“Major Works on Religion and Politics” by Reinhold Niebuhr

Niebuhr is known to be President Obama’s favorite theologian-philosopher. It is easy to see why Niebuhr's writings can be claimed by both modern-day progressives and neoconservatives: he was an unabashed socialist, who believed in American exceptionalism and a muscular foreign policy. This collection, spanning the course of his life, from working as a pastor in Detroit to his time as a public intellectual in New York, shows the nuance in the development of his thoughts, as well as his bedrock principles, which remained constant. Particularly insightful are the essays where he expounds on the dichotomy of civil society versus the governmental State, the morality of the individual versus the morality of society (or lack there of), and on socialism versus Socialism (both of the State and Party varieties). He is most illuminating when he critiques those intellectual bedfellows who would seem closest to him.

“What is China?” by Ge Zhaoguang

This is a short, yet important, book, if for no other reason than it is one of only a few recent books written by a Chinese intellectual, still working in China, that has been translated into English. As such, this book gives the reader insight into how mainland Chinese see the breath of Chinese history, as well as the country’s place on the world stage today. Ge is a history professor, but he also delves into the culture and politics of what has made China China. However, as a historian, he begins by asking how has China been defined historically and how has that conception changed over its various dynasties, both as defined by the Chinese themselves and by the outsiders who have come into contact with “the Middle Kingdom.”

Ge realizes that both culturally and geographically what has been considered China has changed over the centuries. “From the third century BCE, when the Qin Shi Huangdi established a unified empire and used its official power to ensure that “all weights and measures were standardized, the gauge of wheeled vehicles was made uniform, and the writing system was standardized,” down to the second century BCE, when the Han dynasty “admired nothing other than Confucianism” in its philosophy but, in terms of its institutions, “took variously from the ways of the Lords Protector and the [ideal] kings” in its political system, a Chinese empire (Zhonghua diguo), relatively unified in terms of politics, culture, and language, had formed.” The peripheries of the empire might have shifted and its borders might have expanded, but from the Qin Shi Huangdi there arose a core to China. This core consisted of “the central region [that] has been relatively stable, becoming very early on a place with commonly recognized territory…. The cultural tradition based on Han culture, however, extended across time in this region, forming into a clear and distinct cultural identity and cultural mainstream…. Regardless of how [future] dynasties were established, they all believed that they were “China” or the “Middle Kingdom”…. The notion of All-under-Heaven, through which traditional culture imagined itself as the center of the world, and the tribute system, which depended on courtly ritual, also helped build up a [single] consciousness” of China.

For Ge, ““All-under-Heaven” is one family; its standard of identification is culture.” There is a China-centric particularism to the world that does not depend on geography. There is a tension between how China’s borders are understood in political and in cultural terms. There was always the historical fascination with “bringing the Four Barbarians into China (na si Yi ru Zhonghua),” even as the actual power of the state ebbed and flowed with each empire. The aim was expanding territory from the ethnically Han center out to the peripheries, while accepting other ethnic groups as part of a single Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). Even, “the abdication edict from the last Qing emperor in 1911 called for preserving the model of “Five Nations under One Republic” that “continued to preserve the complete territory of the five nations of Manchus, Han, Mongols, Hui, and Tibetans.””

Despite the coopting of multiple ethnicities, Ge claims that the core of Chinese culture has always been Han. This comprises “the use of Chinese characters (Han zi) to read and write, as well as the ways of thinking that are derived from Chinese characters…. The structure of family, clan, and state in ancient China…. The belief system of “three teachings in one.” In traditional China, “Buddhism was used to cultivate the mind, Taoism was used to extend life, and Confucianism was used to govern the world.”… No religion could supersede the secular power and authority of the emperor, and thus religions accommodated one another while remaining under a dominant political power…. [The] understandings of and interpretations of ideas about “the unity of Heaven and man” (Tian ren he yi) in the universe, the study of Yin and Yang and the Five Elements…. and finally [the concept] of All-under-Heaven, which was influenced by the cosmology of “round Heaven and square Earth.”” Ge does recognize cultural blending and convergence between the outsiders and the Han, crucially, in both directions. During the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties Han culture and Confucian primacy was particularly ascendant, whereas in the Yuan and Qing dynasties foreign ways were blended into Han orthodoxy.

External interactions have been paramount in defining how China sees itself and its place in the world. It has been colored by the Manchus conquering of the Ming Dynasty and establishing the Qin Dynasty, the West’s efforts at colonization of Asia, and by Japan’s grasping for Asian hegemony starting at the end of the nineteenth century. As the Chinese were forced to interact with outsiders beyond their neighboring barbarians within the tribute system, they were forced to acknowledge that the world was not centered around China. “As the status and power of the nation and state were diminished, the self-consciousness of the nation and state grew ever stronger.”

In the present day, Ge feels that China has ambitions to unite the cultural Chinese across the globe, while taking its place as a central leader on the world stage once again. ““Grand unification” has been a political ideal, some might even say a dream, throughout Chinese history…. Because China was bullied by both East Asian and Western countries in the early modern period, none of its rulers can accept the ignominy of losing sovereignty or giving up territory…. China’s idea of itself as a ruler of All-under-Heaven (Tianxia ba zhu) meant at most that it was a “suzerain” (gong zhu) state of the Asia region…. China is a state that is formed on the basis of culture, and feels that it is important to defend the idea of a great multinational state that has existed since the Han and Tang dynasties and was exemplified in the Qing-dynasty ideal of “spreading virtue in four directions” across vast territories…. China is also eager to show that its culture is the representative of Eastern culture.”

“Trick” by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

This short novel is narrated by an Italian widower finagled by his daughter into traveling back to his old home in Naples to babysit his grandson. The old man is a once famous artist who now keeps busy illustrating books. As the novel progresses one can sense the narrator has not aged well. He is now unconfident in both his art and his life. “For a few moments I felt like an insignificant part of a long process of disintegration, a scale soon destined to join the organic and inorganic matter solidifying since the Paleozoic era on the ground and at the bottom of the sea.” Snooping through his dead wife’s papers, he found that she had been cuckolding him for years. The narrator moves about gingerly, as if each new step could spell disaster. He is old and proud, yet he knows that time has passed him by. “Fashions, I thought, sadly, wear out, leaving behind the futile traces of those who upheld them.” His grandson gives him all he can handle. He is rambunctious, bordering on bratty. Yet, in time, the narrator almost seems to crave the four-year-old’s approval. The grandson becomes both his rival and his glimpse to a path not taken. Starnone is at his best when he describes the specificity of Naples in detail. The narrator can still speak in dialect, but it almost seems false to him. “But the Neopolitan that was spoken in Vasto, at the Pendino, at the Market— the neighborhoods where I was raised, and before that my father and grandparents and great-grandparents, maybe all my ancestors put together—didn’t know the word ire, the wrath of Achilles and others who lived in books. They only knew ‘a raggia, rage.” Instead of becoming a street tough or a degenerate gambler like his father, he has become an effeminate artist. But he still has a part of the old city within him. This is a story about an old man trying to come to terms with the importance of his legacy and the futility of his remaining days.

“Border Districts” by Gerald Murnane

This is a novel that any writer would love. It is fundamentally about the process of thinking, the images that one pictures in the mind, and the memories that the brain recalls. “I have learned to trust the promptings of my mind, which urges me sometimes to study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish.” The novel’s narrator is a writer, as well as a deep thinker, perhaps, even, a philosopher. The ebbs and flows of internal thought are tremendous. “I supposed the endless-seeming landscapes of my own thoughts and feelings must have been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites where others located their selves or their personalities or whatever they called their mental territories.” There are thoughts wrapped in thoughts wrapped in memory. The narrator describes the craft and process of writing the very book he is supposedly writing. He is full of asides and tangents that flow to where his thoughts and memories happen to take him. He digresses and circles back around to conclude or clarify a point made in previous pages. “The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands.” I am not sure if this novel is supposed to be memoir disguised as fiction or fiction disguised as memoir. The details of the narrator’s life certainly mimic the experiences of Murnane. “I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.” This novel definitely engages with the reader’s mind and forces one to grapple with one’s own conception of the world, one’s mental constructs, with one’s own faulty memory, and with the experience of life itself.

“Lightening Rods” by Helen DeWitt

This novel is humorous and raunchy. Some of the jokes are so sly you don’t quite know whether she really means them to be funny at all. The protagonist, Joe, has had an unsuccessful career as a salesman- both trying to sell Encyclopedia Brittanica’s and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. He fantasizes while he masturbates everyday after work in his trailer. And that’s what leads him to his great innovation. He thinks of all the companies that have had problems with over-eager, go-getter-type salesmen, who inevitably get the firm into trouble with sexual harassment suits. The companies want to keep the sales, while avoiding expensive litigation. Therefore, Joe starts up a company, Lightening Rods, which is a temp firm that hires personal assistants who on the side offer anonymous sex in the handicap bathroom stall. The path is initially rocky, but eventually rewarding. On the way to success, Joe ends up inventing toilets that go up and down to help out dwarfs, as well as toilet seats that expand and contract to help the obese and the skinny. One of his personal assistant hires goes on to become a Supreme Court Justice, while two others have successful careers in business. The book is complete farce, but with a thin veneer of social commentary. The story moves along at a brisk pace and Joe’s side thoughts are worth the read in and of themselves. DeWitt has a knack for portraying characters who should seem ludicrous in a highly realistic light. No matter how farcical, she does not skimp on developing their personalities and quirks to make them human. She says she developed the idea of a lightening rod when she got repeatedly fucked in the ass by the publishing industry during the travails of her first novel. This is revenge at its humorous best. This is no “Last Samurai”, but it is an entertaining read.

“On Dreams” by Sigmund Freud

This is a short book concerning Freud’s method for interpreting dreams. Freud states that dreams and their contents are not known to our consciousness. In that way dreams share qualities of phobias and obsessions. However, dreams can be analyzed for their deeper meanings. Freud feels that dreams are “a sort of substitute for the thought processes, full of meaning and emotion.” However, the contents of each dream is much shorter than the thoughts for which they are a substitute. The manner in which the latent content of a dream is transformed into its manifest content Freud has coined as the process of “dream work”. Because this process disguises the latent information in dreams it makes the nature of dreams outwardly unintelligible and confused. 

The simplest dreams, children’s dreams, are often undisguised wish fulfillments. Sometimes this takes place in fulfilled reversals. When a disagreeable experience happens in real life, the dream will later represent the opposite scenario. Dreams also condense thoughts. Combinations of different persons are often combined into a single representative figure, designed to connect or compare the two separate individuals. “Just as connections lead from each element of the dream to several dream thoughts, so as a rule a single dream thought is represented by more than one dream element; the threads of association do not simply converge from the dream thoughts to the dream content, they cross and interweave with each other many times over the course of their journey.” The manifest dream content is invariably quite different from the latent thoughts. In fact, the dream content is always subservient to the role of the dream thought. “It is often an indistinct element which turns out to be the most direct derivative of the essential dream thought…. The more obscure and confused a dream appears to be, the greater share in its construction which may be attributed to the factor of displacement.” Freud believes that every dream, without exception, goes back to impressions of only a few days, most often the day immediately preceding the dream. Dreams are always of import and never concerned with trivialities, if we dig deep enough into their latent content. “It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or recognize the dream thoughts in the dream content, unless we understand the reason for their distortion." The dream thoughts are disguised as symbols by means of similes and metaphors, images representing poetic speech. “The manifest content of dreams consists for the most part in pictorial situations; and the dream thoughts must accordingly be submitted in the first place to a treatment which will make them suitable for a representation of this kind…. Absurdity in a dream signifies the presence in the dream thoughts of contradiction, ridicule, and derision…. No dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones.” Finally, all dreams that are produced in a single night will derive from the same circle of thoughts when they are analyzed deeply enough.

The “dream work” is never creative. It develops no fantasies of its own. It makes no judgements and draws no conclusions. It merely transforms through condensation and displacement, using pictorial forms. When one digs deep enough into latent thoughts one invariably finds thoughts that are both alien and disagreeable to the conscious mind. “There is a causal connection between the obscurity of the dream content and the state of repression.” Freud posits that in a state of sleep censorship of the mind is relaxed. Dreams are often quickly forgotten upon waking because “when the state of sleep is over, the censorship quickly recovers full strength; and it can now wipe out all that was won from it during the period of weakness…. [However, sometimes] a fragment of the dream content which had seemed to be forgotten reemerges. This fragment which has been rescued from oblivion invariably affords us the best and most direct access to the meaning of the dream.” Dreams exist to help us sleep. In fact, dreams are guardians of sleep. “The dream provides a kind of psychical consummation for the wish that has been suppressed (or formed with the help of repressed material) by representing it as fulfilled; but it also satisfies the other agency by allowing sleep to continue.”

Freud also contends that most dreams are about sex. “Analysis proves that a great many of the thoughts left over from the activity of waking life as “residues of the previous day” only find their way to representation in dreams through the assistance of repressed erotic wishes…. Infantile sexual wishes provide the most frequent and strongest motive forces for the construction of dreams…. The material of the sexual ideas must not be represented as such, but must be replaced in the content of the dream by hints, allusions, and similar forms of indirect representation.” For Freud, a banana is never just a banana. “There are some symbols which bear a single meaning almost universally: thus the Emperor and Empress (or the King and Queen) stand for the parents, rooms represent women and their entrances and exits the openings of the body. The majority of dream symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested in erotic interest.” Freud believes these symbols are not created by the “dream work”, but are taken from cultural artifacts such as myths, fairytales, and jokes. In the world of dreams, nothing is as it first seems.

“From The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” by Pankaj Mishra

Mishra begins with Japan’s destruction of the Russian Navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. It was the first time a Western power had been defeated by an Asiatic power in a major battle since the Middle Ages. The news was applauded as far afield as India by Gandhi and America by W.E.B. DuBois as a blow against white colonial power. Mishra goes on to survey a wide breadth of the story of colonialism in Asia, its reversals, and its remnants. He tells the forgotten biography of Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghnai, a man who influenced the revolution in Iran, the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, modern salafists, other pan-Islamists and pan-Arab nationalists alike. He was the first scholar who saw Islam and the West as diametrically opposed, preceding Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” by decades. He called out Islamic rulers, from the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire to the Shah of Iran, for their retrograde ways. He also called out western powers for their hypocrisy in extolling liberty and freedom at home, while behaving as despots above the law abroad. He was convinced Islam needed its own Reformation (and that he was Islam’s answer to Luther). At times, he preached the need for tolerance, the need for Muslim/Hindu unity, and the virtues of science and modern learning. At the same time, he decried mimicry of the West, which would lead to false admiration of and dominance by colonial powers.

Mishra also shines a light on China through the lens of Liang Qichao. Liang was from the Confucian scholar tradition and at first only a modest reformer, who wanted to reinvigorate the Manchu Dynasty. By the end, however, he became a fervent anti-Manchu, while still sensing that the Chinese peasantry was not ready for western democracy. His democracy was not individualist, but aligned with a common good for all. In his years exiled in Japan he had become impressed with the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s efforts to modernize, selectively westernize, and build an identity as a collective nation-state. Foremost, he argued that the accumulation and centralization of capital was the only defense China had against the encroachments of the West.

In India, Rabindranath Tagore was similarly skeptical of wholesale westernization. He worried that uncritical mimicry would lead to the dehumanization of the soul. He extolled a return to Indian peasant ways and towards the spirituality of the ancient East. But he also dismissed the caste system and other mysticisms of Hinduism. He believed self-regeneration began in the simple village life. Tagore thought the ideas of the Western enlightenment, individualism, and the glory of the nation would lead to man devoid of his inner worth. He felt the West, itself, was becoming subsumed by its own materialism and cautioned countries like Japan and China with trying to catch up to western wealth and status on the West’s own terms. Visiting New York, he conceded, “the age belongs to the West and humanity must be grateful to you for your science, [but] you have exploited those who are helpless and humiliated those who are unfortunate with this gift.”

Mishra ends by describing Turkey as an example that in many ways has succeeded in modernizing with its own blend of Islamic culture and westernization. Ataturk brutally suppressed Islamic tendencies for a time, eliminating the Caliphate, forbidding the headscarf, and replacing Arabic with the Turkish language, but a current of Islam was always bubbling below the surface, particularly in the heartland of Anatolia. Erdogan and the AKP have successfully harnessed this nascent sentiment. The West would do well to embrace Turkey as a full-fledged member of its community rather than to look on it as a second-class uncouth brother unfit for a seat at the grownup table, like the West treated Meiji Japan.

“The Edge of the World” by Michael Pye

Pye details the rise and fall of the three main powers of the medieval North Sea: the Frisians, the Vikings, and the Hanseatic League. It is no surprise that all three made their livings on the sea, as the lands in which they inhabited were so inhospitable for much of the year. Pye makes the case that the harsh conditions of the region led to an independent peoples who led modernizing innovations in seafaring, writing, architecture, governmental institutions, weaponry, gender roles, and the creation of money which were then adopted throughout the rest of Europe.

Pye posits that the North Sea’s development was every bit as essential to the development of Western civilization as its well studied compatriot the Mediterranean. Pye is at his most compelling when making the case for the economic development of the West and, particularly, of international trade. Pye posits that because the land abutting the North Sea was often so inhospitable and under threat, with the water often reclaiming the land along with homes and entire communities, that the people who chose to settle these backwaters were often left alone by the great powers of the day- the Roman Empire and its bastard heir “The Holy Roman Empire.” Within this milieu, inventions were allowed to develop and grow without a central authority- chief among them paper money, printed books and written ledgers for accounting, and seafaring science and technology. 

Chronologically, Pye details the rise and subsequent fall of the three great North Sea cultures the Frisians, the Vikings, and the Hanseatic League of free city-states. Pye, more importantly, details the remnants of those cultures that outlasted the societies themselves, most often through extended and prodigious trade. He does not gloss over the sometimes brutal and warlike nature of the people who inhabited the outskirts of the world, but convincingly refutes the myth that they were mere plunderers and not innovators too. He details law that evolved naturally so that trading strangers could resort to contracts and tort claims through information-disseminating institutions used to shun those who reneged on their word. It is no coincidence that the first stock market in Amsterdam grew from the joint-trading institutions of the Hanseatic League. Pye also makes a powerful case for the polycentric order that developed- where people had recourse to multiple competing and overlapping sources of institutional order from kinship bonds, religious affiliations, commercial relations, and community formations from small villages to larger cities that could unite or divide as the particular situation saw fit. Pye describes the village of Helgo, near modern day Stockholm, that predated even the Viking societies of 800 AD, where in was found buried a bronze ladle from Egypt and a gold Buddha covered with a fine embroidered cloak from Kashmir. These men might have lived on the edge of the world, but by no means were they your typical country bumpkins.

“The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov (translated by Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O'Connor)

Bulgakov’s novel is full of mysticism, fantasy, and religion. The plot is mostly set in pre-Great Patriotic War communist Moscow. There is much mystery and more than a little devilish magic. Ten ruble notes turn into worthless scraps of paper and back into money again. A large black cat walks on his hind legs and pours himself glasses of vodka, while playing chess. Pigs fly and buildings burst into flames. The Devil plays a proponent role in the story, as he befuddles a bevy of Muscovites and causes mischief and worse all around the city. And, somewhat even more enchanting, Bulgakov has written a novel within his novel, which depicts the details around the last days of Jesus, after his condemnation by Pontus Pilate. Bulgakov’s story skips around from character to character, but is linked by the mayhem caused by the Devil and his crew of wicked subordinates. The mysterious Master is introduced to the reader as an inmate in an insane asylum, who has abandoned his lover Margarita. There is dark humor throughout the book. The scene shifts to a mysterious underworld where a monkey band plays jazz, skeletons turn to men dressed in tuxedos, and polar bears mingle with naked ladies swimming in pools of brandy, before the story returns to biblical Judea and Moscow. As Margarita says, “it’s not everyday you meet up with an evil power!”

“One Way and Another” by Adam Phillips

Phillips is truly the master of the essay. Whether primarily about psychoanalysis, literature, or just the quirks of life, he combines pithy epigrams, keen observations, and beyond-the-surface commentary in a succinct and funny way. His essays allow him to ramble, to meander, and to explore a subject, while always circling back to the heart of the matter, in a thoroughly enlightening trip. In this collection of essays Phillips writes deeply about the craft of analysis and the process of psychoanalysis, while referencing the points of view of both the analyst and the analysand. He quotes Freud on the unconscious, “everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable.” He discusses the theory of the Self, “one’s history, of course, never begins with oneself.” On the subjectivity of memory, “memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience.” On childhood, “every child grows up in the climate of his parents’ mostly unconscious history.” On the Self as seen by the Other, “other people see us in ways that we cannot anticipate; we cannot know ourselves because we cannot be everyone else in relation to ourselves.” On self-betrayal, “people who believe too much in compromise believe too much in not getting what they want.” On the purpose of dreaming, “awake or asleep we do not want to be awakened to, or by, our wishes, the wishes that represent our unconscious forbidden desire. Dreams just help us to stay asleep when we are asleep.” On our ideals, “we are tyrannized by our picture of ourselves as we would prefer to be; we organize our lives around it.” On the nature of our preoccupations, “our preoccupations are the way our pasts go in search of a future.” On the role of accidents in interpreting life, “it may not be that all accidents are meaningful, but that meaning is made out of accidents.” On imagining one’s inhibitions, “if we can’t to some extent imagine it- whether consciously or unconsciously- we wouldn’t know not to do it, or how to go about avoiding doing it.” On what failing in life actually means, “to fail at one thing is to succeed at another.” Each essay muses on a different subject matter, but the book is held together by the process of exploring the Self as a continual project that may or may not be helped through analysis. He does not judge and hopes the reader does not judge either.