A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell is known for two things, depending upon the tradition from which you approach him: he’s an early and ardent atheist (perhaps the grandfather of the recent “New Atheist” movement popularized by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett), as made clear in Why I Am Not a Christian. Much less controversially, his contributions as a mathematician and logician (for which see his and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) were perhaps the most important to formal Logic since the early Greeks.

But mathematics and logic were not Russell’s only interests; indeed, he was something of a polymath, and studied/published such various topics as political history, social criticism, and, as we shall see, philosophy. This latter item isn’t necessarily a surprise, or at least it shouldn’t be; while it’s easy for modern readers so far removed from the history of philosophy to think of it in terms of the abstracted and generalized primers we got in college, the origins of philosophy are intertwined with physical science and mathematics—indeed, they’re occasionally indistinguishable.

A History of Western Philosophy sprang from this facet of Russell’s learning, and it was not—then or now—the unmitigated success that Russell’s Principia had been. It was a commercial success, certainly, netting Russell not only a $3’000 advance from his publishers, but a steady income from ongoing sales which lasted throughout his life. The critical reception was decidedly chilly, however. Before talking about what fault Russell’s peers found with his book, it would behoove us to skim over the book itself.

The history of philosophy, at least as Russell has it, breaks down into three overarching categories: the ancient Greeks, both Pre-Socratic and those of the later Socratic traditions; the early [Catholic] Church fathers and the members of the tradition of religious scholarship which flourished between the middle of the first millennium and the early days of the Medieval period; finally, the “modern” philosophers, a rather more disparate category which includes everything from Renaissance philosophers like Erasmus or Descartes to later political philosophers like Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and all the other names you’re more likely to hear.

Russell proceeds more less chronologically, devoting a chapter to each philosopher he deems of note. Some receive more words than others; while some of the earliest Greek philosophers make for little more than summaries, despite their relative influence, it is the heavyweights—principally Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—who receive the most attention, for better or worse. Russell is underwhelmed with Aristotle, believing that the subsequent diminishment of original philosophical thought in deference to his authority is his damning legacy. The author’s opinions are oddly interspersed in the text; one may read for quite some time a straightforward recitation of philosophical before being surprised by a sudden influx of Russell’s own opinions—some of which are valid and argued, and some of which are mere dismissals. Russell’s tendency toward arbitrary omission is aggravating, and seems insufficiently academic for an intellectual of Russell’s stature.

In my mind, the most interest bits of the book were the early church fathers and religious intellectuals, since it’s a subject which tends to get lost. Christian apologetics is weighted so heavily toward more recent writers, and early church history simply isn’t a sexy enough subject to get popular treatment. But I think Russell does a decent job of handling the history, such as the early conflict between the state (Kings, Emperors) and the initial succession of popes, whose legacies range from appropriately holy to positively debauched. Before the pope sat supreme in the Vatican, the institution was a rather more turbulent affair than we modern readers are given to assume. It was in this atmosphere, despite mutual condemnations between the canonical Church and various and sundry heretics, that religious intellectuals generated impressive corpus of philosophical consideration. I include in this august collective not just Christian philosophers, but also notable figures like Maimonides (the preeminent Jewish philosopher). Important, too, is that this period also saw the emergence of Islam, and Russell takes care to tease out the influences that Judaism and early Christianity must have had on the burgeoning new Abrahamic religion. Though he always uses the word “Mohammedan” rather than “Islam[ic]“, it’s also refreshing read about the topic outside our current poison of Islamophobia; though Islam owes most of its foundation precepts (and even large swatches of its holy text) to its predecessors, people often forget just how intimately tied it is to the other major monotheisms.

After many centuries of Pre-Cartesians, Russell finally lands gasping on the near side of the dark ages, where he picks up the early Protestants, and Descartes himself, and proceeds through his own era. Unlike his treatment of, say, Aristotle, most “modern” philosophers receive much shorter shrift by Russell, a phenomenon that appears to exist in clear inverse proportion to their antiquity. Though this was one of the most frequent complaints about the book, it does make more than a little sense; though he often peeks out from behind his wall of intellectual dispassion to editorialize about this or that philosophical precept, Russell is writing a social history, and our ability to judge historical merit grows correspondingly with distance. Is it any wonder that Russell can be so profligate with his words about Aristotle (who Russell thinks is overrated) but so sparing with, e.g., Nietzsche, who’d been dead less than 50 years at the time Russell was writing?

Modern readers must be aware of both the author and the context in which he wrote the book. Russell was an avowed and lifelong pacifist, writing a history of philosophy during the throes of the second World War. He was also a mathematician/logician, and a rather stalwart empiricist, and thus when he produces a tome about the entire history of organized thought on our half the globe, the temptation to dismiss philosophy that encourages violence (Machiavelli, for instance) or does not lead inexorably into the sort of Mechanical Materialism to which Russell at least appears to have subscribed. On the whole, however, Russell has created a compelling and fascinating (if incomplete) collation of western philosophy that still remains an important work more than 50 years later.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

Solaris is considered one of Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s greatest books—certainly, it’s his most popular, having been adapted for film three times. But, while the original book was written in Polish, there has not, and still is not, a direct Polish-to-English translation available. The book available in your neighborhood bookstore is in fact an English translation of a French translation of the original Polish. I can’t speak to its quality, since I’m not familiar with the original Polish, but the things I’ve heard have been mixed.

Solaris is the sort of science fiction that I’ve talked about previous where, regardless of what contrivances are used—space aliens, faster-than-light travel, laser guns, time travel, &c.—they are merely tools used to underscore cultural or philosophical questions or assertions that aren’t intrinsically tied to the universe being described.

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, the author broaches the possibility that if an alien intelligence were to communicate with us, they would choose to use mathematics (a “universal” language) do to so. By contrast, Lem offers up this possibility: consider that you find an alien intelligence on some distant planet in a physical form unlike anything we’ve known. What is the likelihood of finding some mutual syntactic basis with which to communicate, mathematical or otherwise? In fact, what is the likelihood that the alien intelligence and our own intelligence are anything alike?

Such is the nature of Solaris, a distant planet in Lem’s imagined future which has no life as we know it: rather, most of its surface is covered by an ocean which appears to be a conscious, single organism. By the time that Kris Kelvin arrives on Station Solaris, the study of the planet has faded away: once a thriving field, years and years of fruitless research have whittled away at its constituents, and most of the scientific community (and, indeed, the non-scientific population) have written the planet and its massive oceanic organism off as an enigma which will never be solved; though it exhibits signs of intelligence, the organism shows no interest or response to human study or attempts at communication (indeed, how would one communicate with an plasmic ocean?).

The output of Solaricist studies, when they thrived, were a detailed (and deadly and costly) list of observed phenomenon—complicated structures made by the ocean, described in a complex nomenclature which says nothing at all about their purpose or meaning. Lem, by way of Kelvin’s internal narration, actually goes to great lengths to show this generated history, citing publications and long-standing theories, well-known scientists and marginalized errata. I was perplexed, at first, as to why so much room in such a slim text would be given over to such things when it was immediately clear that Solaris’s mysteries would not be solved, perhaps ever. It occurred to me only later that Lem is attempting to create in his readers the same mix of wonder, bafflement, and frustration that plagues Kelvin and all the other Solaricists; to be able to observe the ocean’s phenomena, catalog and name them, and be no closer to understanding them than a cockroach is to understanding quantum entanglement.

When Kris Kelvin arrives at Station Solaris, the station’s leader, Gibarian (and the one who sent for him in the first place) is recently dead by his own hand. The only other remaining person on board are the distracted and irritable Dr. Snow and the reclusive Sartorius, barricaded in his lab. Kelvin thinks these are the only two people, anyway, until he sees a large black lady walking down the hall (translated somewhat antiquatedly as “Negress”), and later finds her in the cold storage unit next to Gibarian’s corpse. Kelvin soon learns that the ocean (or so they presume) has been reaching into the deep psyches of the station inhabitants and recreating people from their past in realistic form. Kelvin is soon met by Rheya, an old lover who killed herself after a fight, and whose death (presumably) haunts Kelvin to this day, although I admit to being unmoved by his apparent level of remorse. We never learn who Snow or Sartorius’s visitors are, but they both seem appropriately unnerved or discomfited by their presence.

In later interviews, Lem expressed dismay that the film adaptations of Solaris all focus on Kelvin’s relationship with the Rheya simulacra and his acerbic colleagues: “[My focus on alienness] is why the book was entitled Solaris and not Love in Outer Space”. In fact, Kelvin’s odd relationship with the ersatz Rheya is a meagre narrative, and while her growing and terrible sense of self provides a Romantic foil for the book’s more fatalistic tone, it is more useful as a dramatic parallel for Kelvin’s knowledge of Solaris itself, filled with bold and dramatic gestures that communicate nothing at all.

Fundamentally, Solaris is about that notion that mankind will ultimately tame the galaxy, but everywhere we go will simply be transplanting our humanness onto other planets. A location, heretofore alien, is now alien with a human colony; such is the case with Solaris. The important point is that such exploration brings us no further to understanding, because we necessarily express everything in human tropes and human technology. Lem’s desire to depict something fundamentally alien has a devastating effect: Solaris is saturated with an intense loneliness and melancholy, created first by the conceptual remoteness of the enigmatic ocean and then mirrored by the suspicion, terror, and interiority of the inhabitants of Station Solaris.

Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers

Though it’s been over two years since I was first introduced to Richard Powers (via Galatea 2.2), this is regrettably only the second book of his that I’ve read. Powers’ books are not the sort of fluff you can just pick up any time you want, after all. Reading them—and I think this is the hallmark of great books—is a work of care and devotion. Otherwise, you might as well be reading Twilight.

Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance is Power’s first novel (published way back in 1985, when I was born), but you’d never notice: it contains the same distinct Powerisms and the same quality of craft that mark every other book by him since.

There are three plots and several narrative voices in Three Farmers. It begins with Powers as a first-person narrator (which may or may not be an accurate depiction of the real Powers ) seeing a photograph while in Detroit, and this photograph sending him into a frenzied hunt to find out more about it. The real Richard Powers had just such an experience: he was a computer programmer until he saw “Young Farmers” by August Sander (the photograph on the book cover), at which point he quit his job and wrote his first novel. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the recursive nature of that event. This character (or I believe it to be) spends half the time as an actionable character and half the time as a general narrator, lecturing about, say, Henry Ford, or the nature of photography. He’s also the narrator whose philosophical musings tie the lessons of the other plot threads together.

The second plot is that of the three young boys in the photograph, taken as it was on the cusp of World War I. The story follows their travails as they deal with, run from, or fight in the conflict. On a smaller scale, it deals with their senses of identity (as they vacillate between being German and being Dutch); on a larger scale, it touches upon sense of biography (which becomes important later) and their physical (read: timeline) effect on the characters of other threads.

Finally, there is Peter Mays, whom we assume is contemporary to the Powers narrator, since he’s living in the 1980s. An unhappy technical writer for one of three virtually identical trade magazines, Mays sees a redhead lugging a clarinet one day from his office window, becomes smitten, and sets off on a journey to find his mystery woman. Along the way, as you might guess, his plans change and he learns a few things about himself.

Powers doesn’t necessarily write characters with whom we can relate, or sympathize. Powers as narrator is perhaps a half-character, and short of Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I can’t think of any other character in popular culture who seems so deeply affected by seeing a work of art. The three Germanic friends in 1914 are all mad, or stupid, or crass, or naïve, or all of the above. Peter Mays, perhaps, plays the hopeless romantic at whom we coo sympathetically, but his existential helplessness turns him into something of a vehicle.

I don’t say any of this to imply that Powers has written anything insipid or distant. What I mean to say is that the story of Three Farmers isn’t necessarily to present a character who fulfills a narrative arc and you, as reader, eventually empathize with him and cheer inwardly when he succeeds at the story’s climax. No, what Powers has written here is more akin to the gears of a clock; we get to watch it run smoothly as well as break, its success or failure cascading from gear to successive gear.

So, in part, Three Farmers is a general historical critique of the 20th century—of World War I in particular—and the vagaries of its violence, celebrities/royalty, its reactions to blistering technological progress (and its effect on violence); in part, it’s a description of the biographical legacy of those same ideas; in part, it’s a dissertation on the very idea of biography, the disparity between historical record and personal experience. In sum, it’s an absolutely riveting book; if one is being picky, I suppose it’s not as polished as some of Powers’ later work, but its ideological, intellectual and emotional depth is breathtaking.

I happen to be backing up some computer data and came across a large archive of documents that I took from his computer in the days after he died.

Going through a dead family member’s documents is always a strange experience, but it’s also a time for learning. There were no skeletons in my father’s proverbial closet, neo-Naziism or secret lives or anything like that. All we found was a shitload of credit cards, investment accounts, and backups of backups on his computer.

My father was a bit of a packrat, never throwing anything away. He was even worse with computers: since he was an early adopter of computer technology, he had computer parts and digital data that stretched the limit of imagination. Since I was the resident computer guru in the family, I spent the week or two after his death going through his computers, backing up what personal files I could and social-engineering my way into most of his accounts, sounding out what he had and where; canceled his book club subscriptions, documented his credit cards, saving into many media his documents, photos, and any scrap of material that could possibly preserve Eric Gunnink after his body had been committed to the ground.

There were a lot of work-related documents that ended up being preserved. My father, before he switched jobs in the Fall of 2007, worked as the Registrar in a small Fransciscan university in Joliet, IL (where I am now employed); he had become something of an expert at the administrative software system / database used there, known as Banner (a product of Sungard HE). So, surprising nobody, I found a lot of documents pertaining to registrar procedures, data extracts of various types from various years. I found a “Goals to Achieve” from 1999:

Goals for 1999-2000: Eric Gunnink

• Produce 2000-2002 University Catalog on time.
• Increase knowledge of Access and Excel to improve reporting capabilities from Banner.
• Develop processes and procedures to identify and report graduates by semester in Banner.
• Assist with the implementation and maintenance of degree audit in Banner.
• Assist with the implementation of WEB based registration for students in all colleges.
• Assist in developing processes and procedures to insure the accuracy of the data in Banner
• Review records retention practices and evaluate the effectiveness of microfilming records vs. other storage methods.

I found an old Christmas list:

• Two Towers Extended Ed. DVD
• Heart Rate Monitor
• Casual/Dressy casual LS shirts
• Lightweight sweater (s) (blue or brown/tan)
• Brown tone dress shirts (17.5″ X 36″)
• Best Buy, B&N, or A.com gift certificates
• Tall sweatpants (XL)
• Glide Comfort Plus dental floss
• Red, Blue, and Green retractable pens (big around)
• Talking Dictionary program (one that loads on the hard drive)
• Popcorn (like Brian’s)
• USB Hub (4 port USB 2.0)
• Almond patties

I was able to recover dad’s original masters thesis from a floppy disc, stored in a propriety (ASCII + control chars) format in files that are older than me. That’s right: when I recovered the data, the timestamp on the files was 1984 (I was born in ’85):

Heinlein develops the theme of sexuality and the roles of men and women through the “Success” period, changes the idea somewhat in #Starship Troopers# and moves on to new ideas in the “Alienation” novels. Heinlein has women play many different roles in his novels. The competent female is one main role. The role of father seems to be an important one to the author. There are many “neutered” male characters with domineering females in their backgrounds in the “Success” novels, culminating with Starship Troopers and Farnham’s Freehold.

The theme of free will is subverted in Starship Troopers from its strong showing in the “Success” novels. Determinism takes over in Starship Troopers and the “Alienation” novels. The hero who determines his own destiny is made into the “hero” by virtue of forces beyond his control.

Heinlein frequently uses sociopolitical themes to make his points. The themes examined in chapter four are: Heinlein’s Utopia, “benevolent” vs. “corrupt” government, libertarianism, and communism. Each of these themes develops in the “Success” period, changes in some way in Starship Troopers and continues the change in the “Alienation” period.

Think of “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket,” but no longer so abstract and literary.

It’s almost as though dad left a legacy in two parts: that which he passed on to those he knew, and that which he left written or photographed. How to process his notes about databases, or his letters of recommendation for students, or his resumes, notes to self, and data extracts? From a document of questions to ask his cardiologist called How do we know that my arteries are not clogging up again.doc, which is utterly devastating to read. Can I learn anything from the fact that his “To-Do” list from February 11th, 1999 lists ‘Complete 993 degree audits” as the first item? That he had written documentation for web-based frontends that I created (I think he was immensely proud of me)? Or his set of photographs from the last Gunnink reunion he ever attended (summer 2007, in Iowa).

Today, my father would have been 52 years old. I am tempted to rail against the cosmic injustice that denied him such a relatively small number of years; I demure for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that 51 years was enough to do an awful lot, including the insistent devotion to his wife, his children, and an extraordinarily large number of colleagues and friends who weren’t simply blowing smoke when they proclaimed what a great guy he was.

In that spirit, I console myself with the notion that grief is the price of love, and that dad’s legacy, in whatever media, isn’t simply committed to the ground along with him. December 18th is a reminder to me of the inherent fragility of human life; it also forces me to remember that the window of opportunity to do great things—to accomplish, to learn, to love—is arbitrary in its length. I could die tomorrow, for all that the molecules of my body care: remember our oldest of texts, Gilgamesh, in this, that immortality is achieved not in the living, but in what one leaves behind.

Happy birthday, dad. We miss you.

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

I was vaguely aware of Douglas Hofstadter by reputation: his reputed magnum opus, a dense 1970s work called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain Braid, has been the subject of much praise and adulation. My brother, who read the work in question in the context of a college course, read and apparently enjoyed this new work by Hofstadter somewhere in the time surrounding the death of our father. It is from that recommendation that I picked the book up.

Before I started throwing adjectives or grades around, I should expand upon the context at play here: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BrainBraid was, if I may condense it thus, an exposition of Hofstadter’s thoughts on conscious and the nature of Self-with-a-capital-S. Despite the acclaim which this book earned him, Hofstadter was perturbed that much of his thesis was largely ignored or misunderstood, and so almost 30 years later comes this latest book about Self, and if I might guess, I would wager that none of the imprecision or vagueness or…. opaqueness… has been resolved in that span.

I picked up I Am a Strange Loop because it ostensibly sought to understand how the “strange loop” of human consciousness managed to worm its way into surrounding consciousness—essentially, how one mind continues to inhabit, influence, or inform another, even long after it’s gone. You can imagine the interest of such a book to a person experiencing the loss of a loved one. In fact, Hofstadter’s wife passed away suddenly at the age of 43 from the brain tumor, and so Hofstadter more than anyone has a particular investment in the concept of a sort of continuity of consciousness.

Here’s the issue: Hofstadter is not, to me, a good writer. He goes to great pains to be accessible, taking a page from Stephen Hawking’s book and speaking in clear English, with plenty of visual language, examples, and metaphor. But (and isn’t there always a but), Hofstadter takes so long to actually make a point that by the time he does so, it’s underwhelming and foregone. The first half of the book, literally, is spent in short, digestible little sections which are generally rambling tangents about whatever ill-chosen metaphor Hofstadter chose to illustrate his point. Let me do a bit of summary (with page numbers fudged because I can’t be arsed to be exact):

• Introductions – page 15: “I’m smart.”
• Page 16 – page 40: The principle of gestalt will be at play in this book” (that is, Hofstader will not concern himself with the biochemistry or cellular biology of the brain; rather, its ending effect—that of thought, which is the level upon which most of us experience our brain—will be his focus.
• Page 41 – page 150: “Strange loops” are a curious artifact that scare mathematicians (Bertrand Russell in particular), Gödel is a genius who formulated theories about such self-referencing loops. I will illustrate these by way of totally ridiculous metaphors which only serve to confuse and obfuscate my point by virtue of the metaphors’ sheer shallowness and unnecessary length and complexity.
• Page 151 – end: Who the hell knows?

Let me profess at this point that Douglas Hofstadter is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author and I am a schmuck with a blog. It is entirely possible—nay, likely—that I Am a Strange Loop is a brilliant book, full of both technical insight and philosophical comfort, but I confessed to being left flat and underwhelmed by the whole book. It seemed to me a long and arduous (not to say semantically-tricky) way of talking about memes, the psychosocial behaviors which are passed onto progeny, and first proposed (using such a word) by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Granted, there are differences between a multi-generational look at common behaviors and a more invasive exposition on the idea of “I”-ness or the sense of self, and how it self-creates and propagates, but it seems to me as though Hofstadter’s point actually proposed very little about the human brain except that its capacity of self-reference currently escapes our ability to describe mathematically with any kind of philosophical comfort.

So, my immediate opinion as a self-admitted schlub with no formal philosophical or mathematical training is that I Am a Strange Loop is an explanation without a question. Ostensibly, it seeks to correct misunderstandings about Gödel, Escher, Bach, though I think Hofstadter’s tendency toward obfuscatory is apparently as present as ever, and so I Am a Strange Loop ends up a sort of rambling and ultimately cloudy sort of book that gives vague impressions rather than any sort of resounding point. I liken it to watching clouds float by, anthropomorphizing shapes and meaning out of the random or the otherwise-structured. Its mission to give the consciousness the quality of a self-referencing mathematical loop is by and large a silly exercise, like trying to put a Halloween costume on a household pet: its owner may ultimately feel proud that Rover is dressed like Darth Vader, but no one else is very impressed.

Continuity of consciousness? Identity of Self? All very interesting, and none of which are covered to my satisfaction in I Am a Strange Loop. With the caveat that there is a distinct possibility that I am a mouth-breathing and just don’t “get it” when it comes a mind like Douglas Hofstadter’s, I have to say that I fail to be impressed. Everything that Hofstadter says seems like old news to me; the difference is that he takes forever (and a lot of mediocre writing and bad analogies) to get there, rendering any such epiphanies tempered by frustration and disincredulity.

The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Part of the problem with books making predictions about the future is they only have two markets: (1), people who want to read predictions about the future, and (2) people who want to read the book ten years later and call the author stupid. When I picked up The Age of Spiritual Machines on the advice of my boss, I was only vaguely aware that it was already ten years old. That doesn’t seem so strange, but when you’re talking about technology, that’s forever.

I will readily admit that The Age of Spiritual Machines has aged surprisingly well; but Kurzweil is undoubtedly a smart cookie, even if some of his other, hm, predilections are a bit left-field. But then, too, the easy life of a futurist (especially a technophile) is apparent here, especially when he revisits some of the predictions he made in his first such book: simply predict an upward technological trend and reap the inevitable benefits as a prognosticator par excellence.

Kurzweil spends a great deal of time on exposition: he sets up logical but tenuous parallels between biological evolution and technological progress, expounding at length about the nature of the human brain and its similarities and differences to mechanical and electronic computation machines. He creates a “Law of Accelerating Returns,” which is a little presumptive of him (a law? really?), which, in short, speaks of the exponential rate of technological acceleration, and Kurzweil therefore sees general technological acceleration/evolution as being immune from the sort of asymptotic nature that limits more specific things like Moore’s Law.

The crux, then, of Kurzweil’s book is that there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when we will be able to technologically outpace the human brain: our transistors are already faster than neurons, and more efficient, but still outnumbered by them. This, Kurzweil says, will not last long. The more science understands about the brain, and as the progression of technology (inevitably) surpasses the raw computing power of our brains, we will come across the problems of artificial intelligence, continuity of consciousness, &c. None of which is anything particularly new, but I think Kurzweil’s point is that these will soon be real, pressing questions rather than hypothetical thought experiments in a futurist book.

One rather strange feature of the book was the day each chapter ended with a sort of Q&A: Kurzweil the author talking to some hypothetical questioner who wanted clarification on certain points—a “Little Billy,” if you will, though not quite so hackneyed. I thought this was kind of a weak device: if you need a fake conversation at the end of a chapter to further boil down your already-distilled points further, then you haven’t done your job in the preceding text. Kurzweil’s many sidebars on various topics are distracting but useful; his version of chapter summaries are not.

If Ray Kurzweil wasn’t such a business success and obvious technological genius, I’d write The Age of Spiritual Machines off as underwhelming, somewhat obvious predictions. Or maybe they just seem obvious in retrospect: still, there are plenty of Kurzweil’s contemporaries who think, especially with his latest book about technological singularities, that he’s perhaps drunk too deeply of his own Kool-Aid™. Still, the man is obvious very smart, and so I give him credit for his insight, and as a futurist myself I empathize with him, but I fall short of necessarily praising him as a brilliant prognosticator.

God's Problem by Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman is a compelling scholar, or so I’m told. I was entirely underwhelmed by his previous work, The Lost Gospel of Judas, which was largely a historical curiosity with a lot of directed Biblical scholarship; neither moving nor groundbreaking. I was unaware that Ehrman had written another book until I stumbled across it just recently; I decided to read it, hoping it would be a better indication of the author’s writing ability.

God’s Problem is really two interwoven threads. One is largely personal, and partly narrative: Ehrman tells us the story of his change from a fundamentalist Christian (Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, &c.) to an agnostic, and states quite bluntly that his fall from faith was predicated upon the problem of suffering in the world. It’s stated mostly famous by Epicurus, often retold in much simplified versions because there is no canonical version. The problem is this:

God either wishes to take away evils and is unable; or he is able and is unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able; or he is both willing and able. If he is willing but unable he is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God. If he is able and unwilling, he is envious, which is equally at variance with God. If he is neither willing nor able, he is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God. If he is both willing and able, which alone is suitable for God, from what source then are evils? Or why does he not remove them?

This particular problem was neologized by Leibniz as “theodicy”, and it’s been one of the more complicated and storied cases for Judeo-Christian apologists. This problem, which Ehrman reveals he taught as a course early in his career, was his ultimate cause for disbelief, and he proposes early in the book to study the problem and the various and sundry ways that we’ve answered it.

While Ehrman makes his own convictions known, the book itself mostly reads as a textual and historical survey of theodicy rather than an argument for or against something—I’d chalk this up to Ehrman’s continuing interest in and respect for Christian intellectualism. This is a convoluted way of saying that despite the title of the book, it shouldn’t be something that committed theists are afraid to read: the bulk of it is dedicated to nothing more than explaining how different groups, and different authors of Biblical texts, have explained the presence of “evil” in the world.

One thing that does eventually irritate me about the book, however, is the same Ehrman dedicates to creating specific and overly-long examples of suffering. That is to say, instead of letting his readers tacitly acknowledge that yes, there is suffering in the world, he spends a great deal of time setting up examples of Khmer Rouge-led Cambodia, the Holocaust, sick and suffering children, &c. This particular tactic smells a little like propaganda to me, although Ehrman’s contextualizing hints that many people don’t quite appreciate the issue until it’s laid explicitly in front of them.

There are a lot of things to say about theodicy, and God’s Problem shouldn’t be considered a definitive work by any means: the Wikipedia entry for theodicy lists many more explanations that Ehrman does, for instance. The difference, I suppose, is that Ehrman has his New Testament scholar and (former) practicing evangelical bona fides, and he really does do a good job bringing his extensive knowledge of the Bible and extra-Biblical text to this theodician history.

The first theory that Erhman covers is the idea that God causes suffering as a punishment for straying from his commands (what’s known as the “Classical” view of suffering). For examples of this, see, well, most of the Old Testament. The Jewish god could be a real dick sometimes: this is principally Ehrman’s argument against the efficacy of such a reasoning, namely that the enslavement, death, and continued persecution of his chosen people is hardly a satisfying, theologically, especially to the latter-day Christians, who have largely transformed the Old Testament god into a much nicer, self-realized version of himself, replete with a salvific crucifixion. There’s a big difference between the stern father and one who will kill children just to make a point. With enough torturous logic, you could justify it, perhaps, but surely, Ehrman argues, there must be better.

And indeed, even though the author likely spends the most time on this first explanation (due, in part, to its relative surfeit of textual evidence), there are in fact other ways of approaching theodicy. The next explanation is possibly the most popular form with Christians: suffering exists because free will allows some sinful people to act cruelly toward others. That is to say, Adam & Eve → sin → fallen nature → suffering. The obvious problem with this viewpoint, Ehrman supposes, is suffering that isn’t the responsibility of humans: literal “acts of god,” in insurance parlance, don’t appear to be the end result of human action; they are either built into the nature of the world, or they are created spontaneously by God, both of which are problematic in thinking of about suffering.

Thirdly, there is redemptive suffering: specifically, we experience suffering so that we may be better people. This, too, has a gloss of respectability, Ehrman says, except when you consider all of the fringe cases. Even if you could argue that losing a child in an accident makes a mother a better person (stronger, more faithful, what-have-you), you could hardly say the same for the child. Despite what seems like a lot of exceptions to the rule, the idea of redemptive suffering has become the theological cornerstone of Christianity, as seen in the passion of Jesus.

Finally, Ehrman discusses another viewpoint associated with Jesus and his close followers: apocalyptic suffering. Simply put, this is the idea that suffering is fine now because we’ve got much better things coming that will make it all worth it. There are two levels to this: to early apocalyptic writers (Ehrman mentions Paul as an example), contemporary suffering is irrelevant, since divine deliverance is soon at hand. 2000 years later, the idea of “soon” has changed somewhat, but the idea that suffering in the here and now pales in comparison to the rewards of the afterlife is very much a part of the fabric of Christian doctrine. Ehrman, ever the dedicated agnostic, thinks this little consolation for all that happens in this world (insert his many descriptive examples, for the fourth or fifth time).

In the end, I’d say God’s Problem is a bit of an answer without a problem. Although it’s an excellent survey of historical and current Christian teachings regarding theodicy, its contextual problems—the author’s own revulsion to suffering and its effects on his faith—aren’t likely to sway any reader on any side of the debate. I think Ehrman understands this (he appears to disclaim as much), and yet much of his personal narrative, injected between textual analyses, appears worded to provoke just such an event. Theodicy is a very real topic of debate that continues to inform sermons even today, and remains relevant as long as the world continues to appear an arbitrary and cruel place. I knew, generally, of the arguments for suffering, having heard of and contemplated Epicurus’ (in)famous proposal long ago, but it was nice to get lot of textual information with which to frame the subject.

I still haven’t been entirely convinced of Ehrman’s ability as a writer (perhaps I simply need to go ahead and read Misquoting Jesus, which appears to be a fan favorite), even though I accept his reputation as a scholar. God’s Problem suffered at times from its own maudlin sympathies, relying too hard on an argument from empathy in a work that proposed a scholarly debate.

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Continuing a long and somewhat tawdry literary affair with the much-loved and oft-maligned Christopher Hitchens, I am reading his latest, God Is Not Great. This is his first book that deals with his rather public denunciation of religion, though to faithful readers of his other books, his articles, or his interviews, it’s no surprise at all. In a manner much to the consternation of the political conservatives who gleefully forward his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Christopher Hitchens is a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, lumped together with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris as the new breed of intellectual disbelief (so-called the Four Horsemen, either with affection or opprobrium, depending on with whom you’re speaking).

What may be said almost without reservation about Christopher Hitchens is that he is the most eloquent and compelling writer of his little group. While Richard Dawkins may have made a name for himself in the mainstream by his well-written and comprehensible accounts of science, and likewise Daniel Dennett has a long history of successful philosophical tracts (Sam Harris being the relative newcomer); Hitchens, however, is a veteran journalist, essayist, literary critic, and his breadth of knowledge, grasp of language, and staunch support for liberty of any and all sorts makes him a powerful intellectual force.

Some or much of God Is Not Great is historical in nature; he references, at length, the noted historians Karen Armstrong and Bart Ehrman, among others, to make historical criticisms of the three major monotheisms and their inherent schisms. Dubiously, Hitchens seems to insists that the person of Jesus is far from a historical truth, though in fact I think Dr. Ehrman himself would disagree with the conclusion, depending of course on how you define the person of Jesus. Some history is more recent: in dealing with the common misconception that disbelief somehow begets violence, intolerance, and lawlessness, Hitchens debunks more recent examples (Stalin, Hitler, & al.) and in doing so notes some of the more reprehensible actions of the Catholic church, even in the last century.

Remarkable, I think, about Hitchens’ book is that, unlike Dawkins, at least—who while generally civil, made few concessions—Hitchens reveals that he has tremendous respect for religious intellectuals, and for the generous intellectual, literary, and scientific achievements many of them have left for posterity. Evelyn Waugh comes to mind immediately: though Waugh was a staunch Catholic, and by extension a supporter of the Vatican-supported fascist regimes in Italy and Spain, for instance, Hitchens dearly loves and respects the literary canon that the man left us. In this way that Hitchen’s book, however uncompromising, feels less like a screed and more like a tract in the grand tradition of those he so dearly admires—Hume, for instance, and Socrates and Paine. Some old canards, such as Anselm’s ontological argument, and Paley’s argument from design, Hitchens dismisses outright with the same easy answers as most other disbelievers.

It is interesting to note that Hitchens’ book, while arguablky the most overtly intellectual and steadily uncompromising, also feels the least condescending and the most pluralistic. He says, in one moment, that he doesn’t really care what you do or believe so long as you stop trying to convert him and it is this ultimate conceit of religion—that it cannot for a moment respect the right of another to live without obligation to a particular moral/cosmological/ritual code—that is its greatest fault and that which has led to the most of the suffering commonly attributed to religion.

Some memes are held in common with other noted atheist/agnostic writers, which is only to be expected. The notion of a child being of the faith of his parents, even before he is of the age to understand, is a notable one, as is the notion of child mutilation (think circumcision of various sorts). In fact, Hitchens devotes a whole chapter, entitled “Is Religion Child Abuse?” to the subject, which, even if you don’t ultimately think so, is deserving of some contemplation. The ritual removal of that which can never be reinstated is hardly a fair thing to do to a child for whom there is no possibility of consent and a very real possibility of regret.

In something by way of conclusion, I feel compelled to say that God Is Not Great is not a likely tool of conversion, which Hitchens hints/hopes at some point in the book; at most, it will disgust the faithful, who will likely never read more than a summary of it, and convince only the disbelievers, for whom I am disinclined to use the worn metaphor of a choir. However, God Is Not Great manages, I feel, to walk the line between a screed and a genuine criticism, which should also be good reading for the faithful; it never hurts to get a good prod every now and then.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

I don’t remember where I saw Altered Carbon, or what inspired me to read it. Generally, I don’t like noir; neither do I care for cyberpunk. I think William Gibson is massively overrated. I suppose what ultimately made me read Morgan’s Altered Carbon was its treatment of virtual immortality, something that I haven’t necessarily seen elsewhere.

Altered Carbon is full of opposites—or, appropriately enough, binary systems: there’s the typical cybertronic/organic divide. There’s also reality/virtuality, male/female, life/death, and consciousness/physicality; in Morgan’s future, science has created a way to completely digitize a person’s brain and store the generated code in a small microchip, called a “stack.” This means that unless the stack is destroyed, the physical death of a body does not mean the end of that consciousness. Most people get two lives; the rich, called “Meths,” live for centuries.

The undercurrent of the whole book explores this disparity, perhaps with less attention than it deserves. The better part of the novel is simply a hardboiled detective novel with equal measures cyberpunk and serial action novel. Requisite steamy sex sequences; some pretty dark parts with torture and the like; lots of really ham-fisted dialog, which, in the setting, at least seems appropriate.

On its face, the book is pretty baldly about the level of depravity to which we can sink when life ceases to hold singular meaning—when culture actually has need for such distinctions as “death” and “real death.” It’s not exact the most subtle of messages: while never explicitly stated, it becomes pretty obvious that this future could officially be considered a dystopia, despite the miraculous scientific and medical advances. Somebody’s been reading too much Cat’s Cradle. The moral conflict inherent here is made obvious by Morgan’s inclusion of Catholics; in this case, they are religious abstainers from resuscitation. That is, once a Catholic is dead, his stack is stored but not put into a new body unless a court proceeding demands it temporarily.

These questions that Morgan raises are, in the end, addressed only in the most oblique of ways, hidden behind the gunfire and necessarily action-oriented plot mechanics. I think that the book ultimately did them an injustice, if only because a noir detective story cum cyberpunk thriller cum Elmore Leonard novel isn’t necessarily the most suitable place to discuss metaphysics and the nature of the soul.

As a surface-level action novel, it was entertaining, if somewhat forgettable. As new blend of fiction archetypes, it is substantial. As a multi-faceted work, it falls tantalizingly short. I recommend it as worth a read regardless, and hope to see Morgan refine this strategy in future works (Altered Carbon is his debut novel).

Condensed Knowledge by Will Pearson et al.

My brother’s been reading mental_floss and its associated books for several years. Condensed Knowledge is, to the extent of my knowledge, the first of their [adjective] Knowledge compendia, essentially giant books of trivia. After having my appetite whetted by A.J. Jacobs (who, though is a contributor to mental_floss, does not have any material in this particular book), I decided to try my hand at one of these.

To be honest, Condensed Knowledge is a little hit-or-miss. Personally, I can’t quite figure out of it’s supposed to be a “Knowledge for Dummies” kind of book, or a “Bet You Didn’t Know…” kind of book. It’s organized into sections based on topic; e.g. “Condensed Religion,” “Condensed Geography,” “Condensed Art.” Each section contains a bunch of 1 or 2-page articles with a variable number of trivia. For example, “5 Famous Sculptors” or “7 Ancient Civilizations You Never Knew About.” Each subitem gets a little blurb.

Perhaps it’s just my own variable knowledge that made the book seem inconsistent. When I’m being told, somewhat condescendingly, about famous painters, I think to myself, “Why am I reading this again?” But when the books veers into the esoteric, like little-known painful rituals in history, it becomes genuinely interesting. Even within a section (each section being written by a different author or co-authors), there is remarkable inconsistency: religion, for instance, goes from the stupidly simple to the genuinely interesting.

Then, too, some of the authors seem to have a better grasp of neutrality than others. The author responsible for the philosophy section, for instance, really hates Jean-Paul Sartre, and made those feelings known on at least two separate occasions.

Remember, too, that the purposed of Condensed Knowledge is to tell you a little bit about a lot of things. There’s no in-depth analysis here; sometimes the author repeats a misconception or is so glib that they misrepresent their topic.

Despite its flaws, the book was a fun enough read. If nothing else, it should function similarly to Wikipedia: if you read a blurb that piques your knowledge, or that sounds suspicious, go research it. I know that happened with not a few topics in my case. In that respect, I suppose, the book has fulfilled its mission.