Ryan McCarl

Recommended books and media

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 03:58:00 +0000

Here is a list of the books and media I've read over the years that I have either (a) enjoyed the most or (b) learned the most from.

Within each category, authors are listed alphabetically. Where more than one book is listed for an author, I've listed the books in order of preference.

Fiction/Literature/Literary Nonfiction:

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine; Fahrenheit 451

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!; My Antonia
Albert Camus, The Stranger
John Cheever, Collected Stories
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
John Grisham, The Client; The Runaway Jury; The Firm
Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil; Pan; Victoria; Dreamers
Jim Harrison, Returning to Earth and True North
Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: Ecclesiastes, Job, Genesis, Song of Songs, Exodus, Hebrews
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf; Siddhartha
Homer, Iliad, Odyssey
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Dubliners
Jack Kerouac, On the Road; The Dharma Bums
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
Halldor Laxness, Independent People
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (series)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Billy Budd
Arthur Miller, The Crucible
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; Confessions of a Mask
Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm
The New Testament: John, Luke, Revelations, James
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; We the Living; The Fountainhead; Anthem
William Shakespeare, King Lear; Hamlet; Othello; Julius Caesar; Macbeth; Richard II
Natsume Soseki, Kokoro
John Steinbeck, East of Eden; Travels with Charley; The Grapes of Wrath; The Pearl; The Red Pony; Junius Maltby
J.R.R. Tolkier, The Lord of the Rings; The Hobbit
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Virgil, Aeneid
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5
Elie Wiesel, Night

Poetry:

Anna Akhmatova

Yehuda Amichai

W.H. Auden

Elizabeth Bishop

William Blake

Billy Collins

T.S. Eliot

Thomas Hardy

Randall Jarrell

D.H. Lawrence

Robert Lowell

Czeslaw Milosz

Sylvia Plath

Ezra Pound

Rainer Maria Rilke

Poetry anthologies:

The Columbia Book of Modern Korean Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

"Children's" Literature (great for all ages):

Beverly Cleary, Dear Mr. Henshaw
Roald Dahl, Matilda; James and the Giant Peach; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; The BFG
Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy
Brian Jacques, Redwall (series)
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (series)
Lois Lowry, The Giver
Katherine Paterson, The Bridge to Terabithia
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (trilogy)

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter series

Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from Wayside School (trilogy)

Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree; The Missing Piece; Where the Sidewalk Ends; A Light in the Attic

Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee

E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

Politics, History, and Social Sciences:

Stephen Arons, Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation
David Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate
Randy Barnett, The Structure of Liberty
W.M. Theodore de Bary, Sources of Chinese Tradition; Sources of Japanese Tradition; Sources of Korean Tradition
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence; Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Frederic Bastiat, The Law
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun
Norman Davies, Europe: A History
William O. Douglas, The Douglas Letters
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads
J.K. Galbraith, The Good Society
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics; The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution; Global Political Economy
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
E.D. Hirsch, The Knowledge Deficit
Robert Maynard Hutchins, Education for Freedom
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration; 2nd Treatise on Civil Government
John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; Autobiography
Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State; For a New Liberty; What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Snell and Gail Putney, The Adjusted American: Normal Neurosis in the Individual and Society
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract
Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
Harvey Silverglate, FIRE's Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Control; FIRE's Guide to Free Speech on Campus
Voltaire, Political Writings
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Man, the State, and War
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars
Jack Welch, Winning

Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States; A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

Philosophy, Religion, and the Humanities:

Augustine, Confessions
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Poetics
Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction
Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; The Sickness Unto Death

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Martin Marty, Luther

Montaigne, Essais

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; On the Geneaology of Morals
Blaise Pascal, Pensees

Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart; The Four Cardinal Virtues

Plato, Symposium; Phaedrus; Apology; Republic

Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy; Why I Am Not a Christian

Friedrich Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now; The Courage to Be; Systematic Theology; On the Boundary

Magazines, Websites, and Columnists:

Becker-Posner Blog
Cato Institute

The Economist
Education Next
Future of Capitalism
The Freeman
Cafe Hayek
Frederick Hess
Hoover Institution
Lifehacker
The Marginal Revolution
MGoBlog.com
Mises Daily
The New Yorker
The New York Times
NPR
Poetry
Political Wire
Reason
SCOTUSBlog

The Volokh Conspiracy

The Wall Street Journal

The Writer's Alamanac with Garrison Keillor
George F. Will

Rethinking the Great Depression and the New Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 06:02:00 +0000

I've become increasingly interested in the history of the 1930s, and I just finished Eric Rauchway's The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. It has become increasingly clear to me that there are major holes in the dominant historical narrative about the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Roosevelt administration. The standard, high-school-textbook version of the story goes something like this:

"Greedy stock market speculators caused the stock market crash of 1929, which triggered the worst depression in American history; President Herbert Hoover believed in an outdated laissez-faire economic philosophy, so he did nothing; thankfully, President Roosevelt was elected, and his New Deal policies saved capitalism and helped the common man survive the Great Depression; and finally, World War II was an enormous boon to the U.S. economy, and it finally solved the problem once and for all."

Those of us with a preference for economic liberty and peace should be greatly disturbed by this story. If true, it suggests that the best ways to fix a broken economy are (1) total war, including conscription; and (2) dramatic increases in government taxation, spending, regulation, and redistribution.

Thankfully, there are convincing reasons to believe that the standard narrative is wrong. There is a lot more I need to read on the topic, but here are some resources and ideas that I look forward to exploring further:

-Murray N. Rothbard, America's Great Depression (free PDF and ebook)

-George Selgin, "The Economics of America's Great Depression" (course syllabus in PDF format with many links to readings). My interest in this topic is largely attributable to a fantastic lecture I heard Selgin deliver in June.

-David Gordon, "What you must read about the Great Depression," Mises Daily, 2/22/09

-George Selgin, review of Hall and Ferguson's The Great Depression.

-Robert P. Murphy, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.

Stephen Davies, "Top 3 Myths About the Great Depression and the New Deal," LearnLiberty.org:

In my next post, I will share excerpts from Rauchway's The Great Depression and the New Deal, which - unlike the libertarian works linked to above - is firmly on the side of the standard narrative.

Lying about Libya

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:30:00 +0000

My latest op-ed, "Lying about Libya," appeared today in Mises Daily, a publication of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. You can read the article here. In it, I write:

"What was sold to the American public as a humanitarian intervention morphed almost immediately into unreserved support of one side in Libya's civil war and a commitment to overthrowing Libya's existing government.
...
To decide whether a military action undertaken in our name is prudent and just, we must adopt a skeptical stance toward politicians' stories and rationalizations. We must attempt to see through these to the reality of the situation.

Stories can change, and new excuses can be spun, but once a war is launched there is no predicting the course it will take or the consequences it will have. Wars rarely go according to plan; they set in motion a course of events that no one person or group of people can hope to control."

Click here to read the entire article. Please consider posting it on Facebook or Twitter, or otherwise passing it along to others if you enjoy it. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Use of Predators Sets Dangerous Precedent

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:53:00 +0000

My op-ed "Use of Predators Sets Dangerous Precedent" appeared today on Antiwar.com. In it, I criticize President Obama's decision to authorize drone warfare in Libya. I write:

"The expediency of drones makes it all-too-tempting for governments to use them frequently and carelessly, brushing aside the ethical questions they raise and ignoring the long-term security consequences their use could entail."

Click here to read the full article. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Excerpts from Klein, Warren, Chirelstein, and Gluck

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:34:00 +0000

Customs grow out of social processes whose details are highly individuated in regards to the type of activity, the individuals involved, their reputational pedigree, the knowledge they have about each other, and so on. Viewing cultural evolution as deeply and densely rooted process may make one doubt the wisdom of government attempts to fine tune, guide, or supplant it. It is highly unlikely that the blunt instruments of government will be well suited to cultivating the growth of delicate, teeming, unique interactions.

Daniel B. Klein
--"Assurance and Trust in a Great Society." FEE Occasional Paper Two.

I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.

Robert Penn Warren
--from "Touch Me"

Some assert that strict enforcement of contracts is really a way of showing respect for the dignity and freedom of other individuals by taking them at their word.

Marvin A. Chirelstein
--Concepts and Case Analysis in the Law of Contracts

Look at her, touching his cheek
to make a truce, her fingers
cool with spring rain;
in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus -

even here, even at the beginning of love,
her hand leaving his face makes
an image of departure

and they think
they are free to overlook
this sadness.

Louise Gluck
--from "The Garden"

Book received: "The Crimean War: A New History"

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Sun, 01 May 2011 22:32:00 +0000

Thanks to Henry Holt and Company for sending a review copy of Orlando Figes' The Crimean War: A History." I look forward to reading it.

Authors and publishers interested in sending review copies of books in the social sciences or humanities - especially education and international relations - should contact me by email at ryan (dot) mccarl (at) wideawakeminds (dot) com.

Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine"

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 06:23:00 +0000

The following is political philosopher Robert Nozick's incredible allegory of the "Experience Machine," from his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The allegory makes a case against hedonism, the idea that sensory pleasure is the highest good:

---
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired.
Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? If you are worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? Nor should you refrain because of the few moments of distress between the moment you’ve decided and the moment you’re plugged. What’s a few moments of distress compared to a lifetime of bliss (if that’s what you choose), and why feel any distress at all if your decision is the best one?

What does matter to us in addition to our experiences? First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. In the case of certain experiences, it is only because first we want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them or thinking we’ve done them. (But why do we want to do the activities rather than merely to experience them?) A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what a person is like who has long been in the tank. Is he couragous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to tell; there’s no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But why should we be concerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are?

Thirdly, plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated. Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance. This clarifies the intensity of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper reality; what some view as equivalent to surrender to the experience machine, others view as following one of the reasons not to surrender!

We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it. We can continue to imagine a sequence of machines each designed to fill lacks suggested for the earlier machines. For example, since the experience machine doesn’t meet our desire to be a certain way, imagine a transformation machine which transforms us into whatever sort of person we’d like to be (compatible with our staying us). Surely one would not use the transformation machine to become as one would wish, and thereupon plug into the experience machine!

So something matters in addition to one’s experiences and what one is like. Nor is the reason merely that one’s experiences are unconnected with what one is like. For the experience machine might be limited to provide only experiences possible to the sort of person plugged in. Is it that we want to make a difference in the world? Consider then the result machine, which produces in the world any result you would produce and injects your vector input into any joint activity. I won’t pursue here the fascinating details of these or other machines. What is most disturbing about them is their living of our lives for us. Is it misguided to search for particular additional functions beyond the competence of machines to do for us? Perhaps what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality. (And this, machines cannot do for us.) Without elaborating on the implications of this, which I believe connect surprisingly with issues about free will and causal accounts of knowledge, it’s merely worth noting the intricacy of the question of what matters for people other than their experiences.

Robert Nozick
--Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Discussing the Libya War on "Russia Today"

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:33:00 +0000

I appeared on Russia Today (RT) yesterday to discuss the U.S./NATO intervention in Libya as well as the situation in Syria - feel free to check it out if you are interested:

My related article, "Rolling the Dice in Libya," appeared on Antiwar.com yesterday.

Another, unrelated op-ed of mine appeared yesterday as well in the Michigan Education Report: "National standards will stifle innovation." In it, I argue that "strict standards risk forcing students and teachers alike into a curricular straitjacket, alienating creative teachers and sapping the motivation of students."

You can find links to all of my online publications at my homepage, www.ryanmccarl.com.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Rolling the dice in Libya

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:13:00 +0000

My latest op-ed, "Rolling the dice in Libya," appeared today on Antiwar.com.

You can find the op-ed here as well as pasted below. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing it on your Facebook wall, mentioning it on Twitter, or emailing it to a friend. Thanks, as always, for reading.

---

Rolling the dice in Libya

Ryan McCarl

President Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in 2008 partly by reminding the party’s base of his early, prescient criticisms of the ill-fated decision to invade Iraq. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war … a rash war,” then-Senator Obama explained in 2002.

Obama was right to call the Iraq War “dumb” and “rash”: the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq was based not just on an “intelligence failure,” but on flagrant hubris, ignorance of geography and history, and unawareness of the limits of American power in the 21st century. And yet the Obama administration demonstrated each of these failings in deciding to involve the U.S. in Libya’s civil war.

Much ado was made about the U.S. “handing over” the Libya mission to NATO after dominating the first stage of the operation. But NATO is best understood as a multilateral cloak for American power; the U.S. has a military far larger and more advanced than any of its NATO allies, and it is by far the largest contributor to NATO’s budget.

The U.S.-NATO mission in Libya, we are told again and again, is nothing more than a temporary “humanitarian” operation to protect civilians. Since we are still bombing away at Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s military, one would think that Gadhafi’s forces are still on the verge of massacring defenseless civilians in rebel-held cities. But then we learn of “progress” in the war: under the cover of U.S./NATO-provided air power, rebels have taken cities from Gadhafi’s forces and advanced closer to Tripoli.

Apparently, “protecting civilians” means attempting to crush the Libyan government forces and turn the tide of the civil war in the rebels’ favor.

Defenders of the intervention appeal to our sense of decency by warning of the “genocide” that might have occurred had events in Libya been permitted to run their course, but this is nothing more than conjecture. It is possible to defend any course of action by asserting that a worst-case scenario would have occurred had the action not been taken. However, our worst fears usually do not turn out to be accurate predictors of the future.

Despite the Obama administration’s protests to the contrary, what was sold as an effort to protect Libyan civilians has quickly developed into an unstated commitment to regime-change in Libya, with all the long-term challenges, obligations, and uncertainties that entails. It has also morphed into a full embrace of the Libyan rebels, though no one is sure exactly what the rebels stand for, or whether they have a workable plan to restore stability and govern the country democratically in a post-Gadhafi era.

Like Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, Obama’s decision to intervene in Libya relied upon wishful thinking about the post-intervention course of events. Bush assured us that the conflict in Iraq would be swift, decisive, and relatively painless for the U.S.; Obama assured us that the mission in Libya would not require ground troops or a sustained American commitment and that it would be over in “days, not weeks.”

But as political scientist Robert Pape has shown, air power alone is rarely, if ever, sufficient to achieve a state’s aims in war. And the “days” of U.S. involvement have already become “weeks” and will soon become “months,” as they tend to do in wars—which are, after all, unpredictable and uncontrollable.

President Obama has joined the long line of presidents who have been blinded by U.S. power and failed to perceive the limits of that power. He is likely to fail in Libya—or pay a high price for a very limited and temporary success—because he chose to ignore the advice of the great strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote: “War is the realm of chance. … Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events.”

The hopes and expectations of war supporters are routinely dashed by the complexity of reality. War plans often rely on best-case scenarios and assume that the planners are gifted with such foresight and judgment that they can realistically project how events will unfold. But the human actors driving these events on the ground often respond quite unpredictably to changes in their situation.

Prudent policymakers and citizens should expect hasty wars of choice based on rose-eyed assumptions to fail and to have unforeseen consequences that last decades. This is not the outcome we hope for in the Libya war, but it is the outcome we can most safely bet on.

--
Ryan McCarl has an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and he writes about education at www.wideawakeminds.com.

Excerpts from Jacques Barzun, "From Dawn to Decadence"

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 04:01:00 +0000

(Note: The excerpts below are related to issues outside of education; I will post education-related excerpts from From Dawn to Decadence on Wide Awake Minds, my education blog. You can find these here if you are interested.)

Here are a few excerpts from what I've read so far:

---

In any art a new technical power leads to uses and ideas not suspected at first.
...
Another singularity in Petrarch's life was that he climbed a high hill in southern France in order to admire the view. If it was done before him, it was not recorded. Nature had been endlessly discussed, but as a generality, not as this landscape.

...
Inquisition as such, that is, apart from methods and severity of results, has remained a live institution. The many dictatorships of the 20th century have relied on it and in free countries it thrives ad hoc - hunting down German sympathizers during the First World War, interning Japanese-Americans during the second, and pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War.
...

"Heretics are given us so that we might not remain in infancy. They question, there is discussion, and definitions are arrived at to make an organized faith." -St. Augustine

...
It takes hundreds of the gifted to make half a dozen of the great.

...
Why is fame so capricious a goddess? In any country its favor depends on attention by one group of critics rather than another, or again by the fanatical devotion that goes to the right man at the right time. Some element of the work must chime in with some concern of the moment.
...

"(Smoking) is a custom loathful to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs; and the black, stinking fumes thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." --James I of England (1604)

...
Desire must be dammed up to be self-renewing.
...

"Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us. Individuals show the way, set the patterns, The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world." -William James (1908)

...
Where in the scheme of things do I belong? Who am I, anyway? Such questions made up the 'identity crisis' studied by psychiatrists whose patients had not 'found themselves.' ...Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made; and the anti-hero, anti-history bias was an obstacle to making it, because a starting point from the past was missing; it had to be made from scratch.
...
In Geneva under Calvin people had to go to church twice daily. ...If stubborn and persistent in sin, the dear soul must be turned over to the civil authorities. Adultery might mean death, quite as if Jesus had not dealt rather differently with the woman taken in adultery. Blasphemy, that curious crime of 'damaging God by bringing Him into ill-repute,' was even more unforgivable. ...

Calvinism, it has been said, makes every man the enemy of every other, as well as his own. Certainly its rigor accounts for the agonizing fear of sin that has been recorded in many lives.... The number of plain people, especially adolescents, whose minds were tortured by Calvinist sermons in England in America may be imagined.

...Luther wrote that 'the Christian man is dead to the world,' yet, as we saw, he relished life. The ailing Calvin was not a relisher; his advice is contradictory and leaves nature a rather narrow crack through which to manifest God's goodness.
...

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven."

-Wordsworth remembering the French Revolution

...
Montaigne lived in an age full of people who knew that they, and they alone, had the truth, direct from God - and these truth-bearers all disagreed. Reflecting on a far wider set of facts and with greater self-knowledge, Montaigne was at pains to make the point that Cromwell later phrased so superbly: 'By the bowels of Christ, bethink ye that ye may be mistaken.'
...
Erasmus loved travel and the good things of life, including the rapid, flashing conversation of learned friends in Paris, Oxford, and...Basel.
...
The welfare ideal did not merely see to it that the poor should be able to survive, but that everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways. Besides providing health care, pensions ("social security"), and workmen's compensation for accidents, it undertook to protect every employee by workplace regulations and every consumer by laws against harm from foods, drugs, and the multiform dangers that industry creates. All appliances were subject to design control and inspection.

...At the same time, it was also held that the state had the duty of supporting art and science, medical research, and the integrity of the environment, while it must also make sure that all children were not simply literate but educated up to and through college - rules, rules, definitions, classifications, and exceptions = indignation - and litigation.

...The cost of welfare in money was huge and in mental effort exorbitant. ...The task of distributing benefits was alone overwhelming. High taxes were unavoidable, and so was waste. Add to it corruption, also inevitable when inspectors are afoot, and it should have been no surprise to the contemporaries that the program fell short of its aim. There was still poverty, derelicts on the street, unattended illness, and complaints of 'not enough' from every welfared group in turn - workers, farmers, businessmen, doctors, artists, scientists, teachers, prisoners, and the homeless.

Jacques Barzun
--From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

Excerpts from Benedict Anderson, Gottfried Benn, and Bob Altemeyer

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:36:00 +0000

Happy Thanksgiving weekend! I am spending it in Boulder, CO, one of the most beautiful cities in America.

From "Static Poems"

Deafness to imperatives
is profundity in the wise man,
children and grandchildren
don't bother him,
don't alarm him.

To represent a particular outlook,
to act,
to travel hither and yon
are all signs of a world
that doesn't see clearly.

--Gottfried Benn
(in Poetry, 11/09.)

Adult authoritarians tend to be highly ethnocentric and heavy users of the "consensual validation pill" (Newcomb, 1961). They travel in tight circles of like-minded people so much, they often think their views are commonly held in society, that they are the "Moral Majority" or the "Silent Majority." It has been hard to miss the evidence that certain kinds of religious training have sometimes helped produce their ethnocentrism and authoritarianism.

...(They) are scared. They see the world as a dangerous place, as society teeters on the brink of self-destruction from evil and violence. This fear appears to instigate aggression in them. Second, right-wing authoritarians tend to be highly self-righteous. They think themselves much more moral and upstanding than others - a self-perception considerably aided by self-deception, their religious training, and some very efficient guilt evaporators (such as going to confession). This self-righteousness disinhibits their aggressive impulses, and releases them to act out their fear-induced hostilities....

Bob Altemeyer
--"The Other 'Authoritarian Personality'"

From "What's Bad"

Seeing a cold beer when it's hot out,
and not being able to afford it.
...
Hearing the waves beat against the shore on holiday at night,
and telling yourself it's what they always do.

Very bad: being invited out,
when your own room at home is quieter,
the coffee is better,
and you don't have to make small talk.

And worst of all:
not to die in summer,
when the days are long
and the earth yields easily to the spade.

--Gottfried Benn
(in Poetry, 11/09.)

Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.
...
The Reformation...owed much of its success to print-capitalism. Before the age of print, Rome easily won every war against heresy in Western Europe because it always had better lines of communication than its challengers. But when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel-door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German translation, and 'within 15 days [had been] seen in every part of the country.' In the two decades 1520-1540 three times as many books were published in German as in the period 1500-1520, an astonishing transformation to which Luther was absolutely central. His works represented no less than one third of all German-language books sold between 1518 and 1525. ...'We have here for the first time a truly mass readership and a popular literature within everybody's reach.' In effect, Luther became the first best-selling author so known. Or, to put it another way, the first writer who could 'sell' his new books on the basis of his name.
...
In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for those speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed, that had print-capitalism sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process. ...Nothing served to 'assemble' related vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, created mechanically reproduced print languages capable of dissemination through the market.

These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.

Benedict Anderson
--Imagined Communities (one of the most fascinating and insightful books I have ever read - a book that can change the way you understand the world.)

Two cents about COIN

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:08:00 +0000

My latest op-ed, "Two cents about COIN," appeared today on Antiwar.com. It discusses the the growing faith of U.S. political and military leaders in the military doctrine of COIN, or manpower-intensive counterinsurgency warfare.

You can find the op-ed here as well as pasted below; if you enjoy it, please consider sharing it on your Facebook wall, mentioning it on Twitter, or linking to it on your blog. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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Two Cents About COIN

Ryan McCarl

The war in Afghanistan, according to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recent assessment, is "a situation that defies simple solutions or quick fixes. Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign." McChrystal and other American leaders calling for a "surge" of additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan to mirror the alleged success of the "surge" in Iraq are voicing their belief that the doctrinal framework for the original surge – COIN, or manpower-intensive counterinsurgency warfare – is a widely-applicable tool in asymmetric warfare that the U.S. ought to employ in Afghanistan.

Top decisionmakers in the U.S. military, including Gen. McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, continue to express their faith in the doctrine, which they played major roles in creating. Prominent Republicans in Congress, who almost unanimously support sending more troops to Afghanistan, have endorsed a nation-building strategy that relies heavily on COIN over a counterterrorism strategy that focuses on targeting al-Qaeda and other militants from a distance. Several key figures in the Obama administration also appear to favor that approach.

It may be true that, as military expert Stephen Biddle said in recent Congressional testimony, "the U.S. is an unusually experienced counterinsurgent force today," and "the new Army/Marine counterinsurgency doctrine…is the product of a nearly unprecedented degree of internal debate, external vetting, historical analysis, and direct recent combat experience."

But these very factors that have encouraged so many highly capable U.S. leaders to sign on to "COIN" should cause observers to be wary of the doctrine and the currency it increasingly enjoys in the American political debate. After all, the more enthusiastic we are about the potential of COIN warfare, the more blind we will be to its costs, which are enormous.

We can and must think about contemporary problems – such as what strategy the U.S. should pursue in Afghanistan – through the lenses of relevant theories and historical analogies. But it is foolish to think within the box of a single analogy, such as the Iraq "surge," or a single theory, such as the idea that we can succeed at counterinsurgency and nation-building by deploying generous numbers of ground troops and focusing on winning the "hearts and minds" of local communities.

Our need to make quick decisions and cope with a complex world creates a powerful incentive for us to create "rules of thumb," default beliefs, habits, choices, or courses of action that we adopt almost without thinking. And yet when those in the halls of power make major decisions on the basis of such "rules of thumb," the results can sometimes be disastrous. It behooves political observers to be aware of new decision-making habits, and the spread of some new piece of "conventional wisdom," in their leaders.

It is important to remember that military leaders have a major incentive to endorse a COIN approach in Afghanistan. According to General Petraeus and other experts, most successful COIN operations require very high numbers of U.S. troops on the ground – numbers that may be politically and logistically impossible for the Obama administration to accept.

Because the number of troops that can be reasonably demanded for a COIN operation is essentially limitless, mission failure can be blamed on the executive branch for not sending enough troops rather than on military leaders, the combat environment, or the COIN playbook itself. As Gen. McChrystal wrote in his assessment: "Success is not ensured by additional forces alone, but continued underresourcing will likely cause failure."

Organizational psychology and the logic of bureaucracies provide more clues into the wave of COIN-fever that appears to have struck so many of our political and military leaders. Simply put, it was neither easy nor cheap for the military to develop COIN doctrine as we attempted to salvage the war in Iraq in recent years, and now COIN feels like hard-won wisdom that we should put to the test in another theater of war. It’s a classic case of sunk costs: it is felt that we paid too much for COIN to abandon it now.

Policymakers’ belief in the power of COIN may encourage them to see military solutions where none exist. If the U.S. opts to send tens of thousands of additional ground troops to Afghanistan in order to pursue a comprehensive COIN strategy, it will be taking on a great deal of risk and incurring substantial additional costs in pursuit of a highly uncertain outcome.

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Ryan McCarl is a writer and educator. He has an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and he maintains a blog at www.wideawakeminds.com.

A limited ecumenism

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:19:00 +0000

My latest op-ed, "A limited ecumenism," appeared today in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. It discusses the Catholic Church's recent outreach to traditionalist Anglicans. Sightings is a free online publication sent out twice a week to over 7,000 scholars, ministers, students, and others interested in the intersection of religion and public life; you can subscribe to it at the Sightings subscription page. Sightings is also online at http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/.

You can find the op-ed here as well as pasted below. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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A Limited Ecumenism

Ryan McCarl

As reported in Sightings last Monday, the Vatican announced two weeks ago that it was setting up a new canonical structure, or Apostolic Constitution, to facilitate the conversion of disaffected Anglican traditionalists to Catholicism; the converts will be able to “enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony,” in the Vatican’s words. Married former Anglican clergy will be allowed to become Catholic Priests, though not Bishops.

The Vatican portrayed the move as a response to requests from Anglicans and as representative of its broader “commitment to ecumenical dialogue.” Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and symbolic leader of the Anglican Church, and Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, released a statement confirming the Vatican’s narrative: “The Apostolic Constitution is further recognition of the substantial overlap in faith, doctrine and spirituality between the Catholic Church and the Anglican tradition.”

But what leaders of the two churches depicted as an historic, ecumenical move toward Christian unity, others saw as something considerably more complex. Andrew Sullivan, a Catholic writer who has often been critical of Pope Benedict XVI’s leadership, used economic analogies in describing the move as a power grab. “Married priests are fine…as long as they help build market share,” he wrote, paraphrasing what he sees as the Vatican’s new position on clerical chastity. The move “essentially junks an entire tradition of ecumenical dialogue in favor of a quick and sudden merger and acquisition.”

Such analogies, while jarring, may be worth exploring further. Organizations and societies learn from each other’s successful practices, and religious organizations are no exception. The language and efficiency of the Vatican’s announcement made the policy appear to be as carefully scripted and “rolled-out” as a new product by an electronics manufacturer or a new policy by a political leader.

The Holy See demonstrated that it, too, can masterfully employ the techniques of “spin,” omnipresent in both consumer and political marketing. And still other political analogies may apply: Is the Vatican practicing religious realpolitik, strengthening itself at the expense of a weakened and divided adversary?

In short, this development may tell us more about the contemporary Catholic Church than about divisions in the Anglican Church. Perhaps most interestingly, the Vatican's plan suggests that current Catholic leadership sees liturgical procedures and even the chastity of priests as somewhat flexible, but its stands against homosexuality and the ordainment of women as fixed and beyond debate – indeed, even as a source of common ground with other socially conservative Christian groups.

Many of the Christian churches place a high value on reconciliation and unity. But few see unification as an aim that trumps the aims of conscience, that is, of right doctrine and right orientation toward God. In evaluating the Vatican’s move, observers will have to ask themselves whether reconciliation ought to come at the price of continuing and even strengthening the exclusion of women and gays from full and equal membership in the Church.

References:

Donadio, Rachel and Laurie Goodstein, “Vatican Bidding to Get Anglicans to Join Its Fold,” New York Times, 10/21/09. Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/world/europe/21pope.html.

Holy See Press Office, “Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about Personal Ordinariates for Anglicans Entering the Catholic Church,” 10/20/09. Online at http://212.77.1.245/news_services/bulletin/news/24513.php?index=24513&po_date=20.10.2009&lang=en.

Nichols, Vincent and Rowan Williams, “Joint Statement by The Archbishop of Westminster and The Archbishop of Canterbury,” 10/20/09. Online at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2572#.

Sullivan, Andrew, “Married Priests Are Fine…,” The Daily Dish, 10/20/09. Online at http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/10/married-priests-are-fine-.html.

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Ryan McCarl is a writer and educator. He has an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and he maintains a blog at www.wideawakeminds.com.

Empathy across neighborhood lines

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:56:00 +0000

My latest op-ed, "Love Thy Neighbor: In the wake of an attack on the Men’s Cross Country team, it’s time to rethink University-community relations," appeared in the Chicago Weekly today.

You can find the op-ed and add your comments here, and I've also pasted it below. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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Love Thy Neighbor: In the wake of an attack on the Men’s Cross Country team, it’s time to rethink University-community relations

Ryan McCarl

The University of Chicago is a bastion of resources and privilege in a largely underserved and segregated South Side. The University and many of its students regularly engage in outreach and volunteer programs aimed at bridging the gap between the University community and the broader South Side, and Hyde Park is often hailed as one of the most integrated neighborhoods in the United States. But there is an undeniable separation—an invisible wall—between the University and its surroundings.

Every day, the wall is breached by students working in local schools through the Neighborhood Schools Program, by local residents seeking treatment at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and by members of the University staff who live in nearby communities. The constant movement of people and capital between the University area and surrounding areas is a movement across the barriers of income, class, and often race, and such movement is critical to reducing tensions between the communities and promoting empathy, awareness, and mutual understanding.

But the decision to cross barriers is rarely risk-free. It often requires going outside of one’s comfort zone and making oneself feel vulnerable. Sometimes the experience is rewarding, but that is not always the case.

Members of the University of Chicago cross country team often see much more of the South Side than the average University of Chicago student. Their runs of four, eight, or twenty miles carry them all around the city, through neighborhoods where their presence as a large group of often scantily-clad, mostly white runners speeding along down the middle of the street comes as a surprise to the residents they encounter.

I ran with the team for four years as a student. I remember positive experiences of having moments of connection and shared humor and understanding with some of the people we passed on our runs, of having friendly snowball fights in the winter, and of seeing communities that I would never see if not for those runs. The places I saw helped to shape my social, political, and economic awareness.

I also remember negative experiences: having rocks thrown at us by students, being cursed at and called racist and homophobic epithets, encountering big-and-mean-looking stray dogs, and having two teammates shot with a BB gun.

Earlier this week, the team was running their “Garfield Loop,” a run west on Garfield, past the Dan Ryan interchange and toward Midway Airport, when the team was shot at with paintball guns fired by an eastbound car. One team member was struck between the eyes, and the paintball buried itself in his right eye, where it caused substantial damage. His iris is now partially detached; cells deep in his eye are traumatized; and his vision in that eye is 20/60 instead of the 20/20 it was previously. It is probable that the injury will affect his vision for the rest of his life.

Is there a moral to this unpleasant story? Let’s hope it isn’t, “Don’t run through unsafe neighborhoods; stick to the treadmills or the lakefront parks.” It is essential that University of Chicago students accept some personal risk in order to spend time in the neighborhoods around their school. Like all great cities, Chicago is flawed, but Chicago’s particularly egregious flaw is its sharply drawn, if invisible, barriers between communities separated by de facto segregation, uneven development, and unequal opportunities for work and education.

The only way to break down those barriers is through the continued exchange of people, conversations, and capital: we must visit each other's homes and communities, walk awhile in each other’s shoes, and see the places where each other lives. We must see and hear our neighbors in order to empathize with them and see them in the fullness of their individuality and their common humanity. Knowledge and empathy go hand in hand.

The joyriders who shot my teammate in the eye with a paintball gun would not have done the same to their own family and friends, those they care most about. May we all work to expand the circle of those we care about to include all our neighbors; let us see these neighbors as neighbors, as our human family, rather than as distant others from whom we may safely separate ourselves.

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Ryan McCarl is a writer and educator. He has an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and he writes about education at www.wideawakeminds.com

Readings from Solomon's "Judaism: A Very Short Introduction"

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:11:00 +0000

Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas put their faith in the God of relationships. Alles Leben ist Begegnung ('all life is encounter'), declared Buber, and the important thing is to get your relationship with God and with people right (I-Thou, rather than I-It); from that relationship, which is the essence of Revelation, ethical action flows; laws and rules are feeble attempts to capture revelation, and doomed to inadequacy.
...
Genesis 1:27 states clearly enough: 'So God created humankind in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.' This implies that in using our concept of God to model human behavior we should not distinguish between male and female.
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Emil Fackenheim grounds his theology in the actual resistance of Shoah [Holocaust] victims to whom no realistic hope remained: 'A philosophical Tikkun ['repair', 'restoration'] is possible after the Holocaust because a philosophical Tikkun already took place, however fragmentarily, during the Holocaust itself'; the rebirth of Israel, and a new constructive dialogue with a self-critical Christianity, are essential to this process. Fackenheim is also noted for his statement that there should be a 614th commandment, surplus to the 613 of tradition - to survive as Jews, to remember, never to despair of God, lest we hand Hitler a posthumous victory.

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Is there such a thing as a 'just war', and if so, what are the conditions of engagement? Out of this debate emerged the novel concept of tohar ha-nesheq ('purity of arms'), which demands inter alia that the fighting force take special risks to avoid harm to non-combatants and to minimize enemy casualties.
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Many Jews, including secular ones, see Israel as the fulfilment of the 'national' aspirations of the Jewish people; after thousands of years of minority status, of being alienated from the host societies, and in many cases actually prevented from becoming full citizens of the lands in which they lived, they feel that they have at last 'come home' and are able to control their own destiny within the normal limitations of independent statehood. Israel is perceived as a secure haven for persecuted Jews; had Israel existed during the years of the Holocaust, Jews would have had somewhere to turn to. Moreover, Israel provides the opportunity to live a fulfilling Jewish life free from the inhibitions and restrictions of minority status.
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Large numbers of men and women have abandoned organized religion, some because they have found it intellectually untenable, more because they have found it emotionally unsatisfying, most because they have found that its demands inhibit the personal freedom which they regard as a fundamental human right. If Western Christianity has been most strongly affected, Western Judaism runs it a close second, for both have their home in the lands which modernity and the Enlightenment were nurtured.
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The downside of the emphasis on family values is the danger of marginalizing the stranger, the single, and the unattached.
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The 'heroes of the spirit,' Elijah shows the conventional rabbi Baroka, are not the ostentatiously pious, not even the learned and devout like Baroka himself.... They may appear to be quite ordinary individuals, not even religious in a conventional sense, whose quiet deeds enhance the quality of life around them - the carers, the compassionate, those who use their talents to ease the burden of humanity.

Norman Solomon
--Judaism: A Very Short Introduction

Readings from the stories of John Cheever

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:50:00 +0000

It was after four then, and I lay in the dark, listening to the rain and to the morning trains coming through. They come from Buffalo and Chicago and the Far West, through Albany and down along the river in the early morning, and at one time or another I've traveled on most of them, and I lay in the dark thinking about the polar air in the Pullman cars and the smell of nightclothes and the taste of dining-car water and the way it feels to end a day in Cleveland or Chicago and begin another in New York, particularly after you've been away for a couple of years, and particularly in the summer.
...
I took the eight-ten train into town in the morning and returned on the six-thirty. I knew enough to avoid the empty house in the summer dusk, and I drove directly from the station parking lot to a good restaurant called Orpheo's.

--"The Cure"

"The sun is in your hair."
"What?"
"The sun is in your hair. It's a beautiful color."

--"The Chaste Clarissa"

I felt that he was a captive of financial and sentimental commitments, like every other man I know, and that he was no more free to fall in love with a strange woman he saw on a street corner than he was to take a walking trip through French Guiana or to recommence his life in Chicago under an assumed name.
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"Is divorce so dreadful and of all the things that hold a marriage together how many of them are good?" She sat down at the table. "In Grenoble," she said, "I wrote a long paper on Charles Stuart in French. A professor at the University of Chicago wrote me a letter. I couldn't read a French newspaper without a dictionary today, I don't have the time to follow any newspaper, and I am ashamed of my incompetence, ashamed of the way I look. Oh, I guess I love you, I do love the children, but I love myself, I love my life, it has some value and some promise for me and Trencher's roses make me feel that I'm losing this, that I'm losing my self-respect."
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Walking down Lexington Avenue, we heard the drone bass of a church organ sound from the sky, and we and the others on the sidewalk looked up in piety and bewilderment, like a devout and stupid congregation, and saw a formation of heavy bombers heading for the sea. As it got late, it got cold and clear and still, and on the stillness the waste from the smokestacks along the East River seemed to articulate, as legibly as the Pepsi-Cola plane, whole words and sentences. Halcyon. Disaster. They were hard to make out. It seemed the ebb of the year - an evil day for gastritis, sinus, and respiratory disease - and remembering other winters, the markings of the light convinced me that it was the season of divorce.
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I think that the seriousness of the day affected the children, and when they returned to the house, they were quiet. The seriousness of it kept coming to me with the feeling that this change, like a phenomenon of speed, was affecting our watches as well as our hearts.
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Now when I come home in the evenings, Ethel is still sitting on the stool by the sink cleaning vegetables. I go with her into the children's room. The light there is bright. The children have built something out an orange crate, something preposterous and ascendant, and their sweetness, their compulsion to build, the brightness of the light are reflected perfectly and increased in Ethel's face. Then she feeds them, bathes them, and sets the table, and stands for a moment in the middle of the room, trying to make some connection between the evening and the day. Then it is over. She lights the four candles, and we sit down to our supper.

--"The Season of Divorce"

It is true of even the best of us that if an observer can catch us boarding a train at a way station; if he will mark our faces, stripped by anxiety of their self-possession; if he will appraise our luggage, our clothing, and look out of the window to see who has driven us to the station; if he will listen to the harsh or tender things we say if we are with our families, or notice the way we put our suitcase onto the rack, check the position of our wallet, our key ring, and wipe the sweat off the back of our necks; if he can judge sensibly the self-importance, diffidence, or sadness with which we settle ourselves, he will be given a broader view of our lives than most of us would intend.

--"The Summer Farmer"

Excerpts from Jonathan Glover's "Humanity"

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:16:00 +0000

Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century is one of the best and most important books I have ever read.

Excerpts below:

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An extimate for the period from 1900 until 1989 is that war killed 86 million people. Eighty-six million is a small proportion of all those alive during the ninety years, and is a small number compared to those who have died from hunger and preventable diseases. All the same, death in twentieth-century war has been on a scale which is hard to grasp. ...If these deaths had been spread evenly over the period, war would have killed around 2,500 people every day. That is over 100 people an hour, round the clock, for ninety years.
...
One of this book's aims is to replace the thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex, something closer to reality. A consequence of this is to defend the Enlightenment hope of a world that is more peaceful and humane, the hope that by understanding more about ourselves we can do something to create a world with less misery. ...We need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.

...
Our entanglements with people close to us erode simple self-interest. Husbands, wives, lovers, parents, children and friends all blur the boundaries of selfish concern. Francis Bacon rightly said that people with children have given hostages to fortune. Inescapably, other forms of friendship and love hold us hostage too. The deeper levels of relationships are denied to people who hold large parts of themselves back. And to give yourself means that part of you belongs to the person you care for. There is a constant pull towards new kinds of sympathy and commitment. Narrow self-interest is destabilized.
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Happiness depends on psychological integration, or wholeness. We need to be at peace with ourselves. Inner conflict is a threat to happiness. Disharmony involves slavery to madness, and allows the beast in man to gain control.
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Claims to be treated with respect are often linked to standing within a group. The claim of an outsider may be minimal. Sympathy has similar limitations. The sympathies which really engage us are often stubbornly limited and local. I may move mountains for my child, but perhaps I will not cross the street to be a good Samaritan to a stranger. Sympathy may hardly extend to those outside a particular community. These limitations help to explain a moral gap which is increasingly evident. Many moralities are "internal," giving weight to the interests of those inside a community, but doing little against the common indifference or even hostility towards those outside. It is increasingly obvious that this moral gap is a human disaster.
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(In 1991), Amnesty International recorded protests against human rights abuses in over 50 countries, the protests to thirteen countries making specific reference to torture. These are the kinds of thing that many of us have a vague background awareness of, without there being much publicity unless the perpetrators are some currently loathed regime, or unless some highly visible Westerner is among the victims. The reality is that in many countries torture of the most revolting cruelty happens routinely, often under the auspices of governments with good relations with Europe and the United States, sometimes using equipment knowingly supplied by Western companies. There is little reason to think torture is in retreat. The festival of cruelty is in full swing. What is it about human beings that makes such acts possible? Three factors seem central. There is a love of cruelty. Also, emotionally inadequate people assert themselves by dominance and cruelty. And the moral resources which restrain cruelty can be neutralized.
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For some, especially when the victims are women, the pleasure of cruelty is sexual.
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Ideas about how to live should be shaped partly by awareness of collective disasters.
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Atrocities are easier if the human responsibilities are weakened. Torturers have to suppress sympathy, or "squeamishness" as they come to think of it. One way is to stress that victims do not belong. They are usually assigned to some other, stigmatized, group.
...
We are a species both brutal and sickened by brutality. This conflict between our cruelty and our aspirations goes as far as we can see back in human history.

Jonathan Glover
--Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

Readings from Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning"

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:12:00 +0000

I am currently reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl, a psychiatrist, was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, for several years. He survived the experience and went on to develop the theory of "logotherapy," a branch of psychoanalysis that focuses on human beings' "will to meaning." The part of the book that discusses Frankl's memories of his camp experience is, like any Holocaust memoir worth its salt, extremely disturbing and difficult to read, but it ought to be read in spite of that. Here are a few (non-graphic) excerpts from the book, which I highly recommend:

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Soon we had resumed the previous day's positions in the ditch. The frozen ground cracked under the point of the pickaxes, and sparks flew. The men were silent, their brains numb. My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing - which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
...
If there is a meaning of life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life.
...
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.

...
I remember two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument - they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. We found, in fact, that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. For the other it was a thing, not a person. This man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else, any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child's affections.
...
Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
...
I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on us in different hours - a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God - and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly - not miserably - knowing how to die.
...
When we spoke about attempts to give a man in camp mental courage, we said that he had to be shown something to look forward to in the future. He had to be reminded that life still waited for him, that a human being waited for his return. But after liberation? There were some men who found that no one awaited them. Woe to him who found that the person whose memory alone had given him courage in camp did not exist any more! Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for! Perhaps he boarded a trolley, traveled out to the home which he had seen for years in his mind, and only in his mind, and pressed the bell, just as he has longed to do in thousands of dreams, only to find that the person who should open the door was not there, and would never be there again.

Viktor E. Frankl
--Man's Search for Meaning

Discovering the letters of Justice William O. Douglas

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:55:00 +0000

I was sorting through some books in my closet yesterday, and I discovered a fantastic book which drew me away from my regular reading: The Douglas Letters: Selections from the Private Papers of William O. Douglas, edited by Melvin I. Urkofsky. William O. Douglas was a brilliant, contrarian Associate Justice on the Supreme Court as well as a transformative environmentalist and New Dealer who crusaded against rampant speculation and corruption in the financial industry. His writing is insightful and often hilarious. Here are a few samples:

To Ramsey Clark, 4/28/70:

On my visit to Baghdad, I went to the University with my interpreter to see what books, if any, they had on our Constitution or Bill of Rights or Jefferson, Madison, democracy, etc.

That library was bare on those subjects. So when I returned, I prepared what I called the Douglas Eight Foot Shelf which I thought should be in every underdeveloped nation. I thought then - and still think - that those ideas are more important than military missions.

To Max Radin (professor at Berkeley Law School), 5/27/46:

...If you are willing, I will ask you to find me a law clerk each year....I need not only a bright chap, but also a hard-working fellow with a smell for facts as well as for law. I do not want a hide-bound, conservative fellow. What I want is a Max Radin - a fellow who can hold his own in these sophisticated circles and who is not going to end up as a stodgy, hide-bound lawyer. I want the kind of fellow for whom this work would be an exhilaration, who will be going into teaching or into practice of the law for the purpose of promoting the public good. I do not want to fill the big law offices of the country with my law clerks....

To the Wall Street Journal, 10/16/78

To the Editors:

Notice of my demise has been emanating from several sources recently, not least of which is your Journal.

Please be advised that I am today joining the ranks of citizens known as octogenarians and I assure you that I was never in a position to be resurrected in order to achieve such standing.

To Edward L.R. Elson, 12/7/77:

...Concerning my funeral arrangements...From my hobo days, I knew the famous songwriter Woody Guthrie who wrote a song called "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land." It reflects not a socialist dream of mine, but many of the freedoms that are explicit or implicit in the Constitution, such as the right to move from place to place to look for a job or establish a new home, and the right to move interstate without payment of a fee, as some states within the last thirty years have tried to impose. In other words, it expresses the vagrancy issue as I have expressed it and as it has become in-grained in the law. (See my opinion in Papachristou et al v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 [1972].)

To Peter K. Westen (Douglas' law clerk, now a highly-respected professor at the University of Michigan Law School), 10/1/68:

(After chewing him out for various mistakes): You might think these things over, because the first case we have to dispose of when I get back is the case of P.K. Westen.

Interview with the University of Chicago Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:03:00 +0000

UChiBLOGo, the blog of the University of Chicago Magazine, interviewed me about Wide Awake Minds and the idea of self-education today.

Check it out here, and please pass the interview along to others if you enjoy reading it. Thanks for helping to spread the word about self-education!

Readings from Charles Taylor and Erich Auerbach

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:54:00 +0000

One way to put the question I want to answer here is this: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?
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Important as science is to our present outlook, we mustn't exaggerate its causal role here, and make it the main motor of the transformation. Our encasing in secular time is also something we have brought about in the way we live and order our lives. It has been brought about by the same social and ideological changes which have wrought disenchantment. In particular, the disciplines of our modern civilized order have led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious resource, not to be "wasted". The result has been the creation of a tight, ordered time environment. This has enveloped us, until it comes to seem like nature. We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done. This "time frame" deserves, perhaps more than any other facet of modernity, Weber's famous description of a "stahlhartes Gehäuse" (iron cage). It occludes all higher times, makes them even hard to conceive.
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Augustine sees ordinary time as dispersal, distensio, losing the unity, being cut off from our past and out of touch with our future. We get lost in our little parcel of time. But we have an irrepressible craving for eternity, and so we strive to go beyond this. Unfortunately, this all too often takes the form of our trying to invest our little parcel with eternal significance, and therefore divinising things, and therefore falling deeper into sin.

Charles Taylor
--A Secular Age

If it is true that man is capable of everything horrible, it is also true that the horrible always engenders counterforces and that in most epochs of atrocious occurrences the great vital forces of the human soul reveal themselves: love and sacrifice, heroism in the service of conviction, and the ceaseless search for possibilities of a purer existence.
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To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.
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The Old Testament, in so far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three domains: legend, historical reporting, and interpretative historical theology.
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The Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactical culture appears to be so...highly developed, are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings; and no less so in relation to the real life which they describe in general. Delight in physical existence is everything to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us. ...(The Homeric heroes) wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly.
...
Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, (the Bible) seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. This becomes increasingly difficult the further our historical environment is removed from that of the Biblical books; and if these nevertheless maintain their claim to absolute authority, it is inevitable that they themselves be adapted through interpretative transformation.
...
It is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly. All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared. The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly.... Legend arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninterrupted.

Erich Auerbach
--Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Quotes from Hugo Black and Lon L. Fuller

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Every departure from the principles of the law's inner morality is an affront to man's dignity as a responsible agent. To judge his actions by unpublished or retrospective laws, or to order him to do an act that is impossible, is to convey to him your indifference to his powers of self-determination.
...
I believe that if we were forced to select the principle that supports and infuses all human aspiration we would find it in the objective of maintaining communication with our fellows. ...How and when we accomplish communication with one another can expand or contract the boundaries of life itself.

Lon L. Fuller
--The Morality of Law

The Court's justification for consulting its own notions rather than following the original meaning of the Constitution, as I would, apparently is based on the belief of the majority of the Court that for this Court to be bound by the original meaning of the Constitution is an intolerable and debilitating evil; that our Constitution should not be "shackled to the political theory of a particular era," and that to save the country from the original Constitution the Court must have constant power to renew it and keep it abreast of this Court's more enlightened theories of what is best for our society.

It seems to me that this is an attack not only on the great value of our Constitution itself but also on the concept of a written constitution which is to survive through the years as originally written unless changed through the amendment process which the Framers wisely provided. Moreover, when a "political theory" embodied in our Constitution becomes outdated, it seems to me that a majority of the nine members of this Court are not only without constitutional power but are far less qualified to choose a new constitutional political theory than the people of this country proceeding in the manner provided by Article V.

Justice Hugo Black
--Harper v. Virginia State Board of Education (dissent); 383 U.S. 663 (1966)

No one may be compelled against his conscience to render war service involving the use of arms.

--Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, Article IV

I cannot consider the Bill of Rights to be an outworn 18th Century 'strait jacket' as the Twining opinion did. Its provisions may be thought outdated abstractions by some. And it is true that they were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century wherever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many. In my judgment the people of no nation can lose their liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced and respected so as to afford continuous protection against old, as well as new, devices and practices which might thwart those purposes. I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practice of substituting its own concepts of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights.

Justice Hugo Black
--Adamson v. California (dissent); 332 U.S. 46 (1946)

All excerpts from Lloyd, Introduction to Jurisprudence (4th ed., 1979).

How to Think About Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:59:00 +0000

"How to Think About Politics," my most recent essay, is being featured in the August issue of Fogged Clarity. I've also pasted it below. If you enjoy it, please consider linking to it, sharing it, or passing it along to others who might be interested. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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How to Think About Politics

Ryan McCarl

First, question everything, beginning with the political ideas you inherited from your parents, family, community, church, and school.

Create an inventory, in your mind or on paper, of these ideas: what are your strong, visceral, “gut” feelings about the political parties, religion in schools, the legalization versus criminalization of abortion, taxation, drug laws, and so on? What about your ideas about other races and social classes, and about race and class relations in general? Interrogate your emotional, pre-rational political ideology: why do you think it is the case that some people are poor, others wealthy, and others starving? Do you admire military power, or are you suspicious of it? How do you react to talk of America’s present and past wars – World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan?

The first step to becoming a serious political thinker is to distance yourself, at least temporarily, from what might be called your “political inheritance” – the political ideas and values that you were infused with as a child and young adult.

Many of these ideas may be worth keeping, of course, and it is perfectly acceptable to venture into the wilderness of new ideas and then return, older and wiser, to where you began – but it is unacceptable to never waver, even in thought, from the political ideas you grew up with. You must rediscover these ideas to make them truly your own.

The second step is to understand your own interests and distance yourself from them for the purposes of political thinking.

Your self-interest, whatever it may be, can probably be translated into a political and economic ideology: you are in a union, so you support unions and vote for pro-union politicians. You are an investment banker or venture capitalist, so you oppose anything – including unions – that could interfere with economic “efficiency,” that is, with your ability to “restructure” businesses and shift resources around to make a profit. You own a home in an almost entirely white, middle-class suburb where your kids attend a top-tier public school, so you oppose policies such as intradistrict school choice and property taxes that could, you feel, threaten your lifestyle.

But mature political thinking requires that you think about politics in terms of the public good and what is best for society (or humanity, even) as a whole. That does not imply that mature political thinking requires a “liberal” political ideology: it is quite acceptable to believe, conservatively, that radical or revolutionary changes to the status quo would do more harm than good, or that the way things are should be tweaked and adjusted rather than significantly changed, or that the public welfare is best served through deregulation, lowered taxes, and the privatization of public institutions. But whatever political ideology you adopt, you must, if you want to begin thinking seriously about politics, adopt it for some reason other than the health of your pocketbook.

Of course, it often happens that people consciously or unconsciously wrap their self-interests in a veil of ideology – they disguise the fact that their political views are a function of their self-interest by speaking in terms of the public good, and often they even believe their own disguise. But serious thinkers must honestly examine their own views and biases, look at their own ideas with critical eyes, and constantly work to create distance between their self-interest and their political views. If these overlap, it must be by accident and coincidence.

Question yourself, your ideology, your vocabulary, and the beliefs behind your beliefs. And also question every overt and covert political statement, every candidate’s speech, every newspaper opinion column, every dinner-table rant, every historical narrative, and even every piece of art or literature. Politics touches everything and everything touches politics. Cultivate your awareness of the political dimension of the world, a dimension that is often hidden beneath the surface of things. A map, for example, seems straightforward and self-evident – but what part of the world did the mapmaker select as central? Which continents’ sizes are distorted?

And speaking of looking beneath the surface of things: advanced political thinking requires a partial distancing from the rancorous spats and celebrity politics that are all-too-often the central focus of 24-hour cable news stations, political talk shows, and the most popular political blogs. Thinking politically does not mean choosing a side, stepping into the echo chamber, and becoming one more unimaginative partisan foot-soldier – it is better to keep one foot in the fray and one foot in the slightly-removed world of philosophy, theory, scholarship, history, and literature.

For me, this means reading both conservative and liberal blogs and websites, but favoring those that are more thoughtful and less reactive. More importantly, it means monitoring the amount of online, print, and cable news I consume, and giving primacy of place in my reading to good books – which are intrinsically more thought-out, edited, careful, and less bound to a specific historical moment than even the best newspapers and websites.

The third step toward mature political thinking involves understanding that we look at political issues through certain lenses – lenses of theory, of history, and of our biases and ideologies.

The best political thinkers do not get trapped in one lens. Rather, like an ophthalmologist conducting an eye examination, they shift from lens to lens and look at a problem through as many lenses as possible in order to identify which lens best clarifies the problem and points the way to a possible solution.

Let’s take the contemporary debate about school reform and vouchers as an example. Conservatives use the analogy of market economics to argue that if we privatize schools and school services and create a more competitive school system, the outcome will be better and more educationally efficient; liberals argue that it is a profound mistake to think about schooling in economic terms, and that we should focus on improving the public schools, which reflect our moral commitment to providing equal educational opportunity to every American child. But why not look at education through both lenses – the lens of economics and the lens of ethics? And also the lenses of history and law?

Take practically any political or economic problem and gather a room full of academic specialists: one each in political philosophy, political psychology, law, evolutionary biology, theology or religious studies, women’s studies, history, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Each of these experts will speak intelligently about the issue, looking at it through the lens of their discipline. And each will have something valuable to contribute to the debate.

And so we arrive at a final guideline for engaging in serious political thought: become a lifelong self-educator, and never stop critically examining your own political ideas and those you find in contemporary debates.

Political issues are infinitely complex, and the political loudmouths of our world who claim to have it all figured out are cashing in on a lie. You, their target consumer, have the power to reject the narrow wares they peddle and turn to better, more thoughtful sources.

If there is one slogan and sound-bite that is worth adopting, it is this: “Well, it isn’t really that simple.”

A vacation and a reading list: a personal update

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:01:00 +0000

It's hard to believe how quickly things happen. My summer term - roughly six hours a day, five days a week of education classes - is drawing to a close, and as of Friday afternoon I'll be free for an entire month (the life of a student is good - certainly beats two or three weeks of vacation over the course of a year). I'll be in Colorado (Boulder, Telluride, Denver) for almost two weeks, in Chicago for one, and in Muskegon for one - as well as a few days of camping in Northern Michigan with friends.

Whenever I prepare to travel, my thoughts quickly turn to the question of what books I will bring along and read. I always make absurdly ambitious reading lists and pack way, way more than I could ever hope to finish, and this time is no exception. I am bringing four:

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. About the rise of secularism in Western society. Considered one of the most important books in the field of religious studies in recent decades. Weighs in at a hefty 776 pages.

John Cheever, Collected Stories and Other Writings. Cheever is one of the best short fiction writers of the 20th century. 969 pages.

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Publishers Weekly says: "The author, beginning with Homer and the Bible, traces the imitation of life in literature through the ages . . .touching upon every major literary figure in western culture on the way." A key work in 20th-century literary criticism. 574 pages.

Dennis Lord Lloyd of Hampstead, Introduction to Jurisprudence. A vast, out-of-print, fantastically rich collection of writings on the philosophy of law and political philosophy - a mangled old book I believe I picked up for free in the box outside of the Powell's Books in Hyde Park, Chicago. 981 pages (but I'll skip writings that I don't want to read for whatever reason). From the Independent's interesting obituary of Lloyd: "As important to generations of students has been his encyclopaedic Introduction to Jurisprudence (1959). Lloyd was working on the sixth edition when he died. It was through this book that law students in much of the English- speaking world came to read Kelsen, Olivecrona, Savigny, Geny, Pashukanis, giants of continental juristic thought otherwise largely inaccessible. The recipe of wise text and suitably chosen extract remains a model guide to the study of legal thought. To the text he brought his own philosophical training, his culture and his erudition. The Introduction has its detractors but it remains the standard student text on the subject."

Will I succeed in finishing all of these, or any of them? Most likely not. If history is any guide, I'll buy some other book or books during vacation and distract myself with those, or I'll get heavily involved with my writing, almost as a way of avoiding my reading with a good conscience. But if I restrict my book-reading to these four tomes and read around 118 pages a day for 27 days, I could do it - so that's the bar I'm setting for myself.

I can't wait. Two more days of finishing my summer projects, and I'll be free to travel, read, and write without restrictions for an entire month.

Should we finish the books we begin? It depends.

noreply@blogger.com (Ryan McCarl) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:37:00 +0000

In an article published in Friday's Washington Times, economist Tyler Cowen makes several interesting and provocative arguments about reading and books.

1. "What should you do when, 20, 50 or 100 pages in, you realize you just don't like a book?" Cowen says: "Give up."

2. "We should treat books a little more like we treat TV channels," (Cowen) argues. No one has trouble flipping away from a boring series."

3. "(Cowen) notes that many up-and-coming writers complain they can't break through in a best-seller-driven marketplace. 'We're also making markets more efficient," Mr. Cowen says. "If you can sample more books, you're giving more people a chance.'"

The article goes on to discuss several other readers who advocate quitting "boring" books: "One of her online friends reminded her there's even an abandonment rule: The 'Deduct Your Age From 100 and Read That Many Pages Before Giving Up on a Book' rule"; and "Having an e-book reader has made Ms. Wendell more ruthless. "I'm holding 100+ books on one device. If one isn't floating my boat, I can move on to something else by pressing one button," she points out."

So should we finish the books we begin? The short answer: it depends. On what? That's more difficult, but it depends on something more than how much we are enjoying the book.

Why did you pick up the book in the first place? If you are reading for pure entertainment, it makes sense to put the book down if you aren't feeling entertained after giving the book a fair shot. But surely most readers read for more than pure entertainment; if "entertainment" were the ultimate goal, there would be no reason to prefer an entertaining book over an equally or more entertaining movie, television show, or video game. In fact, I suspect that the widespread idea that books are primarily sources of entertainment is partially responsible for the decline of book-reading, especially among young people, in recent decades.

I choose and read books that are rewarding and that will enrich my understanding of the world, of myself, and of the human condition. If they are entertaining or exciting at the same time, so much the better, but that isn't the primary goal. In fact, my idea of what is "entertaining" has shifted. I have conditioned myself to prefer forms of leisure - i.e., reading good books, practicing banjo and listening to music, engaging in good conversation, watching good movies - that are rewarding and educative. So even if I am reading a book that I must struggle to get through, that to me is often more entertaining than reading, say, Angels and Demons.

There are, in short, problems with considering a book's excitement and ease the most important factors in deciding whether to read it or finish it. We build our literacy and expand our understanding by reading material that challenges us, just as a musician continually improves his or her proficiency in an instrument not by playing the same basic tunes over and over, but by constantly pushing his or her limits by tackling new, more frustrating and difficult works and techniques.

I have as much trouble as anyone with finishing books, but some books are worth finishing regardless of whether I feel like finishing them. The other week, I completed Moby-Dick after a slow, gradual, four-month effort. Moby-Dick would certainly fail the "entertainment" test for the vast majority of readers, including me. And yet it is now one of my favorite books, because Melville's incredible use of language and his insights into religion, human nature, and life itself made Moby-Dick matter to me: I read it in the hope that it might change the way I write, think, and see the world.

Steinbeck writes in East of Eden: "You can start reading if you want and it will raise up your lid a little." That's as good a statement as any of what good books are for.

(Hat tip for the link to the Washington Times article: Andrew Sullivan)