Category: Books and literature

Discussion of books and other literature

Education as a technology

“Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child’s nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much more difficult than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because these bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.”

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. p. 222 (paperback)

Appreciating Pinker

Now that I am forty pages in, I can enthusiastically endorse Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. It engages with complex and important ideas in a highly accessible way, without the tediousness that sometimes accompanies technical writing. In terms of his brilliance in covering challenging topics comprehensibly, Pinker reminds me of Richard Dawkins and Simon Singh.

It’s one of those books where you want to underline and quote nearly every sentence.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a classic spy novel, written for those who enjoy the suggestion of authenticity. Rather than indulging in the over-the-top pyrotechnics found in some spy thrillers, Le Carré’s characters are cautious and meticulous. In particular, the protagonist George Smiley is a kind of antithesis to the James Bond stereotype: fat, clad in fogged spectacles, burdened with an unfaithful wife, but nonetheless at the top of the game when it comes to counterintelligence operations in the United Kingdom.

The setting – Britain during the Cold War – permeates the book. I will admit that it is a bit amusing to read about the high drama of spies speeding along obscure motorways connecting small British cities, rather than jetting around between glamorous national capitals. At the same time, Le Carré does capture what I would expect to be the key geopolitical dynamics of the time: the superpower competition between Russia and America, with the United Kingdom in the middle in a diminished post-imperial role. Le Carré talks about how British agents were: “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.” It makes you wonder who will be elevated and who will be lowered, forty years from now.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy includes some observations that border on the philosophical. Le Carré raises the question of oversight, and the difficulty of trusting spies (p. 74 paperback) ; he explains how the wily opponent seeks not perfection, but advantage from his actions (194) ; the ways in which the false identities a person maintains actually express the person they conceal (213); how intelligence services have an incentive to puff up the competence of their opponents, to get more support for themselves (316); how “survival” is “an infinite capacity for suspicion” (337); how the essence of betrayal is to “overtly pursue… one aim and secretly achieve its opposite” (354); how a state’s secret services provide a measure of its political health (365); and how treason becomes “a matter of habit” once initial motivations become fuzzy and continuing on the same course seems the simplest option (377). The comment about enemy capabilities is especially relevant today, as gigantic state security bureaucracies justify themselves on the basis of the threat from a few dangerous malcontents hanging around in caves and radical discussion forums online.

Le Carré’s writing is full of examples of clever observation, which both appeals to the reader’s curiosity and makes the characters themselves seem more interesting and authentic. The book is also peppered with authentic-seeming espionage tradecraft, in areas like following people, transmitting information securely, sending coded signals, and handling in-person meetings. Probably technology has changed some of that since 1974, but perhaps not all that much. The paranoid world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which it is unclear which of the authorities can be trusted, has many parallels with the world today.

Cities with unusually good libraries

I think Vancouver is on the list. I remember actually attending the opening ceremonies for the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, when I was in elementary school. The building is rather elegant, I think, and they have a good selection.

Oxford obviously counts, though only from the perspective of students. The same may be true of Toronto. How is the public library system there? I am sure U of T has good libraries, even if one looks like a gigantic concrete turkey.

The reading room of the New York Public Library is one of the most appealing spaces I have ever read in, plus it is free and their archives are gigantic.

Ottawa’s central public library, on Metcalfe, doesn’t have either the physical attractiveness or the comprehensive catalogue of some of those other offerings. Perhaps that is something Ottawa should change, particularly given the number of people here who try to stay well read on their topics of personal expertise. It would add a lot more to the city than some new suburban road or sports venue might.

A better library would also be a nice place to meet bookish people.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Ordinarily, the multi-generational family story is my least favourite kind of novel. I usually find them tedious and uncompelling. It speaks especially well of Junot Diaz’s book, then, that I found it engagingly written and worthwhile, though a rather darker read than I was expecting.

Diaz succeeds in giving distinct voices to his multiple narrators, though it wouldn’t have hurt to identify them at the beginning of each section. The book is also full of poignant and clever descriptions, though they may be a bit crass for some tastes. Diaz’s writing includes many untranslated Spanish passages, some of which at least provide hints of meaning to speakers of English and French, while some of which are simply incomprehensible without assistance. It also includes numerous references to science fiction and fantasy books, which are a passion of the novel’s titular figure.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the way in which it effectively expresses the experience of living in a dictatorship that is also a police state: the arbitrary arrests, the inconsistent application of justice, the torture, the rapes, the fear, the spying between neighbours, the absurdity, and the inevitable abuse of power by the secret police. Diaz is very effective at conveying an impression (I cannot judge how accurate) of what the Dominican Republic was like under Rafael Trujillo, the man who looms over the book but whose assassination is relegated to a long footnote.

Reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao could serve as a bit of a vaccine for those who are frustrated by the imperfections of democracy and who wonder whether a benevolent despot might do better. With visceral language that makes for anxious reading, Diaz expresses the injustices that arise when power exists without oversight.

Activism and psychology books

I know bold plans to read and discuss The Moral Landscape did not go as smoothly as one might have hoped, interrupted by more urgent undertakings.

That said, there are a trio of books I am planning to read that may be of interest to readers of this site:

  • Alinsky, Saul. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.
  • Carson, Clayborne ed. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

If anybody feels inclined to read and discuss one of them, I can make it a priority reading task for myself.

The Moral Landscape

Traditionally, science is understood as having limited authority on ethical questions. While scientific knowledge is useful for understanding the world better – including in ways that change our moral thinking – the idea that you can have a scientific answer to a moral question is usually rejected. That position is itself rejected by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. Harris argues that we can use science to develop an objective sense of what is good for human beings and what is not, and that we can judge various practices using that scale. The book sharply and effectively criticizes both religious perspectives on the nature of the world and moral relativism. Indeed, the author’s principle project seems to be the development of a non-religious alternative to relativism, based around cognitive science. For the most part, his argument strikes me as a convincing one. That, in turn, has some important implications for political debates.

Harris’ book is a complex one that makes many different arguments and points. Often, he is able to illustrate his logic through clear examples, though some of them feel a bit cliched. He could also have devoted more attention to criticizing intuitive moral reasoning within western societies. He manages some elegant and convincing rebuttals, such as his response to the scapegoat problem on page 79 of the hardcover edition.

One key element of Harris’ argument is the view that it is the conscious life of animals that matters, when it comes to the basis of ethics: “[Q]uestions about values – about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose – are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures”. He argues this point convincingly, and suggests that we can build from that claim and from factual understanding of cognitive science to robust ethical judgements. Harris pays relatively little attention to non-human animals, but that is clearly an area into which such thinking can be extended, when it comes to questions like factory farming or veganism. Harris says that: “The only thing wrong with injustice is that it is, on same level, actually or potentially bad for people”. A richer ethical theory might incorporate the interests of other conscious organisms in some way.

Some of Harris’ concerns do seem a bit exaggerated. For instance, when he walks about the danger of “the societies of Europe” being “refashion[ed]” into “a new Caliphate”. He also has a bit too much faith in the power of brain scans as they now exist. Being able to track which parts of the brain receive more blood flow than others is useful, but doesn’t necessarily allow us to develop nuanced pictures of complex ideas and thought processes. As such, his argument that since functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people thinking about mathematical equations resemble those of people considering ethical propositions, we should consider that evidence that the two are similar things.

Ultimately, the argument made in The Moral Landscape is utilitarian. We can come to know the basics of what makes up a good human life, and we should arrange states and global society so that people can experience them (and so that they avoid experiencing the worst things, like slavery and total personal insecurity). He makes the important point that we cannot expect to know all the consequences of particular choices, but we can nonetheless reach firm conclusions about important problems. Societies that provide education for women are better than societies that keep them in ignorance. That claim can be justified, according to Harris, by carefully examining the mental lives of people living in both kinds of society.

In particular, Harris highlights how societies that are based upon secular ethics consistently do better in measurable ways than those which are most explicitly modeled on religious ethics. “Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands”, Harris explains, “which are consistently the most atheistic societies on earth – consistently rate better tan religious nations on measures like like expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, economic equality, economic competitiveness, gender equality, health care, investments in education, rates of university enrollment, internet access, environmental protection, lack of corruption, political stability, and charity to poorer nations, etc”. He attributes the claim to P. Zuckerman’s 2008 book Society Without God.

Harris’ purpose is not a dispassionate one, focused on description. He says clearly that: “[c]hanging people’s ethical commitments… is the most important task facing humanity in the twenty-first century”. I am not sure if I quite agree. You can argue that people need to change the fundamental basis of their ethical views in order to deal with a world of 6.7 billion people. Alternatively, you can see the problem as the disconnect between the choices people make and the ethical views they already possess. If people could directly see the consequences of their choices, I think their existing ethical systems would often drive them to behave otherwise. It is because the consequences are mostly hidden – largely imposed on people in other places, and in the future – that people often make choices that are so oblivious to the harm they are forcing upon other conscious creatures. Harris argues that “one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions”. I think that is especially true when it comes to economics, public policy, and the environment.

Reading momentum

On top of a chest of drawers, I have about six tall stacks of partially read books. Each horizontal stack contains about ten volumes, lying atop one another with spines facing into the room. Most of them are serious tomes on environmental topics or difficult novels that I have received as gifts. It is relatively rare that I come home from a day of work in the kind of headspace where sitting down with something challenging – in a literary or intellectual sense – is terribly appealing. Weekends, too, tend to be filled up with laundry and catching up on a work week’s neglected sleep. As such, the books tend to sit unread for weeks, and months, and years.

One trick I have found is to give myself a bit of mental cheesecake – a book that is quick and delicious. For instance, a novel that doesn’t require you to keep track of the storylines of multiple family members across different generations, perhaps punctuated by nauseating sexual violence. Or a non-fiction book that is not a depressing trudge through all the ways humanity is wrecking the planet that sustains us.

Malcolm Gladwell’s books often play this role well. So can classic novels, which often lack the flourishes that Booker Prize judges seem to fixate upon but which often make the books into impossible morasses that can only be passed through as the result of determined and uninterrupted effort.

Not only does the cheesecake book itself get read quickly and enjoyably, but it also conveys a certain forward momentum to the general project of reading, and sometimes makes me make some progress against one of the heavier items in my long queue.

VERSeFest 2011

I went to a slam poetry event at Ottawa’s VERSeFest tonight, and it was extremely good. The speakers were very talented, and the crowd was duly appreciative.

For the most part, the poets were very critical of government policy and society in general. I suppose that is normal at these events, which have a certain idealistic revolutionary flavour. At the end, I wished I had a chance to respond to some of the speakers and say that, for the most part, problems persist because they are difficult to solve, not because people are malevolent. More often, they are just focused on other priorities, or blocked by structural constraints and the inherent difficulty of solving enduring problems. All that said, a lack of compassion is definitely one reason why problems like homelessness endure, and poetry is a medium that seems capable of encouraging greater compassion.

This is the first time this particular festival is being held, and it seems to involve a tonne of different events. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 13th) is the last day, with a bilingual poetry event at 1:30pm, Japanese form poetry at 3:00pm, a Dusty Owl Reading Series event at 5:00pm, and a closing ceremony at 7:00pm.

Passes for the day are $10, and available at Arts Court (2 Daly Avenue), The Manx (370 Elgin Street), and Collected Works (1242 Wellington Street).

I have about eight gigabytes of RAW image files from the event to process, but I will definitely put up a link to the Flickr set once I have dealt with them.