“The Plotters” by Un-su Kim (translated by Sora Kim-Russell)

Kim’s novel is full of suspense and killing. It reads fast. The hero, Reseng, is an orphan trained as an assassin. His boss and adopted father, Old Raccoon, is a polio-crippled librarian. “Had Reseng continued to grow up in the orphanage, where divine blessings showered down like spring sunshine and kindly nuns devoted themselves to the careful raising of orphans, his life might have turned out very differently. Instead, he grew up in a library crawling with assassins, hired guns, and bounty hunters. Just as a plant grows wherever it sets down roots, so all your life’s tragedies spring from wherever you first set your feet.” Seoul’s underworld is the Meat Market, where murderers, arms dealers, kidnappers, and other crooks shop their wares. But behind it all are the plotters. “To the plotters, mercenaries and assassins were like disposable batteries. After all, what use would they have for old assassins? An old assassin was like an annoying blister bursting with incriminating information and evidence…. Plotters hated when lowly assassins took it upon themselves to change the plot. It wasn’t about pride. The problem was that if the plot changed, then the people waiting at their various posts would need new cues, and everyone’s roles would get out of sync. If incriminating evidence got left behind or if things went sour, then someone else would have to die in order to cover it up. And sometimes that someone was you. Changing the assigned plot was not just a headache but a potential death sentence…. Not that anyone could have said where the plot originated or what its ultimate goal was. No one ever knew the full truth. In the plotters’ world, everyone avoided having any more information than absolutely necessary. The more information you had, the easier it was to become a target. Ignorance was survival. You couldn’t just pretend, you had to genuinely not know. Why would anyone bother asking how much you knew when they could simply kill you?” Kim’s plot is filled with other unforgettable characters. There is the pet crematorium operator shaped like Winnie-the-Pooh, who offers soju to the gods, the cross-eyed librarian’s assistant, who never reads, but gives insightful book recommendations, and the wheelchair-bound knitter, obsessed with Barbie and Chester Cheetah. “In the end, none of us can leave the place we know best, no matter how dirty and disgusting it is. Having no money and no other means of survival is part of the reason, but it’s never the whole reason. We go back to our own filthy origins because it’s a filth we know. Putting up with that filth is easier than facing the fear of being tossed into the wider world, and the loneliness that is as deep and wide as that fear.”

“Virtue Politics” by James Hankins

Hankins has written a book about the Italian humanist scholars of the quattrocento and their effects on the politics of northern Italy. He states, “for most Renaissance humanists, freedom was a moral achievement, the fruit of virtue, and was prevented from collapse into license only by good character…. Their principle message [was] that cities needed to be governed by well-educated men and women of high character, possessed of practical wisdom, and informed by the study of ancient literature and moral philosophy.”

Quattrocento humanists were not necessarily republicans in the modern sense. They worked under, advised, and tried to influence princes and tyrants, but also aristocracies, oligarchies, and democracies. “What was common to humanist political literature was a commitment, not to a particular regime type or to “republican liberty,” but rather to a reform project that was in a certain sense supra partes, directed by political elites in general, whatever regime they served…. For the humanists constitutional form was far less important than the character of rulers.”

Hankins defines virtue ethics and virtue politics. “In contrast to the other two leading approaches to normative ethics in the modern world—deontology and utilitarianism—virtue ethics emphasizes the need to develop, through reflection and practice, excellent patterns of conduct (the virtues) so as to achieve human good and human flourishing (eudaimonia, or happiness)…. “Virtue politics” by analogy with virtue ethics, focuses on improving the character and wisdom of the ruling class with a view to bringing about a happy and flourishing commonwealth. It sees the political legitimacy of the state as tightly linked with the virtue of the rulers and especially their practice of justice, defined as a preference for the common good over private goods…. Legitimacy of exercise in the discourse of virtue politics must spring from the desire of a political leader both to be and to do good.”

Hankins begins with Petrarch. “It is still right to call him the father of Renaissance humanism, since it was he who created the new paideuma that opened Christian culture anew to the lost civilizations of the ancient world. It was he who deepened the admiration for ancient authors that had long existed in medieval culture into a kind of Sehnsucht, a longing for the restoration of lost qualities of mind, for the return of ancient virtue. It was he who turned the new paideuma that was the fruit of that longing into an institutio—a way of forming the mind, oriented above all to the acquisition of virtue, wisdom, and eloquence.” Petrarch was also able to convince his contemporaries that pagan philosophy was, not a threat, but complimentary to Christian faith. The pagan classics would instruct on the virtues of the world and Christ on matters of the spirit. “The studia humanitatis had to do with the edification of human beings in this life and the reform of human states and societies.” Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Tacitus, and, particularly, Cicero were their ancient lodestars.

Humanists were also concerned with moral character more than laws and justice. They thought beneficial laws would necessarily flow from a ruler with proper virtues. “Like Plato, they did not think obedience could be secured merely by writing down laws and institutions that conformed to abstract principles of justice. Human justice began in the soul, and a way had to be found of engraving laws in the souls of both rulers and ruled. Justice was not a right or entitlement, as most people believe today, but a personal commitment to give fellow citizens what they deserved, even citizens poorer or weaker than oneself. It was a virtue—an excellent character trait informed by practical wisdom.”

Quattrocento humanists were egalitarians. “Most humanists from Petrarch onward insist that even a person of humble birth can merit a place in the ruling class via the acquisition of virtue…. The humanists of the quattrocento may indeed by credited with inventing a new form of equality not found in modern political theory—nor in ancient for that matter—which might be labeled “virtue egalitarianism.”” Bartolomeo Platina expounds, “It is characteristic of nobility to follow the right, rejoice in duties, have command of desires, and restrain avarice. Whoever does this, even if he were by some chance born to the lowest human condition, merits being called and regarded as noble.”

Humanists saw partisanship as ugly and sought to act above that fray. “The humanists generally saw open partisanship as unseemly and, like other passions, a threat to virtue and the rule of reason, quite apart from the damage it caused to the state in affairs domestic and foreign…. The goals of the political project operated on a higher plane than that of partisan conflict and regime loyalties.” Humanist advisors had no problem mentoring new rulers and shifting loyalties when regimes changed from tyrant to tyrant or even from tyrant to Pope or republic. It was the virtue of the ruler and not the form of government that they sought to influence. “Loyalty to a particular constitutional form was no part of what it meant to be a man of virtue in the quattrocento.” Petrarch insisted, “Where there are no tyrants, the people tyrannize.”

The humanist scholars of the quattrocento were anti-scholastics. “Petrarch lays out a model of moral and intellectual self-cultivation that rejects the ethos of scholasticism. The latter for him represented a corrupt form of education, mere pre-professional training, oriented to power and money-making and transmitting expertise without concern for moral character. Scholasticism focuses on problem-solving in particular contexts; it is designed to train medical doctors or lawyers, future decision-makers in lay governments and in the Church. Petrarch’s otium litterarium by contrast—revealing its Stoic inspiration—is designed to instill wisdom and virtue. It broadens the mind so that it adopts a universal perspective, the perspective of all of time and space. By ranging through past times and around the globe the solitarius is drawn out of the moment.”

Hankins also extolls Leonardo Bruni as an exemplar of humanist philosophy. Bruni saw liberty and equality as the precursors to political virtue. “Liberty is valued above all because it produces virtue, and it is virtue that makes Florence worthy of leadership among peoples, perhaps even empire. It is the virtuous rule of Florence that in turn guarantees liberty to other towns and cities within their sphere of influence.” Bruni saw Florence as the natural successor to Rome, the classical model par excellence for most humanist scholars. Within Tuscany, Bruni saw Florence as first among equals and guarantee of liberty for all. He states, “Our magistrates and generals yearned to acquire the greatest praise from one thing alone, the fair and faithful defence of our provinces and of our allies. In this way we could more truly have been titled a protectorate [patrocinium] than an empire [imperium] of the world.”

Bruni identifies faction as Florence’s main obstacle to success. The Guelf and Ghibelline nobles vied for political power, even as both factions tried to suppress the rise of the popolo and the guildsmen. “Bruni’s approach is straightforwardly moralistic; he regards human vice as the ultimate cause of factionalism. The highest and lowest classes in the state are naturally uncivil and immoderate, while the broad middle classes—the popolo—have the greatest capacity for civic virtue. It is only the middle classes that have a real interest in observing the common good…. They can identify their own interests more closely with those of the state.”

Hankins ends by contrasting the quattrocento humanists with Machiavelli. For Machiavelli, “the study of letters and philosophy are a “dangerous deceit” that undermines a city’s institutio, the disciplines of civic life that buttress warlike virtue; and the softening of manners that result from literary study ultimately brings the state to ruin.” Machiavelli is not concerned with the virtues when governing affairs of state. “Necessity became Machiavelli’s watchword and the basis of his political science. Power, virtu in Machiavelli’s sense, is the condition of all other goods…. What should guide a ruler’s policies is the logic of necessity, which belongs to a different register entirely from the laws of morality…. Machiavelli teaches his prince that following habits of behavior, whether good or bad, as though on a kind of moral autopilot, will bring him ruin. He must learn moral flexibility, strategic inconstancy, selective clemency, and cruelty. Goodness must become the servant of necessita, the logic of power.” Rulers could not afford to be guided by personal morals and principles when dictating political affairs. “Machiavelli was the first to explore the paradox of the moderns: that evil must be done to safeguard the good. This a paradox of statesmen, not of philosophers, and it acquires moral gravity because, even in democracies, statesmen must choose not only for themselves but for others.”

“10:04” by Ben Lerner

Lerner has autobiographical fiction down. This novel is primarily about him struggling to write this novel. “I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work, that like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.” At this novel’s crux is a previously published New Yorker story embedded complete within it. That story’s real world literary strength was supposedly how Ben, the narrator, was given a six figure advance for this very novel. Sometimes it gets even more meta, as when the embedded New Yorker story references its author, Ben, reflecting on his first novel’s narrator, who is also a sometimes-less-than-flattering version of Ben (but named Adam). “He’d likely be asked what parts of his book were autobiographical…. And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.” Ben, this novel’s narrator, is most definitely a gentrified Brooklynite. “I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river.” He is also an unabashed hipster—a supporter of Occupy Wall Street and a member of his local food coop. “As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.” But he also wants to show he is not one of those hipsters; he is not too cool for school (and still has his Midwestern charm). “I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar.” Some of his best stories are memories of his youth, which serve as asides on topics he is mulling over as his present narratorial self. “In the nineteenth century a paleontologist put the skull of a camarasaurus on an apatosaurus skeleton and believed he’d discovered a new species, so that one of the two iconic dinosaurs of my youth turns out not to have existed, a revision that, along with the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard at my childhood worldview, my remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time.” Pages later, he returns to the riff. “Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence…. I wasn’t a balanced person who had his difficult periods; I was an erratic blind to his own psychological precariousness; I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet.”

“A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth

Seth’s epic of nearly 1,500 pages centers around a few related families from Brahmpur and Calcutta, just after India’s Partition. The plot deals with religion, politics, gender roles, cultural traditions, and, particularly, family obligations. As India struggles with the birth pangs of independence, societal mores are changing in fits and starts. Socialists and Hindu nationalists contend with the Congress Party’s stranglehold on power. Those Muslims who did not leave for Pakistan try to integrate themselves into the new fractured society. Upper-caste Hindus assert their place replacing the British. Students protest for rights on campus and jobs after. Dalit cobblers strike for better terms with bazaar middlemen. Muslim sharecroppers are fitfully given new rights through land reform legislation. Zamindari feudal lords struggle to find new vocations, income, and purpose. Traditional Urdu songs and Bengali poems vie for attention with motion pictures, dance clubs, and pop records. The younger generation asserts new prerogatives, all the while careful to still defer to their elders.

Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s quest to find a suitable boy for her youngest daughter, Lata, propels the thrust of this novel. Mehra is an old school widow, devout in her prayers and completely devoted to the future of her children. She does not believe her youngest daughter should act in plays with boys, not to mention marry someone from another caste or, god-forbid, a Muslim or foreigner. Her children—Arun, a “brown-white” at a covented British Calcutta firm, Varun, a struggling student who drinks Shamshu and studies horse racing more than his books, Savita, the loyal daughter already fobbed off into an arranged marriage, and Lata, the rebellious student of English literature—all try her patience in varying ways. But for hundreds of pages at a time the Mehras fade into the background as the plot meanders through the stories of the Kapoors, Mehra in-laws from Savita’s marriage, whose patriarch is a local Congress cabinet minister, the Nawab of Baitar’s family, the local Muslim feudal lords, the Chatterjis, an eccentric Brahmo aristocratic family from Calcutta, who are in-laws of Mrs. Mehra through Arun, Saeeda Bai, a courtesan singer of alluring beauty who plies her trade for the best of Brahmpur society, Haresh Khanna, a shoe factory foreman from Delhi educated in England, Kabir Durrani, a history student more fond of cricket and poetry, Abdur Rasheed, a pious college tutor from a rustic Zamindari family, and many, many more. Even Nehru makes a few cameo appearances. As all of these diverse lives interconnect, Seth paints a picture of the tight web of relations within the upperclass Brahmpur community. But as characters strive to work for better futures for themselves their pasts are never far behind. “Look at history. It’s always been the same. The old men cling to their power and their beliefs, which admit all their worst vices but exclude the least fault and strangle the smallest innovation of the young. Then, thank God, they die, and can do no more harm. But by then we, the young, are old, and strive to do what little mischief they left undone.” 

“Something Deeply Hidden- Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime” by Sean Carroll

Carroll consistently writes books about dense scientific topics in terms that are easy for the layman to comprehend. This book deals with quantum mechanics, his specialty, as a theoretical physicist. “Quantum mechanics is unique among physical theories in drawing an apparent distinction between what we see and what really is…. The fundamental new element of quantum mechanics, the thing that makes it unequivocally distinct from its classical predecessor, centers on the question of what it means to measure something about a quantum system.”

Carroll begins by getting into the nuts and bolts of what we know about quantum mechanics. “Quantum systems are described by wave functions rather than by [classical] positions and velocities…. We can express Schrodinger’s equation in words as: “The rate of change of a wave function is proportional to the energy of the quantum system.”… A wave function can represent a number of different possible energies.” Next, Carroll lays out what the different interpretations of quantum mechanics hold in common. “Every version of quantum mechanics (and there are plenty) employs a wave function or something equivalent, and posits that the wave function obeys Schrodinger’s equation, at least most of the time…. [In the minimalist approach,] we take the wave function seriously as a direct representation of reality…. We don’t see wave functions; we see measurement outcomes, like the position of a particle…. If the wave function usually evolves smoothly in accordance with the Schrodinger equation, let’s suppose that’s what it always does…. The world is a wave function, nothing more nor less. We can use the phrase “quantum state” as a synonym for “wave function.”… Given two different objects… they are not described by separate, individual wave functions. There is only one wave function, which describes the entire system we care about, all the way up to the “wave function of the universe.”…  Although such a superposition in principle includes every possibility, most of the possible outcomes are assigned zero weight in the quantum state.”

Carroll begins to make the case for the particular interpretation of quantum mechanics he favors, Everettian Many-Worlds Theory. “The right way to describe things after the measurement, in this view, is not as one person with multiple ideas about where the electron was seen, but as multiple worlds, each of which contains a single person with a very definite idea about where the electron was seen…. The price we pay for this vastly increased elegance of theoretical formalism is that the theory describes many copies of what we think of as  “the universe,” each slightly different, but each truly real in some sense…. The potential for such universes was always there—the universe has a wave function, which can very naturally describe superpositions of many different ways things could be, including superpositions of the whole universe…. Once you admit that an electron can be in a superposition of different locations, it follows that a person can be in a superposition of having seen the electron in different locations, and indeed that reality as a whole can be in a superposition, and it becomes natural to treat every term in that superposition as a separate “world.”” Carroll summarizes, “Every version of quantum mechanics features two things: (1) a wave function, and (2) the Schrodinger equation, which governs how wave functions evolve over time. The entirety of the Everett formulation is simply the insistence that there is nothing else, that these ingredients suffice to provide a complete, empirically adequate account of the world…. Any other approach to quantum mechanics consists of adding something to that bare-bones formalism…. Reality is described by a smoothly evolving wave function and nothing else.”

Carroll builds on this picture by going into more details on the specifics of quantum mechanics. “Qubits can help us understand a crucial feature of wave functions: they are like the hypotenuse of a right triangle, for which the shorter sides are the amplitudes for each possible measurement outcome. In other words, the wave function is like a vector—an arrow with a length and a direction. The vector we’re talking about doesn’t point in a direction in real physical space, like “up” or “north.” Rather, it points in a space defined by all possible measurement outcomes.” Next, he explains entanglement and decoherence. “We know there is only one wave function, the wave function of the universe. But when we’re talking about individual microscopic particles, they can settle into quantum states where they are unentangled from the rest of the world. In that case, we can sensibly talk about “the wave function of this particular electron” and so forth…. In ordinary situations, there’s no way to stop a macroscopic object from interacting with its environment…. That simple process—macroscopic objects [becoming] entangled with the environment, which we cannot keep track of—is decoherence…. Decoherence causes the wave function to split, or branch, into multiple worlds…. To [the observer], the wave function seems to have collapsed…. The collapse is only apparent, due to decoherence splitting the wave function.” Carroll usefully defines exactly what measurements and observers are. “A measurement is any interaction that causes a quantum system to become entangled with the environment, creating decoherence and a branching into separate worlds, and an observer is any system that brings such an interaction about.”

Carroll goes back to discussing the specifics of Many-Worlds Theory and defending some of its more unintuitive implications. “Many-Worlds is a deterministic theory, and if know the wave function at one time and the Schrodinger equation, we can figure out everything that’s going to happen.” With perfect knowledge, we could look back into the past and future with absolute certainty. “Many-Worlds doesn’t assume a large number of worlds. What it assumes is a wave function evolving according to the Schrodinger equation. The worlds are there automatically…. The space of all possible wave functions, Hilbert space, is very big. It’s not any bigger in Many-Worlds than in other versions of quantum theory; it’s precisely the same size…. Other worlds could be detected in principle, if we got incredibly lucky. They haven’t gone away, they’re still there in the wave function. Decoherence makes it fantastically unlikely for one world to interfere with another, but not metaphysically impossible…. Branching happens when systems become entangled with the environment and decohere, which unfolds as time moves towards the future, not the past. The number of branches of the wave function, just like entropy, only increases with time…. The low entropy of the early universe corresponds to the idea that there were many unentangled subsystems back then. As they interact with each other and become entangled, we see that as branching of the wave function…. The picture of branching as “creating” an entirely new copy of the universe is a vivd one, but not quite right. It’s better to think of it as dividing the existing universe into almost-identical slices, each one of which has a smaller weight than the original…. You do not cause the wave function to branch by making a decision. In large part that’s just due to what we mean (or ought to mean) by something “causing” something else. Branching is the result of a microscopic process amplified to macroscopic scales: a system in a quantum superposition becomes entangled with a larger system, which then becomes entangled with the environment, leading to decoherence. A decision, on the other hand, is a purely macroscopic phenomenon.”

Carroll ends by questioning the very nature of physics as we know it. At this point, he concedes that this is still speculation. He posits, “Spacetime isn’t fundamental, but emerges from the wave function…. This emergent geometry on space evolves with time in exactly the right way to describe a spacetime that obeys Einstein’s equation of general relativity…. Starting from an abstract quantum wave function, we have a road map describing how space emerges, with a geometry fixed by quantum entanglement, and that geometry seems to obey the dynamical rules of general relativity…. If quantum gravity operates according to some version of the Schrodinger equation, then for almost all quantum states, time runs from minus infinity in the past to plus infinity in the future. The Big Bang might be simply a transitional phase, with an infinitely old universe preceding it…. The quantum state of the universe doesn’t evolve at all as a function of time.”