“Young Romantics” by Daisy Hay

Hay makes the case that the second generation of Romantic poets, particularly Shelley, Keats, and Byron, coalesced around Leigh Hunt, an editor and publisher of the political newspaper, The Examiner, who also wrote his own, if more ephemeral, poetry. Hunt was a radical whose own editorials earned him two years in Surrey Gaol on a charge of libel to the Crown. The Examiner’s motto was “Party is the Madness of the Many for the Gain of a Few.” From 1813 to 1815, Hunt and his brother John, The Examiner’s printer, who was also incarcerated on the same libel charge, were able to keep the paper running every week from prison. In fact, the fame and repute of the paper only grew and Leigh Hunt attracted many famous visitors to his prison cell, amongst them Lord Byron. Soon after their first meeting, Byron would write in his journal of Hunt that he is a soul “not exactly of the present age [and] he is, perhaps, a little opinionated, as are all men who are the centre of circles, wide and narrow.” To contemporary friends and foes, Hunt was the man to whom the fashionably avant-garde painters, sculptors, journalists, and poets of the day gravitated. Hunt would establish ‘sociability’ as an ideological principle in its own right.

This book is a joint biography of the group Hay labels as the “young romantics.” It skips along between the travails of the Hunt family, both pecuniary and political, the affair and marriage of Percy Shelley to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and the brief romance, the ensuing pregnancy, and the much longer feud between Lord George Byron and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont. To a lesser degree, John Keats’ relationship with Hunt and Shelley floats in and out of Hay’s story. Throughout her book, lesser known family, friends, and artists such as William Godwin, Thomas Peacock, Thomas Hogg, Vincent Novello, Benjamin Haydon, Joseph Severn, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Edward Williams, and Edward Trelawny add color to the lives of the protagonists.

Percy Shelley, despite being married to a wife enduring her first pregnancy, upon his first meeting with his idol, William Godwin, ended up falling head over heels in love with his sixteen year old daughter, Mary. Shelley would write to a friend of her, “how deeply did I not feel my inferiority, how willingly I confess myself far surpassed in originality, in genuine elevation & magnificence of the intellectual nature until she consented to share her capabilities with me.” This affair of “free love” would shape the lives of Percy, Mary and Claire, the latter of whom would accompany the previous two on their escape from the unreceptive Godwins across the Continent and back to England. Shelley was part aristocrat, part radical, and part reformer, whose first major poem Queen Mab would be decried by the establishment for its atheism, republicanism, and materialism, particularly the Tory press. Hay writes, “it was the poem of a man who could never be dull: cool and reasoned maybe, but also susceptible to fits of hyperactive over-excitement and to dreams and hallucinations.” After all, Shelley was the type of man who, on their escape through war-torn France, “one day…. decided to adopt a beautiful little girl he saw on the road, and was surprised and put out when her father informed him she was not available.” The most practical of men he was not. Shelley’s friend Peacock would agree “that a man who lived so totally out of the ordinary world and in a world of ideas, needed such an ever-present sympathy [of a woman like Mary] more than the general run of men.” Shelley’s second major poem, Alastor, would be a meditation on the virtues of isolation versus companionship for the artist. Was the search for knowledge a solitary one? Was isolation necessary to produce a great work? In Alastor, Shelley would disagree, “those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.” Shelley had a specific teleological idea of poetry at its best. He wrote, “poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”

To many of her contemporaries Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was no more than the sum of her components. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical anarchist, whose political writings were among the most influential of his day. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a feminist and philosopher, whose thoughts on marriage and childrearing were among the most well-known, if radically subversive to mainstream morality, of her times. Her lover and future husband, Percy Shelley, was an up and coming poet of the new school, whose political verse was already causing a rage amongst the conservative press. However, Mary Shelley came into her own with the publication of her novel, Frankenstein. She published the work when she was twenty-one, having started it on a challenge by Byron to write a ghost story. Hay writes that “Frankenstein condemns…. isolation, self-indulgence, and an abnegation of social responsibility…. It champions a method of endeavour in which ideas reach fruition through ‘many a walk, many a drive, many a conversation.’” Mary Shelley’s novel combined her father’s ideas of historical perfectibility, her mother’s thoughts on parental responsibility, and her husband’s materialism in her own way, while throwing in her own ideas on the importance of community for the impetus of creation. Frankenstein was a social critique, as well as a manifesto of social duty. It’s nuanced prose led to a reading of layered meanings with multiple interpretations. Some of Mary Shelley’s later works would play on darker themes. Isolation and regret would seep to the fore. Later in life, Mary, having lived through much tragedy, including the deaths of three of her children, would admit that “the living were not fit companions for me, and I was ever meditating by what means I might shake them all off, and never be heard of again.”

Lord George Byron would tell Hunt immediately following his engagement to Annabella Milbanke, in what would be a disastrously loveless marriage, that he was “in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.” At this time Byron was already engaged in semi-secret sexual relations with his half-sister, Augusta, perhaps fathering her child. Byron was the embodiment of the aristocrat. He would wake up after noon, chat, read, ride, and shoot pistols through the day, dine with friends late into the night, and finish another bottle of wine while writing verse, before going to bed around four or five in the morning. He seduced women, young and old, married and virginal, with abandon. Byron was a man on contradictions. He lived a life of solipsism and decadence, but also with his own particular code of honor and virtue. He could alternate between being miserly with his fortune and secretly helping an acquaintance in desperate need. His poems, particularly Don Juan, were regarded by his peers as the pinnacle of the day’s verse. His contemporaries only wished that he lived a little bit less and wrote a little bit more. Towards the end of his life, Mary Shelley would note that “she had seen him be kind to children and servants- to the weak and defenceless- [and] that it was only to his equals that he was cruel.” 

“The Mountain Shadow” by Gregory David Roberts

This sequel to Shantaram is pretty much more of the same. It has Lin still working for the Company in Bombay and still in love with a married Karla. Didier is still hanging out at the Leopold bar, drinking too much and doing enough dirt to get by. Even, the Zodiac Georges have an improbable role in the story. Abdullah, the nicest and most honorable street thug killer there ever was, pops in and out of the tale, helping as stoic best friend, sparring partner, confidant, and angel protector. The warring mafias still rule the streets and bribe the cops with abandon. The fast paced plot lines interweave and are occasionally interspersed with quasi-deep philosophical asides. There is love, sex, murder, bribes, beatings, and lots of joints being smoked by all. Again, the star character is the city of Bombay herself. The city pulses with vibrancy as the story unfolds.

“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The two women, Elena and Lila, have both grown into married adults, but have also grown apart. Elena is married to a university professor and has moved to Florence, while Lila is working in a sausage factory on the outskirts of Naples. Elena’s novel is a huge, if risqué, hit, reviewed in all the major Italian newspapers. She travels the country, staying in fancy hotels, and giving lectures on her writing. But soon all is not well. After giving birth, she feels the strains of family life. Suddenly her leg begins to hurt, reminding her of her crippled mother’s, her baby never sleeps and refuses to nurse from her breast, and her husband is too distracted by his work to help out around the house. Despite all her worldly success, Elena is still shackled by the traditional roles expected of a married woman in Italy. Lila, meanwhile, struggles through her life in Naples, raising a child out of wedlock, and living together with an old neighborhood friend, Enzo, in an ambiguously sexual relationship. Power, sex, and tradition all intermingle as these women try to navigate and defy social expectations in post-war Italy.

What ties the novel together is the ongoing politicization of Italy. The country is being divided between the Fascists and the Communists. There are pitched battles in the streets every day. The universities have been taken over by radical students, who berate their own professors and spend all day out of class and plotting revolution. The workers in the factories are organizing, while gangs of fascist thugs, recruited from the slums, menace any leftist political gathering, carrying metal pipes and knives. One cannot help but have a political opinion. Italy is on fire and both Elena and Lila are caught in the middle. Despite time and distance, however, they cannot seem to break the childhood bond between them, for better or for worse.

“The Elephant in the Brain” by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler

Humans often act in their own selfish interests. However, humans do not want to appear to others to be acting selfishly. Through evolution, the brain has come up with mechanisms to obscure one’s own selfish behavior. This book discusses the hidden motives that are ubiquitous in human society. These motives are so hidden that they are often hidden even from our conscious selves. Hanson and Simler’s thesis is “we, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives- we’re design to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide from others.”

The social brain hypothesis suggests that humans got smarter than other primates primarily through competing with other humans in social and political situations. It was an intra-species arms race that led humanity to such massive brain size, through natural selection. Robert Trivers suggests, “both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence. It is perhaps ironic that dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.” We yearn for sexual partners, friends, prestige, and to be part of winning coalitions and so our brains have evolved to facilitate that type of success. However, signaling fitness as a mate, friend, or teammate is costly. “The best signals- the most honest ones- are expensive. More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.” Furthermore, successful humans live within the bounds of societies governed by norms. “The insistent egalitarianism of our ancestors was arguably the world’s first true norm…. Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms.” Collective punishment can deter even the strongest of alpha males and force them into submitting to the group. Gossip is an effective tool in spreading reputation and, therefore, status within society.  Meta-norms have also been established, whereby those who don’t actively punish norm breakers, because it might seem too costly, are themselves punished, thereby reinforcing group cohesion and loyalty. 

So, while it pays to be selfish, even more so, it pays not to look selfish. However, “weaker norms, the ones that regulate intention, are harder to notice.” Intentions leave room for more leeway and ambiguity. “Pretexts are a broad and useful tool for getting away with norm violations. They make prosecution more difficult by having a ready explanation for your innocence.” Discreet communication also allows for ambiguous interpretation. Body language, cryptic talk, and subtext all allow for deniability. These methods allow one to convey one’s meaning to the intended recipient, but also leeway to deny that meaning if confronted by a third party or even betrayed by your target. It is even easier to appear unselfish if you are able to deceive yourself. “It’s possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions.” As Robert Trivers notes, “we deceive ourselves, the better to deceive others.” This pays evolutionarily. “We’re often rewarded for acting on selfish impulses, but less so for acknowledging them.” To do this we often come up with justifications. “Rationalization, sometimes known to neuroscientists as confabulation, is the production of fabricated stories made up without any conscious intention to deceive.” We spin our version of the truth for others (and ourselves) to consume.

We convey many intentions through body language. Leonard Mlodinow notes, “much, if not most, of the nonverbal signaling and reading of signals is automatic and performed outside our conscious awareness and control.” Hanson and Simler continue, “body language, however, is not arbitrary. Instead nonverbal behaviors are meaningfully, functionally related to the messages they’re conveying.” Acts of following and copying another can show sympathy or submission. Rituals, such as hand shaking or kissing of the hand, similarly convey status. Body language’s primary usefulness is in its lack of explicitness. “Relative to spoken language, it’s considerably more ambiguous. While the overall patterns of body language may be consistent, any isolated behavior will have many interpretations…. This is the magic of nonverbal communication. It allows us to pursue illicit agendas, even ones that require coordinating with other people, while minimizing the risk of being attacked, accused, gossiped about, and censured for norm violations.”

Laughter is another way to convey intentions ambiguously and often unconsciously. “We use laughter to flirt, bond with friends, mock our enemies, probe social norms, and mark the boundaries of our social groups. It’s a response to social cues, laced with interpersonal significance, and yet “we”- the conscious, deliberate, willful parts of our minds- don’t get to decide when we do it.” Humans laugh thirty times more often in groups than when alone. Speakers laugh fifty times more than listeners. Babies laugh more when tickled by their mothers than when tickled by a stranger. Laughter is a social phenomenon. It is a signal of play. “When we laugh at our own actions, it’s a signal to our playmates that our intentions are ultimately playful (although we may seem aggressive)…. When we laugh in response to someone else’s actions, however, it’s a statement not about intentions but perceptions. It says, “I perceive your actions as playful; I know you’re only kidding around.”” Laughter can be used to test norms. “We use laughter to gauge and calibrate social boundaries- both behavioral boundaries (norms) and group membership boundaries (who deserves how much of our empathy)…. Laughter, then, shows us the boundaries that language is too shy to make explicit.” Laughter allows us to test what is appropriate and what will get sanctioned by the group.

Why do humans engage in so much conversation? “We spend roughly 20 percent of our waking lives engaged in conversation.” One might assume it is to gain information cheaply. “Listening costs very little, but has the large benefit of helping us learn vicariously, that is, from the knowledge and experience of others.” Yet, it seems most of us prefer to speak than to listen. In fact, humans have evolved and honed our tools for speech far more than our listening apparatus. It seems that we have evolutionarily adapted to become better speakers, while remaining relatively unchanged on the listening front. Speaking well must have a benefit. “Every remark made by a speaker contains two messages for the listener: text and subtext. The text says, “Here’s a new piece of information,” while the subtext says, “By the way, I’m the kind of person who knows such things.” We convey a signal about the type of person we are (or hope to portray ourselves to be) through speech. We demonstrate our fitness and imply that we are the kind of person others should gravitate towards by talking to others, not by listening.

Humans engage in consumption, but more than that, we enjoy conspicuous consumption. We take pleasure in showing off. We even discuss our services and experiences with others (or post them on social media), so that we can flaunt those intangibles, as well as material goods. What is self-described as individuality or personality is often another way of distinguishing ourselves from the herd. Advertisements rely on this instinct in humans. “The easier it is to judge someone based on a particular product, the more it will be advertised using cultural images and lifestyle associations.” Fancy products are often advertised to the masses, who cannot afford them, because of this third person effect. By showing the product to non-buyers, it still increases the prestige of the product and thus the prestige of those few who can afford to buy it.

Art seems to be wasteful from the standpoint of natural selection. Making art is “a costly behavior, both in time and energy, but at the same time it’s impractical.” However, while it doesn’t make sense to produce art in terms of fitness selection, it does in terms of sexual selection. It signals that you are the type of person who is so fit you can waste your time on art. “Human art is more than just a courtship display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s value as a potential mate. It also functions as a general-purpose fitness display, that is an advertisement of the artist’s health, energy, vigor, coordination, and overall fitness. Fitness displays can be used to woo mates, of course, but they also serve other purposes like attracting allies or intimidating rivals.” That is why it is often the extrinsic properties of art that society judges artwork by. “These properties include who the artist is, which techniques were used, how many hours it took, how “original” it is, how expensive the materials were, and so on.” These properties help to advertise the “survival surplus” of the artist. It is the very fact that he can spend so much time and effort on something non-functional that suggests that he has such as surplus of fitness that he can afford to waste his energy on frivolous pursuits. The impracticality and waste is actually the feature.

Humans like to appear altruistic. However, “only 3 percent of donors do comparative research to find the best nonprofit to give to…. People also prefer to “diversify” their donations…. Only 1 percent of donations to public charities are anonymous.” This leads Hanson and Simler to believe that charity is actually more about making the giver feel good, than about helping others. They point to five factors that have been shown to influence charitable giving: visibility of the giving, peer pressure, proximity to the people being helped, relatability of the recipient, and thinking others from the opposite sex will notice. After all, “up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.” Studies have also shown that men are much more likely to give to a cause when approached by a stranger of the opposite sex. We only get social rewards when others notice. Charitable behavior sends a signal that we have an excess of goods and wealth.  It also conveys that we are prosocial individuals, concerned with the greater good. They argue against Peter Singer’s theory of charity. “Singer may be right that there’s no moral principle that differentiates between a child drowning nearby and another one starving thousands of miles away. But there are very real social incentives that make it more rewarding to save the local boy. It’s a more visible act, more likely to be celebrated by the local community, more likely to result in getting laid or making new friends.”

Hanson and Simler rely on much of Bryan Caplan’s work to assert that most education is signaling. The sheepskin effect seems undeniable. “Each of the first three years of high school or college (the years that don’t finish in a degree) are worth on average only about a 4 percent salary bump. But the last year of high school and the last year of college, where students complete a degree, are each worth on average about a 30 percent higher salary.” Students signal their innate intelligence, work ethic, and ability to conform to expectations by finishing what is expected of them, school. School performance is just a proxy for future work productivity.

Medicine in America is expensive. Hanson and Simler suggest much of it is unneeded. There is social pressure to enlist every possible treatment, no matter the cost, lest there be gossip that we didn’t care enough for our dying parent or spouse. Expense has been equated with care. Cheap remedies are deemed not as effective as the newest expensive drug or fancy technological gadget. More is always better. The credentials and reputation of doctors shield them from probing questions. We are taught never to question the experts. However, Alex Tabarrok points out, “more people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms.” Hanson and Simler add, “the public is eager for medical interventions that help people when they’re sick, but far less eager for routine lifestyle interventions.” The one is visible and thus could be commented on by neighbors and peers, while the other is often hidden from public approbation. “Medicine isn’t just about health- it’s also an exercise in conspicuous caring.”

Religiosity is still deemed admirable in American life. More citizens would prefer a Muslim president to an atheist one. Yet, “most religions are fairly lax on questions of private belief as long as adherents demonstrate public acceptance of the religion.” Jonathan Haidt says, “religion is a team sport.” Emile Durkheim agrees that “God is society writ large.” Sacrifice is a signal to the community that one takes religion seriously. Whether it is wearing distinctive clothes, abstaining from eating certain meats, giving alms, or actually killing an animal, sacrifice is costly and, therefore, hard to fake. By going to sermons you are implicitly submitting to the authority of the speaker and the religious organization at large. You are endorsing the message and staying within the norms of the group. Beliefs can be arbitrary, but as long as they are distinctive they serve the purpose of creating an in group/out group bond.

Politics seems to cost more than it’s worth. No single vote actually matters, but it costs time and energy to go to the polls. Yet, voting allows you to signal what team you are on. It is the symbolism that matters, not the results. Voters in “swing” states (where your vote might theoretically matter more) hardly show up to the polls in greater numbers than in “safe” states. Voters care more about values than particular policies. Even uninformed voters are encouraged to go vote. This only makes sense if voting is more about personal expression than actual outcome.

Hanson and Simler argue that in all these fields the brain distorts your real motives to your benefit. It makes you look better to the group than your real motives might. “Key tasks for our distant ancestors were tracking how others saw them, watching for ways others might accuse them of norm violations, and managing stories of their motives and plans to help them defend against such accusations. The difficulty of this task was a big reason humans had such big brains.” They conclude by suggesting, “savvy institution designers must therefore identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve.” Humans are selfish and designed to conceal it. Any useful public policy will bear this in mind.

“Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture” by Rene Girard with Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha

As in many of Girard’s other works, this book is constructed as a series of dialogues between Girard and his interlocutors. This book was published in 2008 and thus is an attempt to clarify and modify his mimetic mechanism, first developed in works like “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.”  It also deals with the familiar Girardian themes of doubles, sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, victimhood, and the founding murder, portrayed through myth, literature, and religion. Girard explains his underlying methodology, “there is also a strong curiosity, and curiosity and understanding are obviously linked. There is a form of humility as well, in the sense that it is a methodological attitude, a postulate that you have to have in order to solve specific problems. I have the impression sometimes that a book I am reading could upset my entire existence.” Girard never claims to be a theologian. He views himself as a literary scholar and an anthropologist.

Girard’s analysis goes back to man’s origins and that is where he seeks to find the beginnings of culture. “Stoning (or crushing) and throwing someone from a rock are forms of sacrificial killings which are related to each other. They are forms of capital punishment where everybody participates and nobody is responsible. Nobody touches the victim. It is a form of collective and unanimous capital punishment, and it is a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts. There must be a device that makes collective killing possible at a distance, without any polluting contact with the victim. This is really the beginning of the state as an institution.” He explains the mimetic mechanism, “it describes the whole process, beginning with mimetic desire, which then becomes mimetic rivalry, eventually escalating to the stage of mimetic crisis and finally ending with the scapegoat resolution.” Girard goes on to detail how the scapegoat mechanism works, “in the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit’ who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is single out and unanimously killed by the community. He isn’t any guiltier than any other, but the whole community strongly believes he is. The killing of scapegoat ends the crisis, since the transference against it is unanimous. That is the importance of the scapegoat mechanism: it channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.” This founding murder is embedded in culture through ritual. “Ritual is a cultural form that prepares for the sacrificial resolution, but it serves mainly as a form of controlling violence, and the increasing sophistication of ritualistic forms and elements helps in distancing further and further a given culture from the original violence implicit in the ritualistic act…. As in all sacrificial rites, it is the ritualization of a spontaneous collective murder…. Repetition is as important as imitation for cultural transmission. ” 

However, Girard also recognizes that mimetic desire can be a positive for society. “Mimetic desire is what makes us human, what makes possible for us the breakdown from routinely animalistic appetites, and constructs our own, albeit inevitably unstable, identities…. There would be no human mind, no education, no transmission of culture without mimesis.” Humans might have come from humans, but there is also a distinction in quality, not just gradient between ethology and ethnology. “Symbolicity is essential. Scientists have the tendency to overlook the emergence of symbolicity as the force behind the discontinuity between animals and humans.”  

Girard sees truth embedded in ancient myths. “Myths are forms of organization of knowledge- and in fact the word veda means knowledge, science- and this knowledge is essentially related to desire and sacrifice…. Why are there myths and stories that seem so similar? Why do all these cultures carry similar features and tell of an original murder?…. I am in search of the innocent victim in any historical, mythical and fictional account…. One has to regard mythology and archaic religion as a riddle, and the solution of that riddle is quite real. Myth is primarily the accusation of the victim presented as guilty. Moreover, the myth is written from the point of view of the accusers.” Myth and ritual are intimately intertwined. “Whatever one demonstrates in myth, there is a direct counterpart of it in ritual, and vice versa…. Ritual is the deliberate reproduction of the mechanism; myth is the narrative…. Normally ritual is more directly revealing than myth, and this is because it confirms the interpretation of the latter as the resolution of the mimetic crisis…. Ritual confirms that the victim is really killed. Myth suggests that the victim is killed in order to reproduce the effects of the first murder.” Girard recounts three elements he finds in these myths, “(1) a crisis of undifferentiation (which corresponds to the orgiastic elements in rituals); (2) a victimary sign that singles out a villain; (3) an expulsion/killing of this villain (which is also represented as a hero because he/she eventually saves the community.” The link between myth and the founding murder (and its coverup) is what is most essential. “In myth, it is much more obvious that there is this logical inconsistency, and when one realizes that inconsistency is an invariant, it no longer looks like a mere logical inconsistency, but it turns into a clue which suggests the violent origin of the myth: a logical break, which is the same in so many myths, can’t be meaningless. This constant similarity, in spite of the diversity of myths, points to the presence of a common cause of logical distortion at the threshold of human culture. I believe that this cause is the original founding murder, and myths do their best- unconsciously at first, and then more consciously- to erase the traces of scapegoating…. Practically every story of origin or foundational myth states that society was founded upon a murder.” This origin of culture gradually evolved until its origins were obscured. “If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor’, ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.”

Christianity was the break from archaic religion in that it proclaimed the victim as innocent. “Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous mob.” Christianity is actually anti-mythology. “Christianity is also paradoxical, because the more similar it seems to mythology, the more clearly it becomes a radical rereading of myths, the preparation of the deconstruction of all mythical presuppositions…. Myth is against the victim, whereas the Bible is for the victim…. In the Old Testament, the innocent victim appears for the first time. The victim is the only innocent person within a guilty community…. Revelation is the reproduction of the victimary mechanism by showing the truth, knowing that the victim is innocent and that everything is based on mimetism. The Gospel represents the crucifixion as a mimetic phenomenon. The true cause of Peter’s denial, of Pilate’s behaviour, of the bad thief’s attitude, is their imitation of the crowd, the collective mimetism, the violent contagion. Jesus is innocent. But everything lies upon mimetic unanimity…. Jesus saves all human beings because of his revelation of the scapegoat mechanism, which also deprives us more and more of sacrificial protection, therefore forcing us to abstain from violence if we want to survive. In order to reach the Kingdom, man has to renounce violence…. violence which is not divine but human.” According to Girard, it is Nietzsche who has it backwards. “Nietzsche is never more wrong than when he says that Christianity is the religion of the crowd, as opposed to Dionysus, which is seen as the religion of the aristocracy, of a minority. It is exactly the other way around: Dionysus is the crowd and Christianity is the small minority able to resist the crowd.” The revelation in Christianity is that the guilty are the many, while the victim alone is innocent. “This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity…. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.”

“Exact Thinking in Demented Times” by Karl Sigmund

This book is a history of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who met regularly every Thursday evening in a private, by-invitation-only, seminar at the University of Vienna, followed by drinks and more debating late into the night at a neighborhood coffeehouse. Together, the members of the Vienna Circle originated and molded the idea of logical positivism, while having the ambitious goal of unifying all human knowledge into one grand discipline. Their program was anti-metaphysical and anti-theological to its core. The Circle’s manifesto stated, “the scientific worldview is characterized not so much by theses of its own, but rather by its basic attitude, its points of view, its direction of research…. In science there are no ‘depths’; instead, there is surface everywhere. All experience forms a complex network, which cannot always be surveyed in its totality and which often can only be grasped in parts. Everything is accessible to Man; and Man is the measure of all things…. The scientific worldview serves life, and life embraces it.”

The Vienna Circle was formed in 1924 by philosopher Moritz Schlick, mathematician Hans Hahn, and sociologist Otto Neurath. The Circle hammered away at the tension between science and metaphysical philosophy. “Clarification of the traditional philosophical problems sometimes leads to their unmasking as pseudo-problems, and other times converts them into empirical problems, which can thereby be subjected to the methods of experimental science. The task of philosophical work lies in this type of clarification of problems and statements, rather than in the crafting of special ‘philosophical’ statements.” The intellectual milieu in Vienna during the inter-war years was vibrant. Scholars from all over the Empire, as well as Germany, and the rest of Europe strove to get chairs at the University of Vienna. 

One particular inspiration for the Vienna Circle was Ernst Mach. He wrote, “all of science tries to replace or economize experience by mental models, since models are easier to deal with than experiences, and can even replace them in some situations…. By recognizing science’s fundamentally economical nature, we rid science of all mysticism…. [However,] we should not confuse the foundations of the real world with the intellectual props that serve to evoke that world on the stage of our thoughts.” Mach was an anti-Kantian. He did not believe in the “Thing-in-Itself”. For him, there was no independent object absent of our sensations. The whole world was made up of sensory perceptions. The physicist Mach was to have a great debate with the mathematician Ludwig Boltzmann on whether atoms existed. Mach was skeptical, as atoms, in his day, could not be seen, detected, or experienced. Boltzmann was less of a radical empiricist. He stated, “what the brain is to man, mathematics is to science…. No equation ever represents any phenomenon with absolute precision. Each equation is an idealization, stressing commonalities and neglecting differences, and therefore going beyond experience.” Despite his best efforts, he was also a closet metaphysician. “Metaphysics appears to exert an irresistible charm on the human mind, and this temptation, despite all our vain attempts to lift the veil, has not lost any of its intensity. It seems impossible to squelch our inborn urge to philosophize.” Anguished to the end, he would hang himself from a window pane while on vacation. Hertz retorted, “science has progressed almost more through deciding what to ignore than through deciding what to study.” Albert Einstein’s breakthroughs in physics, particularly his special and general theories of relativity, his principle of equivalence, and his discovery that light consists of particles, David Hilbert’s mathematics, particularly his extrication of geometry from the human physical world, and Bertrand Russell’s new logic, particularly his paradoxes, were all vital inspirations for the Circle.

One motto of the early Vienna Circle was that facts should replace human intuitions when they disagreed. As such, in math, Hahn’s work on infinite dimensions was a step in that direction. In philosophy, Schlick pronounced, “after thus sentencing theoretical philosophy to death, life itself urged me to delve into the most important part of practical wisdom, the study of man and the human condition, something I had always maintained belonged to science rather than philosophy.” The philosopher Schlick became one of Einstein’s proteges and popularizers, writing a book on spacetime, which expounded Einstein’s combination of gravity with geometry.

Ludwig von Wittgenstein was to fundamentally change the direction of the Vienna Circle, although he never attended a single meeting. The Circle became enamored with the analysis of language. Two times in a row the Circle read aloud and analyzed every word in Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” line by line, first under the suggestion of Kurt Reidemeister, then under Rudolf Carnap. Carnap was insistent that all philosophy had to be distilled by the new logic being espoused by Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein. “If philosophy is willing to follow the path of science (in the strictest sense), then it will not be able to do so without this thoroughly efficient instrument for clarifying concepts and cleaning up problematic situations.” The Circle adopted Wittgenstein’s phrase from the “Tractatus” as its own shibboleth, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Wittgenstein, himself, felt that “philosophy is the discipline that deals with all those propositions that are assumed to be true without proof by the various sciences.” His book’s aim was to “draw a limit to thinking, or rather- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think on both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense.” Wittgenstein was always a bit of a riddle, even to himself. He goes on about the nature of philosophy, “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy, thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” But then he continues, “the inexpressible is contained- unexpressed- in the expressed…. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” What are we to make of all of this contradiction? Wittgenstein tries to square the circle. “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” Despite the cryptic phrasing, or perhaps because of it, the “Tractatus” was a huge hit within the Circle. Hahn stated, “logic therefore does not say anything about the world; it only has to do with the way in which I talk about the world.” Schlick added, “logical conclusions express nothing about real facts. They are merely rules for using our signs.” Neurath, however, thought that Wittgenstein was all bunk and his words all smelled distinctly of metaphysics.

In 1929, the Vienna Circle finally published its own manifesto, “The Scientific Worldview.” It was a rejection of all things metaphysical and theological. It stated that only results based on experimentations and logical analysis were to be accepted as truth. Its goal was to tackle the problems at the foundations of mathematics, physics, geometry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences and to integrate them into one core discipline. Later Schlick emphasized, “philosophy is not a set of statements. It is not a science. But what is it then? We see in philosophy not a system of knowledge, but a system of actions: philosophy is that activity through which the meaning of statements is revealed or determined. Through philosophy, statements are explained; through science they are verified. The latter is concerned with the truth of the statements, while the former is concerned with what they actually mean…. The method of science is observation and experiment, combined with calculation and inference; through this method one establishes the set of true propositions about the real world. The method of the philosopher, by contrast, is reflection; the philosopher looks upon the given statements, observations, and calculations, and explains what they mean. To do philosophy is not to give a list of true propositions. It is, rather, an art- an activity leading to clarity.” Hahn separated philosophies turned towards the world, such as Epicurus and Hume, with philosophies turned away from the world, such as Kant and Plato. “The English, after all, are known as a nation of shopkeepers. And it is surely no accident that one and the same nation gave the world both democracy, on the one hand, and the rebirth of a philosophy turned toward the world, on the other; nor is it an accident that the same land that saw the beheading of a king also witnessed the execution of metaphysics.” Questions such as “Is the external world real?” are not genuine problems, but pseudo-problems, for they cannot be answered conclusively. According to Carnap, “everything that is beyond the factual must be considered meaningless” because according to the manifesto, “the scientific worldview knows no unsolvable riddles.”

As the years past, the Vienna Circle became more publicly known and its membership grew more diverse, although still having to be specially invited to join. Kurt Godel was a mathematician universally recognized as brilliant and insane. Einstein considered him his only true peer. Godel solved Hilbert’s riddle that “there exist true mathematical statements that cannot be derived by formal means from a set of axioms.” Godel’s proof of incompleteness claimed, “if mathematics is consistent, then the statement “mathematics is consistent” is precisely one of those weird Godelian propositions that are true but cannot be proved!” Karl Popper was never invited into the Vienna Circle but was a friendly antagonist, sparring and clarifying the views of the Circle because his views were greatly similar. He viewed induction as a flawed method because no matter the amount of experimentation, it could never lead to a general law. He stated, “my view implied that scientific theories, if they are not falsified, forever remain hypotheses or conjectures. This consideration led to a theory in which scientific progress turned out not to consist in the accumulation of observations, but in the overthrow of less good theories and their replacement by better ones- in particular, by theories of greater content.” The mathematician Karl Menger  advanced the ideas of dimension theory, while in his spare time editing his father, Carl’s, posthumous book, clarifying his invention of marginal utility theory. The economist Franz Alt invented the concept of a utility function and contributed to the burgeoning field of computer science. Abraham Wald founded the field of statistical sequential analysis and started to sketch out the concept of general equilibrium in economic systems. Oskar Morgenstern invented game theory along with John von Neumann, a friend of many in the Vienna Circle.

Already tottering from years of domestic authoritarian rule, the Vienna Circle finally broke up after the Anschluss. A few members had already left Austria, sensing which way the fascist winds were blowing. After the German invasion, even those members who were not themselves Jews were branded as friends of Jews and lost their University positions as well. Some emigrated to England or America and continued their correspondence as best they could. Godel had to take the trans-Siberian railroad across Russia, before setting sail to America from Japan. Neurath hopped on a stolen Dutch naval schooner to cross the heavily mined English Channel. The lucky ones found professorships in the Allied countries. The historian of physics Gerald Holton coined the phrase, “from the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square.” In fact, many were not so fortunate. The more junior members of the Circle often could not get teaching visas to flee abroad and many died in the concentration camps, committed suicide, or lived out their days in poverty, stripped of all ability to earn a living teaching in the Reich.

After World War II, there was a feeble effort to resurrect the Vienna Circle, but most of its members were dead or refused to return to Vienna from teaching posts in the West. The Vienna Circle petered out with a whimper. A few members even recanted their positivist worldview. Godel, ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, wrote to his mother after the war, “the world and everything in it has a reason and meaning, and actually a good and indubitable meaning. This immediately implies that our existence on Earth, since it has by itself at best a very doubtful meaning, must be a means for another existence…. For we understand neither why this world exists, nor why it is constituted just as it is, nor why we are in it, nor why we were born in just these and no other circumstances. Why then should we fancy that we know one thing for sure, that there is no other world, and that we never were nor ever will be in another?” He was certifiably insane, but that sounds like metaphysics to me.

“Free Food For Millionaires” by Min Jin Lee

This was Lee’s first published novel. Like “Pachinko” it is at heart a story of an immigrant family trying to find a place in their new world. They struggle with straddling the line between their old and new cultures, trying to feel at home in both or even in either one. However, unlike Lee’s latest work, this novel has more of a soap opera tone. I do not mean that in a disparaging way. The story is not tragic, while still dealing with the harsh realities that all immigrant families face. This novel deals with the dramas of dating, clothes, and style, while also touching heavily on more weighty themes such as familial duty, fitting in, and racial mixing. The protagonist, Casey, is a Korean girl who just graduated from Princeton and grew up in Queens, the daughter of two dry cleaner workers. She is thoroughly Western in mindset, but her family tries to assert their own Eastern sensibilities on her as well. Her younger sister, Tina, a pre-med at MIT, has seemed to have figured out how to balance both worlds and, therefore, is viewed as the golden child in the family. Casey struggles through life, dating and dumping a white boyfriend, hooking up with coworkers at an investment bank, and eventually dating a Korean-American banker from Texas. Her work life is equally hectic, as she refuses to settle for what is expected of her. Throughout the story socioeconomic class comes up again and again as Casey interacts with Ivy League graduate bankers and friends from Princeton who went to Andover, Exeter, and Groton and who summer on Nantucket. Her best friend from college is on a seemingly endless tour of men through Italy as she continually postpones a graduate degree in art. Casey’s mentor is an older Korean lady, married to an Italian Jew, who runs her own boutique department store in Chelsea. She freely gives out lavish gifts and advice, but expects devotion in return. One anchor in every Korean immigrant community is the Church. But even within the congregation in Queens there is a divide between the doctors, accountants, and other professionals and the dry cleaners, shopkeepers, and bodega owners. Class again asserts itself. This is a tale of a girl growing up in New York, finding herself, and learning how to be true to her values, while coming to terms with her parents and traditions.