“10% Less Democracy” by Garett Jones

In a way, Jones has written a timid book. Most of his proposed reforms are marginal. And yet, to many people, advocating ten percent less democracy will seem highly controversial. “Most prominent political thinkers… take the unalloyed merits of democracy for granted.” In his book, Jones suggests some “democracy-reducing reforms that take control of the state a little further away from the average citizen.” He suggests there might be a Laffer curve for democracy and that many rich countries in the modern world, particularly America, might be on the right side, sloping downward.

The book uses anecdotes to make some points, but Jones primarily relies on time-series or cross-country data. He claims, “there is no professional consensus at all on whether higher levels of democracy cause higher growth, cause slower growth, or cause nothing much at all.” First, he suggests longer terms for politicians. “We have three major areas where governments facing a looming election are reluctant to take the tough but probably effective medicine: trade policy, labor regulation, and exchange rate policy.” Politicians know when the voters are watching. “Senators… tend to backload the pork, delivering 15% more projects and 15% more dollars in home-state spending in the last two years of their cycle…. When a senator is in cycle, she’s 10 percentage points less likely to vote for a trade deal.”

Jones recommends those parts of the United States system that are more-shielded from politics and the voters. He praises the independence of the Federal Reserve. “Independent, generally less democratic central banks… averaged 4% lower long-run rates of annual inflation compared to countries with the most politician-dependent…. Countries with more independent central banks appear to have fewer financial crises.” The judicial branch and regulatory agencies are two other areas where Jones has found better outcomes from appointing, rather than electing, officials. “Appointed treasurers are able to get lower interest rates on the city debt—about half a percentage point lower on average—than elected officials.” Jones finds, “States with elected regulators are less likely to pass through cost changes into prices [and] utilities invest less in places with elected regulators.” One important measure of independence is funding. “Having to ask the government for annual appropriations… obviously weakens the political independence of the regulator.” Jones also suggests using executive headhunting-style firms to identify talent, especially those who might not be citizens, and filling local, state, and federal posts with them. Finally, Jones suggests expanding political independence into areas like an independent tax commission. “Let Congress decide on the values, let the Federal Tax Board iron out the details.”

Jones now gets into more controversial ground. He suggests tilting the scales of voting to give more weight to those who are smarter. “The more educated tend to know more about how government works and about how different policy proposals—even well-intentioned ones—may or may not work as planned…. Since politicians pander to voters, not to nonvoters, then any improvement in the skill level, the information level, or the human capital of voters will mean that politicians will be pandering to customers who know more about the product.” He suggests a practical idea, “Everyone with a current right to vote gets to vote in elections for the lower house and for the head of state, but only those with a college degree or equivalent can vote in elections to the upper house.”

Another controversial idea is to give voting rights to a country’s bondholders. “Bondholders are an important and useful check on the potentially reckless behavior of governments…. Long-term government bondholders—investors holding maturities of, say, ten years or longer—should be given an explicit advisory role in modern democracies as a check on the shortsighted, impulsive, frequently ignorant electorate…. perhaps through nonbinding public resolutions where one dollar of bonds means one vote.” Jones goes further, advocating for “formal annual shareholder-style meetings between elected bondholder representatives and elected government officials, formal appointments of bondholder representatives to high-level finance ministry positions, or even handing bondholder representatives limited forms of veto power over economic policy actions.” He even suggests to “grant the bondholder council a small number of seats in the upper house of the national legislature…. The number of seats that belonged to these bondholders would rise as the nation’s ratio of government debt to national income rose. One more seat in the upper house for every 10% increase in the debt-to-income ratio.”

Jones also suggests that political party machines have come to influence too little of policy in America today. “The machine has a longer political life than most politicians, so it cares whether the country will be rich enough, stable enough, safe enough, for it to remain strong for decades to come. The machine has patience…. Machines are to politics as banking is to the economy: being long-term, repeat players, they can extend something like political credit.” He also suggests staggering election cycles. “If there’s more noise in the public sphere, then any one election tells us less about what the public is really saying…. The bigger the random swings, the stronger the argument is for not listening too closely to any one election…. Any country with four, six, or… eight-year terms could easily stagger out the terms to create what the Senate calls “a continuing body.” And one benefit of a continuing body is that it will have a more stable, more coherent mind.” Jones concludes, “if a modern, relatively prosperous nation wants a greater degree of liberalism, it probably wants a little less democracy.”

“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.” 

“Lucky Per” by Henrik Pontoppidan (translated by Naomi Lebowitz)

This novel, set in nineteenth century Denmark, is a bildungsroman. The eponymous hero, Per, was born into a rural Jutland family, whose men had, for generations, taken the cloth. His father was a hard and cold pastor, who was feared and ridiculed by his own congregation in equal measure. Per was the black sheep in the family. As a boy, he was more fun-loving, than god-fearing. At night, he liked to sneak out of the parsonage to go sledding and to flirt with girls. “An unappeasable hatred of his family awakened in his hitherto carefree soul, a defiant and bellicose feeling of abandonment that would become the heart and driving force of his future life.” Per was shunned by his parents and siblings alike and eventually packed off to Copenhagen to study engineering. Science and progress had become the buzz words of the age. Since Denmark’s defeat in the war to Prussia, its leading lights preached industrialization and modernization. To the enlightened, even Copenhagen seemed like a European backwater.

Per is caught up more than most in the fever of the age. “His life’s motto, “I Will,” would now be tested. It would be all or nothing.” He wants to become a man of substance and influence. He derides the religious-tempered and aesthetes alike. Despite his blooming atheism, Per felt in his bones that he was destined for something special. “For he knew now he was born to become, in his domain, the morning horn-herald, the path breaker in this sluggish society of thick-blooded sons of pastors and sextons.” Per has romantic dalliances with all that Copenhagen has to offer, eventually settling down and becoming betrothed to a Jewish heiress from an illustrious banking family. She is a like-minded soul: modern, passionate, and headstrong. “They talked together about the future, envisioned the coming century that, eventually, would give mankind back its spiritual freedom, reawaken the courage to act and the instinct for adventure, erect altars to strong and great deeds on the ruins of the church.” Armed with a letter of credit from his perspective father-in-law, Per travels the Continent to further his budding engineering schemes. However, his relationship with his father’s Church keeps lingering in his life. He cannot escape his past. The pull of the Danish countryside again proves alluring when he meets in Rome the wife of the Master of the Hunt in his native Jutland. “Nature folk were, essentially, the happiest. With a curtsy before a pair of sticks nailed together to form a cross, they solved all the riddles of life and death and let the fiddles wail on.” Eventually, having absconded to the country, Per meets two rural parish priests with divergent world views, who both, nonetheless, once again tug on his heartstrings and threaten to pull him back into the Christian fold. “How poor was the worth of such a cheaply bought cheerfulness in comparison with the faith or the doubt that had cost blood and battles…. The citizens who sat comfortably protected by their own lack of passion…. had never felt a titanic urge to struggle with the gods.” Eventually, Per makes his own personal peace with himself. “When, in spite of all the good fortune that had come his way, he wasn’t happy, it was because he had not wanted to be happy in the general sense of the word…. It was in solitude his soul felt at home, and in affliction and pain.”

“The Confucian-Legalist Legacy” by Dingxin Zhao

Zhao is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He attempts to frame the sweep of Chinese history through a Confucian-Legalist lens. The Confucian-Legalist state was “a system of government that merged political and ideological power, harnessed military power, and marginalized economic power. In the Confucian-Legalist state, emperors accepted Confucianism as a ruling ideology and subjected themselves to the control of a Confucian bureaucracy, while Confucian scholars both in and out of the bureaucracy supported the regime and supplied meritocratically selected officials who administered the country using an amalgam of Confucian ethics and Legalist regulations and techniques.” This was a formal system that had its precursors in the first Chinese dynasty, the Qin, but began in earnest in the Western Han dynasty, continuing, with only minor interruptions, for centuries, until the end of imperial China with the fall of the Qing dynasty.

Zhao begins his history with the city-state period of Western Zhou, from 1045 to 741 BC. “Three pivotal institutions of Western Zhou origin exerted an enduring impact on the history of China: the Mandate of Heaven, the kinship-based “feudal” system, and lineage law. The Mandate of Heaven concept, which originated as the early Zhou rulers’ justification for their overthrow of the Shang state, endured as a foundation of state power, widely accepted among Chinese rulers, the elite, and the people. The dominance of this political concept made government performance one of the most important bases of state legitimacy…. The Western Zhou “feudal” system took shape in the course of Western Zhou kinship-based military colonization. This political arrangement not only sustained Chinese culture when ancient China faced many potential intruders, but also contributed to the spread of Western Zhou culture and identity, and its writing system…. To regulate the relationships between the Western Zhou court and the enfeoffed city-states, the Zhou rulers gradually improvised a system of lineage law. The development of lineage law furthered the importance of family in Chinese culture…. Hierarchy, division of labor, and meritocracy contributed to the emergence of bureaucracy during the Western Zhou period.”

Even after the collapse of the Western Zhou, the Eastern Zhou city-states that emerged as power centers modeled their system of governance on their western predecessor. However, “the early Eastern Zhou city-states were not run by bureaucracies and had no standing armies. These city-states began as lineage-based organizations with dukes acting as lineage heads…. City dwellers in China did not possess a territory-based identity, and the Chinese city-states were not territorial states…. [Later,] during the Age of Total War, although all the major city-states had developed into territorial states, the social relations caged into these states were not yet territory-based…. Consequently, people accepted “foreign” rulers with little psychological aversion, and local scholars frequently travelled to other states to attain better positions, both of which were conducive to the unification of China.” The Eastern Zhou period is often separated into the Spring and Autumn period and the period of Warring States, together spanning 770-221 BC. Zhao, instead, breaks it into three periods—the Age of Hegemons (770-546 BC), the Age of Transition (545-420 BC), and the Age of Total War (419-221 BC).

The Eastern Zhou period was one of continual warfare and shifting alliances, as the new city-states sought to gain power at the expense of their neighbors. Throughout these centuries of war, the Qin, Jin, Qi, and Chu city-states emerged as dominant powers, although the Wu and Yue, particularly, developed later into formidable rivals as well. During the Age of Hegemons, “the states whose rulers became local hegemons tended to free themselves from the constraints of Western Zhou rituals and codes of conduct and to adopt war strategies based on their utility or efficiency…. Qi, Jin, Chu, and Qin were also able to achieve dominance because they were located on China’s outskirts and faced enemies on fewer fronts. Their peripheral geographic locations allowed them to retreat from interstate conflicts at the center when they were weakened, returning to the fray after regaining their strength…. To maintain dominance, a state needed to either conquer or manipulate the state of Zhou, which was thus far still a rallying point. As the spheres of influence of all four local hegemons…. converged, the four theaters of war gradually merged.” Along with warfare, these hegemons experimented with political reforms. Bureaucratization and secondary feudalization were two ways in which they tried to maintain control over their expanding territories. Land was parceled out based on the county (xian) system, which served both as an administrative and military unit.

During the Age of Transition, succession struggles broke the city-state of Jin into three competing states. This increased competition ramped up the process of innovation and reform. Li Kui, Duke Wen’s chief minister, is considered the first Legalist philosopher. He established a full-fledged bureaucracy, a comprehensive system of penal law, promoted increased agricultural production, and strengthened the army through universal conscription. These Legalist reforms put the State’s welfare (and its ruler’s) ahead of the people’s. “The state’s administration and taxation capabilities greatly increased as bureaucracy and meritocracy became the norm.”

In the Age of Total War, rival philosophers and teachers wandered from state to state selling their knowledge. Shi were the lower nobility, often poor, who sold their service to the state, as opposed to farming or commerce. They also started systems of private education. “Confucius (551-479 BC) was the first person to have offered private education on an impressive scale.” Shi also broke down kinship-based relations. Now, successful shi and the rulers who employed them became enmeshed in patronage networks. They were rewarded monetarily by their patrons and were free to leave them at will to search for better opportunities or more authority in neighboring states. “The kind of freedom of expression that the shi group exercised, whether in written treatises expressing their views or in oral disquisitions meant to attract the favorable attention of rulers, was a completely new phenomenon…. All the major states were trying to attract clever men and effective problem solvers to their side.”

Zhao takes an interlude here to describe the major tenets of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. “Confucius believed that the Western Zhou political system, which had taken form during the early Western Zhou period and had matured by the mid-Western Zhou period, was the model of a good society.” Most important was zheng ming, the rectification of names. This meant that “people from a certain social position must fulfill the duties and behaviors associated with that position…. It was only when social relationships in a stratified system became ambiguous that social conflict intensified, and turmoil and chaos ensued.” Furthermore, “believing that law could not be the basis of a good society, Confucius prescribed instead the cultivation of virtue that he referred to as ren.” This was sometimes thought of as humaneness or excellence, as well. Finally, “Confucius urgently promoted the importance of li (ritualized decorum), ritual music, and family relationships in education and daily life…. As for the role of family, Confucius believed that the family, with its extensive duties, responsibilities, and associated rituals sanctioned by lineage law, was the most important venue in which virtues and ritualized decorum were learned and became second nature.”

Daoism emerged before the end of the fourth century BC. “The meaning of dao partly corresponds to the English “way” or “road.”” Laozi, author of the “Dao de jing,” did not believe in human intervention in society. Intervention solved one problem by creating many more. “The wisest conduct of society is neither an artificial system of decorum, as Confucians thought, nor a system of laws and punishments, as the Legalists maintained but to “let be”…. Wuwei literally means nonaction, or not acting, even though in Laozi’s writing wuwei also means not to overact, not to push things too far, to keep things simple, and to let all beings follow their natural courses. To Daoists, “wuwei is the highest virtue” (shang de wuwei) and “the most important dao of all.”… A good ruler knows how to rule a country by less intervention (wuwei erzhi).”

Legalists were political realists. “In a society where lineage-law doctrines could no longer regulate social relations, they emphasized the importance of laws administered by a bureaucracy…. They promoted changes that would strengthen the state…. Legalists thinkers had little interest in justifying their theses on moral grounds.” An “ideology of war” permeated political and social relations. All was for the good of the State. Hanfeizi wrote, “If a ruler can keep punishments and rewards in his hands alone, his subordinates will be in awe of his mastery and avoid seeking benefits from him.” Zhao states, “Legalist doctrines centered on three necessaries: fa (penal law and bureaucracy), shu (administrative techniques coupled with the ruler’s artful deviousness), and shi (a ruler’s authority over his subjects).” A ruler was expected to play off the various branches of officials within the meritocratic bureaucracy, inspiring loyalty, while making sure they all feared him, as well.

The state of Wei, which formed out of the fracturing of Jin, most completely implemented Legalist ideology into practice. “Military competition in conjunction with the feudal crisis [of the three Jins] prompted the state of Wei to initiate Legalist reforms. Wei’s military dominance thereafter compelled the other states to learn from it, triggering a wave of isomorphic changes. The Legalist reforms greatly expanded a state’s power, giving it tighter control of the society and the ability to extract more resources for warfare. The reforms also made possible large-scale water projects for enhancing transportation and agricultural production, also for the purposes of war. Finally, the rise of state power after Legalism took hold fostered quick development of extensive technologies, that is, inventions aimed at extracting more output from more coordinated and organized inputs. That capacity placed a lid on the booming market economy, thereby firmly subordinating it to political forces. State dominance permitted the organization of the whole society into a war machine.”

Towards the end of the Age of Total War, the successor to Wei’s hegemony was the state of Qin. Wei declined in the mid-fourth century BC as its alliances with its two former Jin allies, Zhao and Han, broke up due to deceit and mistrust. Its poor geography in the middle of China also precipitated Wei’s decline. “Relative to the other states Qin’s geopolitical and geographical positions were the most ideal. Equally important, Qin’s aristocratic tradition was very weak, and its policy of importing talent and instrumentally effective ideas and institutions from the other states was very strong. Both factors facilitated radical Legalist reforms in Qin.” Qin was also adept at playing off the interests of the other city-states against each other. They would form alliances only to break them at their convenience and convince enemies further afield that they were not a threat, until they had built up adequate strength and manpower. “By the Age of Total War, the interstate system had sunk into Hobbesian anarchy. Without norms and institutions acting as a regulatory force, an anti-Qin alliance could not be maintained because the parties to it did not trust one another, often disregarded each other’s interests, and each wanted the others to bear the brunt of Qin’s assaults.” Lack of nationalism and patriotism for particular city-states also paved the way for the unification of China. “Talented individuals were inclined to leave their natal states for better opportunities in bigger and stronger states, and the masses did not care who ruled them. Both attitudes greatly lowered the cost of conquering another state and contributed to Qin’s victory.” Although the Qin dynasty was short-lived, due to its brutal Legalist policies even during times of peace, it established a unified China that would last, with only minor periods of fracture, to modern day.

During the Western Han dynasty, the concept of the Mandate of Heaven was fully restored and Imperial Confucianism emerged. This was not quite the same as Confucius’ original teachings. This “Confucianism not only emphasized the dominance of the head of state over his officials and subjects, but also the dominance of officials, who were of the elite, over their subordinates and over commoners…. While emphasizing the dominion of the state, Confucianism also emphasized that it is the ruler’s virtue that sustains his rule, and it authorized Confucian scholar-officials to indoctrinate rulers with Confucianism from childhood on and to criticize immoral rulers…. Once Confucianism was transformed into a state ideology, Confucian learning and moral conduct became increasingly important in the selection of officials…. The Confucianized bureaucracy [became] a significant institution through which the state [absorbed] social elites into the government…. Confucianism satisfied much of the religious need of the Chinese and performed many social functions…. This it accomplished through the rituals of ancestor worship and its emphasis on the human capacity to cultivate and achieve union with the ways of Heaven.”

Another Confucian reform that was to have a long-lasting impact was the civil service exam system. “The civil-service examination for recruiting civilian officials had been pioneered late in the Age of Disunion and Sui dynasty, and was immediately adopted by the new Tang dynasty rulers. It endured from the early seventh century until its abolition in 1905…. By the Ming dynasty, mastering Neo-Confucian orthodoxy became crucial to examination success. Being rule-driven and instrumental, it was also Legalist in its use of competitive examinations to select officials…. Since emperors increasingly participated in the grading of the essays and in the placement of successful candidates in appropriate offices, the examinations also enhanced the personal loyalty of the successful to the emperor. Finally, since successful candidates came from different regions and different backgrounds, the resulting bureaucracy was hardly likely to form a single interest group in opposition to the state.”

The primacy of Confucian philosophy gave rise to a new gentry class. These were often those who had studied for the civil service exam, but had not been selected to serve in an official capacity. “Unlike the English gentry, the Chinese gentry acquired their status mainly from education rather than land and wealth; also unlike the English, their status was not inherited. As gentry, they were community leaders. They sponsored local schools, promoted Confucianism and its ethics, provided welfare, arbitrated local disputes, and saw to the construction and upkeep of the local irrigation and road systems. Acting at the intersection between state and society, the gentry carried out all these functions on a volunteer basis…. The state’s limited infrastructure was compensated for by the self-organizing lineage communities led by the scholar-gentry who shared the mentality and values of government officials.”

Zhao concludes with some remarks on the legacy of Confucian-Legalist thought in modern China. “The millennia-long domination of the Confucian-Legalist state has given China a strong state tradition, a huge core territory, a large population with a shared identity, and a pro-education ideal…. The Confucian-Legalist state tradition also instills in China a tradition of civilian rule that is quite unusual among the developing countries…. The legacies of the Confucian-Legalist state tradition have given China an inward-looking character…. China has inherited a strong tradition of performance-based legitimacy derived from the concept of the Mandate of Heaven.”

“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.

“Leaving The Atocha Station” by Ben Lerner

By the first page of this novel you know exactly who this narrator is. “The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate the noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited the coffee…. Next my project required dropping myself back through the skylight, shitting, taking a shower, my white pills, and getting dressed. Then I’d find my bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, drugs, and leave for the Prado.” This type of self-styled creative is well worn, but still worth getting into the head of when portrayed convincingly. Soon, he is pondering art. “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change…. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf.” The narrator, Adam, is living in Madrid on a Fulbright Fellowship, supposedly researching a historical epic on the Spanish Civil War to be written in verse. He spends much of his time scoring hash from African illegal immigrants, flirting with women, and making fun of the American tourists (in his own head). He can speak rudimentary Spanish, but in his struggle to learn it better he alternates between false confidence and hopelessness. “My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time.” Often, his struggle with language generates his most beautiful thoughts. “The song was Portugese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled.” Adam is a published poet and he is always trying to measure up to other writers, both past and present. “I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own…. I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.” Adam is immensely concerned with appearances, his and others, and, so, often puts on a pose. “I didn’t know how to compose my face, if indifference tinged with vague disdain was still the right expression. If I could have smiled Teresa’s inscrutable smile, I would have.” However, through it all, his self-importance is saved by his slightly biting humor. “The prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face.”