Comprehending the self and its states of being in Being And Nothingness

From The Week of April 20th, 2014

Who we are, and defining how we fit into the world in which we find ourselves, has been a problem preoccupying philosophers for thousands of years. In millennia past, where human understanding of science - particularly biology and physics -, was poor, it was an unanswerable question. After all, how can the self be understood without any conception of neurology? But even as the steady march of progress endows us with knowledge the ancient Greeks could've only dreamed of, the debate continues. Can we truly be reduced to component parts? Can all of our memories and emotions, our actions and our insights, be summed up in neurological code? Or do the desires and the motivations of a conscious being extend beyond science and into realms both theological and psychoanalytical? It may be many more centuries before proof removes these questions from the argumentation of philosophy, but in the meantime some of our greatest minds will continue the discussion in hopes of answers. Being And Nothingness is Jean-Paul Sartre's contribution.

Being and Nothingness is a defining work of Existentialism, a philosophical movement that seeks to characterize the human experience as a subjective amalgam of consciousness, emotions and actions. Existentialism contends that humans are, as far as we know, unique in that we have both existence, defined as awareness of self, and essence, defined as existence as an object - a human is a human in the same way as a table is a table. Because we are endowed with self-awareness, we can make choices in ways objects cannot. And if we can make choices, then it follows that we are profoundly free in ways objects cannot be. We are individuals, enslaved to no will but our own. We can fulfil our desires, obtain knowledge, achieve our goals, all without subjecting ourselves to anyone else's definition or mastery.

Being and Nothingness further refines this idea by laying out Sartre's key components of Existential existence: Being For Itself - awareness of self and of the world around us -, Being In Itself - the object that we are, the physical human form -, and Being For Others - the subjective and objective selves that we put forward for public consumption. He argues that to be conscious is to be free, to act, to choose, but that this freedom is refined and reduced by not only our own actions but the regard of others. For when other conscious beings look at us, they objectify us. We become a thing in their reality just as they become a thing in ours. These tensions are deepened by what Sartre calls Bad Faith, the tendency of conscious beings to objectify themselves, to squander their freedom by reducing themselves to form and function. This struggle, the subjective with the objective, the Being For Itself with the Being In Itself, he argues, damages us, defeats us, in ways profound and disturbing.

A dense, 630-page treatise on the nature of consciousness and social interaction, Being And Nothingness is, despite its length and its complexity, a statement about the nature of personal responsibility. Mired in the midst of an ugly war in which Mr. Sartre not only witnessed many of his countrymen willingly surrender to the Nazis, but found himself imprisoned by the Third Reich, the famous philosopher had a great deal of experience with the complexities and difficulties of personal choice. These experiences lie heavily on this work, charging it with a kind of pessimism about human nature that seems both understandable and tragic.

And yet, the Second World War acts as a kind of proof for Sartre's key insight here, that humans continuously squander their freedom by suborning themselves to either their own weaknesses or to the power of others. How else to explain not only the millions who senselessly died in the absurdity of WWII, but the equally numerous excuses that poured out from the survivors, excuses that either sought to justify their inaction in the face of Hitler's society of hate or sought to play down their role in it.

Excuses have no place in a life lived well. Consciousness either endows us with freedom or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we are slaves to our genes and none of this matters. But if we are free, then we are completely responsible for our choices. We may choose well; we may choose badly, but we can choose. Even a prisoner, stripped of all dignity, all physical freedom, can choose how to endure his or her deprivation. To excuse away our choices is to reduce ourselves to objects. It is to claim that we are not free, that something or someone else rules us, defines us. And to do that is to become nothing more than a table.

This is an insight as fascinating as it is powerful. It endows the individual with total responsibility while giving him or her nowhere to escape to when matters go against them. It compels the individual to live a life of honesty, both with the world and with the self, that must foster both consistency of action and authenticity of being that would be both welcome and rewarding.

And yet, this is harsh. For it leaves little room for what seems to me an understandable, and justifiable, distinction between reasons and excuses. The success and failure of our actions are often determined by circumstances beyond our control. Uncovering those circumstances and incorporating them into the justifications for our choices seems reasonable. And yet, it is almost impossible to define when these justifications descend into the realm of excusemaking. This is not just a slippery slope. It's a slippery slope in the midst of a darkness so complete we don't know we're even on the slippery slope. Making some accommodation for this weakness in our cognitive character seems warranted.

Which is why Being And Nothingness feels incomplete. Yes, once one gets past the stuffiness and the headache-inducing defining of terms and conditions, is inarguably potent manifesto for human responsibility which, many would argue, is the perfect tonic for our age. But it is also too much of its time. It is drenched in a kind of grim certainty that must, at least in part, stem from one of the darkest, most violent periods in human history. It argues for a doom that does not seem appropriate for a more peaceful age, one in which the self is not under constant siege. It feels as though Mr. Sartre was looking for an analytical cure for the helplessness that anyone would feel in the midst of colossal warfare and that states of being in conflict with one another was the result.

As difficult as it is insightful... (3/5 Stars)

Petraeus, Counterinsurgency and the new US military in The Insurgents

From The Week of July 29th, 2013

There is no activity with which humanity has more familiarity than war. From the earliest tribes to present-day superpowers, it has been practiced so ubiquitously that it has defined the destinies of virtually every culture we've ever created. And yet, for all this expertise, we are, by and large, miserable, shortsighted wielders of the discipline, profoundly trapped by our biases of the enemy, an overinflated sense of our own martial past, and a rigid adherence to structure and tradition that eschews the bold in favor of the safe. Perhaps, in times past, when men like Alexander the Great could rise out of relative obscurity to conquer half the world, these afflictions were surmountable by the all-but-divine will of a single man, but in this age of massive armies and technological warfare, there is little room remaining for individual geniuses to operate and affect both their futures and those of the nations to which they've sworn fealty. Still, some will try. And Fred Kaplan has, here, chronicled at length the most famous of these revolutionaries.

The son of a librarian and a sea captain, David Petraeus has lived a remarkable life. From 1974 until his retirement from military service in 2011, he served the US Army with distinction, holding numerous commands both domestically, in the training of special forces, and overseas, in hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But though, by all reports, he was a relentlessly driven soldier with a legendary work ethic and capacity to endure punishment, he is best known for his defining role in championing the doctrine of Counterinsurgency, or COIN, which is credited with having helped to empower the Sunni Awakening of 2007 in Iraq which changed the fortunes of that doomed war dramatically, permitting the United States military to deal a devastating blow to Al-Qaeda and their allies. Though his application of COIN in Afghanistan would be less successful, it would do little to tarnish the reputation of this new, intellectually driven form of warfare.

Technology has forever changed our world and this is no more true than for the practice of war. Terrorism has empowered non-state actors, giving them the ability to stand up to much larger nations, at least for a time. Successfully eliminating these insurgent groups would require very different tactics than those nations have traditionally used. The holder of three degrees, David Petraeus believed so deeply in this consequential shift that he devoted his career to compelling the US Army to evolve, to be smaller, trimmer and smarter. After years in the wilderness, after having his reforms blocked by generals and defense secretaries uninterested in coloring outside the lines, he and several key allies both military and civilian, successfully agitated for a new approach to 21st-century warfare, one that relied upon cultivating the trust of leaders in the warzones in question and using those contacts to uproot the enemies hiding in their midst. And though ambition, along with a scandalous affair, would eventually doom his career, his disgrace would come long after he'd left his scholarly mark upon one of the world's most rigid institutions.

The Insurgents is a thorough, well-paced, and engrossing examination of the Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the men and women who fought for it in the face of stiff resistance from well-entrenched traditionalists eager to ignore the evolution of modern warfare. Mr. Kaplan, an author and journalist, uses David Petraeus' career as a focus, a touchstone from which he can cast a wide net that captures not only COIN and its impact on the United States' most recent wars, but the shambolic manner in which the US military is run. Given how infrequently the US military has been defeated, this would appear to be an absurd claim. And yet, this organization suffers from the kind of institutional rot present in all bloated organizations, a decay that results from the self-interested motivations of powerful individuals within the organization who, because they cannot be sure of their place in a changing environment, resist such change with all their might. One need only look at the manner in which the Iraq War was justified and then prosecuted to understand the shattering, real-world consequences of such stubbornness.

As much as the US military comes off poorly here, let it not be said that Mr. Kaplan is in the bag for David Petraeus and his famous doctrine. Quite the contrary. The author is clearly sceptical of the degree to which COIN influenced the outcome of the Iraq War. And he's wise to be. For it seems almost impossible to separate COIN's impact from the abject misery of local Iraqis who, having finally had enough of being victimized by thuggish Al-Qaeda, rebelled against them and, with the eager aid of the United States, crushed their operations. Given that the whole purpose of COIN is to give breathing space for good people to organize against the destructive elements inside their own societies, it is hard to argue that COIN was not a benefit in Iraq, but its fairly evident failure to improve the situation in Afghanistan is a serious blow to its credibility. COIN's defenders will argue that Afghanistan is a uniquely atomized country, one that simply cannot be fairly governed in the modern world and, given its miserable history, that may well be true, but this in no way helps COIN's case.

The Insurgents has its sketchy moments. It seems evident that this book had all-but-come to print when the story of Petraeus' affair broke, compelling Mr. Kaplan to pen a hasty and uninformative coda to his chronicle. Moreover, the author doesn't appear to have had any access to Petraeus himself which is somewhat problematic given the heavily biographical nature of the work. However, these are minor knitpicks in what is otherwise a balanced, rational account of two bad wars, the men who prosecuted them and the ideas that bubbled up to impact them.

An excellent primer on the new face of war... (4/5 Stars)

The many faces of man and India in the long and winding Shantaram

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though we can try to broaden our experiences with travel and literature, exposing ourselves to classes and customs of which we know little or nothing, we will never know others the way we know ourselves. From the thoughts that define our darkest moments to the rhythms of our lives indelibly shaped by the cultures that nurtured us, this is what we know. Everywhere else, we are strangers, floating through societies, defined by languages and landscapes, that would require years to understand. But what if we don't even belong to the places that nurtured us? What if, even there, we are misfits, our energies and temperaments mismatched with what we know? Then escape is our only option, a commitment to life as a stranger in a strange land, the price of which is exquisitely captured in Gregory David Roberts' sprawling work of autobiographical fiction.

The product of a working-class upbringing and a life-defining stint in a harsh, Australian prison, Lindsay Ford is a stranger to himself. A bank robber of some repute, he has fled his native land, and the jail that sought to cage him, and traveled, on a fake passport, to India which, initially anyway, serves as merely a stop on his way to freedom in Europe. However, before Ford can move on, events and new friends conspire to keep him in this unknowable, tumultuous country that he is forced to embrace and understand when, in an act of karmic revenge, he is himself robbed and deprived of all but the shirt on his back.

This defining event sends Lindsay on a remarkable journey of criminality and philanthropy that begins in a Mumbai slum and concludes in the violence of war-torn Afghanistan. Between, he will learn Indian languages, Indian customs and even Indian prisons, each of which serve to deepen his understanding of not only himself, but the suffering of the world. Enlightenment, however, may just come at the cost of his soul which may well be the only thing that one cannot sell in this land of noise and opportunity.

Shantaram is a monumental work of fiction that asks far more questions than it answers. Built on the back of Mr. Roberts' remarkable life, it is a thousand-page odyssey into the India of the 1980s, a place of corruption and sorrow, kindness and justice, that is undoubtedly the star of the tale. For the author forsakes a desire to constantly entertain the reader with plot and action and devotes large swaths of the work to simply describing this nation of a billion souls scrambling to get ahead in a world that makes that an all-but-impossible achievement. Villages and slums, cities and jails, are revealed in all their structure and their limitations, exposing India, at the least the India of this novel, as a place where the failure of organized, fair civic institutions have been replaced by ad hoc operations that attempt to provide some sort of framework for the lives of the lower classes. The patchwork nature of this tapestry is both beautiful and tragic.

Though Shantaram speaks at length to issues that range from morality to corruption, suffering is its profoundest and most consistent theme. Lindsay, Mr. Robert's fictional alter ego, endures a remarkable amount of degradation, all of which eats away at his spirit. In this, he becomes our entry point into the Indians who live with the same treatment, or worse, on a daily basis and do so with, what is to the western mind, a stunning degree of fortitude. The scars of unfathomable poverty linger on them, certainly, but it's the novel's caucasian characters who seem far more burdened by their experiences here. It is they who lack the armor that comes from properly understanding a place, of having their expectations for life calibrated from the moment of their births. The Indians know how to take life's slings and arrows without having them damage their spirit. The westerners, meanwhile, have no such protection which causes them, in the face of all of India's thunder, to break down and lose their way, to become trapped by its schemes, radicalized by its violence, and numbed by its capacity to test the depths of the human spirit.

Shantaram has some revolutionary moments, perspectives and phrases that leave the reader alternately breathless and enlightened, but it does this at the expense of the plot which is picked up and set down at the convenience of its author. Fully half of the work is made up of one rumination or another on the nature of existence which, after awhile, becomes both burdensome and far too apparent. The reader begins to sense the digressions into moral philosophy, to feel them coming, to resist the urge to skip it in order to stay within the story's arc, a frustration that weighs down this truly tome-like work. Had the author made more of an effort to intertwine these spiritual musings with the story's significant episodes, one senses that the read would have been legendary.

Fascinating and enlightening... (3/5 Stars)

The extraordinary labors of a revolutionary in Sperber's Karl Marx

From The Week of May 20, 2013

No life is without challenges, moments of crisis and uncertainty that leave us grasping for answers and yearning for stability. The daily intersection of personalities and fortunes essentially ensures that something, at some point, will go wrong. But it's one thing to understand that life has its difficulties; it's entirely something else to deliberately steer one's existence into the winds of such uncertainties, to face them head on with brashness and truculence, and to do so while knowing full well that it may be decades, even centuries, before any of one's labors will make a meaningful difference. The will that must be required to never take the easy road, to forever endure the hardships of deprivation, in the name of a singular goal is remarkable. Mr. Sperber elucidates in his winningly thorough biography.

One of the most pivotal figures of the last 200 years, Karl Marx was a German political philosopher and armchair economist who lived during the twilight of empire. A polemicist who believed strongly in the corruptive power of the elites, his writings provided the intellectual fuel for a series of revolutions that would, after his death, sweep away the monarchies of eastern Europe and replace them with a powerful and equally corruptible proletariat, or people's party, that aimed to create a Marxist heaven on Earth by empowering the collective whole at the expense of the greedy individual. Though he would not live to see any of his predictions, or his beliefs, put into practice on a national scale, he became, in death, a people's hero, an intellectual whose complete and eloquent rejection of the disproportionate allotment of power and money in western society made him the godhead of 20th-century communism.

But though we know the legend well, how well do we know the man? For while Marx's role as the father of the resistance to capitalism is well known, almost forgotten is his poverty, his love for his children and his enduring devotion to his wife who, despite her upper-class upbringing, stood with Marx throughout his tumultuous life which was characterized by a scarcity of, and thus a desperation for, money. His partnership with Freidrich Engels is well-documented, but less so his unwillingness to let go of a decades-old family dispute, nor his struggles to maintain ownership of the movement he was creating, nor his deficiencies as an orator which counterbalanced, in every way, his excellence as an author. Hell, he spent more time as a newspaper columnist than he did as a revolutionary, a fact which, along with the other revelations of the man's existence, make this towering figure a creature of complexity and fascination.

Though it delves, at times, too deeply into the murky waters of economic theory and German philosophy, Karl Marx is a potent and thorough biography of a most dour and engaging man. Mr. Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri, has gathered up Marx's works and his letters, his deeds and his friendships and fashioned from them a chronicle of the life of a giant of history, a man who has had as many deeds done in his name as some deities. The portrait that emerges from this meticulous assembly is of a man who struggled to find his place, a man who fought his enemies and his slighters at every turn, a man who spent more of his life as a political refugee than he did of a citizen of any country, and a man who knew everything about money and power except for how to make either. For this, he is both a creature of amazement and pity.

The author's characterization of Marx is simultaneously the work's best and worst feature. On the positive side of the ledger, Mr. Sperber removes the mask that history has placed on Marx, revealing him to be an emotional individual whose stubbornness often outstripped his good sense. His willingness to invest his entire life in the erudite refutation of capitalism, as practiced by the western powers, is downright remarkable in light of the Sisyphean nature of the war he was trying to wage against a completely entrenched system. And yet, this brings us to the negative. For Mr. Sperber does very little to actually explain why he was so devoted to an unwinnable war. The author illuminates Marx's influences, his schooling, his family history, his citizenship of the authoritarian Prussia, all of which go some way to sketching out an outline for his motive. But the unimaginable personal deprivations Marx suffered in the name of simple defiance demands a clearer description of what drove him to such atypical lengths. This is a man who endured the better part of a lifetime of financial humiliation, all in the name of exposing a rotten system. Why, when he so clearly possessed the talents to excel within that system?

In every other way, Karl Marx is a satisfying read that breaks the philosopher's life down into manageable sections, each of which succeeds in shedding light on Marx and his world, on 19th-century politics and 19th-century despotism, and on the eternal conflict between socialism and capitalism. But its occasional detours on the road to enlightening its readers prevents it from being truly great. (4/5 Stars)

the West's intellectual debt to the Arab world in The House of Wisdom

From The Week of April 8, 2013

Human history is defined by instability, a tumultuous sea of clashing cultures the waves of which bear aloft the victorious while its depths claim the defeated. And yet, such fortunes, or misfortunes, do not linger long. For like with the brief, violent life cycle of a wave, the victorious can be easily drowned. For in order for a culture to climb to the peak of civilization, it must innovate and create; it must streamline and strategize; but mostly it must supplant its foes, foes who, in the darkness of their subordination, nurse their battered pride and make of their wounds an enduring enmity that, someday, will contribute to a change at the top. Supremacy can never last forever. This much, if little else, Jonathan Lyons elucidates in his troubled history.

In the centuries following the death of the Roman Empire, while Europe was enshrouded in the gloom of cultural stagnancy and religious zealotry, the Middle East was experiencing a new dawn. The inheritors of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, thanks to the alexandrian scholars who preserved such knowledge, the formerly disparate and warring tribes of Arabia had, under Mohammed, forged themselves into a new kind of empire, one built on the principles of a single book designed to provide a moral and political framework for their civilization. Eventually based in Baghdad, this Arab society flourished under a succession of rulers who encouraged scholarly learning, fashioning their subsequent insights into innovations that could transform their cities into palaces that would forever leave behind the plains of the dusty deserts from which they'd come.

From astronomy to philosophy, from the measuring of the earth to the understanding of the human body, this Arab awakening endured for more than three centuries, hundreds of years in which their doctors and metaphysicists would have been the envy of the world if the rest of the world, at least to the West, had not descended into superstition and ignorance. Thoughtful souls from far and wide came to learn at the court of these Arab masters until the rise of the Mongols ended all that they had built, smashing it beneath the hooves of their mountainous horses. Fragments remained. These same Arab tribes remained powerful enough to overthrow Byzantium and to make of Constantinople the seat of a new, Ottoman empire, but the dream of wisdom was over, leaving it to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution to catalyze the advancement of civilization and transform the world into one empowered by western commerce and western technology.

For all its research, for all that it illuminates centuries of world history spitefully ignored by a self-referential West consumed by its own manifest destiny, The House of Wisdom is deeply flawed work. Mr. Lyons' intentions are good, to right a historical wrong by elevating to their proper place of prominence those Arab kings and thinkers who preserved and then improved upon the knowledge of the ancients and, in doing so, created an advanced civilization. However, instead of immersing the reader in the lives of these men and women, largely unknown to western minds, instead of bringing them to life with their histories, their struggles, their crowning achievements, the author chooses to castigate the dimness of western thought during the Middle Ages, devoting swaths of his history to describing Western barbarism and the many wars and tribulations that resulted from it. He must have intended for this to provide some kind of contrast to Arab learning. And yet, his tone is unavoidably reproachful of a culture that is now centuries dead and, thus, unable to hear his howls.

There are some exceptional Arab minds represented here. al-Haytham and al-Khwarizmi, amongst others, have numerous pages devoted to their deeds. And so the tome is not without moments of clarity that educate the reader. Moreover, Mr. Lyons is certainly right to argue that the Western mind receives an inexplicably skewed education in history, with the West forever marching towards enlightenment and freedom while the rest of the world is mired in chaos and darkness. And to whatever extend the author's work here corrects that gross misapprehension makes the enterprise worthwhile. But Mr. Lyons does not celebrate Arab learning. He uses it to sneer at a medieval West lost to doctrine. For proof of this, one needs only look to the work's protagonist,Adelard of Bath, who, despite being a fascinating character in his own right, is a westerner who realizes his culture is hopelessly behind Arab society. Yes, Adelard brings some Arab learning to the West, satisfying one of Mr. Lyons' themes here, but what he gains in this he more than loses in not truly embracing his subject, the prominence and power of post-roman Arabia.

This could have been wonderful work. But its twisted perspective ties it in knots from which it never untangles itself. A shame. For Its cause is just. The torch will have to fall to another to be carried forth. (2/5 Stars)

Words of wisdom and prophecy from a magnificent mind in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

From The Week of March 18, 2013

True genius is a rare and precious thing. For its scarcity stands out like a diamond amongst the rough, allowing its light, in the form of its opinions, its theories, and its understanding, to be taken seriously by a world that largely believes in authority and that holds a deep admiration for exceptional people. Yes, there is certainly great wisdom in the thoughts and beliefs of ordinary folks, but these notions have no platform, no popular basis from which to spread through the culture. This is not a problem for geniuses who, in their celebration, are given a soapbox from which to speak to the world of what they hold dear. Though just such a soapbox was used sparingly and with humility by Mr. Feynman, it was also used powerfully and effectively by one of the 20th century's most extraordinary minds, a truth revealed repeatedly in this collection of his essays.

The son of a uniform salesman who passed on a life-long curiosity for the world and its many, mysterious systems, Richard Feynman was a key physicist in his discipline's formative century. One of the many minds to follow on from the golden generation of Einstein and Bohr, Heisenberg and Wheeler, he left school to work on the Manhattan Project -- holding the distinction of being one of the few scientists to witness the first Trinity test with the unguarded eye -- before going on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his contributions to the advancement of Quantum Electrodynamics. Between these remarkable milestones, he made singular contributions to a dozen aspects of theoretical physics. Today, however, he is remembered best for envisioning and conceptualizing nanotechnology, imagining a world where computers, both quantum and conventional, would facilitate an immeasurable leap forward in human society.

A legendary talker, notable for his unusual deployment of English, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out collects a series of speeches and interviews Mr. Feynman gave over the span of his career. From Japan to Italy, from anecdote to commencement address, he expounds upon not only the moments and insights that brought him renown, but the life experience's that reveal him to be a man of brilliance and humility. From the hilarious absurdities of government censorship during the Manhattan Project to the passionate exhortation for nanotechnology, Mr. Feynman manifests, here, as an exceptional, ordinary man, a profoundly human creature with an otherworldly understanding of the universe.

For all of Mr. Feynman's physics, though, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is most evocative when it speaks to the great man's philosophy. Holding up doubt as the key virtue of the scientific mind, he laments the thoughtlessness of religious believers who accept as truth something they haven't tested. Nor do they wish to test it. Theirs is literally a senseless belief, one that manifests from a mind unschooled in the scientific method. In this vein, Mr. Feynman exhorts his fellow man to doubt everything. For it is only through testing those doubts that one can find truth. Nothing, no theory, no notion, no matter how farfetched, should be dismissed out of hand. For to dismiss anything without testing its veracity is to be no better than those who believe thoughtlessly in dogma. It is to trust what one feels, not what one knows to be true.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is not without its darker moments. Mr. Feynman's anecdotes, playful though they may be, expose the powerful skein of sexism that ran through academia for all but the final few years of the 20th century. He manages, even here, to be charming. Even so, he is representative of the paternalism of his time, a white man in a world that, by and large, only recognized and appreciated the contributions of white men. This is a sin that should not be forgotten, a sense of personal entitlement that not only runs counter to the core philosophies detailed here, but that destructively ignored the talents of millions of women and and individuals from other ethnicities that could have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of science.

This is mesmerizing work, not only for its pleasing voice but for what it teaches us about science, philosophy and the Good Life Outstanding in spite of its occasional missteps. (4/5 Stars)

The principles of rational conservatism detailed in O'Hara's Conservatism

From The Week of March 11, 2013
An unfortunate outgrowth of human intelligence, ideology is a deadly and pernicious force. Capable of unraveling the rationality of even the most discipline mind, it can enslave the wills of millions, chaining them to beliefs that have no truck with reasonableness or compassion, all while convincing these shackled minds that its creeds, its methods, and its objectives are not only perfectly acceptable, but absolutely necessary. Such groupthink has repeatedly, over countless centuries, riven our world, throwing it into darkness and chaos from which generations are needed to recover. But just how do we distinguish ideology from rational argument? How do we avoid having our ideas and our beliefs captured by dogma? Dr. O'Hara demonstrates wonderfully well in his fascinating, if somewhat dense, treatise.

What is conservatism and just what does it stand for? Is it the big-C Conservatism, championed by American Republicans, that advocates for the exportation of democracy, even at the point of a gun; that exemplifies as virtuous the values of big business, no matter the cost in morality; and that uses its patriotic bent to agitate for the strongest possible national defense, regardless of the relative powers of its enemies? Or is it the small-c conservatism that believes in incremental change, that acknowledges that our understanding of ourselves and our world is limited, and that holds with no sacred cows but the openness of ones mind to any fact regardless of how painful or inconvenient?

Strongly contending that conservatism is, in fact, the latter, not the former, Dr. O'Hara argues that two guiding principles should direct small-c conservatism. The first of these is the Knowledge Principle, the belief that society is too complex and too individualistic to allow for anyone, or any computer, to develop a clear understanding of what it wants, what it needs, or even what it should have. The second of these is the Change Principle, the notion that, having established that outcomes cannot always be known, innovation, from government on down, must be adopted cautiously. For wholesale change is invariably disruptive to existing traditions and institutions. And that if we cannot know society, then we cannot know if the change will be to the good. And if we cannot know the change will be to the good, then we must be cautious with its implementation to limit the risk of destroying what is good and functional in the name of nothing more than change.

Conservatism is fascinating work. While Dr. O'Hara, a senior fellow at the University of Southampton, is occasionally laborious with his prose, relying on opaque, philosophic constructs to support some of his contentions, he is, in the main, an engaging guide into the land of small-c conservatism. After clearly stating his two founding principles, he leads the reader on a tour through the ideological minefields of partisan politics and the structure of government to demonstrate that many of the worlds socioeconomic problems can be reasoned through by an adherence to some basic points of logic. Like any good argument, made with reason rather than ideological bias, Dr. O'Hara makes his case convincingly. For he reasonably points out that our existing values and systems are important to us, that, within reason, we know they function, and that to abandon them for uncertainty is, to say the least, risky. Logical points all...

For all its appeal, though, Dr. O'Hara's conservatism leaves a lot to be desired. For we cannot simply accept as fact that society is unknowable. To accept such a premise is to cease working towards making it knowable. And given that understanding society would undoubtedly help us improve it, this seems shortsighted. Should we just disregard oceans of scientific data just because we can't be sure how to weight it, or how definitively to act based upon it? Should we not trawl that ocean for useful conclusions that can then be put to good use? Secondly, though the author argues that small-c conservatives are not opposed to change, it seems to me that slow change is little more than a euphemism for stagnancy. Yes, Dr. O'Hara lays out how small-c conservatives would implement change, beginning with pilot projects that are increasingly scaled up until they have been proven to be valid on a wide enough scale to be legislated. But what if these piloted notions fail for extraneous reasons? What if, like so many things in our world, they are sabotaged by powerful people adverse to what the projects propose?

Dr. O'Hara's conservatism is quite appealing and there can be no doubt that it would be a significant improvement upon the big-c Conservatism so often practiced in our world. But I wonder. While Dr. O'Hara's ideal society is slowly, methodically changing for the better, what if nearby societies are ambitiously changing, transformatively changing, creating a dynamism that always keeps them ahead of the conservative land? An engaging if somewhat monotonous journey... (3/5 Stars)

From The Ruins Of Empire by Pankaj Mishra

From The Week of October 30, 2012 Though we, particularly in the West, have come to understand the crimes and the pains of colonialism, this enlightenment has come at a terrible cost. After all, to learn these lessons, we were compelled to plunge the better part of three continents, Africa, Asia and South America, into chaos and brutality, perfidy and corruption. We created entire ruling bureaucracies which, though their names and their masters have crumbled into dust, have born lasting legacies that have lived on decades, even centuries, after they were forced on the nations subjected to the will of industrialized powers. We cannot avoid the truth of this. We cannot look away from the costs of what those men did. We all bear a measure of responsibility for righting that epic wrong. But there is a deeper truth exposed by colonialism's practice, a truth about power's universal destructiveness that Mr. Mishra does well to expose in his intellectual history of colonial and post-colonial Asia.

For the better part of 250 years, western Europe did its level best to subjugate the world. Casting themselves in the role of light-bringers, men of skill and knowledge who would bring wisdom to the wild, mysterious east, they addicted these monarchies and fiefdoms, empires and tribes, to trade and narcotics, money and wealth. In the name of free trade, that most celebrated of freedom fighters, these nations conquered half the world, not so much with their navies and their cannons, though, these weapons were deployed when necessary. No, victory came through infestation and strong-arming, economic trickery and smart politicking, which saw the unstable eastern powers succumb to the western spell.

There were, undoubtedly, western men who endeavored to do well by their eastern brothers, but whatever blessings such rare gems provided to the newly acquired peoples of the east were more than offset by the darkness of economic depravity and the humiliation of cultural inferiority. This was at least the view of the Chinese, Indian and Arabic intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who rose to prominence within their lands. From Tagore to Al-Afghani, from Gandhi to Sun Yatsen, Mr. Mishra reconstructs the thoughts of these bright but tragic Asian stars and their hopes for a new, united Asia, one that acknowledged its own cultural weaknesses by accepting and benefiting from western strengths without sacrificing those spiritual virtues that helped create civilizations millennia older than the one subjecting them. Their dreams are expansive and glorious, their struggles noble and inspirational, but were their messages for pan-Asian unity listened to? Were their visions implemented in an Asia free of colonialism?

From The Ruins of Empire is a staggering and revelatory read. Energized by the thoughts of Asian scholars envisioning a better, brighter future for their continent, it perfectly encapsulates the fundamental tragedy that emanates from revolutionary thought and the revolutions they ignite. Subjugated people naturally blame their conquerers for ill-treatment that occurs in any inequitable relationship. But in levying this blame, the defeated imagine that if they were themselves but better, purer, smarter, if they but adopted the best of what made their enemies great while preserving the core of their own identities, they could throw off their imperial shackles and be born as free peoples, bound together in common and glorious unity. They see themselves capable of creating lasting peace and stable, centralized governments if given the chance. For are their cultures not older and wiser? Are their motives not purer and higher?

But of course, this is only half of the truth. We are all weak. We are all corruptible. For it is power that corrupts us. Colonialism is merely a symptom of the lust for power. Asia is the proof. For once the great wickedness that was colonialism was banished from its shores, there was no utopia realized, no stable government implemented. Asia went on as it has always been, as most of humanity has always been, dominated by powerful men who answer to no one but themselves and the armies and the structures that prop-up their dictatorships. These nations may well be democracies in name, but they are not so in reality. These are merely pretty fictions that conceal two darker truths: that power is the ultimate corrupter and that we are all equally unwise.

From The Ruins of Empire is a wonderful demonstration of power's corrosiveness, of how dreams of cultural superiority are bound to succumb to their own gravity and be sucked down into the black hole of arrogance. Mr. Mishra has captured the lives of tragic men and their tragic dreams and used them to reveal these truths. And he's done it with force and flair. Colonialism's legacy must not be forgotten, but it is merely the surface of what plagues this most populous, diverse and fascinating continent. Perhaps, in the future, greatness will blossom from the seeds planted by the intellectuals who threw themselves at colonialism's battlements, but it will not come until these deeper truths are understood. (4/5 Stars)

Making An Exit by Sarah Murray

From The Week of September 24, 2012 Death is a merciless disease. Infecting every living organism that has ever called Earth home, it burrows its necrotic tentacles into every cell, every system, every piece of tissue, insisting that, at some future point, its grave price be paid. It plays no favorites. It offers no cures. It requires only obedience, only acceptance of the ultimate fate of every thing and every one that has ever lived, cessation. Unsurprisingly, this particularly grim condition has woven itself deeply into all of Earth's cultures, authoring rites and reflections that honor the dead while passing onto the young the traditions of the ancients. But just how have these cultures decided to cope with death? What do they imagine happens to those they must farewell from this mortal coil? Ms. Murray explores in her examination of this most unavoidable affliction.

From funerals to wakes, from coffins to urns, from spiritualism to pragmatism, humanity's desire to cope with the inevitability of death has manifested in thousands of ways that range from the practical to the incomprehensible. While some cultures consider death a time of celebration, others submerge themselves in shrouds of mourning, releasing their hold on their loved ones with a searing mixture of reluctance and grief. Equally substantial divides exist amongst those who hold opinions on what comes after death. Is it the rapturous reward promised by the Christians to the righteous, is it the nothingness that the atheists conjure up from their rationalist souls, or is it something in-between, a doorway through which the soul wanders into the next life?

In an attempt to chronicle the traditions that have been shaped by these questions, Ms. Murray travels the world, delving into the customs of dozens of cultures to seek out our truths about death. While her journeys often find her hip deep in the macabre and the bizarre, they also shed light upon beautiful and warm celebrations of life that have been performed for thousands of years. From the funeral industry to the ethics of honoring the wishes of the newly departed, she ponders the existential while gaping at the gaudy, finding that, the more one contemplates the practicalities that lie beneath our deathly traditions, one finds them exceedingly disturbing.

And yet, for all that Making an Exit can sometimes leave the reader chilled by its subject and bewildered by the many responses to it, the work's abiding humor suffuses it with an enduring glow that cannot but charm. Ms. Murray's level-headed and open-minded approach to the examination of death finds not the cold shoulder of an inevitable ending, but the cheerful acceptance of what must be. Whatever may lie beyond death's doorway, there is no way but through. And for as different as our response to death might be, there is one commonality across our cultures, that to die loved and cherished is to leave a consequential mark upon the world.

Reflective and expansive, this is a surprisingly entertaining read for a subject so lifeless. Ms. Murray could not be a more engaging guide. (3/5 Stars)

Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

From The Week of August 06, 2012

As much as we tell ourselves that we are rational beings living in the scientific era, our lives are shaped by myths. Large and small, obvious and subtle, they ripple across society, influencing the significance with which we view everything from the oceans that give us life to the stars that give us dreams. They provide us a narrative along which we can trace our heritage, connecting us in an unbroken line back to humans who walked the earth millennia ago. They even bring their formidable powers to bear upon the ways in which we conceive of the future and the paths we will follow as individuals and as societies. Consequently, studying these myths can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our destinies. After all, we authored them. We fostered them. We empower them. Mr. Chatwin takes up one of humanity's most enduring mythologies in this timeless piece of travel journalism.

Cut off from the rest of the world for nearly 40,000 years, the aboriginal people of Australia are an anthropologist's dream. Deprived of any external, cultural contaminations, they possessed, until the arrival of Europeans, a pure strain of belief that stretches back 400 centuries to their landing on these strange, rocky shores. Carefully cultivated by the countless generations, the Dreaming conceives of the world as having been named into existence by the songs of giants, distant ancestors who left buried in their paeans and their deeds the knowledge of the world and the many creatures who inhabit it. This spiritualistic naturalism not only kept the aborigines alive for 1,600 generations in a less-than-hospitable land, it engendered in them a fundamental respect for their environment as deeply at odds with our modern, extractive world as their naturalism must have been to the white puritans who invaded their shores 250 years ago.

In 1988, Mr. Chatwin, originally from England but a wanderer at heart, travelled to Australia to chronicle the Dreaming. Beginning his journey in Adelaide, he and his Australian guide embedded themselves in some of the world's remotest communities, viewing through a humanist's eyes the practices of a people so unlike us as to seem anachronistic, as if time cruelly displaced them from the proper course of events. He chronicles the aboriginal concept of community, of Payback, of songlines. But more than this, he communicates the remoteness and the sameness of a place and a people that might have continued to be as they were had adventurers not interrupted their isolation. For this is a people almost congenitally opposed to change, a people so deeply rooted in who they are and their idea of the world that to endorse change would be to violate the Dreaming and the songs that give the world life. Imaginative and lyrical, Songlines is first-rate non-fiction. Mr. Chatwin, who tragically died a year after his journey into Australia's distant past, is, here, not only linguistically clever and attitudinally charming, he evinces a breadth of knowledge and a depth of inquisitiveness that is both endearing and engrossing. For this is more than just a book about a culture as fascinating as it has been mistreated by the white man. It is an adventure into the nature of modern man, into the ideas that give his life meaning, into the science of his evolutionary history, and into his compulsions to explore, to wander, to investigate, to learn. In this, Songlines is as much a rumination on the essence of life as it is a rumination on the Dreaming which is fortunate given that both pursuits have much in common.

Mr. Chatwin is reluctant to speak directly to the degree to which aboriginal culture has been degraded by the arrival of westerners, but he does allow the anecdotes transcribed here to strongly suggest his admiration for a people whose place in our modern world is less than certain. For our cultural frameworks stand in such stark opposition to one another that it's hard to imagine finding any common ground. Mr. Chatwin's description of aboriginal belief seems almost anti-modern. For to create the world we enjoy, one needs industry, the exploitive nature of which is antithetical to their way of life. However, this position also serves to highlight the shortcomings in our own extractive system. For our civilization only operates so long as it can be materially fed. Once those resources run dry, once the land as been exhausted, the machine grinds to a halt and then where are we? Far worse off than the aborigine's, certainly. Mr. Chatwin has the kind of mind that cannot but be a pleasure to see sprawled out on paper. For in its meanderings and musings is a kind of expansive wisdom that goes some way to bridging the gap between such disparate cultural outlooks. As winning a piece on the nature of man as it is on the aboriginal world... (4/5 Stars)

Emergency by - Neil Strauss

From The Week of July 30, 2012
As much as we strive to be rational beings, as much as the dawn of our modern, technological world has nurtured in us the virtues of reason and patience, fear yet rules us all. With every twist of fate, with every consequential choice, with every random act from a chaotic world, fear hounds us, lurking in the darkness at the edge of our intellectual campfire, just waiting for panic to give it a path through our defenses where it will paralyze us, cripple us and deprive us of the joys of a bold life. Worse yet, fear is a subtle foe, sneaking so stealthily into our hearts that it is often influencing our actions long before we are aware of its debilitating presence.

So what do we do with fear? Do we reject it and live loudly, free of its constraints? Or do we welcome it close, allowing its anxiety to influence our actions but only to a limited degree? Is it an enemy to be conquered, or a seduction to be carefully heeded? Mr. Strauss' funny, charming, disturbing and riotous effort is a long and successful rumination on this question.

Though the aughts was a decade of political change and technological promise, it was also witness to some dark developments which augur grimly for the years ahead. Islamic terrorism and economic turmoil marred most of the decade, leaving behind deep scars unimaginable to the optimistic multitudes who, way back in the halcyon days of the 1990s, imagined clear skies to an unfathomably bright future. But more than wound the decade's reputation and the political parties that ruled during its zenith, this toxic brew of religious nihilism and monetary greed injured, psychologically and otherwise, the countless millions who lived through it. By eating away at their sense of safety, and by diminishing their trust in the national institutions who promised to nurture that safety, it created the perfect breeding ground for the fearful to indulge their trepidations. It enticed them to view differently the signs around them, finding in them not the promise they had seen before but the herald of the apocalypse conveniently interpreted from their books of faith. It prompted them to turn away from trust and hope and to embrace a new, more cynical view of the days ahead.

Mr. Strauss volunteers himself as a classic case of this conversion. Riding high just prior to the millennium, he finds himself increasingly disenchanted by the political trend of his home country, the United States. He sees an election stolen, a terrorist attack 1r\&
, a war on terror launched and an economic system nearly brought to its knees. And with each successive catastrophe, he becomes increasing convinced that the best has come and gone and that the future holds only the promise of disappointment. Thus, he begins a long and winding quest to prepare himself for the dark days ahead. Over nearly ten years, he solicits advice from billionaires and separatists, EMTs and survivalists, all in an attempt to transform himself from an intelligent but physically incompetent citydweller into a well-prepared and hardened soldier of non-civilization, capable of living without power, off the land, in a world that prides itself on skills, on knowledge and on readiness for anything that comes. This is his journey...

Though it deals with the decidedly grim subject matter of the potentially final act of human civilization, Emergency is, shockingly, both funny and warm. Characterized by its author's unequivocal commitment to the subject, and blended with his rank incompetence at anything remotely rural, it serves up a hilarious stew of missteps and mishaps that impact on the bumbling Mr. Strauss. However, despite the severity and humorousness of these largely self-inflicted wounds, the author continuously manages to pick himself up off the ground, dust himself off, learn from his obstinacy and progress to the next challenge, the next achievement, knowing all the while that he is that much closer to realizing an independence the rest of us can only dream about.

There can be little doubt that some of the more extreme behaviors depicted here are influenced by the nature of Mr. Strauss' experiment. He would have known, full well, that theatrics would serve his book far better than blandness. Thus, some of the stunts and the scenarios must be taken with a healthy measure of salt. However, the author's efforts here also reflect the many millions of people who, like him, are, to varying degrees, traumatized by instability. In their fear, they turn away from dependency in order to nurture in themselves a self-sufficiency that will carry them through the imagined dark times ahead. There's wisdom here. After all, these individuals are bound to be better off if civilization does stumble. But they seem to overlook two key points that trouble their argument, firstly, that preparing for the apocalypse, in many cases, seems to lead them down a road to wishing that it would come so that they might get to use their new-found skills and, secondly, that the world they imagine would be so grim, would have lost so much of its light, that surviving the transition into it would not be worthwhile. After all, having gloried in the light of civilization, what would be the point of grubbing out a difficult, daily existence in the darkness and the dirt?

This is a wonderful and amusing journey through the strange and the macabre that is made eminently livable by Mr. Strauss' self-deprecating humor. Surprisingly uplifting for all the anxiety bedded down in its pages... (4/5 Stars)

As Though She Were Sleeping by Elias Khoury

From The Week of July 16, 2012

All that we've built, from the roads to the towers, from the places of learning to the places of worship, the entire edifice of civilization, would not be possible without communication. It is the means by which we not only understand one another, but the means by which we cooperate, pooling our talents and our efforts in the realization of a single goal we could not have achieved individually. But what is the best form of communication?

Language stakes a compelling claim. After all, we can speak it swiftly and dynamically, allowing for complex ideas to be reduced to fairly simple verbal codes. But language is also fragmentary, subject to a kind of geographic drift that causes its codes to mutate until they mean different things to different people. Symbols, meanwhile, are equally potent but also equally challenging. For as much as they benefit from a simplicity of form, allowing the mind to ruminate on their essences without needing linguistics to parse their meanings, this makes them even more malleable. For symbols might end up meaning entirely different things to siblings, let alone to strangers. Which leaves us with dreams, those ephemeral voyages through the armed and dangerous subconscious, a place where truth is rife if it can only be properly interpreted. Perhaps we require all of these methods to communicate, or perhaps life is a battle to see which will be dominant. Mr. Khoury has, here, much to say on this question.

In a rapidly changing Middle East, where borders are literally being redrawn in response to the political tornados kicked up by World War II, life is evolving far too quickly for the millions impacted by such swiftly changing realities. Out of the sands of British-controlled Palestine has erupted the Jewish state, an event which has sent out turbulent shockwaves throughout the region. In the years to come, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine will gain and lose territory, acquire and discard western masters, and adhere to or reject kings, the chaos of which will see them plunged into a modern world that bears chillingly few similarities with the reassuringly familiar past.

Dropped into this uncertainty are Meelya and mansour, a young Lebanese couple who straddle two very different generations. Married in 1946, their parents were subjects of the ottoman empire and their children will be governed by Hezzbollah, placing them at the heart of events that will transform the 20th century for the Middle East. How Meelya and Mansour will navigate both these changes and their own lives, though, will test their love and their sanity. For whereas mansour believes in the power of poetry to create unity, and even victory, out of division and tumult, Meelya, rejects this view. To her, words mean almost nothing next to the power of the vivid and jumbled dreams that have characterized her entire life. These vivid experiences are so powerful that they draw Meelya out of the real world, painting for her a continuum of past, present and future that is subject to nothing more than the laws of the imagination.

Their battle of competing views revolves around Meelya's painful pregnancy which appears, at times, to mirror that of Christ's birth. As Meelya slips deeper into her dreamworld, Mansour tries to reach down and pull her to what he considers safety. But for Meelya, the world of dreams is a world of knowledge and power, a place where she can walk with giants.

Originally published in Arabic in 2007, As Though She Were Sleeping is a challenging novel. Mr. Khoury uses Meelya's dreams to toy with time in a way that demands the reader relinquish his conventional notions of reality so that he might be drawn down into a transient world seething with non-linear events. This dreamscape, if embraced, becomes a rewarding place, a canvas upon which the author can express his lyrical notions of language and politics for which the physical world has proven to be too rigid. Such is Mr. Khoury's talent that, though this world is anathema to the structured manner in which many of us think, he succeeds in conveying both its power and its danger. For as much as we come to understand the ways in which Meelya gains wisdom from her dreaming, we also see the extent to which it drives her husband mad. Meelya is inaccessible to him, a creature whose mind might as well be located on the moon for as much as he can engage with it. This clearly results in a less than ideal partnership.

There's a kind of insanity in Meelya, a dreamy drifting from moment to moment, event to event, that has permanently unmoored her from reality. While she walks with monks and saints, gods and their crucified children, the rest of us live in a world ruled by physical laws that are as well-understood as they are unbreakable. What's more, Meelya's dreaming robs those around her from knowing her in any meaningful way. For she has withdrawn to a world that, though ti is dynamic, cannot be shared. In this, despite the shortcomings of his own preferred poetry, Mansour's means of expressing himself has much more potential for personal reward and lasting, cultural change. But then, we get the sense that Meelya could not care less. For she is content in her knowing in a way the rest of us will never be.

As Though She Were Sleeping was banned throughout much of the Middle East for some of its steamier passages. Though all such bans are ridiculous, Mr. Khoury's case is particularly so. For this is infinitely more a contemplation of knowledge and expression than it is an attempt at erotica. But then try explaining this to the narrowminded censors to whom the literary page is nothing more than a collection of inked words, some of which have the distinction of being taboo to the ignorant.

A surrealist's dream... For the rest of us, an interesting exercise, but one that requires perhaps too much effort on the part of the reader to temporarily abandon his conceptions of reality. (3/5 Stars)

Da Vinci's Ghost by Toby Lester

From The Week of June 11, 2012

As much as we distract ourselves with the mundane pursuits of work and play, shelter and sex, the search for meaning is a siren's song inside all of us, driving us to seek out the universal truths that underpin our lives and the universe that encapsulates us. How is it structured? What are its organizing principles? What, or who, created it? Is humanity nothing more than a random outcome of evolution, or are we a purposeful result of something more aware,more divine? In some of us, these questions are only flirted with during times of intense self-reflection. In others, however, they catalyze the mind, compelling it to travel down roads to self-discovery that have the power to change the world. Few men produced so much from this marriage of drive and introspection than Leonardo Da Vinci. And few of his ideas and drawings have had as much symbolic power as Vitruvian Man.

Reproduced in textbooks and stamps, paintings and poems, Vitruvian Man is both the culmination of a thought experiment and the representation of the intersection of man, his world and the universe that houses them both. First theorized by the Roman General Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, the image -- a man fit within a circle within a square -- is the illustration of the idea that man, specifically the properly portioned man, is the universe writ small, a microcosm of the world he inhabits. In his organs and his dimensions, his aptitudes and his limitations, are the blueprints upon which all else is built. For like everything else in the world, he is subject to proportions, proportions that can be reduced to mathematics, mathematics that govern the design of every godly organism.

Though Vitruvius conceived of this homo-centric notion 1,500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci's birth, it took this giant of the Renaissance to actualize the thought experiment, to prove at least that man could fit inside a circle inside a square. Of course, not even Leonardo was able to prove the philosophical implications of this discovery. Answers to these mysteries, if available, lie many years ahead in our turbulent future.

Da Vinci's Ghost is a charming and concise examination of Vitruvian Man and the master who gave him form. Despite spending the majority of his time here meandering through any of a number of historical digressions, Mr. Lester engagingly establishes the background to both Vitruvian Man and the ideas and biases that dominated the world that spawned him. And so, when the author is finally ready to confront the thought experiment head on, the reader is well-armed with the context necessary to fully comprehend the philosophical implications of just such a notion. For to fit man within a circle, representing the perfect celestial form, and a square, representing the building blocks of the world around him, is to position man within a universal continuum. It is to conceive of him being either the perfect form upon which all else is modeled, or simply one more iteration of a design fundamental to the universe. It is to marry man to both the cosmos above his head and the earth beneath his feet, a relationship that forever embeds him in the grand scheme of life.

Mr. Lester could have taken more time here. For as thorough as he is with the lead-up to Leonardo's sketching of Vitruvian Man, his account of its impact upon the world ends rather abruptly thereafter, leaving his readers only to muse at the myriad ways in which this notion has intrigued and shaped the thoughts of philosophers and mathematicians alike. However, in every other respect, this is wonderful and compelling history, precisely that kind of narrative non-fiction that excites the mind with the tantalizing mysteries of an unknowable universe.

Imaginative work... (3/5 Stars)

The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Forgiveness is a powerful and vexing pursuit. For to forgive is, in a critical sense, to absolve, to wipe clean the slate of past wrongs in hopes of normalizing relations between perpetrators and victims. Considering that, by and large, more is gained from friendship than from enmity, such a normalization is beneficial to both sides, draining from an emotional wound that ugliest of poisons which harden our hearts and calcify our grudges.

Such logic, however, depends upon the perpetrator being, to some degree, sane. It depends upon him grasping the incentive not to wrong in the future. It depends upon the wrong not reaching the level of the heinous. For how can we forgive the unforgivable? How can we allow our most wicked crimes to be absolved with but a few heartfelt words? Are some sins not too grievous, too nihilistic, for forgiveness? Mr. Wiesenthal compellingly ruminates on this question in this short but moving work.

The year is 1943 and much of Europe is awash in war. Though Nazi Germany has recently endured two decisive defeats in their efforts to conquer Great Britain and Russia, their ubermensch war machine churns relentlessly onward in hopes of realizing its Fuhrer's dreams for an Aryan world. In the path of that terrible destiny stands Simon Wiesenthal, a young, European Jew, whose life is irrevocably altered when he is condemned to unimaginable deprivations in the Lemberg concentration camp for no better reason than he is Jewish.

While at the camp, as he and his fellows suffer, Mr. Wiesenthal is approached by a nurse who leads him to a wounded Nazi soldier. Over an afternoon, the blinded warrior describes, to Mr. Wiesenthal, the circumstances and the tragedies that lead him to this moment, asking, at the culmination of his tale, for the Jewish man's forgiveness. Struggling with this burden, Mr. Wiesenthal solicits the opinions of others in the camp, agonizing over his responsibilities in a matter both consequential and insignificant. After all, one soldier's appeal for forgiveness does not absolve the Nazis. And yet, is it not a key piece of information in the understanding of how this horror came about and how it can be made right in the future? Haunted, Mr. Wiesenthal is liberated from the camp and seeks out the soldier's mother, in hopes of finding some cruelty there that will ease his conscience, but when she only has sadness and regret to offer him, his search must go on.

The Sunflower is a momentous and disturbing search for the truth to an unanswerable question. What are the limits of forgiveness? Harnessing the malevolent energies of perhaps the worst, most systemic crime in human history, Mr. Wiesenthal, a man who would eventually become a noted hunter of Nazis, confronts the notion that forgiveness might well be too small, too soft for crimes against humanity. For when faced with a collaboration of men and women intent upon the arbitrary extermination of a people, what can be gained by forgiveness? What future is there after the apologies are made and closure found? The dead remain. The atrocities remain. History cannot be undone, nor paved over. Some stains cannot out.

And yet, there must be an end sometime. The burdens conveyed by such wicked crimes must be laid down. For to clutch close such pain is to allow ones life to continue to be ensnared by the cruel ideologies that once sought to be dominant in the world. They cannot be forgotten, but nor can they be allowed to rule what time the victim has left. If forgiveness can be a means through which peace can come to the victim, and it seems to me a necessary component to the finding of peace, then it must be granted, if only as a means of smoothing the victim's return to something resembling normality.

As a piece of literature, The Sunflower is intriguingly composed. Divided into two parts, it first relates Mr. Wiesenthal's experience and then answers that with essays from prominent figures who have consumed the story, digested its philosophical nourishment and provided, in turn, their individual answers to his ultimately subjective question. Can one man grant a regime absolution? Does forgiveness even matter in a secularist world? How do we weigh the need to move past horror against our need for justice? All such thorny aspects to this persistent problem are raised and addressed by the luminaries, both light and dark, who speak to Mr. Wiesenthal's brief but telling experience with his wounded captor.

There are no limits to forgiveness. There cannot be. For what has been done cannot be unmade. What has past cannot be rewritten. It is. It must be met, assimilated, and, finally, fatefully, laid to rest. To not forgive is to be consumed by the crime, to extend the suffering conveyed by it. there must be an end.

Moving and provocative work... (4/5 Stars)

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

From The Week of May 07, 2012

Though intelligence separated humanity from the animal kingdom, allowing us to invent the tools that would eventually steer us onto a new, evolutionary course of profound self-discovery and world domination, intelligence is but the key to a much greater lock, a necessity for the grander goal of society. For it is society that harnesses that raw intellect and capitalizes upon it, chronicling its many inventions and innovations and putting them to widespread use not only for the general advancement of all, but so that others might improve upon what came before, creating an endless chain of advancement that will one day elevate us to the stars. Without society, the genius of one is never remembered, savored only by those he happens to encounter. His death causes his knowledge to pass into the ether, obligating humanity to sputter along at a level not much higher than the apes from which we branched.

Being that society is critical to our development, it would be advantageous to discover society's ideal form. What rules should it enshrine? What principles should it uphold? Should it favor one class over another, or should everyone be equal? Should innovation be the cornerstone, or should it be the acquisition of knowledge that begets wisdom? Mr. Rawls, a famous 20th century philosopher, grapples with these vital questions in this his classic 1971 treatise on the ideal society.

From the principles of justice to the Veil of Ignorance, from the ethics of civil disobedience to the sins of freeloading, A Theory of Justice is Mr. Rawls' systematic attempt to logic out society's most beneficial form. To do so, he requests that the reader join him in a most detailed thought experiment. The reader is asked to imagine that he is society's ultimate architect, free to work upon a blank and perfectly malleable canvas. He is free to set any rule, to impose any right, to pass any law, to harbor any prejudice. He may shape and contort his society to his heart's content. However, there is one critical stipulation that he must adhere to while he molds his world.

Upon the completion of his experiment, when it comes time for the reader to enter his ideal society, he will do so without any knowledge of where, in that society, he will appear. He does not know what job he will hold, what family he will have, what class he will belong to, or what talents he will possess. He may be the highest of the high, or the lowest of the low. Over this one aspect of his experiment he has no control. With this veil of ignorance in mind, what will his original position be? Will he engineer a society that is fair, fearing that he might enter it as a drudge in need of external support? Or will he engineer an unequal society, trusting himself to rise on the back of his natural abilities? Will he enshrine equal rights to all as insurance against his position at the bottom, or will he opt for unequal rights, confident the powerful will not need such flimsy protections?

Though A Theory of Justice is a challenging read, written more for the benefit of the author's colleagues than it is for the layman, it is nonetheless a powerfully persuasive piece of political philosophy. The Veil of Ignorance, an idea as revolutionary for philosophy as Einsteinian Relativity was for physics, is surely one of the 20th century's most powerful thought experiments. For it forces the reader to recognize that birth is random, that the extent to which we succeed is at least partially based on the luck of the draw, and that opportunity has a huge bearing on our quality of life. Taken altogether, these principles demand that we examine anew our successes, not only to be thankful for the moments in which we were helped by others to achieve our dreams, but in order to recognize that whatever we are is as much to the credit of others as it is to the credit of ourselves. This notion has widespread implications for our future and the societies it will birth.

As much as this work is understandably dominated by the Veil of Ignorance experiment, it is as much a 600-page logistical construct that makes a profound and profoundly simple argument for equality. While we know that society cannot grant us all equal shares of resources or income -- endeavoring to do so is nightmarishly complicated and utterly senseless --, we do all wish to live in a society with equal rights to liberty, to conscience, to life. So how do we justify creating a society that has equal rights but not equal opportunity? By creating a society whose laws, institutions and instruments are designed to consider first the least among us. For to do otherwise is to not only consign the most vulnerable among us to short, pain-filled lives, it is to abandon even the conceit of the notion that society is based on logic and reason.

A Theory of Justice is, at times, interminable and insufferable, a volley of intellectual arrows fired at targets most of us will never meet or know. But within its megalithic logic there are shattering truths that possess the power to reform the reader's conception of society and fairness. In this, it is deeply and enduringly transformative. (4/5 Stars)

Who Am I And If So How Many by Richard David Precht

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Ever since humans evolved into self-awareness, they have been searching for the universal truths that underpin both their environment and their souls. For we are sparks of life within an all-but-eternal experiment. And there is nothing grander than to try to best understand that experiment and our place within it before we die and pass on the torch of discovery to those who will succeed us. After all, the answers to such cosmic questions are too enormous to be found in a single lifetime. If they are to be solved, it will be by those who stood on the shoulders of the countless generations that preceded them. But just how will we arrive at those answers? What avenues of inquiry must we pursue? And while we're pursuing them, how should we live our lives? How can we be moral creatures? These are the musings that bring together Mr. Precht's treatise on philosophy and the human brain. It is an interesting if unoriginal journey.

From Mirror Neurons to Phineas Gage, from the morality of eating animals to the practice of euthanasia, Who Am I And If So How Many is Mr. Precht's journey through the dangerous and contentious jungles of philosophy and neurology. Without choosing sides in this increasingly quarrelsome battle between disciplines that attempt to explain the inexplicable, the author gives his readers a crash course in the history of philosophy while bringing them up to speed on the milestone discoveries of neurology. Along the way, he introduces us to the key figures of both fields, giants of thought and science who have done as much to shape our world as the generals and the politicians who so dominate our history books. In this, he creates a compelling portrait of the uneasy marriage between these two such disparate fields and the extent to which they will continue to be linked for decades and generations to come.

Who Am I And If So How Many is a swift and fascinating read. Mr. Precht is a charming guide through the thorny undergrowth that so defines the scientific ground over which philosophy and neurology are currently fighting. More over, he stays commendably neutral in the questions he raises, professorially extending to his readers the data they will need to draw their own conclusions about the mind and the brain. However, while Mr. Precht manages to educate and entertain in equal measure, I found myself frustrated by a total absence of original thought or research.

The author pays extensive homage to the historical giants upon whose shoulders he stands, but he does so without taking advantage of their discoveries and advancing the arguments further with his own contributions. Perhaps he does this elsewhere, in the classroom or in his other writings, but the piece certainly called out for Mr. Precht to supplement his account with his own conjectures. He is perfectly willing to do so on personal matters. But charming though his anecdotes are, his readers are surely eager for something from the author with more depth than personal reminiscences.

This is a delightful jaunt. Mr. Precht would be a fascinating man with whom to spend an evening, ruminating on the nature of man and his soul over a bottle of quality wine. But it seems to me that he conflated neutrality in the war between philosophy and neurology with neutrality on the pressing questions of the day, leaving others to venture their own opinions while reducing his own to witty bromides. A worthy but slightly annoying read. (3/5 Stars)

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

From The Week of January 23, 2012

Power can be a pernicious force. For not only can its possession encourage the sweet-natured to be tyrannical, its loss can leave us feeling helpless and enraged. Power stokes our ego, allowing us to feel useful and confident, but it can leave us numb to the suffering of those who don't have it, dismissing them as weak and foolish, unworthy of our notice. Power changes how we view the world. Thus, anytime it shifts, there is cause for anxiety. Though this cynical and short piece from the legendary Mr. Tolstoy primarily concerns the dissolution of a marriage, it is the consequences of the redistribution of power that underpins his tale. It is a point sublimely, if unintentionally, made.

On a commuter train journeying through 19th century Russia, a truculent passenger makes a startling confession to those of his fellow travelers inclined to hear him. He has murdered his wife. After a long and difficult marriage, characterized by emotional and verbal discord, Pozdnyshev, the confessor, returns home from business to find his wife entertaining her musical instructor in their home. Embittered by years of disharmony and utterly incapable of blessing his wife with a moment's happiness and freedom, he flies into a rage which culminates in the flight of the instructor and the violent assault of his wife. This leads to not only the dissolution of his family -- his wife, on her deathbed, vengefully removes their five children from his care and gives them to her sister to raise --, it brings about her painful demise for which Pozdnyshev is tried. Dismissing the crime as one of passion, Pozdnyshev is acquitted and allowed to go free, having ruined all for which he cared.

Constructed as a conversation between Pozdnyshev and the story's narrator, The Kreutzer Sonata is, in the main, a warning against carnal love and a dissertation on female power and the extent to which its ascendance stokes male paranoia. Pozdnyshev, made callous by a loveless marriage, lays the blame for his unhappiness at the feet of his own male weakness and the liberalization of womens rights. He holds the view that men and women are fundamentally animalistic creatures, that the purpose of womankind is to perpetuate the species. Consequently, if women are given control over their own bodies, their own destinies, it will yield only disastrous results for the weak-willed man for which woman was created. Repeatedly, he reveals how he expected marriage to be a beautiful and fulfilling engagement, but that his joy was ruined by his wife's willingness to disagree with him, fight him, thwart him. He is completely incapable of realizing that his intractable nature is the cause of all his misery.

The Kreutzer Sonata is cynicism at its most potent. In Pozdnyshev, Mr. Tolstoy has seemingly created a straw man in whom all the author's dismay over the condition of man's soul can be invested. He appears to argue that, by dint of man's weakness and woman's deceptiveness, marriage is bound to be loveless and broken. But of course, this is nonsense. Marriage may well constrain us in ways that it is less than natural for us to be constrained, but Pozdnyshev's problem is that he expected his wife to be his perfect servant, not his perfect partner. He anticipated domination and received, instead, defiance. His inability to understand, respect or cope with this is the cause of his unhappiness, not the weakness of his soul. This is true of any marriage, the dissolution of which is rooted in an inability to adapt and communicate, not in some fundamental flaw. Human nature is imminently malleable. The moment we believe otherwise is the moment we condemn ourselves to rigid lives.

Deeper yet, we fear the loss of power. Having held its reins for so long, we have expectations that, when flaunted, cause us to salve our wounded pride with anger and rage. How dare our lessers defy us! How dare they possess their own wills to choose what they wish! This is what plagues Pozdnyshev. He cannot fathom a world in which he must enmesh his own behavior, his own desires, his own expectations, with his wife's. He cannot conceive of a marriage that does not spring up, fully formed and perfectly blissful. He cannot bring himself to understand that he will only harvest bitterness from a partnership into which he contributed nothing but his arrogance and his preconceived notions.

Fascinating work. Of course, it's possible that Mr. Tolstoy intended this to be satire, but the epilogue to the piece makes that possibility sadly remote. Love exists, just not when the power is this unbalanced. (3/5 Stars)

How The Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Though many factors contribute to how we interpret the world around us, its fundamentals and its ecology, the giants of history that preceded us and the culture that inculcated us are the two most influential forces shaping our worldview. Without the former, entire schools of thought would be foreign to us, compelling each generation to form every idea, to summon every insight. Even so, we would be even more lost without the latter. For with no cultural influences to narrow our focus, to distinguish for us the important from the trivial, the vital from the dormant, we would have no common ground upon which to share our observations, our revelations, or our proofs. A society that cares about freedom inspires research into the forces which bring it about. Conversely, a society that does not care about the rights of women is hardly going to encourage the opening of womens colleges. Everything we are is shaped by what we know and how we've been taught and this is the fascinating lesson Mr. Kaiser successfully communicates in this history of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is a mysterious and troublesome discipline. As much as it explains about the universe, it generates just as many puzzles, causing intellectual giants no less than Albert Einstein to throw up their hands in surrender and disgust. How can the state of something be undefined until its observation compels it to collapse into an outcome? How can the simple observation of a thing change its destiny? These seem like questions as much for philosophers as physicists. No surprise then that the founders and shapers of the field, Neils Bohr, Max Born and John Bell, were freethinking, European physicists whose early-20th-century insights drew together the spiritual and the physical to lay down the fundamentals for a field of study that shaped theoretical physics for the remainder of the century.

For as much as these men launched a thousand experiments, the study of physics is not cheap. Considerable funding is required if theories are to be transformed into reality. And so, as the century bogged down in war, both the hot and the cold, the non-dogmatic ideas of the early decades gave way to the narrowminded and coldly mathematical formulas of the latter, for the research grants flowing from western governments were concerned with military certainties, not intellectual ephemera. This constricted view of physics held sway until the countercultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, decades which produced as much academic change as social transformation. No longer did young scientists feel outcast for marrying the metaphysical with the real. They were free to form clubs, write papers, and imagine experiments that crossed disciplines in ways considered verboten only years prior. And in this, they sparked a rediscovery of earlier ideas of quantum physics, applied new insights and new outcomes to them and, in the process, revitalized and reshaped the study of a discipline that has the potential to change our understanding of the universe. Not bad for a bunch of California stoners who, at any other time in that long and difficult century, would have been shackled by the rigors of stolid academia.

Though Mr. Kaiser has overreached with his title, How The Hippies Saved Physics is an energetic jaunt through the last 50 years of the study of quantum physics: the wars that stunted it, the governments that funded it, and especially the countercultural minds that bent themselves to its challenges. No, the author does not convince that his club of California hippies saved physics; in fact, their most memorable contributions seem confined to the popularization of the work of John Bell and advancements in the field of quantum information. And while both are discussed in detail and each hold considerable promise, they fall short of being called saviors. This aside, Mr. Kaiser has penned a potent piece about a fascinating collection of kooks and freethinkers, eccentrics and geniuses, who helped to broaden the horizons of physics. And the extent to which he distills complex theories into notions understandable by the layman is both admirable and educational.

But for the oversell, this is valuable work that reminds us of the dangers of dogma. Scientific endeavor should not have any sacred cows. Science is the pursuit of truth and knowledge. There is no room for cultural or governmental biases. Knowledge is knowledge. And here, Mr. Kaiser does a wonderful job illustrating this most enduring principle. (4/5 Stars)