Roman civil authorities. 

Self-described prophets, charismatics, and messiahs (anointed ones) were relatively common during this time. They roamed from town to town, speaking, arguing, debating, challenging, and performing miracles in order to attract a following. John “the Baptist” was one such man. He did not claim to be a “Son of God” but a prophet intermediating between Yahweh and his people. Andrew, one of Jesus’ disciples, was a follower and, most probably, even Jesus himself. “Once a pious life was achieved, then baptism followed, not as a means of gaining pardon for past transgressions, but as an affirmation of the start of a new life of right behaviour.” John was executed by Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, around 30 A.D.. Many prophets were executed by the authorities not because of their particular messages, but because they were attracting too big of a following, which would be hard to control, corral, or put down. Jesus was unique in that he did not claim to be a prophet, but “one with Yahweh.” He claimed his “pronouncements were authoritative and of themselves.” The major break with all past Jewish tradition was for “Jesus [to] claim not to speak for Yahweh, but to be Yahweh’s son.”

Early Christians were still enmeshed in Jewish life. They would regularly visit established synagogues and try to convince their fellows that Jesus was the Messiah. Early Christianity presented itself as the correct interpretation of the Torah and would exclusively use Jewish scripture in debates. All of Jesus’ message was fully in line with the Pharisee practice of using oral traditions and the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Jesus kept entirely to Jewish law throughout his own life. Most Christians both kept the Sabbath and celebrated Sunday as the Day of Resurrection, where they would gather together, have a scriptural discussion, followed by a common meal, and, finally, take the Eucharist. The ideas of personal resurrection, the apocalyptic tradition, and the return to life of a martyred prophet were all in the mainstream for Judaic sects of the time. 

Polytheists, unlike Jews, worshipped idols, whether a “family Lar (protective deity), an altar at a crossroads, a statue in a temple, or the home of a spirit such as a grove or stream.” There was always a physical point of devotion. This world of myth was completely shattered by the new cult of Christianity. While the Jews mainly kept to themselves and avoided proselytizing, Christians tried to spread their message. Paul commanded, “flee from idolatry. Do I mean then that a sacrifice offered to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, but the sacrifices of polytheists are offered to demons.” For polytheists, Christianity struck them as a confusing Manichean world, with no nuance. It was an apocalyptic fight between good and evil. There were only two sides. One could no longer pick their god based on the particular situation and needs that suited one best. Christians were also accused of “activities such as cannibalism (reference to the easily misunderstood Eucharist of the body and blood of Christ) incest (all called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’) and sexual promiscuity (the kiss of peace).” Furthermore, Christians threatened the entire social fabric by refusing to pray to the Emperor. Thus, early Christians became a threat to the civil as well as spiritual sphere.

With the destruction of the second temple in 70 A.D., Christianity had to transform a difficult pivot. Most early Christians had fully expected Jesus to return in their lifetimes. Certainly with an apocalyptic event like the temple’s destruction, most expected the arrival of the Kingdom of God on earth immediately. In fact, for most early Christians this expectation was their foundational belief. As time passed, the End of Days went from the prime focus of Christianity to an event receding ever further into the future. Following 70 A.D., Christianity became a movement that focused on proselytizing to polytheists more than to other Jews and “god-fearers” (uncircumcised polytheist Jewish-“converts”). Christianity began to downplay its Jewish origins and took a more philosophical turn. It also became a more hierarchical sect, with designated leaders and followers, preparing for the long haul, instead of an imminent apocalypse. Whereas most of its early adherents were converted to Christianity through witnessing miracles, now the shift was towards reason and philosophical persuasion. Christians made appeals to the Platonic concept of the “daemon” or spark connected to the divine essence and even to the Stoic concept of the Spirit, “diffused through all things, and containing all things within himself.” The bishopric structure of the Church was also rigidly enforced. “A bishop was not only chosen by a congregation but also explicitly authorised by other bishops, who had, in turn, been authorised by previous bishops going back to the eyewitness disciples and apostles. This line of authority reaching back in theory to Jesus himself was intended to guarantee legitimacy and force of a bishop’s actions and words.” Christianity became more regimented and doctrinaire. There was less room for personal interpretation and dissent as the Church asserted its prerogative. The final pivot for the Christian religion occurred in 325 A.D. when Emperor Constantine, having converted, officially codified the Christian faith and proclaimed it as the official religion of the empire.

“The River of Consciousness” by Oliver Sacks

This is a collection of Sacks’ last essays, published posthumously. Some had been published in the New York Review of Books previously. Together they are united by focusing on some the very biggest themes in life and science. In one essay, Sacks recounts, “I wondered sometimes whether the speeds of animals and plants could be very different from what they were: how much they were constrained by internal limits, how much by external- the gravity of the earth, the amount of energy received from the sun, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and so on.” At the time he was playing in his garden as a twelve year-old. Sacks’ talent is to bring alive history’s greats like Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and William James, mining their works for relatively minor details and expounding upon them with his own interpretations, as well as bringing into play relevant thoughts from contemporaries like Charles Koch or Daniel Dennett, combining all for a fresh look. 

The first essay in Sacks’ collection was on the obsessive amount of time that Darwin experimented on plants and flowers and how this research transformed and clarified his theory of evolution. Darwin discovered that plants cross-fertilized, as opposed to self-fertilized. This was because he realized cross-fertilization was essential if any evolution were to happen at all, despite each plant already having its own male and female organs. “It was not just the evolution of plants but the coevolution of plants and insects that Darwin illuminated for the first time. Thus natural selection would ensure that the mouth parts of insects matched the structure of their preferred flowers.” While contemplating different abnormal mind states induced by diseases and drug use, Sacks relates, “dreams can take wing, move freely and swiftly, precisely because the activity of the cerebral cortex is not constrained by external perception or reality.” Sacks discusses Freud’s early career in neuroscience and how Freud blended this learning to psychoanalysis. Sacks states that “Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive…. Certain illusions of memory [are] based on intentionality…. Nothing was more central to the formation of identity than the power of memory; nothing more guaranteed one’s continuity as an individual…. Memories are continually worked over and revised and…. their essence, indeed, is recategorization.” 

In a following essay on memory, Sacks comes to the startlingly conclusion that “some of our most cherished memories may never have happened- or may have happened to someone else…. Many of my own enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, may have arisen from others’ suggestions that have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.” Sacks then ties memory in with the creative mind. “Creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one’s memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives…. Our only truth in narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves- the stories we continually recategorize and refine.” This ever-changing process of shifting and combining memory is what leads to the creative disposition. “Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind.” 

In another essay, Sacks continues with the theme of the creative disposition, “it takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It a is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.” Above all, creativity requires time to marinate. The key for Sacks is “time to forget it, to let it fall into [the] unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts…. [The process consists of] the incubation of hugely complex problems performed by an entire hidden, creative self.”

In his penultimate essay, Sacks expounds on consciousness and goes back to his roots as a neuroscientist. Fascinatingly, he considers the experience of individual brain development within a lifetime. “A crucial innovation has been population thinking, thinking in terms that take account of the brain’s huge population of neurons and the power of experience to differentially alter the strengths of connections between them, and to promote the formation of functional groups or constellations of neurons throughout the brain- groups whose interactions serve to categorize experience…. experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain.”