“Demons” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is not one of Dostoevsky's better known novels, but I became intrigued by it because of its associations with the anarchist circles operating in Russia during the 19th century. In fact, Dostoevsky was inspired by a real political murder in Russia, which took place in 1869 and wrote this novel partly as a protest against what he saw as the over-materialistic sentiments of some communists and anarchists. Although total fiction, the plot references famous anarchists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Herzen. The tale itself is at the same time horrid and laugh-out-loud funny, with grizzly violence mingling freely with strange anecdotes and insane circumstances. There are devious conspirators, haughty aristocrats, silly academics, bungling provincial administrators, newly liberated serfs, lowdown thieves and all sorts of other riffraff all thrown together in the strange brew of small town Russia. As the plot moves, it is unclear if there is a criminal mastermind or other unseen dark forces as the conspiracy and violence pushes itself along seemingly uncontrollably. The real “demons” turn out to be the new ideas circulating at the time throughout Russia- idealism, rationalism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, and, above all, atheism.

“Relentless Strike- The Secret History of JSOC” by Sean Naylor

This book is the unauthorized account of the creation of an integrated Special Operations Command in the wake of the Iranian hostage rescue disaster (Operation Eagle Claw) through the killings of Bin Laden and Awlaki. The fact that so many in the upper echelons of the military were outraged that so many operators talked to Naylor should be reason enough to read this book. It reads like a page-turner, detailing just about every major action that has involved Delta, the Seals, and the Rangers. Even if you know the difference between Special Operations and Special Forces, this book will give you insight into the minutia of the likes of The Army of Northern Virginia (Task Force Orange) and DevGru never before collected. The book also does a great job of detailing both the personalities of people who shaped JSOC from Marcinko to McRaven, as well as the institutional structures and relationships between units, branches, and across agencies that hindered or fostered mission success. The involvement of politics and politicians (including career flag officers) is at the same time the most illuminating and disheartening aspect of the story. Although sourced mainly anonymously, the rigorous footnotes and multiplicity of accounts lets one judge for himself the veracity of each detail. The book is indispensable reading for those who want to learn the nuts and bolts of what has happened in the name of the Global War on Terror and lessons to be learned for the future in a “war” that might never end and on a “battlefield” that includes every inch of the globe.

“Two Arabs, A Berber, And a Jew” by Lawrence Rosen

Rosen is an anthropologist who visited the town of Sefrou, just south of Fez, off and on over the course of forty years. The book is divided into four biographies, which shed light on the changing culture of Morocco as Rosen hears firsthand from his subjects on how the country changed from a Sultanate, to a French colony, and finally to an independent nation. “Sefrou as their place, is experienced differently and indeed differentially by each, yet all recognize it as vital to who they are. Located fifteen miles south of Fez on the edge of the Middle Atlas Mountains, it has grown from a small city of 3,000 (half of them Jewish) before the turn of the twentieth century, to some 25,000 when [Rosen] arrived in the mid-1960s, to some 80,000 at present.” The first biography is of Haj Hamed Britel, who born in the late 19th century, had been raised under the Sultanate. The Sultan held his grip on power by moving his capital routinely between Fez, Marrakech, Meknes, and Rabat, while appointing caids to administer local affairs on his behalf. He had to balance a world of tribal intrigues and  multiple discordant webs of characters. Moroccan history is defined not by events and the passage of time, but by personalities and connections. For Haj, “causation was always traced to some sentient being- to God, a person, an animal, or a spirit; things do not so much make things happen.” The Moroccan identity is composed of a man and his relationships. Moroccans see society as held together by a series of knots, like a loom, and disorder (fitna) occurs when these bonds of obligation break down. Members of different tribes would often seal agreements by trading one another their turbans in a show of trust and respect. There would also have to be a balance of power in society, modulated by an ever-changing web of alliances. An Arab saying is, “certitude divides, uncertainty unites.”

The next Arab in Rosen’s study is Yaghnik Driss, a man with one foot in Sefrou and one in Fez, where his father was born. “For Moroccans the place from which one originates conveys much more than mere geography: it says a great deal about the customs one employs in dealing with others, the expectations one harbors about others, and that whole complex of everyday habits- from the smallest item of politesse to the implications of a turn of phrase for one’s religious sensibilities.” Time is all relative, because “the Quran does not use time as the predominant vehicle for revealing truth. Instead we are shown aspects of things, facets of people, angles of situations…. The word for knowledge is the second most frequently used word in the Quran after the name of God.” Culture and religion are intimately tied. It is posited that bargaining is so important, because “the Prophet himself is said to have bargained with God as to the requisite number of daily prayers, ultimately getting Him down from fifty to just five.” Islam also creates an oral culture- the  tradition is that, for the most learned, the Quran is memorized, recited, and inscribed in their heart. What is not explicitly forbidden by the Quran is not only permitted, but becomes an integral part of the whole culture of localized Islam. “The powerfully inclusive mentality of Islam allows local variation as Islam, not as something in contradistinction to it, a fact that has no doubt contributed to its spread into many parts of the world.”

The Berber described in the book is Hussein ou Muhammad Qadir, a merchant whose fortunes dramatically rose during the course of Rosen’s time with him. The Berbers saw themselves as the original Moroccans, maintained their own language, and tended to live in the rural areas of the Atlas Mountains. Today, even with intermarriage prevalent, over 45% of Moroccans speak Berber as well as Arabic. Berbers, although tribal, always maintained both social and business ties with Arabs and, particularly, Jews within their communities. A common Moroccan proverb is, “Your neighbor who is close is more important then your kinsman who is far away.” In Berber communities, ties and relationships are also paramount. Often times one has to travel far and wide up and down unfamiliar countryside selling sheep and other wares, so Berbers rely on trust and trade to make money and travel safely. “Corruption is the failure to share with those whom you have formed ties of dependence whatever largesse comes your way…. Corruption is our form of democracy…. If some big man says do such and such, but I can pay someone below him not to do it, is that not a check on the big man’s power? And isn’t democracy all about keeping big men from having too much power over you?”

Shimon Benizri is the Jew of Rosen’s study, a man who viewed himself equally as both Arab and Jew, even after the ramifications of the War of 1967 eventually forced him to abandon Morocco for a new home in Israel. Jews had lived in some numbers in Morocco since Phoenician times, another influx arriving with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, and yet many more immigrating after their expulsion from Andalusia in 1492. They tended to live on caravan routes and relied on a local Berber or Arab big man for protection within their community and in dealing with other traders. They survived and prospered, despite the occasional pogroms and the jizya tax they had to pay to the Sultan as unbelievers. Jews were allowed to elect their own internal leader, the Nagid, who dealt with local authorities and established internal security within each city’s Mellah, the ghetto. During World War II, Jews in Morocco were explicitly protected from both the Nazis and the Vichy French. The Sultan himself reportedly told the Axis powers, “I in no way approve of the new anti-Semitic laws and I refuse to be associated with any measure of which I disapprove. I wish to inform you that, as in the past, the Jews remain under my protection and I refuse to allow any distinction to be made among my subjects.” Eventually, however, after the creation of Israel, the numerous Arab wars, and Morocco’s own independence, 90% of Moroccan Jews fled to Israel and, by the time of Benizris’ arrival, one in every six Jews in Israel was actually from Morocco. Rosen’s book is an attempt to capture the history of Morocco by looking back from today’s time of increasing urbanization, modernization, and globalization. Today, “the urban corridor that runs from Kenitra through Rabat and Casablanca to El Jedida, [is] where 61 percent of the nation’s urban population, 80 percent of its permanent jobs, and 53 percent of its tourism are to be found.” With this massive internal migration social bonds are fraying and traditional mores are fading. “Moroccans…. commonly inquire as to one another’s asel, the place of one’s “origins,” that supplies both the sources of one’s knowledge and the conventions used to form attachments to others.” The book uses these four men as a lens to view different aspects of Moroccan culture that together form an intricately united web. Rosen seeks to hold dignity to the North African saying, “when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”

“Covenant and Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption” by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

This is the second book in a series of essays on the Torah. He recounts the parashas in the Book of Exodus and gives interpretations for what they might mean for a modern life. The fundamental difference between Genesis and Exodus is the transformation of the Jewish people from a family into a nation. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph were family patriarchs, leaders of their family, whereas Moses became the leader of a people, their prophet, and Aaron, their priest. Sacks offers opinions on quandaries such as the meaning of prayer in the modern age, abortion rights, the 2008 financial crisis, and even cloning.  Some themes that repeat throughout his interpretations of the parashas are that all men alike are supposed to be learned- literate and knowledgable about the law, that doubt and missteps are often hidden opportunities that can have an illuminating effect, and that outside appearances are often deceiving, so it is most important to judge a man by his presence within. Sacks speaks to themes of morality and character that arise from a Jewish interpretation of Scripture, but that all men can profit from.

“The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt

This is a book about the foundations of moral psychology. Although its basis is psychological principles, it moves beyond the individual human mind. It relies heavily on concepts brought in from evolutionary biology, philosophy, and sociology. Morals are something that evolved over time to help the human species survive. They are foremost intuitive, with the reasoning behind them often happening post hoc. Haidt separates morals into six oppositional matrices: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/domination. Humans, to some degree or another, judge other humans by how their actions conform to these principles.

Humans are intrinsically social animals. Even though evolutionarily we have been bred to be selfish (on the genetic level at least), through group selection humans have also evolved to cooperate well in groups. Those humans that were able to form successful groups beyond kinship bonds were able to out compete other groups and, therefore, their genes multiplied. Haidt posits that in that way we are ninety percent ape and ten percent bee. Unlike our ape relatives, humans are alone among primates in being able to convey shared intentionality. This created a common understanding amongst the group and an ability to punish deviants who strayed from group norms.

Genetic and cultural evolution also reacted with each other over generations to breed a more social human. “Our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness, carried on even into adulthood.” It is useless to look for the positive aspects of religion on an individual level just as it would be useless to look at the actions of an individual bee without relation to its hive. Religion acted as a way to create social ties far beyond kinship networks. It engendered trust between strangers, created group cohesion, and was effective in punishing free riders. This book looks at human morality descriptively, not normatively. It does not hope for the dawning of a new moral man, but looks at how humans have actually evolved over the centuries and how their evolving moral compass has helped them achieve reproductive success. 

“Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” by Adam Phillips

This is billed as a biography of Freud’s early years as part of the Jewish Lives series, but it could just as easily be seen as the biography of the invention of psychoanalysis. Freud first used the term in 1896 and the description, the “talking cure” was coined by one of his patient’s soon after. Freud saw psychoanalysis as a way of sifting through and interpreting the facts of one’s life. As he said, “the facts in psychoanalysis have a habit of being rather more complicated than we like.” That we is rather ambiguous. It could refer to the patient, to the analyst, or, most probably, to both. Freud both wanted to dig for what was buried beneath the surface in a life and to see life’s apparent events in a fresh light. Phillips contends that Freud “will show us how ingenious we are at not knowing ourselves, and how knowing ourselves- or the ways in which we have been taught to know ourselves, not least through the conventions of biography and autobiography- has become the problem rather than the solution.” Freud never trusted biography. He felt it was bound to say more about the proclivities of the author than the subject. In any case, public stories are always the most fictionalized. And so, Philips smirkishly warns us that maybe we should take this whole project with a grain of salt. “From a psychoanalytic point of view modern people were as much the survivors of their history as they were the makers of it. We make histories so as not to perish of the truth…. Our fears of the external world are second only to our fears of the internal world of memory and desire.” Self-knowledge abuts upon self-experience and often one transforms the other (or both). The interruptions in life are most often the most meaningful parts of it. “Partly because the past so insistently informs the present- our seeing the present in terms of the past is what [Freud] will call “transference”- but also because our reconstructions of the past are inspired by our desires for, and fears about, the future.” The truths are revealed in the repetitions in people’s lives. The things that they could not help but avoid getting away from, despite themselves. “People grow into their past more than they grow out of it.”

Humans are social animals. People need each other, but that is also what breeds their discontentment. “If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us. The source of pleasure is the source of pain.” Modern civilization only intensifies these feelings. “Originality is trying to be like everyone else and failing…. Originality and assimilation are inextricable.” There is always a pull and a push between the Self and Society. “Freud’s seemingly unconscious assumption that other people were a threat to the specialness of the self, not that the specialness of the self was itself the greater threat would turn out to be one of the (ultimately controversial and divisive) foundations of psychoanalysis.” Was it the public or private Self that one could never escape from? Adapting to one’s culture led to “the individual’s inescapable difference from himself; the double life of who one wants to be, and to be seen as, and the other person one keeps being.” After all, what was a cure but that which society expects one to be?

Dreams bridge the past, the present, and the future. “The dreamer tells himself secrets at night about what he wants (like an informer, spying on his past; and particularly on the unmet needs of his past.)” Everyone is an artist in his dreams. The past is never real. It is subjective, a telling of tales weaved to resemble some notion of reality. “After all, what could a history of one’s life be, but a history of one’s needs and wants, and the inevitable conflicts around them?” Each human is lost in a hostile world. Life is “what one makes of what one is forced by.” Dreams are the language we are trained to forget. They are the language of the forbidden. “The forbidden was too disturbing because it was too alluring.” The dream was always addressed to the dreamer. “The dream, like the joke, reveals people, from a psychoanalytic point of view, to be in hiding; consciously in hiding from disapproving others, but unconsciously in hiding from themselves. Or rather, in hiding from the part of themselves that has wanted to fully identify with the hostile, oppressing voices in their culture…. This too Freud was beginning to discover: how thorough and destructive socialization can be.” Modernity required a certain kind of self-defense in the individual, a mask from reality. “Freud was discovering how modern people endangered themselves by the ways in which they protected themselves. Each of the so-called mechanisms of defense was an unconscious form of self-blinding; ways of occluding a piece of reality.” The stories we believe are the stories we need to survive. “The Romantic myth of the suffering artist has been transformed, by Freud, into the story of everyone.” If science is about the search for truth, is psychoanalysis a search for fictions or a debunking of myths? For Freud, there was always a search for respectability in his self-promotion of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was to be the rational method for examining the irrational. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance” by Daisy Hay

This book is a joint biography of Benjamin Disraeli and his wife, Mary Anne. This is probably only of interest to fans of Victorian England, British politics, or the wives of political figures. Its new contribution is primarily showing Disraeli’s rise to power through the lens of his wife. It gives detail about the home life, backroom jockeying, and social responsibilities of an upperclass politician, who by necessity is always on the verge of debtor’s prison, living beyond his means. Its other area of originality is delving into Disraeli’s substantial literary career in depth.

“Battling the Gods” by Tim Whitmarsh

Whitmarsh argues that atheism did not begin with the Enlightenment thinkers, but had been around as a philosophy since before the Abrahamic religions. He points to the traditions of ancient Greece. As early as the mid-sixth century BC, Anaximander, shunning the traditional creation myths, believed that all life started in water, moved to land, and eventually evolved to become human. Xenophanes, describing the anthropomorphic nature of the Olympian gods, suggested, “now if cows, horses, or lions had hands, and were able to draw with those hands and create things as humans do, horses would draw gods in the form of horses, and cows in the form of cows, and create bodies just like they had.” Democritus founded the tradition of atomism, the belief that the entire universe was composed of tiny indestructible particles of matter amidst an empty void. Prodicus proposed that it was the first human inventors who were once viewed as gods, so that “they treated as gods those who discovered certain nourishing foodstuffs, so that the inventor of wine was worshipped as Dionysus, that of bread as Demeter, those of shipping as Castor and Pollux.” He stated emphatically, “the gods of popular belief do not exist, nor do they have knowledge.” 

In the classical period of Greece, playwrights like Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides poked fun at and indirectly questioned the gods’ existence. This had to be done in a circumspect fashion. After all, in classical Athens, Socrates had been condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the youth. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles has the chorus say, “if divine predictions do not come true, then the gods are not in control of the universe and what need is there to worship them?” In another play, Euripides has Heracles state, “I do not believe that the gods enjoy illicit unions, or that they chain each other up [in reference to the myth where Hephaestus catches his wife Aphrodite and Ares having an affair]; I do not think, nor will I ever be persuaded, that one god can be master over another. A god has no need of anything, if he is truly a god. These are the wretched tales of singers.” In another of his plays, Bellerophon, Euripides has the title character question, “I reckon that tyrants kill very many people and deprive them of their property and break their oaths to sack cities; and despite this they prosper more than those who live piously in peace every day. I know too of small cities that revere the gods which are subject to larger, more impious ones overcome as they are by a more numerous army.” 

In the later Hellenistic era, philosophy became even more of a direct rival to religiosity. The skeptic, Carneades, suggested it was impossible for the gods to be moral since to be moral you have to be capable of also doing wrong. He also questioned whether the gods could be just since, “a perfect god simply would not have the option of taking the unjust path.” Sextus, another skeptic, suggested, “the gods exist no more than they do not.” The Epicureans had a complicated relationship with the gods. Living just outside Athens following the trial of Socrates, it made sense for Epicurus to pretend to heed the common myths. However, most contemporaries regarded him as an atheist. The Hebrew word for atheist, apikoros, is derived from their word for Epicurean. In general, Epicureans moralized, “Gods did not create the universe, nor do they order it. We can understand nature only if we grasp the physical laws of the world. And when it comes to the way that human beings live their lives, we must take responsibility for all of our choices and not hide behind excuses of external compulsion.” Epicureans were also atomists and they squared away their reluctant belief in the gods by claiming that there were an infinite plurality of universes. 

Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean poet, described thus man’s relationship with the gods, “here is another thing that you should not possibly believe: that the sacred abodes of the gods exist in any part of the world. For the nature of the gods, which is super-fine and far removed from our senses, is dimly seen by the mind; and since it eludes the touch and pressure of the hands, it cannot touch anything that we can touch (for anything that cannot be touched cannot itself touch). For this reason, their abodes must be different to our abodes.” Another Roman, Lucian, was a cynic who used humor to poke fun at the concept of gods. He asked if the gods were all-powerful why did they need human offerings? And why were they so greedy as to seek vengeance on those humans who failed to sacrifice? In his play Lucian has Zeus worry, “if people are persuaded that there are no gods at all, or that we have no thought for humans, we shall go without sacrifices, presents, and honors on earth, and will sit idly in heaven beset by famine.” 

Whitmarsh expertly shows that atheism was not a modern invention, but was rife in ancient Greece and Rome. Although it was later obscured by the forceful rise of Christianity and only “rediscovered” by Enlightenment thinkers, there was always a tradition in the western world of thinkers who questioned the authority and existence of the gods.

“Phishing For Phools” by George Akerloff and Robert Shiller

I have rarely been so disappointed by a book with such a promising premise, written by two Nobel laureates. In the tradition of Kahneman (“Thinking, Fast and Slow”), Tversky, and Sunstein and Thaler (“Nudge”), these authors suggest, plausibly, that humans often do not do what is in their longterm best interests. They go on to posit that unscrupulous actors in the market are able to manipulate outcomes that serve their interests to the detriment of their clients and society at large. Unfortunately, when the authors get to examples such as junk food, credit default swaps, used cars, credit cards, and junk bonds they blame the “too free” market and not the selective enforcement of existing laws by the government. Most of their market failures would be solved by simply enforcing the laws of fraud already on the books. When actions are not illegal, such as high interest rates on payday loans, the authors apply great hubris to claim that even though actors reveal their wants through actions, these actions are not their true wants after all. It is as if the authors are unaware of or feel they are above the subjective valuation of individual actors interacting in a complex society. It is a slippery slope to a nanny state (or worse) where people are protected from themselves for their own good, of course.

“The Sellout” by Paul Beatty

This book is laugh out loud funny at many points, even when you know you shouldn’t be laughing. It has elements that are so far fetched, yet its main themes ring true. It is social commentary at heart, dressed in the most comic style. A novel about a black guy who surfs, was homeschooled by his suicide councilor/black power preaching/psychology professor dad alone (“my father said he never panicked when someone from the neighborhood tried to hang themselves, because, “for the life of them, black people can’t tie knots for shit.””), owns a farm in the middle of Los Angeles (“so I chose to specialize in the plant life that had the most cultural relevance to me- watermelon and weed.”), loves Kafka and quoting Latin (“semper fi, semper funky”), rides a horse around town, has a bus driving girlfriend who is married to a gangster rapper turned sitcom actor, and gets stuck owning a slave who used to be a child actor on the “Little Rascals” (“sometimes work consisted of donning a shiny pair of emerald green and pink silks, holding a gas lamp at arm’s length, and posing in my front yard as a life-size lawn jockey”) is not the most true to life plot scenario. The story holds together loosely, but the book is mainly a racial commentary dressed in joke after joke. It worked as a novel only because the pace of jokes was funny enough to sustain the action. The plot was ridiculous, but it never took itself too seriously, until the concluding twenty pages or so when it tried to wrap up with something to say. It makes one think of how far race relations have come in America and how far they still have to go. “Regardless of your income level, the old adage of having to be twice as good as the white man, half as good as the Chinese guy, and four times as good as the last Negro the supervisor hired before you still holds true.”