“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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Man Tiger” by Eka Kurniawan

Normally murder mysteries do not reveal the names of the corpse and the murderer in their first sentence. This novel has elements of pure fantasy mixed with a realistic window of modern day Indonesia. The scenes of rural life, the natural beauty of the countryside, and the vibrancy of the ordinary villagers all keep you enthralled the whole way through. And the plot still does manage to keep you guessing. 

“Existentialism is a Humanism” by Jean-Paul Sartre

This short lecture really sums up Sartre’s version of existentialism. It starts with the fact that existence precedes essence foremost in man. Man chooses. Life is all about choices made and choices abandoned, but in all that man is the chooser. “Reality exists only in action…. Reality alone counts.” Furthermore, in choice there is responsibility: a responsibility for one’s own actions affecting the self, but also a responsibility affecting mankind. In one’s conception of the self, in one’s morals, in one’s subjectivity one is also affecting humanity at large. There is a commitment to live authentically in the world and primarily not to live in bad faith with oneself.

“A Million Windows” by Gerald Murnane

As is the case with many of Murnane’s works of fiction, this novel has layers of story built upon layers. The stories are embedded within stories. “For the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat the simple fact that I am the narrator of this work and not the author.” Also similar to some of his previous work, this novel is more about the craft of writing than any so-called plot. In fact, Murnane repeatedly mines the same basic facts about his family and his past, all completely fictionalized, of course. “I recall no reviewer or critic who insisted that fictional characters ought not to be discussed as though they are persons living in the world where books of fiction are written and read.” The beauty of Murnane is that the reader gets so wrapped up in the asides and tangents that if one is not careful one can lose track of who exactly is speaking and what is story and what is commentary. “For him, the personages who had first appeared while he was reading some or another fictional text were no less alive after the text itself had come to an end than while he pored over it.” Of course, nothing is real. It is all fiction. “Fiction, even what I call true fiction, is fiction. An author demeans fiction if he or she requires the reader to believe that what happens in his or her mind while reading is no different from what happens over his or her shoulder or outside his or her window.” Murnane spends the most time in this novel ruminating on the art of narration. “The narrator of the this present work of fiction is one who strives to keep between the actual self and his seeming self and his seeming reader such seeming-distances as will maintain between all three personages a lasting trust.” He reveals on the very first page of this novel, “one of the commonest devices used by writers of fiction is the withholding of essential information.” This is sort of like a magician revealing his trick right before he goes ahead and deceives you. “Even the discerning reader who is also a student of narration — even he or she might struggle so far to classify the narrator of this present work and might struggle further as the work becomes more complicated in later pages. It is not for me to define myself, as it were.” The mystery should satisfy the reader even to the very last page. “But what could I have been hoping to learn about the flesh-and-blood author, the breathing author of these and who knows how many other pages of true fiction?”

“The Book of Why- the New Science of Cause and Effect” by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie

Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science at UCLA,  who has been working at the frontiers of machine learning and artificial intelligence for decades. Through this lens, he has become a leader in the new science of causation. Unbeknownst to many even in the disciplines that heavily rely on statistics, Pearl now believes that there has been a revolution in the techniques of teasing out cause from effect. In 2000, he proclaimed, “Causality has undergone a major transformation from a concept shrouded in mystery into a mathematical object with well-defined semantics and well-founded logic. Paradoxes and controversies have been resolved, slippery concepts have been explicated, and practical problems relying on causal information that long were regarded as either metaphysical or unmanageable can now be solved using elementary mathematics. Put simply, causality has been mathematized.” This book is Pearl’s effort to explain the science of causality in layman’s terms. He states that “the calculus of causation consists of two languages: causal diagrams, to express what we know, and a symbolic language, resembling algebra, to express what we want to know.” In this model, the data comes last because data is dumb to causal relationships.

The science of causation is so important because for humans “causal explanations, not dry facts, make up the bulk of our knowledge, and should be the cornerstone of machine intelligence…. Our transition from processors of data to makers of explanations was not gradual; it was a leap that required an external push…. Our ancestors’ capacity to imagine nonexistent things was the key to everything…. The connection between imagining and causal relations is almost self-evident.” The three levels of causation are “seeing or observing, [which] entails detection of regularities…. doing [which] entails predicting the effect(s) of deliberate alterations of the environment and choosing among these alterations to produce a desired outcome…. [and] understanding that permits imagining.” Therefore, Pearl has invented the metaphor of a Ladder of Causation, which consists of three rungs: association, intervention, and counterfactuals. Only the top two rungs involve causation. However, almost all animals and all current learning machines are stuck on the bottom rung. Intervention asks the question, “What if we do…? What Will happen if we change the environment?” Counterfactuals go back into time and require imagination. They ask, “what if things had been different?” This is skill, more than likely, unique to humans.

The bulk of Pearl’s book mixes the history of statistics with the history of a small set of outlaws, who dared to ask “why” questions, instead of just being content with correlations. Sewall Wright “was the first person to develop a mathematical method for answering causal questions from data, known as path diagrams…. [The path diagram] was the first bridge ever built between causality and probability, the first crossing of the barrier between rung two and rung one on the Ladder of Causation. Having built this bridge, Wright could travel backward over it, from the correlations measured in the data (rung one) to the hidden causal quantities.” As Wright himself wrote, defending his method from hostile attacks by the statistical establishment, “the combination of knowledge of correlations with knowledge of causal relations to obtain certain results, is a different thing from the deduction of causal relations from correlations.”

Pearl fully admits that causal diagrams require scientists to step out of their comfort zone of objectivity, explicitly. He states that “drawing a path diagram is not a statistical exercise; it is an exercise in genetics, economics, psychology, or whatever the scientist’s own field of expertise…. Causal analysis requires the user to make a subjective commitment. She must draw a causal diagram that reflects her qualitative belief—or, better yet, the consensus belief of researchers in her field of expertise—about the topology of the causal processes at work.” That is why Pearl came to causal science first through his work on Bayesian networks. “The prototype of Bayesian analysis goes like this: Prior Belief + New Evidence —> Revised Belief…. Bayesian statistics gives us an objective way of combining the observed evidence with our prior knowledge (or subjective belief) to obtain a revised belief and hence a revised prediction of the outcome…. To articulate subjective assumptions, Bayesian statisticians still use the language of probability…. The assumptions entering causal inference, on the other hand, require a richer language.” In causal diagrams, “each arrow can be thought of as a statement about the outcome of a hypothetical experiment…. Whereas a Bayesian network can only tell us how likely one event is, given that we observed another (rung-one information), causal diagrams can answer interventional and counterfactual questions.” The use of such diagrams allows the scientist ““provisional causality,” that is, causality contingent upon the set of assumptions that our causal diagram advertises…. They have the advantage of being conducted in the natural habitat of the target population, not in the artificial setting of a laboratory, and they can be “pure” in the sense of not being contaminated by issues of ethics and feasibility…. One of the major accomplishments of causal diagrams is to make the assumptions transparent so that they can be discussed and debated by experts and policy makers…. The diagram encodes the causal story behind the data.”

Pearl ends his book by circling back around to his expertise of machine learning and the state of the field today. He states, “With Bayesian networks, we had taught machines to think in shades of gray, and this was an important step toward humanlike thinking. But we still couldn’t teach machines to understand causes and effects…. Without the ability to envision alternate realities and contrast them with the currently existing reality, a machine cannot pass the mini-Turing test; it cannot answer the most basic question that makes us human: “Why?”” Machine learning will have to go beyond deep learning and gathering big data sets to get there. “In technical terms, machine-learning methods today provide us with an efficient way of going from finite sample estimates to probability distributions, and we still need to get from distributions to cause-effect relations…. A strong AI should be a machine that can reflect on its actions and learn from past mistakes. It should be able to understand the statement “I should have acted differently”…. Intent is a very important part of personal decision making…. The ability to conceive of one’s own intent and then use it as a piece of evidence in casual reasoning is a level of self-awareness (if not consciousness) that no machine I know of has achieved…. Thinking in terms of intents, therefore, offers us a shorthand to convert complicated causal instructions into simple ones…. The algorithmization of counterfactuals is a major step toward understanding these questions and making consciousness and agency a computational reality…. I believe that the software package that can give a thinking machine the benefits of agency would consist of at least three parts: a causal model of the world; a causal model of its own software, however superficial; and a memory that records how intents in its mind correspond to events in the outside world.”

“Conversations- Volume 3” with Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari (translated by Anthony Edkins)

Borges never wrote a piece of fiction or poetry beyond twenty pages. These transcribed radio conversations show that he could pack a lot of weight into just a few words. The topics range from his own stories and poems, to gossip about his literary friends, to what it meant to be Argentinian, to Oscar Wilde and sodomy, to James Joyce dissecting the genre of the novel, to the defects of sociology, to Stoic philosophy, to Walt Whitman’s quintessentially American poetry, to the nature of time, and much beyond. Each self-contained broadcast is a joy in and of itself, but the collection shows the width and depth of Borges’ knowledge, while being relayed in his unique brand of ironic humor. Ferrari more than holds his own in the exchange of banter and pushes Borges both where he does and where he does not want to go. Although recorded in the 1980s, the themes and commentaries still ring relevant in today’s literary scene and geopolitical climate.

“The Story of the Lost Child” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the final novel of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Ferrante is a master of writing about the details of human relationships. At the heart of these four books is the enduring friendship and competition of two neighborhood girls, Elena and Lila. “I told myself again that she would no longer exercise any authority over me, that that long phase was over.” The quartet began when they were six years old, playing with dolls on the streets of Naples, and finally concludes with the narrator, Elena, as a grandmother living in Turin, but still tied to Naples, both to the city and to her childhood memories there. “A woman without love for her origins is lost.” The breath of this story deals with the mimetic rivalry between the two friends, where the hopes and dreams of the one become entwined with the other, whether in the realm of toys, school grades, the affection of lovers, their sense of purpose in the world, or the love of their families.  “She had dragged me into the swelling sea of her desires.” The two women, even with grown children of their own, constantly measure their own lives based on the success of the other. “From childhood I had given her too much importance, and now I felt as if unburdened. Finally it was clear that what I was wasn’t her, and vice versa. Her authority was no longer necessary to me, I had my own.” They compete for the praise of the same teacher. They fight for the charms of the same man. And by the time of this fourth novel, as both have matured into adults, each successful in their own way, they compete for the respect and admiration of their old neighborhood. “I had no doubts about how I would react if I discovered that she really had irrupted into my professional identity, emptying it.” This tight-knit lower class community has followed both of their lives and judged their successes and failures to its own idiosyncratic standards. “I loved my city, but I uprooted from myself any dutiful defense of it.”

“The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis

Lewis may be best known for his fantasy epic “The Chronicles of Narnia,” but he was also a devout Christian whose theological works such as “Mere Christianity” and “Reflections on the Psalms” dealt with his personal relationship with divinity and organized religion. In “The Screwtape Letters,” Lewis mixes fiction with his religious interpretations, writing as if an agent of the Devil who is giving guidance to a young co-conspirator trying to co-opt a man’s soul to the depths of Hell. The book is short, but densely packed and I found myself rereading many of the fictional letters over and over again. Strangely perhaps, it reminded me of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” in that this book also tries to set down a guide to living a moral life, albeit a Christian, rather than a Stoic, one. The form of the book is entertaining and catching in the sense that one has to remember that it is the Devil’s agent giving the advice so one has to do the opposite to avoid being ensnared by the Devil’s traps. Lewis makes the case for an uncomplicated and personal piety away from the trappings of religiosity, while never outrightly condemning the established Church.

“Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State” by Parag Khanna

Khanna hammers away at a few simple points in this short book. Democracy is not the finality of all political progress. It is only a means, not an end in itself. The American system has a lot to learn from best practices in governance abroad. It needs to rely less on democracy and more on technocracy. Technocracy needs to be founded on a system of meritocracy. I do not agree with all of his diagnoses of the problems with American governance, not to mention his solutions, but Khanna has written a thoughtful book whose primary attributes are his boldness and fearlessness in solutions. No one can accuse him of not thinking outside the box. Still, the best parts of the book are where he dissects the best practices of other countries, rather than drawing up systems for America ex novo.

Khanna's two main models are Switzerland and Singapore. They both combine what he finds most appealing in direct democracy and technocratic management. Since 1848 Switzerland has held over half of all the world’s plebiscites. “With only 100,000 signatures, Swiss citizens can…. instigate national initiatives to propose new laws and even constitutional amendments, or referenda to challenge them.” Singapore has “scenario planners embedded in every ministry covering both domestic and international issues. These “foresight officers” organize and impartially frame scenarios for leaders to consider on an ongoing basis…. Scenarios are neither predictions nor straight-line projections, but are composites of emergent patterns that could combine into an integrated picture…. [Government] sets reasonable key performance indicators (“KPIs”) that are tracked at regular intervals to assess progress.” Khanna approves of the fact that the executive duties in Switzerland, Singapore, and China are shared, to some degree, by a committee rather than a single president. This divides oversight, responsibilities, and spreads out the leadership agenda. He also praises the Singaporean system where “all cabinet ministers are matched to permanent secretaries from the civil service who know the beat inside out. Singapore’s civil service is a spiral staircase: With each rung you learn to manage a different portfolio, building a broad knowledge base and first-hand experience…. Along the way, generalists become specialists and vice-versa, and cross-pollination leads to innovative problem-solving.” Singapore’s civil servants are also compensated well, among the best paid and most revered of its citizens.

Khanna favors changing America to a parliamentary system with no fixed election cycle and an executive chosen from among these MPs. This would be an executive committee of seven people. He also favors abolishing the Senate for dual-governorships, rotating between the state capital and Washington. This is all pie in the sky stuff, but Khanna exhibits a continual emphasis on administration, accountability, big data, empirics, trial and error, all mixed with plebiscites. He views the city-state as the unit of governance of the future. “The virtue of devolution is not only that distributing authority is as powerful a check on tyranny as democracy, but that it allows for local experiments and rapid citizen feedback, resulting in models that the federal government can further study and scale to other states.” His vision of America is an urban one, where cities connect with other cities, be they American or foreign, and in many ways bypass the gridlock of Washington. Meanwhile the federal government combines an administrative executive with a permanent technocratic bureaucracy, all checked by public referenda. That his America of the future will never actually become a reality doesn’t mean the Khanna doesn’t have some fresh ideas to debate.

“The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is a novel that deals with life’s biggest themes- filial bonds, sibling relations, God and the Devil, the honor of gentlemen, duty, respect, the purpose of life, free will, sex, love, and passion. The tale is full of intrigue and suspense. The three brothers Karamazov are so different and yet they seem to have a mystical bond that unites them. Their father is a degenerate, yet true to himself. The novel is particularly Russian, yet its themes transcend time and place. The plot is almost incidental to each character’s development. Almost all the individuals are fully fleshed out, with flaws and beauty in each. Dostoevsky does a particularly wonderful job plumbing the depths of what makes each brother tick, their internal struggles, and their code of life. The psychology of what makes us all human, how we relate to each other, and how we find purpose and meaning in life, both in this earthly world and in relations to a higher heavenly power, all come through. There is a current of mysticism that runs alongside an intensely religious pulse. The lessons are not didactic and yet Dostoevsky is seeking to expound eternal truths as he writes.

“The Iliad” by Homer (translated by Richmond Lattimore)

I had been meaning to read the Lattimore translations of Homer for a while now. He does not disappoint. I cannot read ancient Greek, so translation is the best I can do. I have read the Fagles, Pope, and Fitzgerald translations at different points in school, but almost every classicist I have spoken to speaks most highly of the Lattimore. The verse is a superb mix of keeping the poetry, while not taking liberties with the story. I cannot get enough of Homer and this was a great excuse to remember the tales of Hector and Achilles.

“In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: Swann’s Way” by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin)

The narrator eats his madeleine dipped in tea. This is an epic length classic, told in such sustained detail and fervor. “Swann’s Way” starts with the narrator still in childhood. His recollections are priceless and his reflections insightful. It depicts a young boy growing up in Paris and the surrounding countryside in such intensely described vignettes that fascinate the mind. You see a changing aristocracy, an eccentric extended family, a loving mother, a detached father, and old servants still stuck in a disappearing formality. Proust’s words flow with such vigor and zest it is hard to tell where his own memory ends and where his imagination begins. No detail is missed. No thought left unexplained. Suddenly, we are swept away, back in time, into the world of Monsieur Swann, the narrator’s countryside neighbor. In this section of the novel the narrator remains in the background, as Swann’s tale begins years before his birth. Swann moves in the most notable and eligible of circles while in Paris, dining frequently with the Prince of Wales. However, it is intimated that he also has a disreputable side. Soon we hear of Swann’s passionate dalliance with Odette, a lady rumored to be of ill repute. What starts as a hot and heavy affair turns into a fractious relationship with Swann eventually maneuvered into the role of the spurned lover. Yet his attraction will not yield. The more he is tossed aside, the more his infatuation grows. He is consumed by his passion for Odette, even as he learns more and more of her notorious past. Proust relishes in giving every detail and intriguing morsel. Finally, the spell is broken and Swann’s consuming vigor passes. The love has finally faded. Or so we think, until the narrator starts up again, retelling the days of his own youth, and his own unrequited love affair with Swann’s daughter.

“Private Governance” by Ed Stringham

This is a good primer for anyone unaware of how the market can establish laws and regulations outside of a government framework. Stringham uses the example and analogy of private clubs that are able to form their own personal codes without the recourse to a monopoly of force. He then deals with the problems of negative externalities that often arise with public goods and how to best avoid free-rider problems. Much of the book details the rise of financial institutions that arose despite the lack of formal government laws and, in fact, sometimes, with laws that actually forbade them. Stringham recounts the formation of the first joint-stock companies like the United East India Company in 1614 Amsterdam. The Dutch government tried to prevent trading in stock-paper and especially short selling and futures contracts, but these inventions flourished nonetheless. Despite having no recourse to formal law, traders still acted honestly and fulfilled their obligations, for the most part. In London, barred from the main trading facilities for goods, stock traders formed their own private coffee houses, which eventually transformed into the City’s stock exchange. More controversially, perhaps, Stringham then goes on to detail how even brick and mortar services such as fire and police provisions have been provided by private parties when the government was unwilling or unable to adequately perform the task. The Patrol Special Police in San Francisco is just one modern example of private firms setting up where there was a demand that was not being met by public services. This private force was tailored to the demands of their clients, so whereas they prevented burglary and assault in San Francisco’s Chinatown, they were little concerned with the consensual acts of opium smoking and gambling. Stringham posits that absent government enforcement there would still be private law that evolves spontaneously, organically, and evolutionarily where and when the need occurs. Law can exist without legislation, but legislation rarely is enforceable when its contradicts civil society’s notion of law.

“Reasons and Persons” by Derek Parfit

This is one dense book of philosophy. It has many thought experiments and digressions that make it more bearable, but each page (and almost every sentence) has to be pondered over and reread to get the full depth of Parfit’s arguments. The beauty of this book is that it makes you reexamine your most cherished and basic beliefs. It makes you question the very essence of the Self and what makes you you. 

Parfit argues that humans would benefit from a new way of seeing the world. “Our reasons for acting should become more impersonal.” When viewing our own actions and weighing their morality it is often not enough to look at their effects in isolation. “It is true, of the act of each, that its effects on others are trivial or imperceptible. We mistakenly believe that, because this is true, the effects of our acts cannot make them wrong. But, though each act has trivial effects, it is often true that we together impose great harm on ourselves or others.” Actions often have imperceptible harms and benefits. It is better to be a rational altruist, who views it as irrelevant whether their acts perceptibly harm another.

Another area in which it behooves humans to be more impersonal is in relationships to their own children, family, and friends. “If we follow this impersonal principle, and give no priority to our own children, this will be better for all our children. Impersonality is again better, even in personal terms.”

Parfit considers effects logically and with numeracy. He takes into account probability and risk. “When the stakes are very high, no chance, however small, should be ignored. The same is true when each chance will be taken very many times.”

Parfit believes human morality should accept the Critical Present-aim Theory. “On this theory, the fundamental unit is not the agent throughout his whole life, but the agent at the time of acting. Though CP denies the supreme importance of self-interest through time, and of a person’s whole life, it is not impersonal. CP claims that what is rational for me to do now depends on what I now want, or value, or believe. This claim gives more importance to each person’s particular values or beliefs.” The reason this makes more sense to Parfit than a self-interest belief, which takes account of a person’s values throughout his life, is Parfit’s views on the nature of the Self. “We cannot explain the unity of a person’s life by claiming that the experiences in this life are all had by this person. We can explain this unity only by describing the various relations that hold between these different experiences, and their relations to a particular brain. We could therefore describe a person’s life in an impersonal way, which does not claim that this person exists…. Persons are not, as we mistakenly believe, fundamental.”

Parfit’s views on personhood do not imply a dismissal of the subjective world. “What are called subjective truths need not involve any subject of experiences. A particular thought may be self-referring. It may be the thought that this particular thought, even if exactly similar to other thoughts that are thought, is still this particular thought—or this particular thinking of this thought. This thought is an impersonal but subjective truth.”

However, Parfit denies the conception of the Further Fact of something like a Cartesian soul, ego, or any other type of mind/body dualism. “On the Reductionist View that I defend, persons exist. And a person is distinct from his brain and body, and his experiences. But persons are not separately existing entities. The existence of a person, during any period, just consists in the existence of his brain and body, and the thinking of his thoughts, and the doing of his deeds, and the occurrence of many other physical and mental events…. Personal identity just involves physical and psychological continuity. As I argued, both of these can be described in an impersonal way. These two kinds of continuity can be described without claiming that experiences are had by a person.”

Parfit also ruminates on how the ever-changing Self can affect love. “It may be clear to some couple that they love each other. But if they ask whether they are still in love with each other, they may find this question perplexing. It may still seem to them that they are in love, yet their behaviour towards each other, and their feelings in each other’s presence, may seem not to bear this out. If they distinguished between successive selves, their perplexity might be resolved. They might see that they love each other, and are in love with each other’s earlier self.” In fact, Parfit later suggests, “we can love, and believe we are committed to, someone who is dead. And the object of such love and commitment may be, not someone who is dead, but some living person’s earlier self.” This can be true because “we may regard some events within a person’s life as, in certain ways, like birth or death. Not in all ways, for beyond these events the person has earlier or later selves. But it may be only one out of the series of selves which is the object of some of our emotions, and to which we apply some of our principles.”

This view of the Self leads to Parfit’s views on morality and responsibility. “We no longer have the right to do whatever we like, when we affect only ourselves. It is wrong to impose upon ourselves, for no good reason, great harm…. These claims again give less importance both to the unity of each life and to the boundaries between lives…. I believe that what matters is Relation R, psychological continuity and/or connectedness…. This is what matters and the physical continuity does not matter…. On the Reductionist view, the unity of our lives is a matter of degree, and is something that we can affect.” We can affect this through the process of keeping a connectedness with our former selves as we age in our continual bodily process. “I want my life to have certain kinds of overall unity. I do not want it to be very episodic, with continual fluctuations in my desires and concerns. Such fluctuations are compatible with full psychological continuity, but they would reduce psychological connectedness.”

Parfit believes “that Relation R— continuity and connectedness— gives us a reason to be specially concerned about our own futures. This reason may not be as strong as the reason that would be provided by the Further Fact. And, because psychological connectedness is a matter of degree, we should reject the claim that it must be irrational to care less about some parts of our future.” However, Relation R, rather than the Further Fact, “makes me care less about my own future, and the fact that I shall die. In comparison, I now care more about the lives of others.” Parfit continues on death, “I believe that we ought not to be biased towards the future. This belief does not beg the question about the rationality of this bias. On any plausible moral view, it would be better if we were all happier. This is the sense which, if we could, we ought not to be biased towards the future. In giving us this bias, Evolution denies us the best attitude to death.”

Parfit makes the case that morality is simply a means and not an end in itself. “Compare two people who are trying to relieve the suffering of others. The first person acts because he sympathizes with these people. He also believes that suffering is bad, and ought to be relieved. The second person acts because he wants to think of himself as someone who is morally good. Of these two people, the first seems to be better. But the first person has no thoughts about the goodness of acting morally, or the badness of wrongdoing. He is moved to act simply by his sympathy, and by his belief that, since suffering is bad, he ought to try to prevent it. This person seems to regard acting morally as a mere means. It is the second person who regards acting morally as a separate aim that is in itself good. Since the first person seems to be better, this supports the claim that acting morally is a mere means.”

Parfit suggests that two of our moral beliefs can often compete and yet neither is intrinsically wrong. “We may have a pluralist morality in which we believe that it would be better both if there was greater equality and if there was a greater sum of benefits. There may then be cases where greater equality would lower sum of benefits. Our two principles would here conflict. But there would be no inconsistency in our moral view. We would merely have to ask whether, given the details of the case, the gain in equality would be more or less important than the loss of benefits.”

In the last section of his book, Parfit tries to tie his morality into a unifying theory through sheer effort of reasoning. He admits he does not fully succeed. He discusses some major unresolved problems at length. I will skim over some without doing justice to any. 

One is the Non-Identity Problem. The Time-Dependence Claim states that “if any particular person had not been conceived when he was in fact conceived, it is in fact true that he would never have existed.” Parfit goes on to debate what then we, in the present, owe to future generations. “Since these future people’s lives will be worth living, and they would never have existed if we had chosen [otherwise, any choice we do make] is not only not worse for these people: it benefits them.” In the future, the same people will not exist based on whatever choice we choose in the present. Should we then conclude about how our actions might affect the future, “since it will be bad for no one, our choice cannot have a bad effect?”

On morality, Parfit argues “it becomes more plausible, when thinking morally, to focus less upon the person, the subject of experiences, and instead to focus more upon the experiences themselves…. We are right to ignore whether experiences come within the same or different lives…. When we are trying to relieve suffering, neither persons nor lives are the morally significant units…. Suffering is compensated if it comes within a life that is worth living. If it comes within a life that is not worth living, it is uncompensated…. It is always bad if there is more uncompensated suffering. To this badness there is no upper limit…. The badness of this suffering cannot be reduced by the fact that other people are happy…. [However,] when there is more suffering only because there are more lives lived that are worth living, this extra suffering does not make the outcome worse.”

Parfit discusses his Repugnant Conclusion: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”

Parfit contrasts his Absurd Conclusion: “In one possible outcome, there would exist during some future century both some population on the Earth that is like the Earth’s present actual population, and an enormous number of other people, living on Earth-like planets that had become part of the Solar System. Nearly all of the people on these other planets would have a quality of life far above that enjoyed by most of the Earth’s actual population. In each ten billion of these other people, there would be one unfortunate person, with a disease that makes him suffer, and have a life that is not worth living.

In a second possible outcome, there would be the same enormous number of extra future people, with the same high quality of life for all except the unfortunate one in each ten billion. But this enormous number of extra future people would not all live in one future century. Each ten billion of these people would live in each of very many future centuries.

On our view, the first outcome would be very bad, much worse than if there were none of these extra future people. The second outcome would be very good. The first would be very bad and the second very good even though, in both outcomes, there would would be the very same number of extra future people, with the very same high quality of life for all except the unfortunate one in each ten billion….

This conclusion followed from the asymmetry in our claims about the value of quantity. We placed a limit on quantity’s positive value, within some period, but we placed no limit on its negative value. To avoid the Absurd Conclusion we must abandon this asymmetry.

We cannot plausibly place a limit on quantity’s negative value. It is always bad if there is uncompensated suffering, and this badness never declines. We must therefore remove the limits on quantity’s positive value. When we remove this limit, we need a new way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion.”

Parfit concludes, “because we can easily affect the identities of future people, we face the Non-Identity Problem. To solve this problem we need a new theory about beneficence. This theory must also avoid the Repugnant and the Absurd Conclusions, and solve the Mere Addition Paradox.

Since I have not yet found this theory, these conclusions are unwelcome. They undermine our beliefs about our obligations to future generations…. I believe that, though I have so far failed, I or others could find the principle we need…. But, before we have found solutions, we ought to regret this conclusion. With more unsolved problems, we are further away from the Unified Theory. We are further away from the theory that resolves our disagreements, and that, because it achieves this aim, might deserve to be called the truth.”