“Rivalry- A Geisha’s Tale” by Nagai Kafu (translated by Stephen Snyder)

Kafu was a Japanese aristocrat, who spent time studying in America before returning home to Tokyo. He was enamored by the city’s seedier sides- the theater district, the Geisha houses, tea houses, playhouses, and brothels. This novel is set deep within this unwholesome milieu. The story follows a young woman, Komayo, who has returned to life as a geisha, following her husband’s untimely death. “Had she chosen to live out her days in the quiet backwater of Akita, she would never have known this kind of joy—a thought that made her grateful for all the trials she had endured and made her wonder at the strange turns of human destiny. She felt as though she were understanding for the first time what it truly meant to be a geisha, all the sorrow and the joy. It was odd though: she’d been a geisha yesterday, too, and yet somehow everything was different now.” Komayo has to learn to re-navigate this world full of ceremony, ritual, performance, and patronage. “Eda discreetly took stock of Komayo’s costume, her accessories, and her way of conducting herself in front of guests. None of this, of course, concerned him directly. But since he was in the habit of amusing himself in the company of such women without partaking of the erotic possibilities, he was determined this evening, for Yoshioka’s sake, to make an accurate assessment of Komayo’s worth as a geisha through the eyes of an impartial observer. Every woman in the quarter bore the title of “Shimbashi geisha,” but he knew that they represented a wide range of quality.” The novel details the politics, power dynamics, and honest love affairs that develop in the world inhabited by the geishas. And, of course, the bitter rivalries too. “Now that she’s got such a fine patron, all she has to do is take a lover—an actor, perhaps, like Kikugoro or Kichiemon—and she can have her cake and it too.”

“Lost Christianities” by Bart Ehrman

Ehrman expounds on many of the lost gospels and other apocryphal texts expunged from the modern Christian canon. These texts were often deemed dangerous teachings counter to what the proto-orthodoxy was trying to establish and codify. For instance, the Gospel of Peter came close to endorsing Docetism, the belief that Christ did not suffer and die, either because he was completely divine and could not suffer pain, his body being mere phantasm, or because Jesus the human and Christ the divine were actually two separate beings with the divine leaving the corporal on the Cross. Another text, the Acts of Paul, through the story of his disciple Thecla, endorsed the power of women to baptize and sexual equality in general. This text, through its endorsement of celibacy for laypeople, even in marriage, and asceticism for women, also threatened existing social structures and constructs.

Ehrman deals with three heretic sects in detail. The Ebionite Church believed that all Christians first had to convert to Judaism and follow all the laws of the Torah, including the Sabbath, keeping Kosher, and circumcision. At the other end of the spectrum, the Marcionite Church disavowed the Old Testament entirely, saying the Gospels of Jesus were the only true Christian doctrines. Marcion, the sect’s founder, was the first to compile a canonical scripture (years before a New Testament) that included only the Gospel of Luke and ten Pauline letters, expunged of all references to the Jewish God and Old Testament. The final group, the Gnostics, never setup their own church, but considered themselves an elite within the early Christian Church. Gnostics, Greek for “those in the know”, had secret interpretations of the Gospels which included the view that there was a one true God above other lesser Gods, and that one true God “was totally spirit, totally perfect, incapable of description, beyond attributes and qualities.” They also were docetic in their belief in Jesus Christ. These sects were only later deemed heretical centuries after Jesus’ death as the proto-orthodox consolidated power and won out in creating the canon that became the current New Testament.

“Love in the New Millennium” by Can Xue (translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen).

This is a strange novel. “The place doesn’t feel solid, it’s like you—like you’re in a land of illusion!” The plot is filled with sex, murder, intrigue, and busybodies spying on other people’s lives. ““I have something to tell you. Wei Bo and I sleep together every night,” said the ghost of the man dead for many years.” It deals with contemporary China through the shield of allusion. There is an air of mystery in every word. “Your not understanding is understanding.” One is disoriented and doesn’t quite know where it is going next. It is a hard book to read. There is a sense that every word is essential. “Living in the caves would be so much better. You close to me, me close to you, listening to the sounds coming from the earth’s core. People grow discontent, they flatten mountains into the ground and run madly all over like weasels.”

The novel’s story mixes fantasy and reality into an odd tale that doesn’t quite make sense, but doesn’t ever seem too weird either. “His aunt sat in a corner drinking water from a jade brush pot, saying to him, “This is called ‘drinking ink.’ This is education.”” There are allegories wrapped within allegories. Clues are left on every page. “Here you plant things, but don’t hold out hope, it’s no use. You toss them into the soil and forget as soon as possible. We all do this. I used to think that seeds would grow into the plants they were harvested from, but it’s not that way at all. You can wait and see.” Nothing is at all obvious. ““All of the discussions use a method of allusion,” Little Green answered with utter seriousness. “We talk about the weather, about playing chess, about matters of national importance, when in fact our topic is the Gobi Desert. Teacher, do you understand?”” Lush dream sequences pull you in, before being jolted quickly back into whatever reality there is. “A Si pointed with her chopsticks at the salmon’s bones inside the large soup tureen. They saw its skeleton eaten bare of flesh moving around in the soup. It swam in three circles, then paused at the bottom of the tureen and remained still. The three women looked at each other in shock.” The reader is never on sure ground and is forced to struggle for the underlying truth. “Her songs aren’t about our past life, or about the emotional life of people today, but instead about the life we have never even imagined.”

“Death’s End” by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

This is the final novel in Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy. Clocking in at over six hundred pages alone, this book brings the trilogy’s total page count to well over fifteen hundred. This story circles back on many of the philosophical themes of the previous books, with a continued emphasis on physics, cosmology, free will, and the nature of language. “If, as soon as you were born, you were locked inside a small box, you wouldn’t care because that was all you’ve known. But once you’ve been let out and they try to put you back in, it feels completely different.” Liu’s story also compels the reader ask what it truly means to be human. “Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are free from the Earth, they cease to be human.” This novel’s time scale is also even more epic, with over eighteen million years elapsing during the course of the story. “The known universe is about sixteen billion light-years across, and it’s still expanding. But the speed of light is only three hundred thousand kilometers per second, a snail’s pace. This means that light can never go from one end of the universe to the other. Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, it follows that no information and motive force can go from one end of the universe to the other. If the universe were a person, his neural signals couldn’t cover his entire body; his brain would not know of the existence of his limbs, and his limbs would not know of the existence of the brain.” However, as in his past novels, this story also remains rooted in the specific lives of a few core characters, who are able to transcend time and keep the reader rooted in humanity’s journey. “This wasn’t a decision born of thought, but buried deep in her genes. These genes could be traced to four billion years ago, when the decision was first made. The subsequent billions of years only strengthened it. Right or wrong, she knew she had no other choice.” This is a novel that makes one deeply ponder the meaning of humanity, the meaning of the universe, and the meaning of time, as well as the meaning of an individual life. “The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness.”

“A Hero of Our Time” by Mikhail Lermontov

This is a strange novel that begins disguised as a travelogue. It is considered the first in the Russian psychological style and is said to have been admired by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. Lermontov was also an accomplished poet, painter, and soldier. He was exiled twice, spending time stuck in regiments in the Caucasus, from which the plot of this novel is largely based. In the nineteenth century the Caucasus were even wilder than today and Lermontov spent time studying the languages and folklore of the simple peasants. This novel begins recounting the travails of two strangers stuck together traveling the high mountain passes of Ossetia during a blizzard. However, the tales quickly move backwards as one begins to recount stories of his time stationed in a fort near Georgia. He tells of the native peoples, of a dashing aristocratic companion named Pechorin who steals a local Princess for a bride, and her eventual death at the hand of a local rogue.  After more adventures, the narrator comes into possession of a travel diary written by the same aristocratic adventurer, Pechorin. The tales written within border between gallant, weird, and romantic. Pechorin becomes embroiled in a smuggling ring from the Crimea, witnesses a murder of an officer by a Cossack, and finally takes in the spring waters in a picturesque mountain town. There he embarks in a flirtatious affair that ends in heartbreak for many and death for a few. All the tales involved convey the personality of a dandy, at once romantic and melancholy, as he searches for his true life’s purpose amidst the banality of his fellow man.

“The Dark Forest” by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen)

Liu’s science fiction trilogy succeeds in combining realistic contemporary physics, plausible futuristic extrapolations, historical eastern philosophy, and cultural sociology all within a grippingly mysterious narrative. This novel continues the story of “The Three Body Problem”, but most of the main characters are new, even as humanity’s existential threat remains. Ye Wenjie reappears in the opening pages of the novel, coining a new field in the social sciences, and setting the table for the rest of the plot, in her usual enigmatic fashion. “Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society…. Setup a few simple axioms at first, then derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a foundation…. First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant…. To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.” One constant in Liu’s novels is the reminder that humanity is still extremely young in the timespan of the universe. “The outcome of natural biological evolution requires at least twenty thousand years to manifest itself, but human civilization has just five thousand years of history, and modern technological civilization just two hundred. That means that the study of modern science today is being done by the brain of primitive man.” The novel’s protagonist, Luo Ji, warns, “Everything has an ending. The sun and the universe will die one day, so why should humanity believe that it ought to be immortal?”

“Does Altruism Exist?” by David Sloan Wilson

Wilson is a professor of biology and anthropology, who specializes in evolution, both genetic and cultural. His theory can be summed up as, “selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.” The key tension is between intra-group selection and inter-group selection. There is a constant friction between the individual and the larger group. “Behaving for the good of the group typically does not maximize relative fitness within the group.” And for evolution everything is relative. “Natural selection is based on relative fitness. It doesn’t matter how well an organism survives and reproduces, only that it does so better than other organisms in the evolving population.” And humans have evolved to a degree that has not been reached by any other animal on the planet, not even fellow primates. Therefore, for humans the group has often become the unit of selection. “We crossed the threshold from groups of organisms to groups as organisms…. The kind of social control that suppresses destructive within-group competition but permits and often cultivates group-beneficial forms of within-group competition is part of what the concept of major evolutionary transitions is all about.”

Humans adapted a whole suite of behaviors from cooperation between genetically unrelated individuals, distinctive cognition, symbolic thoughts, including language, and the ability to transmit and pass on culture in a relatively short amount of time, evolutionarily speaking. This inter-generational learning through cultural evolution is what has separated humanity from other primates. It has allowed humans, as a species, to build on past knowledge, so that the whole has retained more knowledge than is possible for any one individual over the course of one lifetime. “Regardless of whether a phenotypic trait is genetically inherited, learned, or culturally derived, it can spread by virtue of benefitting individuals compared to other individuals in the same group, by benefitting all individuals in a group compared to other groups, and so on for a multilevel hierarchy of groups.” The important aspect of altruism, particularly, is that it is the actions of individuals that matter and not their thought processes. Altruism is defined as traits that help at the group level rather than the individual, regardless of motive. “Proximate mechanisms need not resemble functional consequences in any way whatever.” As inter-group selection has evolved to dominate intra-group competition in humans, altruism has become a mechanism that leads to selection that favors groups that have been selfless in action, regardless of the reasoning behind it.

“Friedrich Holderlin’s Life, Poetry, and Madness” by Wilhelm Waiblinger (translated by Will Stone)

Holderlin was one of the greatest German poets of the late 18th and early 19th century. He studied Lutheran theology in a seminary along with Hegel and Schelling, before writing the epistolary novel “Hyperion” as well as his major odes. He sustained himself with various jobs from being a tutor to the German nobility to being appointed court librarian for a German prince. However, the last thirty-six years of his life he spent raving mad, in the care of a kindly carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, in his hometown of Tubingen. His family refused all contact with him and he spent most of his days locked up in the carpenter’s tower, part of the old city’s fortifications. This short book is a memoir of Waiblinger’s effort to meet with Holderlin from the years 1822-1826. Waiblinger was a young Romantic poet, with anti-establishment tendencies, who was to die of syphilis in Rome, before his memoir was published. According to Stone, for Waiblinger, as well as other Romantics, “Holderlin was a lesson, a terrifying example of the physical and mental health potentiality of imaginative thought unrestrained.”

Waiblinger begins his memoir by recounting what was known of Holderlin’s youth. “This soul then was composed of an infinite delicateness, noble, fine, deep of feeling but all too sensitive, with an audacious and daring imagination…. constructing a world in which the most bitter sufferings were perceived as the necessary creative element of inwardness.” By the time Holderlin reached seminary, he was still suffering bouts of melancholy, along with producing first drafts of what would become some of his greatest works of poetry. “He would sometimes retire for weeks on end and converse only with his mandolin…. his sufferings exacerbated by a love too delicate and sentimental, by his zeal and impetuous cravings for fame and honour, the loathing of his circumstances, the aversion to his course of study.” Throughout his life, “it was nature itself which he most worshipped and adored.” After two doomed love affairs, Holderlin was already teetering on insanity. “He took on a translation of Sophocles, which proved a curious blend of the wondrous and the deranged.”

Soon, Holderlin had been committed to an asylum, where he spent two years, only let out under the care of the carpenter Zimmer, who was a fan of his poetry. When, in 1822, Waiblinger was to first meet Holderlin he was already thoroughly insane. Waiblinger rented rooms in Tubingen and venturing to introduce himself to his hero, went “to the room of Herr Librarian—for this is how Holderlin prefers to be addressed…. The visitor now finds himself addressed as ‘Your Majesty’, ‘Your Holiness’ and ‘Merciful Father’.” Holderlin talked to himself incessantly, repeated the same simple tunes on his piano for days on end, babbled incoherently, and invented new words and languages. Waiblinger recounts, “I gave him paper to write on. Then he would sit at his desk and produce a few lines, metrically rhymed. Admittedly they were senseless, particularly the last ones, but at least they were consistent in their rhyming form…. His head is still brimming with a host of sublime metaphysical notions, indeed even original poetic expressions, but can only communicate them in the most obscure and fantastical manner. He lacks the capacity to retain his vaporous imaginings.” Zimmer summed up Holderlin’s existence, “It was too much inside him that caused his mind to give way.” Towards the end of his days, Holderlin, himself, wrote, “Now for the first time I understand humankind, because I dwell far from it and in solitude.”

“The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

This is “hard” science fiction at its best. It is an epic novel that combines the best of realistic science, actual Chinese history, and world-leaping fantasy. Over the course of the story, realistic nuclear physics, computer science, virtual reality, and extra-terrestrial communications are all seamlessly woven into a compelling narrative. Space and time hop back and forth. The story begins in the depths of the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese intellectuals were being rehabilitated, punished, or worse. “But burning was their fate; they were the generation meant to be consumed by fire.” The story soon shifts to forty years later and to physicists on the frontier of contemporary science. “Theory is the foundation of application. Isn’t discovering fundamental laws the biggest contribution to our time?” But there were also humans opposed to this scientific progress. “He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body.” On Earth, scientists start dying under mysterious circumstances. A secret society (or two) is revealed. Superpowers collaborate. There is also much philosophy interspersed with the hard science. “The more transparent something was, the more mysterious it seemed. The universe itself was transparent; as long as you were sufficiently sharp-eyed, you could see as far as you liked. But the farther you looked, the more mysterious it became.” As the mystery of this novel unfolds, the story envelops you even as the technical details of the science impresses.

“The Story of the Stone Volume I- The Golden Days (The Dream of the Red Chamber)” by Cao Xueqin (translated by David Hawkes)

Cao Xueqin lived in Nanking in the 18th century. The Cao family had been wealthy, holding the office of Commissioner of Imperial Textiles, but by the time Cao Xueqin began this epic his family had fallen out of imperial favor and he was living in poverty near Peking. “My only wish is that men in the world below may sometimes pick up this tale when they are recovering from sleep or drunkenness, or when they wish to escape from business worries or a fit of the dumps, and in doing so find not only mental refreshment but even perhaps, if they heed its lesson and abandon their vain and frivolous pursuits, some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces.” Similarly, the novel tells the story of a grand family, the Jias, and their triumphs and travails over the generations. ““The extreme of adversity is the beginning of prosperity” — and the reverse of that saying is also true. Honour and disgrace follow each other in an unending cycle. No human power can arrest that cycle and hold it permanently in one position. What you can do, however, is to plan while we are still prosperous for the kind of heritage that will stand up to the hard times when they come.” The story mixes an authentic realism of everyday Chinese upperclass life in imperial China with elements of fantasy, such as talking stones, magical monks, and witchcraft. “This object comes from the Hall of Emptiness in the Land of Illusion. It was fashioned by the fairy Disenchantment as an antidote to the ill effects of impure mental activity. It has life-giving and restorative properties and has been brought into the world for the contemplation of those intelligent and handsome young gentlemen whose hearts are too susceptible to the charms of beauty."

Cao Xueqin’s first volume follows Bao-yu in his adolescence, the grandson and favorite of the Jia family matriarch, and a boy born with a mysterious jade stone stuck in his mouth. “When they celebrated the First Twelve-month and Sir Zheng tested his disposition by putting a lot of objects in front of him and seeing which he would take hold of, he stretched out his little hand and started playing with some women’s things — combs, bracelets, pots of rouge and powder and the like.” The story also meanders through a huge cast of characters, from minor relatives, to a bevy of servants and hangers-on. “Though I am so much richer and more nobly born than he, what use are my fine clothes but to cover up the dead and rotten wood beneath? What use the luxuries I eat and drink but to fill the cesspit and swell the stinking sewer of my inside? O rank and riches! How you poison everything!” The plot contains poetry, epigrams, song lyrics, riddles, calligraphy, priceless heirlooms, love intrigues, premature deaths, backstabbing family members, and plenty of family feasts. “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.”

“Stubborn Attachments” by Tyler Cowen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Covenant and Conversation: Leviticus: The Book of Holiness” by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

This is the third book in Sacks’ series of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Sacks, in the past, has made much of the mirror imaging of scripture, so, as the middle book in the Torah, Sacks sees Leviticus, or as he calls it Vayikra, as the pinnacle in the ABCBA format of the Bible. Sacks describes Vayikra as the book dedicated to the priesthood. Unlike the kingly and prophetic traditions, Sacks sees priesthood as representing the eternal, the seasonal, the reoccurring, and the constant. The role of the priest is to be a returning reminder of the obligations of the original Covenant. Vayikra has relatively little action, taking place in only one month, and all of that stationary, near Mount Sinai. The word Vayikra, itself, means “to call, beckon, or summon in love.” Sacks sees this as an entreaty by God, rather than as a command. It starts the willing relationship between one another, which will include holy sacrifice and the Sabbath. Vayikra moves beyond the role ascribed to the priesthood to all the Jewish peoples with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. No longer were the Jews to have a single sanctuary, priestly rites, and animal sacrifice. The destruction of these formal rituals of a peoples could have led to their eventual demoralization and disintegration. Instead, the Jews turned tragedy into a blessing- a democratization of the holy: with every person transforming into the roles and obligations of the priesthood, with the sanctuary replaced by synagogues wherever Jews may live, and with the Torah being the civil law uniting the people until the eventual return to political power in the Holy Land. In these essays, Sacks interweaves the spiritual with the moral and political and evokes the freedom and responsibility of personal choice while living in a community of others in covenant with God.

“Reading Leo Strauss- Politics, Philosophy, Judaism” by Steven B. Smith

It is probably accurate to say that, just as Marx was no Marxist, Leo Strauss would not consider himself a Straussian were he alive today (and certainly not the modern caricature of what it means to be a Straussian). He was a man of contradictions. He was a friend of democratic liberalism. He had a healthy disregard for modernism. He believed in the negative conception of liberty and in natural law.

Smith, in this collection of essays, tries to pick out the essence of the man- no easy task to untangle a philosopher who celebrated esotericism and doublespeak in the writings of others. Strauss’ lifelong themes were tensions in the grand style- “the difference between ancients and moderns, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and of course the tension between reason and revelation.” Strauss’ method was a careful reading of primary texts in their original language, with an eye to catch the out of place word or the hidden meaning. “Great writers often hide or conceal their most profound thoughts from all but the most careful and persistent readers.” Philosophy and politics, in its most general sense, cannot be divorced from each other, but there is, in there, a tension as well. “What distinguishes all philosophers as a class from non-philosophers is an intransigent desire to know, to know things from their roots or by their first principles. It is precisely because philosophy is radical that politics must be moderate.” Politics is the realm of opinion. Philosophy is truth.

For Strauss, his Jewishness was an important aspect of his humanity, if not his philosophy. It was the particularity of Judaism that it had “a preoccupation with such themes as exile, homelessness, and marginality…. The aspirations for assimilation and the assertion of separateness are the twin polarities which Jewish thought has developed.” Strauss viewed Jewish history as the particular proof as to the true general nature of man. As such, he viewed the Jewish problem as the human problem. “The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” Maimonides typified Strauss’ ideal of a philosopher writing for his time, but also beyond it. Maimonides was writing for multiple audiences all at once. “It was precisely Maimonides’s use of a rhetoric of caution, indirection, and ellipsis that made him in Strauss’s view the political writer par excellence.”

Machiavelli, for Strauss, was the first of the moderns. “No longer would politics serve to promote the moral or intellectual virtues; instead, the virtues were to be instrumental to the collective safety and security of society.” It was Machiavelli who first deified the State. “His revolt against the ancient philosophers led him to substitute patriotism or “merely political virtue” for moral virtue and the contemplative ideal.” But for Strauss, it was the modernist Spinoza (along with Hegel) who gave the most compelling proofs of reason (Athens) against revelation (Jerusalem). In Spinoza, “the comprehensive goal of his work was to replace the God of Abraham with the light of reason as the authoritative guide to life.” Strauss’ dissertation in Germany, which he himself would later criticize as being immature, relied heavily on Jacobi’s “Letters” in their critique of Spinoza. Jacobi believed “moral beliefs and commitments require faith, not reason. Reason can analyze and criticize, but morality requires belief, at a minimum belief in human freedom and individual responsibility.” This was the crux of one of the problems of philosophy that became the backbone of all of Strauss’ musings.

For Strauss, “the fundamental question…. 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.” As he later puts it slightly differently, “a life of obedient love versus a life of free insight.” This is where Strauss’ admiration for the esotericism of Maimonides comes to play. Sometimes he wants to have it both ways. He seems to suggest “a “Maimonidean” strategy that combines outward fidelity to the community of Israel with a private or “esoteric” commitment to philosophy and the life of free inquiry…. This dual strategy allows one to maintain respect for, even love of, the tradition prophylactic to the alternatives of atheism and assimilation, while denying orthodoxy any truth value.” Smith posits, “the statement that Judaism represents a “heroic delusion” is as close as he ever came, I think, to expressing in his writing that orthodoxy is a kind of Platonic noble lie.”

Strauss might have seemed to have given the game up- to have shown where his true loyalties lie. But he was equally as hard on the limits of reason. “Strauss’s Plato is in the first instance a skeptic, a “zetetic” philosopher, whose thought is characterized by an awareness of the limits, the incompleteness, of human knowledge.” For Strauss, it is impossible to understand Plato, the philosopher, before understanding Plato, the author. “The dialogue is the form of writing that most closely imitates the openness of inquiry and the limitations on human understanding.” In Plato’s form of inquiry he is creating possibilities of mental thought for later philosophers. “First, the cave represents the city, even the best city (kallipolis). It is a fundamentally political rather than ontological category. The cave is in turn decorated with a variety of “images,” that is, opinions. Opinion, Strauss, maintains elsewhere, is “the element of society.” As such opinion stands in contrast to “philosophy, which seeks to replace opinion with knowledge.”

For Strauss, beware of those who take at face value Plato’s creation of a utopia ruled by philosopher kings as a true (or possible) ideal. “Having perceived the truly grand, the philosophers regard the human things paltry. Their very justice- their abstaining from wronging their fellow human beings- flows from contempt for the things for which non-philosophers hotly contest. They know that the life not dedicated to philosophy and therefore even political life at its best is like life in a cave, so much so that the city can be identified with the Cave.” The philosopher, however, lives within the city and must not openly oppose it. “Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion with knowledge; but opinion is the element of the city, hence philosophy is subversive, hence the philosopher must write in such a way that he will improve rather than subvert the city.”

Strauss was interested in the classics not because he was anti-modern, but because he thought modernity, in its particulars, had gotten off track with the German historicism and moral relativism espoused by Weber and Heidegger. ““Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today,” he avows. The point of a return to the ancients is not to find “immediately applicable” answers to current problems, but to gain clarity about the “starting point” that such answers would have to address.” It was the problems that interested Strauss and not the solutions. It was the search for truth and the tensions and oppositions that that search engendered that tantalized him. “To idealize is not just to praise or flatter, but to use what one regards as the best or highest aspects of one’s tradition as a standard to criticize others.” For Strauss, “philosophy is nothing other than an openness to the alternatives, to the fundamental and comprehensive problems.” However, “to respect opinions is something entirely different from accepting them as true.”

Strauss constantly probed at the bounds of philosophy. Smith argues, “Strauss’s skeptical teaching argues for, rather than assumes, an appreciation of the limits of action and a knowledge of the fact that “evil cannot be eradicated and therefore one’s expectations of politics must be moderate.”” Just like philosophy is above politics, it is also beyond history. Philosophy is “the quest for eternal order, or for the eternal causes or causes of all things…. within which history takes place, and which remains entirely unaffected by history.”

Because he was a friend of liberalism, for he saw no other alternative, Strauss often wanted to protect liberalism from itself. “The liberal desire to secure the conditions for life is in danger of obscuring the question about the meaning of life.” The benefit of liberalism is that it allows the space for the quest for answers to flourish. “The virtue of democracy is its ability to foster the greatest variety of ways of life, among which must be included the philosopher, who “can lead his peculiar way of life without being disturbed.” This regime is “sweet” because it affords people the political liberty to do as they like, thereby making possible Socrates and Socratic-style conversations.” Democracy has its boundaries, however. “The ancients understood a regime to be possible only in a relatively small or “closed’ society. The conditions of mutual trust and common affection that hold society together are only possible within a small polis-like community…. The ancients regarded the regime to be something irremediably particular.” 

Liberal democracy is no easy task and certainly not a universal certainty. “Today modern democracy has become mass democracy, and mass democracy is ruled by mass culture. To be sure, mass culture is compatible with, even presupposes, a high degree of scientific and technical expertise. What one finds is a highly developed scientific specialization and division of labor coexisting with a mass culture that panders to our lowest tastes and desires.” Strauss sees the role of philosophy to serve as a guide and a warning to the masses. “Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by mediation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.”

The philosophic minded statesman has to be even more aware of the limits of his politics. “He will try to help his fellow man by mitigating, as far as in him lies, the evils that are inseparable from the human condition.” The philosopher, as guide, has to be humble as well. “We are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therewith never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.” Strauss firmly believed that no one knows the answers to philosophy’s greatest problems. It was his life’s goal to probe around the edges, to take a stab, and to raise questions as best that he could.

“Stories of Your Life and Others” by Ted Chiang

This is a collection of short science fiction stories. Most are not “traditional” science fiction, as they are not set in the future, but in an alternate past that is very true to actual history, except for one or two fantastical tweaks. Chiang’s most famous story is “Story of Your Life”, which was adapted for the film “Arrival”. The linguistics, physics, and philosophy of time aspects of the story are riveting. Chiang flips back and forth between technical science and a loving narrative between mother and daughter. You get lost in the past, present, and future. It is spellbinding and does not lose its potency after you figure out what is going on. Technical science and math play a role in a lot of Chiang’s stories. “Division by Zero” is about a former math prodigy who discovers a proof that 1=2 and the resulting crisis that that inspires within her. A couple of Chiang’s stories also contain Biblical elements. “Tower of Babylon” is inspired by the Tower of Babel, but as Chiang writes, “the characters may be religious, but they rely on engineering rather than prayer. No deity makes an appearance in the story; everything that happens can be understood in purely mechanistic terms.” In “Hell is the Absence of God”, on the other hand, angels make frequent visitations to Earth, souls can be seen either going up to Heaven or down to Hell after death, and occasionally humans can even see down into Hell, like a glass bottom boat. It makes for a surreal tale set amidst an otherwise present-day America. This is Chiang’s rift on the Book of Job. One of the best features of this collection is that Chiang includes his “Story Notes”, a short paragraph on each story where he explains his thoughts and inspirations. My favorite story was “Understand” about a man awoken from a brain-dead coma, whose neuron synapses are improved by medical injections into his spine. It combines philosophy of mind, technical science, the role of language, the role of culture, philosophy of self, arguments for altruism, and thoughts on the purpose of life in a magical tale. I have not read science fiction in many years, but this book has me researching for similar works in the genre.

“Missing Out- In Praise of the Unlived Life” by Adam Phillips

In this collection of essays Phillips mulls over one’s parallel life- the unlived life. He claims, “our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.” These missed opportunities or forks in the road never really leave us. They are forever lodged in our brains as comparisons of and reference points to our actual lives. “In our unlived lives we are rather more transgressive than we tend to be in our lived lives.” Are these unlived lives the lives we really wanted to have? And when we interact with others, we are not only interacting with their pasts, but with the pasts they might have had- their own alternate possibilities. “Each member of a couple…. is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner’s unlived lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.” 

Phillips begins by writing “On Frustration”. We do not always get what we want. What we want is often something that only another person can give (or so we think). “If someone can satisfy you they can frustrate you. Only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration…. To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had.” In the end, this dependence on others and on the outside world to relieve one’s desire is bound to cause frustration. “Perhaps we are permanently enraged, taking revenge on ourselves for not being sufficient for ourselves, and taking revenge on others for never giving us quite what we want.”

Phillips’ second essay is “On Not Getting It”. “We might consider what it would be to live a life in which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes, to get…. Getting it, as a project or a supposed achievement, can itself sometimes be an avoidance; an avoidance, say, of our solitariness or our singularity or our unhostile interest and uninterest in other people.”

Phillips’ next essay is “On Getting Away with It”. “The child’s first successful lie against the parents is his first moment of independence.” But when did getting away with it become such a good thing? “What is it like to live in a culture in which the thing people like to say is, ‘I got away with it’, in which this is a boast?” And do we ever truly get away with it anyhow? “The mind, at least in the Freudian story, is also the place where, as Hamlet remarks, no one ever gets away with anything. What Lacan calls ‘the obscene super-ego’ is far more scrupulous in its attentions, and more brutal in its punishments, than external authority can ever be.” Truly getting away with it means not feeling guilty- a culture where the sociopath is idealized, where “the clever would displace the pious.”

Phillips’ next essay is “On Getting Out of It”. But do we ever know what exactly we are getting out of? “Perhaps more often than we realize, we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have.” If only I had done this, that, and the other, things would have turned out this way for sure. But these unlived experiences are often the bar by which we judge our lived lives. “It is not unusual, say, for each member of a couple to know exactly what is missing in their partner; and to know, by the same token, how their lives would be different, that is, so much better, if their partner would change in particular ways.”

Phillips closes with an essay “On Satisfaction”. The question is if we can ever be satisfied? If the answer is no, is the reason because what we think will be satisfactions when only wishes are not really satisfactions when lived in reality? Or is it because we have substituted out our real wants for what is available to us in actual life? “How do you know what your desire is? Is it that which makes you feel guilty when you betray it; not when you betray someone else, but when you betray yourself; indeed, for Lacan self-betrayal, the self-betrayal of giving up one’s desire, is the source of guilt.” The only life we can truly draw experiences from is our lived life. “What we learn from experience is that experience keeps stripping us of dearly held beliefs, about ourselves and others. We can’t afford to live as though certain things are true about ourselves. Our satisfactions have to be realigned.” Life interferes with our beliefs. Phillips finishes with an appendix “On Acting Madness.” It is important to remember, “when we think of the lives we may have led, there are lives we are relieved to have missed out on” too.

“Family Lexicon” by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Jenny McPhee)

This book, published in 1961, was written by Ginzburg after she had moved from Italy to London, following the Second World War. It is a blend of a memoir and a novel, detailing Ginzburg’s childhood in Turin, her marriage to an anti-fascist conspirator, and her family’s plight as Italian Jews, forced to live in a village in Abruzzi while in internal exile during the war. She states up front, “I haven’t invented a thing…. If read as a history, one will object to the infinite lacunae…. One should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand any more or less than a novel can offer.” The book blends her humor, the intrigues of Italian politics, her family’s playful use of language, and the deeply personal inner-workings of her tight-knit family. There are familial phrases, whose meanings are only known to the members of her clan, that become themes that return to her life as she ages. Describing her father, “For him someone stupid was a “nitwit.”… In addition to the “nitwits,” there were also the “negroes.” For my father, a “negro” was someone who was awkward, clumsy, and faint-hearted; someone who dressed inappropriately, didn’t know how to hike in the mountains, and couldn’t speak foreign languages.” Ginzburg’s mother had her own peculiar sayings too. “Returning to Freiburg after the war, the bookseller [an old family friend] had exclaimed, “I don’t recognize my Germany anymore!” It was a saying that remained famous in our family and every time my mother didn’t recognize someone or something she would repeat it.” As for Ginzburg’s paternal grandmother, ““For you lot everything is a bordello. In this house you make a bordello out of everything,” my grandmother always said, meaning that for us nothing was sacred. The saying became famous in our family and we used to repeat it every time we found ourselves laughing over a death or a funeral.” As for her maternal grandmother, who died before Ginzburg was born, “Because he [her grandfather] always packed the house full of socialists, my grandmother Pina used to say bitterly, in dialect, of their daughter, “That girl’s going to marry the gasman.”” Ginzburg’s father ended up being a biologist, however.

Growing up under the rule of Mussolini, politics pervaded the life of the Ginzburg family. They were all committed anti-fascists, with Ginzburg’s future husband, father, and male siblings all having been arrested or going into exile. “At the time, my father didn’t really have a well-defined opinion about the communists. He didn’t believe there were any conspirators in the new, younger generation, and if he had suspected that there were, he would have thought them crazy. In his opinion, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to be done about fascism…. My mother went out in the morning saying, “I’m going to see if fascism is still on its feet. I am going to see if they’ve toppled Mussolini.”” Of Ginzburg’s own husband, “Leone was arrested now and again. They arrested him as a precautionary measure every time some notable politician or the king visited Turin. They kept him in jail for three or four days, letting him go as soon as the political figure had left.” Leone was eventually captured in Rome, operating an illegal printing press, and killed by the Nazis towards the end of the war. All that Ginzburg writes about this incident is “Leone had died in prison, in the German section of the Regina Coeli prison one icy February in Rome during the German occupation.” She recounts their friend Pavese as saying, “When someone goes away, or dies, I try not to think about him because I don’t like to suffer.” After the war, people once again had to adjust to their new lives and transform into their new selves. “The postwar period was a time when everyone believed himself to be a poet and a politician…. In one way or another, everyone felt deceived and betrayed, both those who lived in reality and those who possessed or thought they possessed a means of describing it.”

“The Art of Not Being Governed” by James C. Scott

Scott is a political science and anthropology professor at Yale, specializing in agrarian studies. This book focuses on Zomia, a land-space in Southeast Asia as big as Europe, spanning seven countries and over a hundred million peoples of various ethnic and linguistic groupings. It is a world in the periphery and anathema to all government.  The people within it have defied all attempts to make it legible, accessible, assessable, and taxable. 

The modern state has strived for administrative, economic, and cultural standardization. To that end, it has particularly sought legibility in forms of production. In Southeast Asia that has meant irrigated rice agriculture on permanent fields. “Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvee labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages.” Agriculture was determined to benefit the state machine. “Wet rice is, to be sure, more productive per unit of land than shifting cultivation. It is, however, typically less productive per unit of labor.” In an area where arable land was bountiful, but labor was scarce, this only made sense from a legibility standpoint. “Shifting cultivation was a fiscally sterile form a agriculture: diverse, dispersed, hard to monitor, hard to tax or confiscate. Swiddeners were themselves dispersed, hard to monitor, hard to collect for corvee labor or conscription.”

Throughout Southeast Asian history the most important trade goods were slaves, “the human capital who formed the working capital of any successful state.” Where arable land was plentiful what was needed was manpower to cultivate it. As Richard O’Conner put it, “effective strength often came down to a polity’s core, not the realm’s total size or wealth.” Wars in Southeast Asia were therefore, not about killing the enemy, but were slave raids on massive scale to steal manpower and take it back to your own state core to cultivate your lands. Wet rice cultivation maximizes the food supply within easy reach of that state core. “Grain, after all, grows aboveground, and it typically and predictably ripens at roughly the same time. The tax collector can survey the crop in the field as it ripens and calculate in advance the probable yield. Most important of all, if the army and/or the tax collector arrive on the scene when the crop is ripe, they can confiscate as much of the crop as they wish. Grain then, compared with root crops, is both legible to the state and relatively appropriable. Compared to other foodstuffs, grain is also relatively easy to transport, has a fairly high value per unit of weight and volume, and stores for relatively long periods with less spoilage…. Uniformity in the field, in turn, produced a social and cultural uniformity expressed in family structure, the value of child labor and fertility, diet, building styles, agricultural ritual, and market exchange. A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.” 

States had a huge incentive to incorporate disparate peoples into their core. That meant taking people of different ethnic, cultural, and religious persuasions and subsuming them into the monolithic state. Easy assimilation, intermarriage, and social mobility were the norm. Identity was a matter more of performance and adaptability to the state regime more so than genealogy. The Hinduization of the monarch instituted an ideology that provided a ritual umbrella to the claims that the strongman had divine authority, rather than just being temporally powerful. “Sanskritic forms staked a claim to participation in a transethnic, transregional, and indeed, transhistorical civilization." It gave institutionalism and permanence to rule that had previously been based on a cult of personality and personal skill at warfare and leadership. 

On the periphery to state control there was always ungoverned land. This land was “home to fugitive, mobile populations whose modes of subsistence- foraging, hunting, shifting cultivation, fishing, pastoralism- were fundamentally intractable to state appropriation." These shatter zones, on the edges, were geographically inaccessible and had a vast diversity of ethnicities and languages within them. These areas were “locations of very high friction- swamps, marshes, ravines, rugged mountains, heaths, deserts- even though they may be quite close to the state core as the crow flies, [they] are likely to remain relatively inaccessible, and thus zones of political and cultural difference.” In Southeast Asia that often meant climbing higher and higher vertically to areas that were both easier to defend and were inhospitable to wet rice cultivation. Foraging at subsistence levels was an extreme measure. Small, scattered, unobtrusive plots of banana or root vegetables was preferred. Crops were chosen based on their quickness to maturity, the little care needed, and their relative indestructibility. Human groupings tended to be small enough to escape the arm of the state, but large enough to defend against slave raiding parties and to protect plots from wild animals and birds. “Cultivars that cannot be stored long without spoiling such as fresh fruits and vegetables, or that have low value per unit weight and volume, such as most gourds, rootcrops, and tubers, will not repay the efforts of the tax gatherer. In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dup up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder.” Stateless societies were, therefore, widely dispersed and physically mobile, able to fission into new and smaller units as needed, able to forage, hunt and gather when required, were highly egalitarian in social units, and were located in terrain that made them far from the state core in friction, if not in distance.

The peoples of the hills were not left behind by civilization. Most made a conscious decision to escape the reach of the state, joining a small indigenous population already there. As the state expanded further and further, those who wished to escape, in turn, pushed themselves further into the hills, away from the orbit of state control. “Their subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power will arise among them.” Joining the peoples in the hills were often those who had led failed rebellions against the state, those who were members of a religious schism or prophetic cult, those who were escaping diseased areas ravaged by epidemics, those who were slaves, outlaws, and criminals escaping punishment, and those who simply wanted more autonomy or were too poor to pay taxes. “Whenever a society or part of a society elects to evade incorporation or appropriation, it moves to simpler, smaller, and more dispersed social units…. The most appropriation-resistant social structures- though they also impede collective action of any kind- are acephalous (“headless”) small aggregates of households.” These hill peoples, far from being too primitive to write, often chose to discard their written language traditions. Literacy in the valleys was the providence of an elite- the royalty, the state bureaucracy, the clergy, and, most importantly, the tax man. It was also fixed history, where as the oral traditions of the hills allowed for flexibility and adaptability as situations and alliances changed on the ground. New foundation myths and oral traditions could transform and help legitimize evolving social structures. To that end, ethnicity was an amphibious term, with tribes and individuals shifting their cultures depending on the time and place they found themselves trapped in. Instead of the individual having an ethnicity, Richard O’Conner suggested that in Zomia, “where people change ethnicity and locality rather frequently, we might better say that an ethnicity has a people.” There were no distinct cultural borders, but an amorphous continuum, which shifted as situations dictated. “The interflow of genes, ideas, and languages has been so intensive and multidirectional as to render futile any attempt to delineate the various ‘peoples’ in terms of completely distinct bundles of geographical, linguistic, biological, or cultural-historical features.” Tribes did not exist so much on the ground as they were human constructs to make the people seem more legible from the outside. The stateless zones were defined by heterarchy- social and economic complexity, without a formal unified hierarchy. Scott, in closing, maintains that “hill peoples are not pre- anything. In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject, and perhaps even postliterate.”

“Hippias Minor” by Plato (translated by Nicholas D. Smith)

In this dialogue Socrates asks questions of Hippias, a sophist visiting Athens. The discussion is ostensibly about the moral differences between Achilles and Odysseus, but the argument turns to much larger themes of truthfulness in the context of voluntary action, degrees of knowledge, and the wholeness of man.

Socrates begins by stating something of his method, “But it is always my custom to pay attention when someone is saying something, especially when the speaker seems to me to be wise. And because I desire to learn what he means, I question him thoroughly and examine and place side-by-side the things he says, so I can learn. If the speaker seems to me to be some worthless person, I neither ask questions nor do I care what he says. This is how you’ll recognize whom I consider wise. You’ll find me being persistent about what’s said by this sort of person, questioning him so that I can benefit by learning.” Socrates is both stating the modesty in his method of interrogating others for the truth, while he is praising the worthiness of Hippias, even as he contradicts him at the same time. Throughout this dialogue, one gets the feel that Socrates’ praise for Hippias is faint indeed.

However, Socrates is nothing if not always modest. Later he states, “But I have one wonderfully good trait, which saves me: I’m not ashamed to learn. I inquire and ask questions and I’m very grateful to the one who answers…. I’ve never denied it when I’ve learned anything, pretending what I learned was my own discovery.” Finally, Socrates admits that philosophy is hard and one should be expected to waver, to struggle, and to change one’s mind. Speaking directly to Hippias (and more generally about sophists), Socrates says, “On these matters I waver back and forth and never believe the same thing. And it’s not surprising at all that I or any ordinary person should waver. But if you wise men are going to do it too—that means something terrible for us, if we can’t stop our wavering even after we’ve put ourselves in your company.”

“Another Philosophy of History” by Johann Herder (translated by Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin)

Herder was a Lutheran pietist who lived in eighteenth century Prussia. He set himself up as anti-rationalist, but that was too extreme. Rather, he was certainly against the prevailing French philosophes of his day who propounded the ultimate primacy of positivism and Enlightenment thought. Herder was a cultural pluralist, always skeptical of any universal ideal. He believed in a peculiar form of historicism, in which each successive stage of human development was not necessarily better than, just different from the ones that had preceded it. Each age had unique peculiarities imbued in it through a particular culture. His was definitely not a Whig theory of history. He associated the oriental age with one where theology held sway. “Naturally, the most ancient philosophy and forms of government in all countries would originally have had to be theology! A man marvels at everything before he sees.” The next stage of mankind took place in Egypt. “Everyone could be found where he had his property- thus public security, the administration of justice, order, law enforcement came into being, which would never have been possible in the Orient’s nomadic condition…. Thus man was placed under the bondage of the law: the inclinations that had once been merely paternal, child-like, shepherd-like, patriarchal now became civil, village-like, city-like…. The sense of family weakened and became instead concern for the same, social rank, artistic talent that was handed down, along with one’s station, like a house or field.” The next development in history was that of the Phoenicians. “The first commercial state, founded entirely on trade, which expanded the world beyond Asia for the first time, planting peoples and binding them together…. As the hatred of foreigners and imperviousness towards other people faded- even if the Phoenician did not visit other nations out of a love of mankind- a kind of friendship among peoples, understanding between peoples, and law of peoples emerged.” Herder next moved on to Greece. “Their establishment of common games and competitions for even the minutest places and peoples, always with minor differences and variations- all this, and ten times more, gave Greece a unity and diversity that here, too, made for the most beautiful whole. Hostility and assistance, striving and moderating: the powers of the human spirit were most beautifully balanced and unbalanced. The harmony of the Greek lyre!” Finally, Herder proceeded to the Roman peoples. There was “the magnanimous disposition of the soul that looked past lusts, effeminacy, and even the more refined pleasures and acted [instead] for the fatherland. [There was] the composed hero’s courage never to be reckless and plunge into danger, but to pause, to think, to prepare, and to act. There was the unperturbed stride that was not deterred by any obstacle, that was greatest in misfortune and did not despair. There was, finally, the great, perpetually pursued plan to be satisfied with nothing less than their eagle’s dominion over all the world…. The name [of Rome] bound peoples and parts of the world together that had never so much as heard of each other before. Roman provinces! In all of them, Romans trod: Roman legions, laws, ideals of propriety, virtues, and vices. The walls that separated nation from nation were broken down, the first step taken to destroy the national character of them all, to throw everyone into one mold called “the Roman people.”” The importance was not so much the accuracy of Herder’s history, but the cultural pluralism that he expressed. Each epoch was unique and could not have existed except for according to the particularities of that age.

For Herder, however, the individual was the only essence that was whole. “What an inexpressible thing the peculiarity of one human being is; how difficult it is to be able to put the distinguishing distinctively, how he feels and loves, how different and peculiar all things become for him after his eye sees them, his soul measures, his heart senses…. All human perfection is therefore national, secular, and, examined most closely, individual. One does not develop anything but that for which time, climate, need, world, fortune gives occasion: separated from the rest.” The human being is, of necessity, about particulars. “Human nature is no vessel for an absolute, independent, immutable happiness as defined by the philosopher; rather she everywhere draws as much happiness towards herself as she can: a supple clay that will conform to the most different situations, needs, and depressions. Even the image of happiness changes with every condition and location…. Basically, then, all comparison becomes futile.”

Herder takes a step back to describe the triumph of the tribes of Gaul over the decaying Roman Empire. “Of course they despised arts and sciences, luxury and refinement- which had wrought havoc on mankind. But as they brought nature instead of the arts, healthy Northern intelligence instead of the sciences, strong and good, albeit savage customs instead of refined ones, and as everything fermented together- what a spectacle! How their laws breathed manly courage, sense of honor, confidence in intelligence, honesty, and piety! How their institution of feudalism undermined the welter of populous, opulent cities, building up the land, employing hands and human beings, making healthy and therefore happy people. Their later ideal, beyond [mere] needs, tended towards chastity and honor, [and] ennobled the best part of human inclinations.” Herder’s view on religion was as a spur for human agency. “Religion is meant to accomplish nothing but purposes for human beings, through human beings.” The ages of history were moved less by reason and agency than by contingency and fate. Ideas ripened when the time and soil was right. After all, it was the particulars that made the age. “How often had such Luthers stood up before-and had foundered…. Human being, you have always been just a small, blind instrument, [used] almost against your will.”

Herder did not disparage his age, but he always wanted to put its accomplishments in their proper context. “Wisdom was always narrowly national and therefore reached deeper and attracted more strongly.” One thing he vehemently detested was the spirit of colonization, for it broke down proper differences in cultures. “Where are there no European colonies, and will there not be any? The fonder savages grow everywhere of our liquor and luxury, the more ready they also become for our conversion!… The more means and tools we Europeans invent to enslave, cheat, and plunder you other continents, the more it may be left to you to triumph in the end! We forge the chains by which you will pull us [one day], and the inverted pyramids of our constitutions will be righted on your soil- you with us.” The endless search to satisfy Mammon was also a bane to the spirit of the age. “All the arts we practice, how high they have risen! Can one imagine anything above that art of government, this system, this science for the education of mankind? The entire and exclusive driving force of our states: fear and money. Without the least need of religion (the childish driving force!), or honor, or freedom of the soul, or human happiness.” Herder ends by summing up his view of what the nature of history truly is. “What a work it is, this whole containing so many shadowy clusters of nations and ages, colossal figures with barely a perspective or view, so many blind instruments that are acting in a delusion of freedom and yet do not know what or what for, that are unable to survey anything and yet are taking part as eagerly as if their anthill were the universe- what a work!”

“The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (translated by Gregory Rabassa)

This is a fictional memoir written by a corpse. That should make this novel weird enough. The eponymous hero, Cubas, also has a flippant way of recapitulating the details of his life. He writes of his undertaking, “this book is written with apathy, with the apathy of a man now freed of the brevity of the century, a supinely philosophical work, of an unequal philosophy, now austere, now playful, something that neither builds nor destroys, neither inflames nor cools, and, yet, it is more than a pastime and less than an apostolate.” Cubas was a life-long bachelor and an aristocratic layabout in 19th century Rio de Janeiro. He does not claim to be anything more or less. He gives an idea of his philosophy of life when he writes, “tight boots are one of the best bits of good fortune on earth, because making one’s feet hurt they give occasion to the pleasure of taking them off. Punish your feet, wretch, then unpunish them and there you have cheap happiness, at the mercy of shoemakers and worthy of Epicurus.” He is marvelously self-centered. He is not overly proud, but unrepentant. He often expounds on (in order to relieve?) his own conscience, “Ventilate your conscience! That’s all I can tell you…. So I, Bras Cubas, discovered a sublime law, the law of equivalencies of windows, and I established the fact that the method of compensating for a closed window is to open another, so that morality can continuously aerate one’s conscience.” Later, when reflecting on the religious compunctions of a poor old maid he has put up in a house as cover for his liaisons with his married lover Cubas again reflects, “vice many times is manure for virtue. And that doesn’t prevent virtue from being a fragrant and healthy bloom. My conscience agreed and I went to open the door for Virgilia.”

Much of his memoir focuses on his intimate escapades with this one true love of his life, the one who got away, Virgilia. Initially, after he was spurned as her suitor, he writes, “I’d stayed awake a good part of the night. Because of love? Impossible. One doesn’t love the same woman twice, and I, who would love that one some time later, wasn’t held at that time by any other bond than a passing fantasy.” Cubas often talked about how little he liked to talk about money. Reflecting on an incident with a beggar, “I took out my wallet, picked a five mil-reis note—the least clean one—and gave it to him.” Throughout much of his memoir Cubas digresses into his method of writing it. “I went on my way, unraveling an infinite number of reflections that I think I’ve lost completely. They would have been material for a good and maybe happy chapter. I like happy chapters, they’re my weakness.” Later on in his memoir, he self-edits, justifying his previous word choice, “If the reader remembers Chapter XXIII he will observe that this is the second time I’ve compared life to an overflow, but he must also notice that this time I add an adjective: perpetual. And God knows the strength of an adjective, above all in young, hot countries.”