Review: The Speech

The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed & the Decline of Our Middle Class by Bernie Sanders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Greed, in my view, is like a sickness. It is like an addiction.

Say what you will, this presidential race has been, at the very least, an intensely interesting affair. Of course, there is the debacle of the Republican primaries; but those are mainly interesting in the same way that a car accident is interesting—you can’t help but rubberneck, even if you’re a bit disgusted with yourself for doing so. Much more engrossing, for me, has been the rise of Bernie Sanders, something which seems to have surprised everybody, even Sanders himself.

I should admit, right off the bat, that I like Sanders; but I’m going to try my best in this review, however ineffectual that may be, to maintain some skeptical distance. I suggest you do the same for me.

This book was first released in 2011. As its back cover will tell you, it is a transcription of Sanders’s long filibuster speech, delivered on December 10, 2010, on the eve of a deal, brokered by Obama and the Republicans, which extended the Bush tax cuts on the super-rich, among other things. The whole speech is on YouTube, if you’re interested, all eight-and-a-half hours. This book is just a transcription of the speech.

As Sanders warns in the beginning, this speech is quite repetitive, deliberately so; he expected viewers to turn in for only a few minutes on CSPAN, and not to stick through the whole thing. This redundancy is probably the worst aspect of this book. I don’t see why it couldn’t have been edited and neatened up. Even so, despite the recurring sections, there is just enough new material scattered throughout the speech to keep the reader’s interest—or at least, to keep mine.

The subject of Sanders’s speech is most immediately the financial legislation in question and its shortcomings; but Sanders uses this as a jumping-off point to discuss what he sees as the pressing and dire problems facing the United States. Sanders is a remarkably consistent politician, and you will see him focused on the same issues, often using the same language, that he’s employed during his presidential bid this year.

The core of Sanders’s campaign, and this speech, is income inequality. Truly, the level of income inequality in the United States is staggering and hard to wrap one’s head around. Sanders does his best by hammering his listeners with statistic after statistic, numbers so big and so stark that they baffle the mind. After about five repetitions, they start to sink in; and after ten, your own moral outrage begins to simmer along with Sanders’s.

It’s worthwhile to compare Sanders’s speaking style with that of Obama. Obama is, I think, certainly the stronger and more versatile speaker. He is capable of sharp wit, of passionate outrage, of good-natured jocularity. But where I think he most excels, and what was his biggest asset when he ran for president, was his ability to inspire. He does this mainly through the use of anecdotes. He makes his speeches very personal; the way he speaks of nurses and teachers and firefighters is not at all condescending or pandering, but really makes you feel he knows them, knows them personally and intimately.

Sanders’s approach is quite different. For one, he is certainly more narrow in ability and focus. What Sanders conveys, with his voice, with his words, with his thrashing body language and unkempt appearance, is moral outrage. Indeed, I find something Biblical about Sanders’s speeches. He shouts until his voice cracks, until he is absolutely hoarse, detailing in a long, grotesque list how unfair and unequal our society has become. You don’t so much feel inspired as galvanized, jolted with a mixture of desperation and indignation.

To create these feelings, he does not tell stories, but recites facts. It’s astonishingly simple, really; he just has to read off a long list of ways that America is doing poorly—our shamefully huge prison population, our crumbling infrastructure, our soaring college tuition and health costs, and of course the absurd level of wealth and income inequality, which seems to grow more every year.

To speak personally for a moment, I remember the moment when his message really hit me. First I have to tell you that, among my friends, it’s almost a cliché to talk about how much better life in Europe is than in America. In fact, one of my friends, after a long vacation in Europe, said to me: “It’s honest really depressing how much better life is over there.” And it’s not just us; a lot of people have these thoughts. You get used to thinking of the United States as poorer, less prosperous, more benighted than places like Germany and Denmark.

Anyhow, one day when I was listening to a Sanders speech, he said: “Some of you may not know this, it’s easy to forget it sometimes, but the United States is the wealthiest country in the history of the world.” This really made something click within me. I’d gotten so used to thinking of the United States as poor and inferior—a place where you can’t afford to go to school or to get sick—that I was shocked to be reminded that we have more wealth in this country than anywhere else. This is, I think, what’s so effective and compelling about Sanders: you feel you’re being snapped back into reality.

So this is what I like about Sanders. What I dislike is his tendency to demonize the rich. He speaks of the super-wealthy as if they’re a bunch of nefarious, mustache-twirling, conscience-less devils trying to enslave the rest of the world. I just don’t see this rhetoric as necessary. First, everybody pursues their own interests—the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy—so I don’t see any reason to act morally superior. And second, I simply don’t think it’s true, strictly speaking, that the economy is hurting solely because of the greed of the wealthy. Yes, I am sure that a lot of stupid, selfish greed contributed to our economic situation today; but the economy is bloody complicated; it’s not a moral playground, but a vast system that even the best minds have failed to understand.

The cynical side of me sees this finger-wagging as just the sort of us-versus-them rhetoric that politicians use to gain power. But I do think, to be honest, that Sanders is not capable of something so underhanded. He’s been ragging on the rich for his whole career; it’s only recently that this strategy has started to pay off. And besides, I do think his larger point is not only valid, but vitally important—namely, that the influence of the wealthy class on politics, with campaign contributions and corporate lobbyists, has to be curtailed in order to preserve a working democracy.

As for Sanders’s political vision, I can’t deny that it appeals to me deeply. In a nutshell, Sanders’s vision is to make the United States more like Europe, with cheap college education, with free healthcare, with a strong social safety net, with higher taxes on the rich, with stronger infrastructure, and with a great deal more economic regulation. For the truth is, life in European countries often sounds too good to be true to young Americans.

Let me give you some concrete examples. Just the other day, I was in a car with a Spaniard. We got on the topic of vacation. She said she has a friend in the States who only gets 8 vacation days per year. “Is that typical?” she asks. Yes, we tell her. In my last job I got 15, but my girlfriend only had 5. Our driver is aghast. “I get thirty,” she says, “and I think that’s too few!”

Here’s another example, with regards to infrastructure. A monthly subway card in New York City costs $117; the equivalent here in Madrid costs 55€, and only 20€ if you’re 26 or under. What’s more, the subways in New York are overcrowded and dirty, with constant delays due to lines being shut down for repair; whereas the metro here is clean and always has good service. I’ve even seen a video—here’s the link—which shows some of the machines being used today in the NYC subway system. They were built in the 1930s, if you can believe that.

And this is not to mention the looks of shocked disbelief on the faces of Europeans when I tell them just how expensive college and healthcare are in the United States. So, really, when you’re reminded that your country—the place with the slow and expensive and obsolescent trains, where every young person is several thousand dollars in debt from college, and where we still have high levels of unemployment and child poverty—is the richest country in all of history, it hits a nerve.

And while I don’t like demonizing the rich, I do agree that the rich in the U.S. live in a world apart. This was illustrated for me last year when, by chance, I found myself looking through a yacht magazine. Have you ever seen one? It was unbelievable, and I mean I honestly couldn’t believe what I saw. These ships were just huge. Inside they had bowling alleys, movie theaters; they had personal gyms and helicopter landing pads; they had living rooms created by world-famous interior designers. The boats were, I admit, super cool. But what does it say about our society that there are people who can afford things like this, when on every corner is somebody on the street?

This review has already dragged on too long, and still there is so much to be said about Sanders and what his campaign means. The pundits dismissed him before he began, and even now, even in some liberal publications, he’s discussed—discussed all too rarely—with a kind of guarded skepticism. Some have said that the media is ignoring him because of their corporate overlords. But in general, I don’t think conspiracy theories are necessary. The news media in the U.S. is not evil, it’s just shamefully bad.

For example, on several occasions I’ve heard pundits criticize Sanders for focusing on income inequality in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. What a bizarre situation we’re in, when a politician is criticized for not trying to whip up fear. Other pundits have dismissed Sanders based on poll numbers; but even when Sanders was leading in Iowa and New Hampshire, Hillary was regarded as inevitable. Besides, my understanding is that these poll numbers, which change every week, are done on landlines—and thus probably exclude most young people, the bulk of Sanders’s supporters. Ironically enough, the only thing that seems to get the journalists’ attention is how much money Sanders is managing to make without accepting donations from corporations—which says quite a lot about the American media.

Almost every prediction I’ve heard about this election cycle has been shown to be foolish, so perhaps I should demure. But let me give it a go. Even if he doesn’t quite win, I think Sanders will surprise everyone on election day by how close he gets. And even if he loses, I predict that his presidential run will serve a similar function as Barry Goldwater’s did, back in the 60s, giving impetus and direction to a new political movement in the country. In other words, even if he loses the political battle, I think he’s already won the battle of ideas. And, who knows? Maybe he’ll win the political battle, too.

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Review: The Ascent of Man

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books, we shall not exist.

I watched this series right after finishing Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, as I’d heard The Ascent of Man described as a companion piece. So like my review of Clark’s work, this review is about the documentary and not the book (though since the book is just a transcription of the series, I’m sure it applies to both).

The Ascent of Man is a remarkable program. I had doubts that anyone could produce a series to match Civilisation, but Bronowski made something that might even be better. Bronowski was a polymath: he did work in mathematics, biology, physics, history, and even poetry. In this program, his topic is the history of science. Yet for Bronowski, the word “science” not only refers to the modern scientific method, but rather encompasses all of humanity’s efforts to understand and manipulate the natural world.

We thus begin with Homo erectus, learning how to chip away stone to make tools. As Bronowski notes, this simple ability, to chip away at a stone until a cutting edge is left, is a remarkable indication of human uniqueness. Since the behavior is learned and is not an instinct, it requires a preconception of what the toolmaker wants to create, a certain amount of imagination is required to picture the goal before it is realized. What’s more, creating a stone tool requires a sense of the structural properties of the rock. (I’ve actually tried making stone tools with various types of rock, and let me tell you that it’s not so easy. Even with an archaeologist giving me advice, I was only able to create stone tools of the sophistication of an Australopithecus—randomly beating the stone until a sharp edge was created.) Thus both our creative drive and our knowledge are involved in this quintessentially human activity. “Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.”

This brings Bronowski to one of his main points, one of the themes of this series: that art and science are not fundamentally different; rather, they are two manifestations of the human spirit. What is this human spirit? It is a composite of many qualities, what Bronowski calls “a jigsaw of human faculties,” which include our wide behavioral flexibility, our capacity to play, our need to create, our curiosity about the natural world, our sense of adventure, our love of variety. Indeed, these can be pithily described by saying that humans retain many childlike characteristics throughout their lives. The name of the last episode is “The Long Childhood.”

One of my favorite sequences in this documentary is when Bronowski takes the viewer from the posts and lintels of the Greek temples, to the arches in the Roman aqueduct in Segovia, to the somewhat prettier arches in the Mezquita in Cordoba, to the cathedral at Reims with its magnificent flying buttresses. Each of these structures, he explains, is a more sophisticated solution to this problem: how do you create a covered space out of stone? The lintel and post system used by the Greeks leads to a forest of columns, and the Mezquita, although less crowded, is still filled with arches. The Medieval Christians achieved a magnificent solution by placing the buttresses on the outside, thus leading to the towering, open interior of Reims.

We’re used to thinking of this development as an architectural triumph, but as Bronowski points out, it was also an intellectual triumph. This progression represents better and better understandings of the structural properties of stone, of the force of gravity, and of the distribution of weight. And when you see it play out in front of your eyes, it’s hard to shake the impression that these marvelous works are also progressively more elegant solutions to a mathematical puzzle. This is just one example of Bronowski’s talent: to see the artistic in the scientific and the scientific in the artistic; and he does this by seeing the human spirit in all of it.

Here’s another example. Bronowski wants to talk about how humanity has come to understand space, and how this understanding of space underpins our knowledge of structure. How does he do it? He goes to the Alhambra, and analyzes the symmetry in the tiles of the Moorish Palace. Then, he bends down and spreads a bunch of crystals on the ground, and begins to talk about the molecular symmetry that gave rise to them. It’s such a stunning juxtaposition. How many people would think to compare Moorish architecture with modern chemistry? But it’s so appropriate and so revealing that I couldn’t help but be awed.

As the title suggests, this series is not simply about science (or art), but about science through history. Bronowski aims to show how humanity, once freed from the constraints of instinct, used a combination of logic and imagination to achieve ever-deeper conceptions of our place in the universe. This is the Ascent of Man: a quest for self knowledge. It’s sometimes hard for us moderns to grasp this, but consider that we are living in one of the brief times in history that we can explain the formation of the earth, the origin of our species, and even the workings of our own brains. Imagine not knowing any of that. It’s hard to envy former ages when you consider that their sense of their place of the universe was based on myth supported by authority, or was simply a mystery. I’m sure (and I earnestly hope) that future generations will believe the same about us.

Bronowski’s final message is a plea to continue this ascent. This means spreading a understanding and an appreciation of science, as his programs tries to do. This strikes me as terribly important. I’ve met so many people who say things like “Science is a form of faith” or “Science can’t solve every problem” or “Science is dehumanizing and arrogant.” It’s sad to hear intelligent people say things like this, for it simply isn’t true. It’s an abuse of language to call science a faith; then what isn’t? And yes, of course science can’t solve every problem and can’t answer every question; but can anything? Science can solve some problems, and can do so very well. And science, as Bronowski points out, is the very opposite of dehumanizing and arrogant. Science is a most human form of knowledge, born of humility of our intellectual powers, based on repeated mistakes and guesses, always pressing forward into the unknown, always revising its opinions based on evidence. Atrocities are committed, not by people who are trained to question their own beliefs, but by ideologues who are convinced they are right.

This is Bronowski’s essential message. But like in any good story, the telling is half of it. As I’ve mentioned above, Bronowski and his team are brilliant at finding unexpected ways to illustrate abstract ideas. This series is full of wonderful and striking visual illustrations of Bronowski’s points. What’s more, the man is a natural storyteller, and effectively brings to life many of this series’ heroes: Newton, Galileo, Alfred Russell Wallace, Mendel. He’s also a poet; one of his books is a study of William Blake’s poetry. This not only gives him a knack for similes, but helps him to explain how science is fundamentally creative. One of my favorite scenes is when Bronowski compares abstract portraits of a man to the ways that various scientific instruments—radar, infrared, cameras, X-rays—detect the man’s face. As he explains, both the portrait and these readings are interpretations of their subjects.

The cinematography is also excellent. There are some sequences in this documentary that are still impressive, saturated as we are with CGI. There are even some quite psychedelic sections. One of my favorite of these was a sequence of microscopic shots of human cells with Pink Floyd (who contributed music) jamming chaotically in the background. Unlike in Clark’s Civilisation, which uses exclusively ‘classical’ music and is devoid of special effects, the style of this documentary is surprisingly modern and even edgy. Another thing Bronowski does that Clark doesn’t, is include some information on non-Western cultures, from Meso-America, Japan, China, and Easter Island.

Yes, there are some parts of this that are outdated. Most obviously, much of the scientific information is no longer accurate—particularly the information on human evolution in the first episode. This is unavoidable, and is in fact a tribute to the ideals Bronowski championed. More jarring is Bronowski’s somewhat negative assessments of the culture of Easter Island and the lifestyle of nomadic peoples. Less controversially, he also has some negative words to say about Hegel. (Did you know Hegel published an absurd thesis when he was young about how the distance of the orbits of the planets had to conform to a number series?) Another mark of this program’s age is that Bronowski several times shows nudity and even a human birth. This would never fly on television today, at least not in the States.

But these flaws are minor in such a tremendous program. The Ascent of Man is a landmark in the history of science education and of documentary making, and a stirring vision of the progress of humanity by an brilliant and sympathetic man. I hope you get a chance to watch it.

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Review: The Concept of Mind

The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men—a tautology which is sometimes worth remembering.

The problem of mind is one of those philosophical quandaries that give me a headache and prompt an onset of existential angst whenever I try to think about them. How does consciousness arise from matter? How can a network of nerves create a perspective? And how can this consciousness, in turn, influence the body it inhabits? When we look at a brain, or anywhere else in the physical world, we cannot detect consciousness; only nerves firing and blood rushing. Where is it? The only evidence for consciousness is my own awareness. So how do I know anybody else is conscious? Could it be just me?

If you think about the problem in this way, I doubt you will make any progress either, because it is insoluble. This is where Gilbert Ryle enters the picture. According to Ryle, the philosophy of mind was put on a shaky foundation by Descartes and his followers. When Descartes divided the world into mind and matter, the first private and the other public, he created several awkward problems: How do we know other people have minds? How do the realms of matter and mind interact? How can the mind be sure of the existence of the material world? And so on. This book is an attempt to break away from the assumptions that led to these questions.

Ryle’s philosophy is often compared with that of the later Wittgenstein, and justly so. The main thrusts of their argument are remarkably similar. This may have been due simply to the influence of Wittgenstein on Ryle, or vice versa—there appears to be some doubt. Regardless, it is appropriate to compare them, as I think, taken together, their ideas help to shed light on one another’s philosophy.

Both Wittgenstein and Ryle are extraordinary writers. Wittgenstein is certainly the better of the two, though this is not due to any defect on Ryle’s part. Wittgenstein is aphoristic, sometimes oblique, employing numerous allegories and similes to make his point. Ryle is sharp, direct, and epigrammatic. Wittgenstein is in the same tradition as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, while Ryle is the direct descendent of Jane Austen. But both of them are witty, quotable, and brilliant. They have managed to create excellent works of philosophy without using any jargon and avoiding all obscurity. Why can’t philosophy always be written so well?

There is no contradiction, or even paradox, in describing someone as bad at practising what he is good at preaching. There have been thoughtful and original literary critics who have formulated admirable canons of prose style in execrable prose. There have been others who have employed brilliant English in the expression of the silliest theories of what constitute good writing.

Ryle also has the quality—unusual among philosophers—of being apparently quite extroverted. His eyes are turned not toward himself, but to his surroundings. He speaks with confidence and insight about the way people normally behave and talk, and in general prefers this everyday understanding of things to the tortured theories of his introverted colleagues.

Teachers and examiners, magistrates and critics, historians and novelists, confessors and non-commissioned officers, employers, employees and partners, parents, lovers, friends and enemies all know well enough how to settle their daily questions about the qualities of character and intellect of the individuals with whom they have to do.

This book, his most famous, is written not as a monograph or an analysis, but as a manifesto. Ryle piles epigram upon epigram until you are craving just one qualification, just one admission that he might be mistaken. He even seems to get carried away by the force of his own pen, leading to some needlessly long and repetitious sections. What is more, his style has the defect of all epigrammatists: he is utterly convincing in short gasps, but ultimately leaves his reader grasping for something more systematic.

Ryle is often called an ordinary language philosopher, and the label suits him. Like Wittgenstein, he thinks that philosophical puzzles come about by the abuse of words; philosophers fail to correctly analyze the logical category of words, and thus use them inappropriately, leading to false paradoxes. The Rylean philosopher’s task is to undo this damage. Ryle likens his own project to that of a cartographer in a village. The residents of the village are perfectly able to find their way around and can even give directions. But they might not be able to create an abstract representation of the village’s layout. This is the philosopher’s job: to create a map of the logical layout of language. This will prevent other foreigners from getting lost.

Ryle begins by pointing out some obvious problems with the Cartesian picture—a picture he famously dubs the ‘Ghost in the Machine.’ First, we have no idea how these two metaphysically distinct realms of mind and matter interact. Thus by attempting to explain the nature of human cognition, the Cartesians cordon it off from the familiar world and banish it to a shadow world, leaving unexplained how the shadow is cast.

Second, the Cartesian picture renders all acts of communication into a kind of impossible guessing game. You would constantly be having to fathom the significance of a word or gesture by making conjectures as to what is happening in a murky realm behind an impassible curtain (another person’s mind). Conjectures of this kind would be fundamentally dissimilar to other conjectures because there would be, in principle, no way to check them. In the Cartesian picture, people’s minds are absolutely cut off from all outside observation.

Ryle is hardly original in pointing out these two problems, although he does manage to emphasize these embarrassing conundrums with special force. His more original critique is what has been dubbed “Ryle’s Regress.” This is made against what Ryle calls the “intellectualist legend,” which is the notion that all intelligent behaviors are the products of thoughts.

For example, if you produced a grammatically correct English sentence, it means (according to the “legend”) that you have properly applied the correct criteria for English grammar. However, this must mean that you applied the proper criteria to the criteria, i.e. you applied the meta-criteria that allowed you to choose the rules for English grammar and not the rules for Spanish grammar. But what meta-meta-criteria allowed you to pick the correct meta-criteria for the criteria for the English sentence? (I.e., what anterior rule allowed you to pick the rule that allowed you to choose the rule for determining whether English or Spanish rules should be used instead of the rule for choosing whether salt or sugar should be added to a recipe?—sorry, that’s a mouthful.)

The point is that we are led down an infinite regress if we require rules to proceed action. This is one of the classic arguments against cognitive theories of the mind. (I believe Hubert Dreyfus used this same argument in his criticisms of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Considering the strides that A.I. has made since then, I’m sure there must be some way around this regress, though I don’t know what. Hopefully somebody can explain it to me.)

These are his most forceful reasons for rejecting the Ghost in the Machine. From reading the other reviews here, I gather that many people are fairly convinced by these arguments. Nonetheless, some have accused Ryle of failing to replace the Cartesian picture with anything else. This is not a fair criticism. Ryle does his best to rectify the mistaken picture with his own view, though you may not find this view very satisfying.

After doing his best to discredit the Cartesian picture, the rest of the book is devoted to demonstrating Ryle’s view that none of the ways we ordinarily use language necessitate or even imply that “the mind is its own place.” This is where he most nearly approaches Wittgenstein, for his main contentions are the following: First, it is only when language is misused by philosophers (and laypeople) that we get the impression that the mind is a metaphysically distinct thing. Second, our intellectual and emotional lives are in fact not cut off and separate from the world; rather, public behavior is at the very core of our being.

Here is just one example. According to the Cartesian view, a person “really knows” how to divide if, when given a problem—let’s say, 144 divided by 24—his mind goes through the necessary steps. Let us say a professor gives a student this problem, and the student correctly responds: 6. The professor conjectures that the student’s mind has gone through the appropriate operation. But what if the professor asks him the exact same question five minutes later, and the student responds: 8? And what if he did it again, and the student responds: 3? The following dialogue ensues:

PROFESSOR: Ah, you’re just saying random numbers. You really don’t know how to divide.

STUDENT: But my mind performed the correct operation when you asked me the first time. I forgot how to do it after that.

PROFESSOR: How do you know your mind performed the correct operation the first time?

STUDENT: Introspection.

PROFESSOR: But if you can’t remember how to do it now, how can you be sure that you did know previously?

STUDENT: Introspection, again.

PROFESSOR: I don’t believe you. I don’t think you ever knew.

The point of the dialogue is this. According to the Cartesian view, introspection provides not merely the best, but the only true window into the mind. You are the only person who can know your own mind, and everyone else knows it via conjecture. Thus the student, and only the student, would really know if his mind performed the proper operation, and thus he alone would really know if he could divide. Yet this is not the case. We say somebody “knows how to divide” if they can consistently answer questions of division correctly.

Thus, Ryle argues, to “know how to divide” is a disposition. And a disposition cannot be analyzed into episodes. In other words, “knowing how to divide” is not a collection of discrete times when a mind went through the proper operations. Similarly, if I say “the glass is fragile,” I do not mean that it has broken or even that it will necessarily break, just that it would break easily. Fragility, like knowing long division, is a disposition.

According to Ryle, when philosophers misconstrued what it meant to know how to divide (and other things), they committed a “category mistake.” They miscategorized the phrase; they mistook a disposition for an episode. More generally, the Cartesians mix up two different sorts of knowledge: knowing how and knowing that. They confuse dispositions, capacities, and propensities for rules, facts, and criteria. This leads them into all sorts of muddles.

Here is a classic example. Since Berkley, philosophers have been perplexed by the mind’s capacity to form abstract ideas. The word “red” encompasses many different particular shades, and is thus abstract. Is our idea of red some sort of vague blend of all particular reds? Or is it a collections of different, distinct shades we bundle together into a group? Ryle contends that this question makes the following mistake: Recognizing the color red is a knowing how. It is a skill we learn, just like recognizing melodies, foreign accents, and specific flavors. It is a capacity we develop; it is not the forming of a mental object, an “idea,” that sits somewhere in a mental space.

Ryle applies this method to problem after problem, which seem to dissolve in the acid of his gaze. It is an incredible performance, and a great antidote for a lot of the conundrums philosophers like to tie themselves up in. Nevertheless, you cannot shake the feeling that for all his directness, Ryle dances around the main question: How does awareness arise from the brain?

Well, I’m not positive about this, but I believe it was never Ryle’s intention to explain this, since he considers the question outside the proper field of philosophy. It is a scientific, not a philosophical question. His goal was, rather, to show that the mind/body problem is not an insoluble mystery or evidence of metaphysical duality, and that the mind is not fundamentally private and untouchable. Humans are social creatures, and it is only with great effort that we keep some things to ourselves.

I certainly cannot keep this review to myself. This was the best work of philosophy I have read since finishing Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in 2014, and I hope you get a chance to read it too. Is it conclusive? No. Is it irrefutable? I doubt it. But it is witty, eloquent, original, and devoid of nonsense. This is as good as philosophy gets.

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Review: The Essential Plotinus

The Essential Plotinus by Plotinus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up this book after reading Glenn’s fine review, and I’m glad I did. This is an excellent volume; and although I haven’t read the complete Enneads, so I can’t say for sure, I suspect that the editor and translator, Elmer O’Brien, did an expert job in selecting the very best sections from that long tome. In just 170 pages, one finds a complete philosophical system and worldview. I’ve read few books that pack so much into so few words.

It is often remarked that Plotinus was more of a mystic than a real philosopher. But of course, those two aren’t mutually exclusive categories. I’ve heard both Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s works compared to mystical poetry, and indeed the clear demarcation between philosophy and religion is a relatively recent phenomenon. So don’t let the mysticism put you off. This is a serious and significant work of philosophy.

At both the literal and metaphorical center of Plotinus’s system is his concept of The One. The One is the source of all reality, the source of existence itself: “It is by The One that all beings are beings.” It transcends all forms of knowledge; it cannot be described in any words: “This principle is certainly none of the things of which it is the source. It is such that nothing can be predicated of it, not being, not substance, not life, because it is superior to all these things.” The One, which is the same as The Good, is the goal of Plotinus’s system: to seek, through contemplation, an experience of the wellspring of all existence. “By directing your glance towards it, by reaching it, by resting in it, you will achieve a deep and immediate awareness of it and will at the same time seize its greatness in all things that come from it and exist through it.”

Now this all sounds quite abstract and incomprehensible, but I think Plotinus’s point is rather simple. Nothing can exist without having some sort of unity; and the more unity something has, the more stable is its existence. For example, a choir only exists if all of the people composing it are organized in some way. When they disband, the unity is broken, and the choir ceases to exist. A human body exists because all of the diverse parts which compose it cooperate and coordinate their activities. Once this organization ceases, the unity of the parts is broken, and the body ceases to function and ultimately passes away. The more simple something is, the less contingency is has. To pick an inappropriately modern example, a molecule exists because the atoms which compose it are in a particular configuration; once this configuration is broken, the molecule is gone. What persists are the fundamental particles, quarks and electrons, which are (we think) absolutely simple, and therefore persist through all the shifting configurations of matter and energy that cause everything we experience through our senses.

The One is what Plotinus calls the “first hypostasis.” The One is the principle of all existence, because, without some sort of unity, nothing could exist. But by itself, The One doesn’t exist. In fact, to give it any predicate, even the predicate of “existence,” is to attribute some contingent quality to it. So just as Heidegger is fond of reminding us that Being is not a being—that is, the cause of existence cannot itself be something that exists—so does Plotinus warn us that we can know absolutely nothing about The One. It is formless, devoid of all qualities, transcendent of all thought, beyond even our categories of “real” and “unreal.”

But of course, the universe exists, and therefore cannot be identical with The One. This leads Plotinus to his “second hypostasis,” which is The Intelligence. Now, from what I understand, The Intelligence is the realm wherein dwell all the ideals and forms that comprise true reality. Plotinus, borrowing heavily from Plato and Aristotle, considers matter to be pure potentiality. What turns the potentiality into an actuality is a form or an ideal—such as Humanity or Fire in the abstract; and these can only be apprehended through the mind, or intelligence. These ideals are eternal and immaterial; hence it is these ideals that exist in the highest degree, being contingent only on The One, completely independent of matter.

But The Intelligence is static, comprising all things at once, timeless and perfect; yet the reality we know is ever-changing. This leads Plotinus to the “third hypostasis,” which is The Soul. Plotinus thinks not only that people have souls, but that The Soul is responsible for all movement and order in the universe. Just as a human is animated by an indwelling soul, so are the planets and animals and everything around us moved by The Soul, which mediates between the inactive realm of matter and the perfect world of The Intelligence. For Plotinus, each individual soul is just a part of The Soul; and like Plato, he believes in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls.

This elaborate metaphysical doctrine is the backdrop of Plotinus’s spiritual practices. Plotinus shares with many other Western mystics a scorn for the body. The senses are the source of nothing but illusion and suffering, and drag the soul down into petty considerations and vain pursuits. The first step is to appreciate the beauty in sensible objects, for beauty is not raw sensation, but consists of an order or organization in our sensations. The next step is to move beyond the senses altogether, engaging in dialectic to examine the pure ideals through thought alone. But unlike Plato, for whom philosophy was largely a social enterprise, the last step in Plotinus’s system is an introspective voyage to The One, a state of perfect blissful peace, a contemplation of the source of all reality, that transcendent origin which has no qualities and which cannot be grasped in words or thought.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this, especially for one such as myself, a secular rationalist. Of course, Plotinus is worth reading from a purely historical perspective, for his deep influence on St. Augustine, and thence on Christianity itself. And if you are religious or spiritual in any way, be it Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or simply fond of meditation, I’m sure that you can find something of value in Plotinus. From a modern perspective, as philosophy pure and simple, Plotinus’s system isn’t very compelling; for Plotinus does not make strict arguments, but rather grounds his thought in introspective experiences. Yet if you are like me, or like Bertrand Russell—a man who could hardly be more secular or averse to nonsense—you will nonetheless find something beautiful in Plotinus, even if it is perhaps just an elaborate dream, a philosophical fancy, an extended description of one brilliant man’s lonely meditations.

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Review: Tales of the Alhambra

Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To the traveler imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparably intertwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is as much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems.

The name “Washington Irving” has haunted me since I was a boy. I went to a school named after him. We visited his beautiful house, Sunnyside, on a field trip. The house where I grew up is just 500 feet from Irving’s grave in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery—quite a modest grave. My high school football team were the Headless Horsemen.

So imagine how it felt, after moving across an ocean, to see the name “Washington Irving” hanging above a door in the Alhambra: “Washington Irving wrote in this room his Tales of the Alhambra.” It was as if some circuit had been closed, some cycle had been completed. I’d spent the previous week racing through the book in preparation for my visit. And now, here I was, face to face with the same literary giant who hung over my childhood, who had also managed to cast his spell over this magnificent palace.

That’s my tale; what of the book?

The Tales of the Alhambra is something of a hodgepodge. It begins as a travelogue and ends as a collection of fables. In 1829, Irving travelled from Seville to Granada, apparently out of simple curiosity. Once he arrived, he fell under the enchanting influence of the Alhambra, and ended up residing there for several months. At the time, the Alhambra was in a sorry state. Several centuries of vandalism and neglect had reduced it to a ruin, and dozens of poor squatters were its only residents.

Probably its derelict condition added to the romantic wonder with which Irving beheld it. The book is written in a high-flown, almost mystical tone, with fact and fantasy blended into a vibrant fabric. His own observations and experiences are interspersed with historical sketches and old legends, which he purports to have learned from the residents. The final impression is of supernatural beauty. If you’ve seen the Alhambra, this is forgivable; it’s hard to exaggerate its splendor.

As Warwick points out, Irving is most fascinated with the Moors of Spain. The fact that a people with enough culture and power to create the Alhambra could totally vanish beguiles him. Who were they? How did they live? His vigorous imagination fills in the continent-sized gaps in his knowledge, allowing his fancy to run rampant. It’s obvious that he considers the lost civilization of the Moors to be a kind of forgotten paradise; he has nothing but praise for the nobility and sophistication of Spain’s erstwhile inhabitants.

While he stayed there, he grasped at whatever trace of this civilization remained, in architecture, history, and in the people. Irving does his best to convince himself and the reader that the monumental dignity of the Moors of Spain can be seen still in the Spanish peasants of Andalusia. He praises these people almost as highly as their predecessors, saying “with all their faults, and they are many, the Spaniards, even at the present day, are, on many point, the most high-minded and proud-spirited people of Europe.”

The book is enjoyable in short doses but gets tiresome in big chunks. Irving’s tone, though compelling, is monotonous. You can only tolerate breathless wonder for so long without craving something else. His stories, too, are quite repetitive. Hidden treasures, enchanted warriors, princesses in castles, forbidden love between Christians and Muslims—these make an appearance in nearly every tale.

Still, this book is well worth reading, not only because Irving is a skillful and charming writer, but also because it’s a window into the cultural history of the Alhambra, how it has been interpreted and understood by Western writers. For me, of course, this book has a personal significance that extends beyond the boundaries of its pages. Irving’s stories may not have been real, but his name is real enough, which for me has taken on the semblance of a ghost.

As for you, I hope you too get a chance to read this book, and to visit the Alhambra: “A Moslem pile in the midst of a Christian land; an Oriental palace amidst the Gothic edifices of the West; an elegant memento of a brave, intelligent, and graceful people, who conquered, ruled, flourished, and passed away.”

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Review: Democracy in America

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I struggle to penetrate God’s point of view, from which vantage point I try to observe and judge human affairs.

A few months ago, bored at work and with no other obligations to tie me to New York, I decided that I would look into employment in Europe; and now, several months and an irksome visa process later, I am on the verge of setting off to Madrid. Unsurprisingly, I’m very excited to go; but of course leaving one’s home is always bittersweet. This is partly why I picked up Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, as a sort of literary good-bye kiss to this odd, uncouth, chaotic, and fantastic place which has, up until now, molded my character, sustained my body, and contained my thoughts.

This turned out to be an excellent choice, for this book is without a doubt the best book ever written on the United States. I am able to say this, even though I haven’t even read a fraction of the books written on this country, because I simply can’t imagine how anyone could have done it better. As it is, I can hardly believe that Tocqueville could understand so much in the short span of his life; and when I recall that he wrote this book after only 9 months in America, while he was still in his thirties, I am doubly astounded. This seems scarcely human.

Part of the reason for his seemingly miraculous ability is that, with Tocqueville, you find two things conjoined which are normally encountered separately: extremely keen powers of observation, and a forceful analytic mind. With most travel writers, you encounter only the former; and with most political philosophers, only the latter. The product of this combination is a nearly perfect marriage of facts and reasoning, of survey and criticism, the ideas always hovering just above the reality, transforming the apparently senseless fabric of society into a sensible and intelligible whole. Almost everything he sees, he understands; and not only does he understand what he sees, but so often hits upon the why.

Although this book covers an enormous amount of ground—religion, slavery, culture, government, the role of women, just to name a few topics—there is one central question that runs through every subject: What does the appearance of democracy mean for the future of humanity? Tocqueville sees this question as the most pressing and significant one of his time; for, as he perceived, what was happening then in America was destined to inspire Europe and perhaps the whole world to adopt this new form of government, which would forever change the face of society. In short, Tocqueville is seeking to understand America so that he could understand the future; and the plan of the book follows these two goals successively. The first volume, published in 1835, is a thorough analysis of the United States; and the second volume, published in 1840, is a comparison of democracy and aristocracy, an attempt to pinpoint how a switch to a democratic government causes far-reaching changes in the whole culture.

Tocqueville is famously ambivalent about American democracy. He often sounds greatly impressed at what he finds, noting how hardworking and self-reliant are most Americans; and yet so often, particularly in the second volume, Tocqueville sounds gloomy and pessimistic about what the future holds. Much of his analysis is centered on the idea of social equality. He often reminds the reader—and by the way, Tocqueville wrote this for a French audience—that Americans, rich or poor, famous or obscure, will treat everyone as an equal. The entire idea of castes or classes has, in Tocqueville’s opinion, been abolished; and this has had many effects. Most obviously, it gives free reign to American ambition, for anyone can potentially climb from the bottom to the top; thus results the ceaseless activity and endless financial scheming of Americans. And even those who are quite well-off are not spared from this fever of ambition, for the lack of inherited wealth and stable fortunes means that the rich must continually exert effort to maintain their fortunes. (Whether this is true anymore is another story.)

Thus we find a kind of money-obsession, where everyone must constantly keep their minds in their wallets. In America, money is not only real currency, but cultural currency as well, a marker of success; and in this context, the creature comforts of life, which after all only money can buy, are elevated to great importance. Rich food, warm beds, spacious houses—these are praised above the simpler pleasures in life, such as agreeable conversation or pleasant walks on sunny days, as the former require money while the latter are free and available to anyone. The central irony of a classless society is that it forces everyone to focus constantly on their status, as it is always in jeopardy. You can imagine how shocking this must have been for Tocqueville, the son of an aristocratic family. There simply was no class of Americans who had the leisure of retiring from the cares of the world and contemplating the “higher” but less practical things in life. All thought was consumed in activity.

This results in a society of the ordinary individual. In America, there are few “great men” (as Tocqueville would say) but a great many good ones. Americans are self-reliant, but not daring; they are often decent, but never saintly. They will sometimes risk their lives in pursuit of a fortune, but never their fortunes for the sake their lives. An American might temporarily accept hardship if there is a financial reward on the other end; but how many Americans would forsake their fortunes, their comforts, their houses and property, for the sake of an idea, a principle, a dream? Thus a kind of narrow ambition pervades the society, where everyone is hoping to better their lot, but almost nobody is hoping to do something beyond acquiring money and things. One can easily imagine the young Tocqueville, his mind filled with Machiavelli and Montesquieu, meeting American after American with no time or inclination for something as intangible as knowledge.

In the midst of his large-scale cultural analysis, Tocqueville sometimes pauses for a time, putting off the role of philosopher to take up the role of prophet. Tocqueville does get many of his predictions wrong. For example, he did not at all foresee the Civil War—and in fact he thought Americans would never willingly risk their property fighting each other—and instead he thought that there would be a gigantic race war between blacks and whites in the south. But Tocqueville was otherwise quite right about race relations in the slave-owning states. He predicts that slavery could not possibly last, and that it would soon be abolished; and he notes that abolishing slavery will probably be the easiest task in improving the relationship between blacks and whites. For although slavery can be destroyed through legal action, the effects of slavery, the deep-rooted racial prejudice and hatred, cannot so easily be wiped clean. In support of this view, Tocqueville notes how badly treated are free blacks in the northern states, where slavery is banned. Without a place in society, they are shunned and fall into poverty. The persistence of the color line in America is a testament to Tocqueville’s genius and our failure to prove him wrong.

But perhaps the most arresting prediction Tocqueville makes is about the future rivalry of the United States with Russia. Here are his words:

Americans struggle against obstacles placed there by nature; Russians are in conflict with men. The former fight the wilderness and barbarity; the latter, civilization with all its weaponry: thus, American victories are achieved with the plowshare, Russia’s with the soldier’s sword.

To achieve their aim, the former rely upon self-interest and allow free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of individuals.

The latter focus the whole power of society upon a single man.

The former deploy freedom as their main mode of action; the latter, slavish obedience.

The point of departure is different, their paths are diverse but each of them seems destined by some secret providential design to hold in their hands the fate of half the world at some date in the future.

While discussing such an obviously brilliant man as was Tocqueville, whose ideas have become foundational in the study of American society, it seems almost petty to praise his prose style. But I would be doing an injustice to any readers of this review if I failed to mention that Tocqueville is an extraordinary writer. I was consistently captivated by his ability to sum up his thoughts into crisp aphorisms and to compress his analyses into perfectly composed paragraphs. I can only imagine how much better it is in the original French. Here is only a brief example:

Commerce is a natural opponent of all violent passions. It likes moderation, delights in compromise, carefully avoid angry outbursts. It is patient, flexible, subtle, and has recourse to extreme measures only when absolute necessity obliges it to do so. Commerce makes men independent of each other, gives them quite another idea of their personal value, persuades them to manage their own affairs, and teaches them to be successful. Hence it inclines them to liberty but draws them away from revolutions.

In the brief space of a book review—even a long one—I cannot hope to do justice to such a wide-ranging, carefully argued, and incisive book as this. So I hope that I have managed to persuade you to at least add this work to your to-read list, long as it may be already. For my part, I can’t imagine a better book to have read as I prepare myself to visit a new continent, about the same age as was Tocqueville when he visited these shores, for my own travels in a strange place. And although, lowly American that I am, I cannot hope to achieve even a fraction of what Tocqueville has, perhaps his voice echoing in my ears will be enough to encourage me to look, to listen, and to understand.

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Review: The New Spaniards

The New Spaniards by John Hooper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The New Spaniards is an updated and revised edition of The Spaniards, which was originally published in 1986. The revisions were extensive, and thus this text does not feel at all outdated. For subject matter, Hooper casts as wide a net as he can in the span of 400 pages, tackling subject after subject in a succession of pleasantly short but informative chapters. One learns here of Spain’s government, history, economy, culture, music, cinema, monarchy, military, sexual mores, as well as some of the ‘centrifugal forces’ (as Hooper calls them) in modern Spain, the separatist movements in the Basque country and Catalonia.

It is useful to compare this book (as David does) with Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain. The books are, at first glance, quite similar: they are both about modern Spain, both were published in 2006, both are by British journalists who have spent much time living here, and, most importantly, both have yellow covers. But the approaches taken by the two authors differ considerably. Tremlett is personal and immediate; he is married to a Spaniard, has children in Spanish schools, and thus has a lot invested in the future of Spain. His book is thus more anecdotal; he frequently writes in the first person, telling us of his travels throughout the country, the people he meets, the food he tastes, trying to convey some sense of what it’s like to actually live here.

Hooper, by contrast, although he spent many years here, is now living elsewhere. Perhaps as a consequence of this, his tone is much more detached and (as much as possible in a book of this sort) objective. His writing gets straight to the point; he keeps the reader’s interest, not through storytelling or flashy prose, but simply by presenting insightful information clearly and succinctly. Thus, although somewhat dry, I often found the book hard to put down, as it is a veritable feast of facts, figures, particulars, and generalities. So I am heartily grateful, both to Hooper and to Tremlett, for now I feel fairly knowledgeable about my new home.

And what a fascinating place to call home. I’m somewhat ashamed that I had so little interest in Spain before I came here, for it is a country well worth knowing. As many Spaniards like to point out, Spain is “different.” Just the other day, someone remarked to me that “Europe begins at the Pyrenees,” which is a saying here. There is, apparently, a widespread notion among Spaniards that Spain is quite unlike other European countries. Perhaps this is because Spain didn’t fight in either World War I or World War II, and lingered under a repressive regime until the mid 1970s, more or less isolated from the anxieties of the Cold War.

But Spain is changing quickly. Arguably, the theme of both Hooper’s book and Tremlett’s is “change.” Justifiably so, when you consider that Spain went from a Catholic society where divorce was nigh impossible to one of the first countries to legalize gay marriage. And perhaps because many Spaniards think that their country lags behind, they have fully and enthusiastically embraced modernity. According to Hooper, moderno has unambiguously positive connotations here (something which I haven’t had enough time to verify yet). But one only has to skim the history of modern Spain to be convinced that, in the last forty years, Spaniards have thrown themselves into the future. Indeed, Hooper begins this book with the results of an international survey which found that, in Spain, there exists the biggest difference in basic values between the young and the old.

Though, of course, some things change and some remain the same. The Spanish attitude to work is, as far as I can tell, still quite different from both the United States and the northern European countries. After witnessing how much people work in New York, a Spanish friend of mine, with a worried look on his face, told me “Work is good, but there are other things in life.” Simply by walking around Madrid, which I’ve heard is one of the most hardworking parts of Spain, I notice a big difference. In New York, at rush hour, the streets are filled with legions of men and women dressed for work, cramming into the subway, all with vaguely worried looks on their faces. Yet here, rush hour is not very noticeable; in fact, it took a few weeks for me to notice it at all. True, at certain times of the day, the metro is likely to be more full of nicely dressed people; but never is it packed, and nobody runs for the train or tramples you on their way out the door.

The cultural attitude that has been programmed into me since birth is that work is a duty, and the more and the better work you do, the more worthy you are. The money earned is a marker of personal value; and the more accumulated, the better. Indeed, I know people who are tremendously successful and who make a great deal of money, but who are loathe to spend even chump change. The attitude here is quite the opposite. Spaniards seem to regard work as a necessary evil. This is not to say that they can’t or don’t work hard—during the recession, many worked themselves to the bone, and still do—but the idea that one’s productivity is a measure of one’s dignity, and the sort of perverse pride some people in the States take in staying long hours at the office, eating at their desks, and hardly sleeping or spending time with friends—this seems to be largely absent here. And while most people I know in the States think of enjoying oneself as a privilege to be earned through work, in Spain enjoyment is regarded as a right. Thus, while the rush hour here is easy to overlook, the crush of women wearing high heels and make up, and men with gelled up hair and collared shirts, is noticeable every night of the week.

Doubtless, what I’ve just written is a stereotype, lacking in depth or nuance. But if you want something more insightful, you’ll just have to read this book. It is a sweeping and penetrating look at modern Spain, written with authority and rigor. Indeed, it is a bit hard for me to believe that Hooper is a journalist, for this book lacks that characteristic myopia of most journalism, which concentrates exclusively on the present moment. Hooper, by contrast, is scholarly and maintains a historical perspective throughout. In short, I recommend this book heartily; and I hope that it inspires you as much as it has me to ponder modern Spain.

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2015 on Goodreads

2015 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I set out to review my year on Goodreads, I find myself thinking about what a wonderful place this site is. Really, compared to so much of the internet—which so often seems to be the digitized version of a very dim teenager’s brain—Goodreads is almost miraculous. How else can you have intelligent discussion with people all over the world about subjects ranging from quantum physics to Medieval love poetry, from political philosophy to Babylonian astronomy? Every time you find yourself thinking about how technology is ruining our culture and impoverishing thought, remind yourself of Goodreads. So to all of the people who read my reviews or who write great reviews for me to read, I’d like to say, Thanks!

This year I had resolved to read bigger books. In 2014 I managed to make it through 172 books, but the majority of those were rather short. So this year, I decided that I would read a smaller number of heftier tomes. I don’t think I’ll even make it to my goal of 120 books this year, but that’s just as well. In fairness, probably I would have reached this goal had I not moved to Spain, which upset my carefully worked-out reading schedule I had developed in New York—not that I’m complaining.

One of the most persistent feelings of my past few years has been the nagging sense that I am hopelessly ignorant. This led me to read mostly science and history, as I attempted to banish this self-doubt. But unfortunately this venture feels an awful lot like trying to fill the Grand Canyon one pebble at a time. There’s just too much I don’t know; and every new fact or new theory just makes me more acutely aware of how much further I have to go. But I suppose I should be thankful for this. Learning, after all, is one of the most wonderful feelings there is; and life would be intolerably dull if there wasn’t more out there to wrap my mind around, or at least to try.

In this spirit, I managed to slog my way through three textbooks this year: Fundamentals of Physics by R. Shankar, Economics by Paul A. Samuelson, and General Chemistry by Linus Pauling. I didn’t put in enough effort to master any of the books, though I think some knowledge nonetheless managed to sink in. One can only hope. The best of the lot was easily Samuelson’s book, which I read in the original 1948 edition.

With more hope than success, I also tried to teach myself something about the mathematics behind quantum mechanics and relativity. This led me to read Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum book on quantum mechanics, and Peter Collier’s A Most Incomprehensible Thing, a self-published book about general relativity. Both books were designed to teach neophytes like me something about the mathematics behind the ideas. Susskind’s was certainly the better book, since he has a much deeper understanding of the subject matter. Whether some of his understanding rubbed off on me is an open question.

But the real hero of my science reading this year has been Richard Feynman. I made my way through six of his books, all of them excellent. First were his Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, excerpts from his landmark Lectures in Physics. The latter was especially good, giving a fantastic account of special relativity. I followed this up with The Character of Physical Law, another slim book where we see Feynman at his most philosophical. But the real gem of the lot was QED, the best work of popular physics I’ve ever read; it’s a masterpiece.

And this is not to mention the two volumes of Feynman’s quasi-autobiography I read, Surely You’re Joking and Why Do You Care What Other People Think? Though the second was good, I loved the first. Feynman had a personality of Dickensian proportions; and even now I often hear his voice in my head, among the chorus of authors who occasionally give me advice. (Doesn’t this happen to you?) I made my girlfriend and my brother read it, and I’d make you read it if I could.

The second star of my year in reading has been Will Durant, from whose pen I consumed six books. I feel much more ambivalent about Durant than about Feynman. As a thinker and a writer, he has many faults; and of his six books, I gave bad reviews to three of them. But his Story of Civilization series is simply splendid. I’m rather addicted, in truth. This year I read his books on Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, and I just started his book on the Renaissance. I plan on continuing through the entire series; and considering that each volume is at least 700 pages long, this is no small compliment to pay to an author.

To supplement my reading in science and my reading in history, I tackled a few books about the history of science. I began early on with Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, a book part botany, part geology, and part adventure story; don’t miss it. Galileo came next, whose Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems combines sharp thinking with sharp prose. After I was done pondering the earth’s orbit, Newton showed me some of his experiments and theories on light in his Opticks. And Otto Neugebauer, a frightening mix of intelligence and erudition, then lectured me on Babylonian astronomy and Egyptian mathematics in his Exact Sciences of Antiquity, a great little book which Manny recommended to me. In this category I might also mention Richard Oerter’s The Theory of Almost Everything, a book which managed to compress both a history and an explanation of the Standard Model of physics into 300 pages.

A mini-project I engaged in was to read more drama. I began with Molière, who quickly became one of my favorite authors. His plays are laughter on paper; few experiences are so effortlessly joyful. Ibsen was next, a much darker sort of master; and then came Shaw, who is not worth describing if you haven’t already read him. Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Congreve also made brief but memorable appearances, and I hope the future brings us together again. A second mini-project was to read more poetry. To this effect, I read John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But for all this, I remain an uncultured buffoon.

One more project was to educate myself about the political and intellectual history of the United States. This first led me to Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws effectively laid out the basic plan of the U.S. constitution; then I was led naturally to The Federalist Papers, and finally to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I found the first two, if informative and interesting, a bit of a slog to get through. But Tocqueville’s was perhaps the best book I read all year. Read and be amazed; it’s magnificent. In the literary realm of Americana, I read Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Adams. The first is an extraordinary writer, but not much of a thinker; and the second is not much of either.

My readings in philosophy have been a bit light. I began with George Santayana, whose Life of Reason ushered me into 2015. I loved the book, though I’m still unsure whether it was great philosophy or just great writing. Heidegger made another appearance into my reading life this year, after Being and Time defeated me in 2014, though this time I think I understood him better; and then came Plotinus, who was equally as mystical. Oh, and I shouldn’t neglect to mention Ayer, Kripke, and Russell. The philosophic highlight of the year, however, was definitely St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. I read both of their major works, though in abridged versions, and I found both to be richly rewarding.

In the realm of literature, I also managed to cross some big names off my list. I read and fell in love with David Copperfield; and then I did the same with Tom Jones. Both Dickens and Fielding are filled with such exuberance and good will that I smiled constantly through their books. Lawrence Sterne and Rabelais then exploded into my reading life, in the form of Tristram Shandy and Gargantua and Pantagruel, leaving the inside of my skull dripping with ink and littered with allusions and puns. I recommend each of them with all my heart.

The book which has most affected my life outside of Goodreads has been David Burns’s Feeling Good, a self-help book which, indeed, helped me help myself. I was feeling rather depressed and anxious for a while, and Burns helped me get out of it. The change in my mood was almost immediate; and I’ve been feeling good ever since. Also in this category might be placed the books I’ve read on the history and culture of Spain, which helped me to get accommodated in my new environment. The New Spaniards was the best of this lot, though Ghosts of Spain was close.

This “review” has already grown monstrously long and dreadfully dull; and still I have passed over most of the wonderful books who were my companions through the passing days and months of another year. Yes, another year has gone, and hopefully I have grown that much more knowledgeable and perhaps just an iota more wise. What is beyond doubt is that I have grown happier, partly thanks to these books, and also thanks to you, who serve as a constant reminder to me that, despite all the ugliness and stupidity we so often meet with, the world is full of thoughtful, intelligent, and kind people. If 2016 is as good as this year has been, I will count myself enormously lucky.

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A Day in Segovia

A few weeks before moving to Madrid, I was sitting at the dining-room table while my brother showed me pictures from his high school trip to Spain.

The old digital camera made a beep every time he scrolled to the next photo—a tired and rather unenthusiastic beep. The screen, moreover, was exceedingly tiny, even compared to the one on my smart-phone. It is amazing to think that there was a time, not too long ago, when digital cameras like this one were cutting-edge; and now they seem like artifacts from another epoch.

“This was cool,” my brother said, pointing to a microscopic image.

I leaned in and squinted my eyes. With a suppressed gasp, I recognized a towering Roman Aqueduct.

“Wow, where’s that?” I asked.

“Segovia.”

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Several weeks, a plane ride, and a train ride later, my girlfriend and I were standing on a line for the bus to Segovia. We’d just taken the train from Madrid; and, owing to our full bladders, we had missed the first bus from the train station by going immediately to the bathroom upon our arrival; so we had to wait on line for another one to arrive.

“When’s the next bus coming?” I asked, petulantly.

“According to the schedule, not for another thirty minutes.”

“What? So what are we going to do?”

“I dunno.”

I looked around at the landscape beyond. I’d heard that Segovia is a bit like The Lord of the Rings (El Señor de Los Anillos); and indeed it was. Fields of dry grass stretched out in all directions, leading to the gently sloping peaks of the sierra on the horizon. Armies of orcs and elves marched through the countryside of my imagination as I waited, bored and sullen, for the bus to arrive.

“Let’s just walk,” I said, after five minutes.

“No.”

“C’mon,” I said. “It’s only about an hour. I’m tired of waiting here.”

“We’re not walking.”

I began to mope again.

A group of five American girls was standing in front of us, each of them wearing a floral dress and a black leather jacket; did they coordinate? I looked back at the station building, then at an advertisement on a billboard, then at the line in front of me, and then out at the scenery.

“C’mon!” I said again. “I wanna walk. This sucks.”

“There is no chance I’m walking,” my girlfriend said. “Just wait.”

“This is a waste of time!” I whined. “We might as well just go back to Madrid.”

The sun beat down upon my back, the wind occasionally whipped up in a gust, and still the bus didn’t come. The man in front of me shifted his weight from one leg to another, the couple behind us had a subdued conversation, and still the bus didn’t come. No, the bus didn’t come when I looked to the left or the right, nor when I frowned or pouted.

And then it did. A blue blip appeared on the road far away, and was gradually magnified into a full-sized city bus. The bus pulled up to the line, and then the driver promptly got out of the vehicle and popped inside the station building. He was taking a break.

This is actually one of the most jarring differences between Spain and New York. The bus drivers in NYC are more or less chained to their seats. The very suggestion that they would get out of their vehicle is preposterous. Here, the buses are driven by people, and sometimes they take breaks. It’s hard to get used to.

In five minutes, however, we were standing on the bus, speeding towards Segovia. I’m glad we didn’t walk.

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We were delivered right into the center of Segovia. I looked up and blinked into the cloudless sunny sky. Towering over me was a Roman aqueduct.

It was magnificent. Right before my very eyes were two rows, one atop the other, of the famous Roman arches. After all these years, the thing still conveyed a sense of the awe and splendor of the imperial power. What must the local inhabitants of Segovia have thought when these invaders erected this massive structure? What could have prepared them for this feat of engineering, a pathway on stilts to carry water from miles away to the heart of their city?

Even to this denizen of the twenty-first century, the aqueduct is breathtaking. It is so narrow compared to its height that it looks like a strong gust of wind could knock it down. But of course, the wind has puffing away at it for a few centuries now, all to no effect. It has been built with such tremendous skill that it has outlived even the immortal empire that erected it.

When I imagine a gang of ancient Romans, without calculators, without spreadsheet software, without cranes, steel support beams, retractable tape-measures, reflective vests, or hard-hats, pulling up stone after stone with pulleys and hand-twisted rope, writing down their designs on papyrus scrolls (or whatever they used), mixing their Roman cement by hand in giant vats, strong-arming these heavy stones into place, I am simply beyond astonishment at what they accomplished. Really, I haven’t the slightest idea how they did what they did; I have trouble even assembling the furniture from IKEA.

Faced with something like this, there’s not much a tourist can do. You take a photo from one angle, take a photo from another angle; then stop, gape, and stare. You climb some stairs to take another photo; you take a photo with the town in the background, with the sky in the background, with yourself in the foreground; then stop, gape, stare, repeat. It is terribly frustrating, really, because you know that no amount of photos could possibly do justice to the thing sitting before your eyes. Not even your eyes can do justice to it.

But we couldn’t spend all day just staring at it; we had only a few hours, and more sites to see. Our next stop was the Segovia Cathedral.

Compared to other cathedrals I’ve seen, the Segovia Cathedral struck me as more feminine. I hope this adjective does not ring of sexism, for it is not only me who uses it; among the Spaniards, the cathedral is known as la Dama de las Catedrales (“the Lady of the Cathedrals”), partly because of its small size, and partly because of its elegant and curved exterior. Compared with, say, the Toledo Cathedral, the cathedral of Segovia seems rather subdued; the bright tan color is more welcoming than the harsh gray of Toledo; and absent are the statues which seem to burst from every corner of its more southerly cousin.

There was no line, and not even an entrance fee, so we walked right in. The interior was just as welcoming as its exterior. The whole space was wonderfully bright, owing to the many windows on each level of the cathedral. Indeed, there was nothing “gothic” about this gothic cathedral; the design seemed rather joyful and playful. But pleasant as the place was, it did not powerfully capture my attention like other cathedrals have; and thus in thirty minutes, we were walking outside, heading to our next location.

This was the Alcázar of Segovia. As I’ve mentioned in another post, the word “alcazar” comes from the Arabic word for “castle”; thus the word is now used in Spain for castles or forts left behind by the Moors. The three most famous of these, I believe, are in Córdoba, Sevilla, and Segovia. Having visited all three, I can tell you that each one is a stunning work of architecture.

The Alcázar of Segovia is the most dramatic of the group. Built on a large rock overlooking the surrounding area, the castle can only be approached from one direction—that is, unless one is prepared to climb straight up a few hundred feet of rock. In short, it is a perfect spot for a defensive structure, which is why the site has been used for fortifications since Roman times.

A solid wall of stone greets the visitor (or would-be conqueror) as the structure is approached, a towering tan bulwark which seems to beat its chest at you, daring you to attack. Separating the castle from the approaching walkway is a deep moat, which, interestingly enough, was carved into the rock by fitting logs into grooves in the stone and pouring water onto the logs, causing them to swell and break the rock. Thus, with the drawbridge pulled up, the place would be nearly impregnable. Or at least, short of simply blasting it to smithereens, I have no idea how one would go about invading the thing. And indeed, according to the audioguide the place was never successfully taken (though I’m not sure how many attempts were made to do so).

The inside were perhaps less impressive than the outside. A fire had badly damaged the interior of the castle in the 19^th century, and it has since been only partially restored. Nonetheless, it was an agreeable experience to walk around the place. Empty suits of armor (which looked like replicas), greeted us as we walked in, and old pieces of fancy furniture—thrones and chairs and beds—were available for our viewing pleasure. Ornate tapestries hung from the ceilings; stained-glass windows adorned the outside walls; and royal portraits and religious paintings decorated every room. More interesting, perhaps, was the Hall of Kings, a room wherein a band of miniature sculptures of every Spanish monarch—stretching back to Pelagius, the 8^th century Visigothic king—wrapped around the top of the room, each of them sitting on a golden throne, all seeming to be part of some otherworldly general council.

But the highlight of the tour was the tower. To get up to the top, one had to climb perhaps one-hundred stairs up a twisting spiral staircase, occasionally pressing oneself against the wall to allow people to pass by on their way down. It’s an exhausting, claustrophobic, and slightly harrowing experience, as it would be so easy to slip and tumble down all one-hundred steep stone steps and break your neck. But we paid extra to see the tower, and by Joe we were going to see it.

If you are like me, you will be panting, sweaty, and have aching knees by the time you reach the top; but the view is worth it. Or, at least, this is what I told myself as I leaned against the wall, panting, snapping a few photos of the town and countryside beyond. But I’m afraid my peace of mind was disturbed by the knowledge that I would soon have to descend those same steps that led me up here, which did not put me in the mood to wax poetic about the distant hills, the rolling plains, the rivers and trees far below, the bright sunny sky above, and the town of Segovia stretched out before me. No, I was not feeling terribly appreciative at that moment; in fact, I was feeling somewhat peckish. But it was a bit like The Lord of the Rings.

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Before our trip, a kind Spanish teacher from Segovia gave us some tips. She mentioned all the usual sites, which didn’t seem to excite her a whole lot; but she very much perked up when she began recommending food.

We thus arrived in Segovia with a list of foods to eat and restaurants to eat them in. And it wasn’t long after leaving the Alcázar that we had been seated in one of these restaurants, and were going through our list.

The first dish was judiones. This is a bean stew made with giant beans (judiones de La Granja, or “beans from La Granja”), chorizo, bacon, pork, onions, and of course plenty of salt. It’s a rich and hearty appetizer, perfect for cold weather. But what I was really excited for was the cochinillo asado, or Spanish roast suckling pig. This is the most well-known dish of Segovia, and deservedly so. It is exceedingly simple, but exceedingly delicious. The skin is crispy and buttery, while the inside is rich, tender, and succulent. To finish, for desert we had ponche Segoviano, which is a sort of simple cake with a creamy sauce; it was milky, sweet, and scrumptious.

In fact, I think that the meal was the best I’ve had in all of Spain so far—and that’s saying something. We emerged from the restaurant too full to walk; we could only waddle our way back to the bus, taking sundry wrong turns along the way. We had a train to catch, and not enough confidence in our own ability to figure out the buses to wait any longer. This turned out to be a good thing, as we spent about five minutes waiting at the wrong stop. Really, there’s nothing like foreign travel to make you feel absolutely clueless and lost.

But we were not lost; soon we were riding the bus to the train, and then the train to Madrid. This was, by the way, the first high-speed train I’d even ridden on, and I must say that it’s extremely impressive how the train is able to reach such tremendous speeds without passengers feeling so much as a bump. We seemed, rather, to hover through the landscape; or perhaps the landscape hovered past us, whizzing by in a great green blur.

I was luckily sitting on the westward facing side of the train, and thus could see the sun setting on the horizon. It was terrific; the distance was lit up in vivid shades of red and orange, while the sky above turned a purplish blue. It reminded me of the sunset I had seen on the plane ride over; the ground was so flat that it could have been a sea of clouds or a rolling ocean.

I wanted to show my girlfriend, but she was fast asleep. So I pressed my cheek against the cold glass, and watched the sun slowly dip below the horizon, the color draining out of the sky until the world was shrouded in the deep blue of night.

Review: Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with a Spaniard, and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong myself.

Autobiographies and memoirs are, I think, the best books to read on vacation. Not only are they light, easy, and entertaining, but they’re usually not hard to put down. This is important because, if you’re like me, you may end up spending your whole vacation with your head buried in a book. Most valuable, however, is simply seeing how an excellent writer transforms their experiences into stories. The vague emotions of daily life, the interesting characters we encounter, the sights and sounds and smells of new places—good autobiographies direct our attention to these little details.

In this spirit I picked up Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia to read during my trip to Seville. It was an excellent choice. It’s been a while since I’ve read Orwell, and I’d nearly forgotten what a fine writer he is. In fact, perhaps the most conspicuous quality of this book is the caliber of the prose. It is written with such grace, clarity, and ease, that I couldn’t help being constantly impressed and, I admit, extremely envious at times. The writing is direct but never blunt; the tone is personal and natural, but not chummy. The book may have been a bit too readable, actually, since I had a hard time prying myself away to go explore Seville (and a book has to be very good indeed to compete with Seville).

There seems to be a bit of confusion about this book. Specifically, some people seem to come to it expecting to learn about the Spanish Civil War. This is a mistake; Orwell only experienced a sliver of the war, and his understanding of the political situation was limited to the infighting between various leftist groups. The events and conflicts that led up to the war, and the progress of the war itself, are for the most part unexplained. This book is, rather, a deeply personal record of his time in the Spanish militia. We learn more about Orwell’s military routine than about any battles between fascist and government forces. More light is shed on Orwell’s own political opinions than the political situation in Spain.

If you come to the book with this in mind, it will not disappoint. His time in Spain made a deep impression on Orwell; he writes of it in a wistful and nostalgic tone, as if everything that happened occurred in a dreamy, timeless, mist-filled landscape, disconnected from the rest of his life. Characters come and go, soldiers are introduced, arrested, or killed in action; but we do not get acquainted with anyone save Orwell himself. The mood is introspective and pensive, as if it all took place in another life. Even when he is describing his friends’ imprisonment, or his experience getting shot in the neck and hospitalized, he manages to sound dispassionate and serene.

Two chapters, however, do not fit into this characterization. These are Orwell’s analyses of the political situation in Barcelona during this time. In some books, they are published as appendices—which I think is a good choice, actually, since they interrupt the flow of the book quite a bit. Despite the abrupt change in tone and subject-matter, however, they make for valuable reading. The machinations and petty political squabbles that went on during this time are astounding. One would think that having a common enemy in Franco would be enough to unite the various factions on the Left, at least for the duration of the war. Instead, the anti-revolutionary communist party ended up declaring the pro-revolutionary communist party (of which Orwell was a member, entirely by chance) to be a fascist conspiracy, resulting in hundreds of people—people who had spent months fighting at the front—being thrown in secret prisons. Orwell himself narrowly escaped.

Nevertheless, I think that Orwell’s analyses of the general situation in Spain should be taken with copious salt. He understands nearly everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of class-warfare, which I think fails to do justice to the complex political and cultural history of the conflict. Added to this, one gets the impression that Orwell’s command of Spanish was fairly rudimentary, which I think greatly limited his ability to understand the war. To his credit, though, Orwell does warn us about his limitations:

In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.

But these are minor complaints of a book which I found to be supremely well-written and absolutely fascinating. His accounts of life at the front were possibly the best descriptions of war that I’ve ever read, with the exception of those in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This is not because Orwell saw very much fighting; quite the opposite. Rather, he conveys a sense of the crushing boredom and the sense of futility that many soldiers must feel during a long, draw-out war. Also superb was his portrayal of political oppression, the climate of fear and backstabbing that arose during the party conflicts in Barcelona.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is that, despite all of the hardships Orwell endured, and despite the obvious injustices inflicted on both himself and his friends, he does not come across as bitter or resentful. I leave you with his words:

When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this—and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering—the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.

View all my reviews

Lotz in Translation

Saving the world—one long, pretentious blog post at a time.

Author: Roy Lotz

Review: The Speech

Review: The Ascent of Man

Review: The Concept of Mind

Review: The Essential Plotinus

Review: Tales of the Alhambra

Review: The New Spaniards

2015 on Goodreads

A Day in Segovia

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Review: Homage to Catalonia