The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us." Alain de Botton

Lucretius has been on my mind a lot in the past few days since I finished reading "The Swerve." Mind you, I haven't read a word of "The Nature of Things" outside of the quotations in the book, but clearly, he has had a fairly significant impact on my thought. I guess that's because death has been on my mind a lot for the past few weeks. I've just kind of developed the, what, feeling?, attitude?, premonition?, that I'm not going to live much longer. And here comes Lucretius, saying, in effect, "What, me worry? We're all going to get the chop some day and it will be sooner rather than later for some of us, and that's just the nature of things." Or as Goldblatt puts it, "Death is nothing to us. To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed."

So really, he nails it completely. Is that spot on your face cancerous? Is that rattling in your lungs another clot forming? Is the fact that your piss barely dribbles out a sign of prostate cancer or bladder failure? Is some drunk roughneck not gonna see you in time on the side of the highway and take you out? Is it today, tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade? Whatever. Don't get hung up on it. Enjoy the wonder and the weirdness of it, from that fact that anything exists. to our own consciousness of existence and of ourselves. I mean, it is all too weird and incomprehensible that I'm here, sitting in this chair, writing down thoughts about Lucretius and anxiety over death.

And especially weird that a book comes along taking on the issues that I've been pondering for some time, but in a format of historical nonfiction about a "book finder"--Poggio Bracciolini-- who rediscovered Lucretius' poem "The Nature of Things" in a southern German monastery about 1500 years after it had been written. The way that Goldblatt tells the story, it's really improbable that the poem came to light at all, and yet it has made all the difference to the history of western thought since it began to recirculate in humanist circles. To tell that story, Goldblatt covers the development of literate culture in late republican Rome, the demise of literacy in Europe in the aftermath of the Gothic wars and the "decline of the Roman empire," the "revaluation of all values" as both learning and pleasure were both radically devalued by Christianity, the monastic culture that kept reading alive for its spiritual benefit but that paradoxically kept some of the texts of the ancient literate culture that diametrically opposed the values of the monastery.

To make the story even more intriguing is Poggio's role in the debacle of the Papal schism. It makes a grand narrative built around Poggio's discovery of the manuscript shortly after he lost his job and his livelihood as the secretary to Pope John XXII, who was forced to abdicate, along with two other claimants to the Papacy, by the council called by the Holy Roman Emperor. This was the same council that captured and burned Jan Hus at the stake after luring him with promises of safe conduct. (And it was the memory of this betrayal that forced Charles V to allow Martin Luther to leave the Diet of Worms unharmed a little over a hundred years later, a move which Charles later greatly regretted.)

In the midst of this ecclesiastical maneuvering, Poggio discovers the text of a 1500 year old poem that is totally secular. How did it make it through the years of neglect, being recopied again and again--for that is what it took to have lasted that long--when its message was totally antithetical to what the church, the monasteries, and the monks believed? The copyists must have not read the texts that they so painstakingly reproduced.

"There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design," is how Goldblatt summarizes Lucretius' message. Lucretius traces his views back to Epicurus, who in turn looks back to Democritus' atoms as the stuff of all the universe. "You needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything....That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat it to yourself the simplest fact of existence--atoms and void and nothing else...your life will change." Everything that is is just a temporary recombination of atoms, and that's all there is. There is no immaterial soul that survives the body, there is no afterlife with rewards and punishments. And so, the only thing left to us, then, is to enjoy it while we've got it, 'cause it ain't gonna last very long. For Epicurus and Lucretius, it was in physical pleasure, but also, or even mainly, in friendships and contemplation that life finds its highest meaning. 

The life of simple pleasures was all that matter: "Man's natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more." So think: Epicurus--and then think Henry David Thoreau? More weirdness? It turns out that the church naturally did a hatchet job on Epicurus as well as Lucretius, the idea that epicurean means nothing more than overwrought sensual pleasure and debauchery. As Tertullian--he who would enjoy watching the souls of the unsaved burning in hell, even though he also said, "Credo quia absurdum," I believe because it is absurd--said, "If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal....the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels." So morality depends on rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

But then I guess Thomas More and Machiavelli thought so as well. Goldblatt writes that More composed Utopia in response to Lucretius to show what a society could look life if it adopted a free-thinking philosophy devoted to the pursuit of happiness for all. But he insisted that belief in a soul and in an afterlife were absolutely necessary to make it work--which of course totally contradicts the intention of what Epicurus and Lucretius had to say. Machiavelli pronounced that laws and customs were worthless without fear of what might happen in the afterlife. More's friend Giordano Bruno had a much better handle on Lucretius, "Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius' hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction, is inherently sexual."

(I do have trouble reconciling this view of Bruno with the Bruno of the Kabbalah/Trismegistus theme given him by Dame Francis Yates. Somehow, calling down mystical influences through the stars or helping the Sefiroth piece itself back together doesn't quite gibe with which I hear Lucretius saying. Somehow, Bruno is the heir of Lucretius/Copernicus on the one had and Ficino/Pico on the other. Dame Yates saw this strain leading eventually to Newton and the Royal Society. Goldblatt also traces a lineage from Lucretius to Newton.)

And once the cat was out of the bag, it seems, Lucretius became one of the founders of the modern age, not only in Bruno and More and Newton, but in Shakespeare and Montaigne as well. "Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe." Of course, the parallels between Lucretius and Spinoza are obvious, but Goldblatt doesn't go there. He does point out that "Lucretius' materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other enlightenment figures," including, most notably, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the pursuit of happiness into the Declaration of Independence, and who finally described himself as "an Epicurean." Of course, what we know about Jefferson's habits make him an epicurean of the old school as well.

Ultimately, Goldblatt is probably a better story teller than an accurate historian. His story has all the earmarks of being a pivotal moment in the history of western thinking. It seems like there is a straight line from Poggio's discovery of the manuscript to Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Would the thinking of western science have turned out all that much differently if Poggio had not made his his discovery in 1417? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that it would have. But, really, when you come down to it, that's not all that relevant to me right now. What is important is that "The Swerve" has given me another handle on the thoughts and issues that seem to dominate my life these days. It turned out to be the right book at the right time.

Author: Greenblatt, Steven

Date Published: 2011

Length: 284 pp

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Egypt, Greece and Rome

One of my fantasies is to come back as a born again history teacher. I would love to teach a two year advanced placement sequence on Mediterranean and European history stretching from the dawn of agriculture in Syria and Turkey to the latest conflicts over the European Union and Greek debt. Well, maybe not that contemporary, but at least through World War II. This book by Charles Freeman could serve as a good text underlying the first half of the course on the Mediterranean worlds.

The book cover such a wide time--from about 4000 BC until the Islamic invasions of Syria and Spain in the seventh century--and a wide area--all of the Mediterranean civilizations--that there can be little unity of theme to it. It falls in five major areas: the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, the Hellenistic city-states, and Rome, which really ought to be subdivided into the rise of the Roman republic and the establishment and eventual decline of the Roman empire. But really, while the book covers the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, the Israelite, the Gauls, the Germans, etc., etc., the emphasis of the book is in the title--Egypt, Greece, and Rome, with well over half of the book devoted to Rome.

The book is really about the rise of city culture in the different Mediterranean civilizations. Cities in the Tigris-Euphrates valley center on the control of water and the creation of surplus grain. With the incipient cities of the ancient near east--Uruk, Ur, Eridu--by about 3000 BC, also come the first kings that we know of, although it is interesting to note that these kings often shared power with the merchant classes as trading became widespread. Egypt was a bit different in its development as abundance was created by the natural cycle of flooding of the Nile river, and the Pharaoh became a symbol of the cosmic harmony that enabled this cycle. The infamous Sargon subjugated a large portion of the Tigris-Euphrates valley in establishing the first known empire in about 2300 BC, and the even more famous Hamurabi promulgated his law code some 500 years later. But something brought these civilizations to a screeching halt about 1100 BC or so--volcanic eruptions?, new methods of warfare?, the sea people? Freeman doesn't go into any depth for the reasons for the decline. Out of the ruins of this "Dark Age" appear the neo-Assyrians, the Israelites, and a bit later, the Greeks. Egypt appears to get back on track, and the Babylonians appear again as power players. Soon enough, new bad boys--at least to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians--take over the Near East, the Persians.

For me, things take off with the late archaic culture of the Greek peoples who begin populating first the eastern Mediterranean with colonies that eventually spread across north Africa and as far west as Spain as well as across the Black Sea. Then begins the "power to the people" movement that eventually led to the rise and spread of democracy. Freeman characterizes Greek cities as a place where people could hammer out the rules of living together--the rise of politics. This was "the dawning of a new age, that of the city state, where justice can perhaps be made a reality," and the city becomes a place of communal bonding contrasted to earlier cities which served more to glorify the ruler. In Athens, especially, this came about with the reforms of Salon as order threatened to break down under the increasing debts owed by the lower classes to the aristocrats. This was also a time when wealth and opportunity were spread to a lot more people with the massive migrations of Greeks throughout the Mediterranean world. Aristocrats were becoming more and more dependent on the citizens to serve as soldiers, first with the small land owners becoming hoplites and later with even poorer citizens needed to row the triremes of the Athenian navies.

This need to hammer out disputes in the public forums also led to the "incentive to find first principles from which debate could begin." The ability to speak and argue in public forums put an increasing premium on the facility of reasoning, especially in the cities of the Ionian coast, probably the richest cities in the Greek world at the time, and led to searching for the underlying forces of the universe. "This attempt to give a single, rational account of the natural order can be seen as a key movement in the evolution of western culture, and eventually the first formulations of philosophy. "The archaic age deserves to be seen as one where a particular attitude of mind took root, perhaps, as been suggested, because of the intensity of life in the polis. It involved the search for an understanding of the physical world free of restraints imposed by those cultures which still lived in the shadow of threatening gods." At the same time, a revival of aristocratic values in the face of threats from the Persian empire--arete, glory, manliness, and valor--become important in the defense of liberty. Now man and his freedom become the measure of all things.

This could not last. Hubris, or overweening pride, brought about the fall of the Athenian empire, and the rise of Macedonia put a demise to the independence of the Greek polis. At the same time, however, Alexander and his armies spread Greek culture and city life, along with the development and glorification of the individual, throughout the region.  Alexander's tutor, Aristotle, suggests "that there is an underlying purpose to nature, that of the fulfillment of every living being through the correct use of the attributes it possesses....the highest state that all human beings should aim for, is eudaemonia, happiness."

Macedonia also established a new political system for the polis, however, the monarchy. The army and the nobility owed loyalty to the king, not to the city or the state, and the divine right of kings became the norm in the Hellenistic empires. Alexander's legacy was "a form of monarchy, based on absolute power, an aura of divinity, and conspicuous consumption," a legacy later picked up by the Roman emperors and eventually most of the rulers of Europe until the French revolution.

Then come the Romans. To tell the truth, I'm beginning to lose steam on them. They are the baddest bullies of the ancient world--in a world full of bullies--and probably most responsible for who we have become. There are just times when I find myself pulling for Hannibal or the Gauls or Philip, knowing the outcome in advance. There's the dreadful certainty of a militaristic group first conquering Latium, then the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Carthaginians, Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt: from Britain to Mesopotamia and essentially all points in between. And somewhere along the way the Romans decide to take on each other. When the Gracchi brothers try to reform the practices of the aristocracy seeking to hoard the new found wealth of the republic, violence takes over the politics of the city leading first to Sulla, then Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Augustus, who establishes a military dictatorship. Short intervals of peace and order give way to more civil wars and military dictatorships, interspersed with emperors who border on the criminally insane--Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Caracalla, etc--with the famed Roman legions running amok on occasion. Eventually the price of keeping the empire was just too great--over 70% of the state's resources went to the military. By the time that Constantine pulled out of Rome in 325, a general "systems collapse" appears to have begun, at least in the west.

When you get down to it, the development of western civilization in the Mediterranean basin really seems to be about the rich wanting to continually line their own pockets. Greed drives the world, whether its Sargon demanding tribute from the conquered cities of Sumer or Roman emperors plundering the continents for lavish shows of consumption and wealth. The same greed also drives the development of the best and the brightest--the sudden influx of wealth built the glories of Athens and Rome. But maybe its also when the wealth and glory and power begin to recede that the impulse to look inward and individual growth takes over. Or, maybe, the politics of scarcity lead just to meanness and strife. In any case, it seems to be where our civilization is headed these days.

Author: Freeman, Charles

Date Published: 2004

Length: 736 pp

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Hannibal: One Man Against Rome

It was not a great book, but it was both enjoyable and informative for me. I had a vague knowledge that Hannibal used the wealth of the Spanish (rather, Iberian) silver mines to build up the Carthaginians militarily, cross the Alps, defeat the Romans decisively at Cannae in the single deadliest day of combat in history and then hang around southern Italy for a while before being chased around the Mediterranean by the Romans. Now his story is much clearer to me.

With Rome's growth through the defeat of most of the different cities and tribes of central Italy, and with its vested interests in maintaining client relations with those states it conquered, it was probably inevitable that Rome and Carthage would clash. And it was probably inevitable that Hannibal would eventually lose. But he came as close as he could to making it work. As it was, he hung on for close to 15 years in southern Italy, terrorizing the Romans and hampering their grain supply. But since he could not control the seas--and it had only been fairly recently that Rome became a naval power--he could not land supplies and reinforcements. Had he been able to join forces with his brothers as planned, then perhaps he could have broken the Roman domination of the cities and ports that he needed, especially Tarentum.

But Hannibal was at the mercy, really, of the mercenary army that he built from the various tribes and peoples of Africa and Europe, and he convinced most of them that he offered them freedom from domination from Rome. Roman treatment of these various peoples that they conquered--for example, the Ligurians, the Brutians, the Capuans, the Macedonians, the tribes of Portugal and Span, shows how determined and ruthless the Romans were: 80,000 Macedonians sold into slavery from one city; all the males of Portugal massacred.

And who knows what history would have been like if Hannibal had been able to force Rome into some kind of peace? Lamb certainly takes a sympathetic tone towards Hannibal, maintaining that he was really a freedom fighter against the Roman juggernaut, banding together diverse peoples who would all stand to regain their independence should Rome capitulate in some way. But it seems far fetched that Hannibal wasn't as merciless or as imperialist as the Romans he fought. Lamb maintains that Hannibal's destiny came from the pledge that he took at his father's insistence that he never become a "friend"--an amicus--of Rome. This came at the conclusion of the "first" Punic War when Rome and Carthage clashed over trading rights in Sardinia and Sicily. The Roman response to this clash had been to build a navy from scratch--with scenes of building a fleet based on a captured Carthaginian vessel and then teaching men to row from dry land mockups--and establish dominance in the Mediterranean. It was like, "game over, man" from that point on for Carthage as a sea power.

Author: Lamb, Harold

Date Published: 1958

Length: 11 hr 12 min

Narrator: Griffin, Charlton

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

I have had an interesting experience in thinking about my read of this book. I liked reading the book, but not as much as I wanted to like reading it, especially since I enjoyed Betraying Spinoza. I'm not sure whether the problem was with the writing or with my preferences for non-fiction these days. Some of the narrative and the dialog just seemed a bit wooden to me. I enjoyed the story and I identified with Cass, but the book didn't blow me away.

Until I began to look back over the passages that I highlighted. Then the book really took over a whole new meaning for me. First I copied my highlighted passages from my Kindle account to a web page, and then I winnowed those down further to what I thought were the most significant passages. Rereading these passages then really made me appreciate just what a fine book this is.

The major character of the book is Cass Seltzer, a professor of the psychology of religion at a small Jewish university who has just written a best seller, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, which has caused major publications to dub him "the atheist with soul." As part of his book, he has included an appendix with 36 arguments for the existence of God, with a refutation for each argument that points out its flaws. Goldstein has included the appendix as the second half of the novel. It's pretty heady stuff but it seems to me fairly comprehensive, moving from Aristotle's Unmoved Mover through Spinoza's Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe.

I found myself laughing out loud at the foibles of Cass and the people around him. At times, Cass seems a bit like Dobie Gillis as we see him fail at three different love affairs and move with perpetual adolescent wonder and angst through his life. But so much of the comedy also comes at the expense of the pompous academic, Klapper. a thinly veiled parody of Harold Bloom, who makes his graduate students jump through some pretty unrealistic hoops. Some reviewers have felt this character is just too unreal, but it worked for me as broad satire. And Klapper presents a pretty good foil against the Rebbe's son, Azarya, who struggles with the passion to follow his individual genius versus the need of his Hasidic community for him to fulfill a specific and circumscribed role that is central and sacred to them.

But still, it's those passages trying to capture what is really ineffable, moments when Cass is struck with the weirdness of existence, seeking for meaning and feeling special in the the face of being a cosmic fluke lost in an unfeeling and unmeaning universe. "All that one knows is that onen is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it." So there's part of me that says this is what Camus calls the absurd, man's searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. And yet, I get a sense almost of joy rather than despair. "The brave new world of Modernism, where we aren't shaded from the hard truths of the natural world, and we have to create what meaning we can get from our relations with one another. That's all we have, in the end. The sublime has abandoned us, and what sublimity we have remaining we have to make for ourselves, subliminally, from the material of our our own self."

Is that the same as the look that Sisyphus has as he begins his walk down into valley to begin rolling his rock up the mountain yet once more time? And is that joy, that sublimity, coming from Goldstein's infatuation with Spinoza and his Intelligibility, that the universe, or at least our place in it, is ultimately knowable, even though our own understanding is, and will probably always be, incomplete, but it gives us meaning to strive for intelligibility, and that this striving gives us purpose, gives us dignity, gives us grace? In that regard, it seems in line with Kazantzakis in Saviours of God, maybe, or even--and this is a stretch--Teilhard's evolution toward the omega point. Are Teilhard and Spinoza on the same page, when you get down to it?

"Perhaps that is the proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility [what a phrase!] that assaults us on all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise, what are we?"

Author: Goldstein, Rebecca

Date Published: 2010

Length: 530 pp

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The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind

Scholarly, the book is not. It's another book written to accompany a British television series, but it tells the story so well, if a bit over the top at times ("There was never anything like the great library and museum before, nor has there been since: the single place on earth where all the knowledge of the entire world was gathered together…the key to understanding…simply everything."), it is both enjoyable and informative, filling in the blanks of a lot of my knowledge. I mean, I know the outlines of Alexander's march through Anatolia, the near east, Egypt and thence back through southwestern asia well enough. And I have an inkling, though admittedly not nearly as good, of the Hellenistic kingdoms that shook out from his conquests. But Ptolemy was just a name to me, and it was enlightening to see his efforts at forging an empire in Egypt what would accept a Greek ruler by combining Egyptian religious thought with Greek concepts of rationality, economics, and politics.

The wealth of the Nile, "the most production agricultural land in the known world," held it all together, of course, producing something like 20 million bushels of grain a year in seemingly endless fertility. Not for nothing was it called the bread basket of the Roman Empire in later years. But if Pollard and Reid are correct, it was Ptolemy I's vision of Alexandria as the intellectual center of the world that really made the difference. And since Ptolemy, a boyhood friend of Alexander, also received his education from Aristotle alongside Alexander, the museum and library of Alexandria were driven by Aristotle's vision of collecting and understanding all knowledge.

The observations and the knowledge that came out of the museum underlie much of modern science: the geometry of Euclid, the algebra of Diophantes, the geography of Ptolemy. But even then, many of the observations that anticipated the findings of modern science were lost during the "Dark Ages": Eratosthes' measurement of the earth's circumference and tilt, Aristarchus' heliocentric model of the universe, knowledge of the body obtained through dissection (widely practiced in Egypt but strictly forbidden elsewhere), and who knows what else.

The stability of Alexandria depended on wise rule, but this only lasted about three generations. The downfall of the dynasty began with Ptolemy IV, leading to a period of aoubt 150 yers of economic and social decline, until Cleopatra ascended the throne. She sought to restore Alexandria through alliances with Caesar and Anthony, but ultimately brought about the collapse of the dynasty. Did Julius Caesar inadvertently destroy the great library, some 400,000 volumes of all the known works of antiquity? That's what Livy would have us believe, but Pollard and Reid are not so sure. In any case, by the time that "Octavian walked into Alexandria [in 30 BC], the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end." Alexandria entered into the Roman Empire where it remained until destroyed by the Arab conquest of the Middle East. It also became a city riven by ethnic tensions (the city was originally laid out one third Egyptian, one third Greek, and one third Jewish) and by the vagaries of the different Roman emperors. Caracella, the worst of the lot, executed all males below the age of 25, among others, an estimated 20,000 persons--this after murdering his brother to gain sole possession of the throne.

Much of the thinking in the museum now became more attuned to philosophical and metaphysical speculation, and the big names in Alexandria's intellectual history take a religious turn, beginning with Philo's concept of God as "creativity itself," and the world having been created by "Logos, the word of God." After than, Alexandria became a major source for the development of Christian theology. The speculations of the pagan philosophers Ammonious Sacchus and Plotinus found Christian counterparts in Clement and Origen, who applied Alexandrian rationality to Christian beliefs in coming up with a coherent theology and philosophy of the world. This speculative theology also led to one of the first great battles over heresy in the early church with Arius. Arius' fight with Alexander, the patriarch of Alexandria, and his toadie, Athanasius, triggered the formation of the council of Nicea in 325 under Constantine, leading to the expulsion of the Arians who could not support the formulation of the Trinity put forth in the creed.

Much ugliness ensued in later years. Theophilus sought to destroy pagan philosophy in Alexandria following Theodosius proscription of paganism in 391. Theophilus physically assaulted managed to destroy the contents of both the "daughter library" and the Serapeum, the temple built by Ptolemy I combining the remains of Alexander with the worship of the Searapis bull. Theophilus' successor, Cyril, then incited his bully boys, the Nitratian monks and the Parabolans, using physical force to grab secular power in the city and to also murder the philosopher Hypatia, "the last of the Alexandrian Hellenes." 300 years later, the Sultan Omar I ordered what was left of Alexandria to be destroyed. "Religious bigotry had after a thousand years of enlightenment finally dragged Alexandria into oblivion."

So the story of the Rise and Fall of Alexandria is a good story of light vs. dark, with the dark side winning out in the end, perhaps with a warning for the rest of us. Knowledge is a precious commodity, but also very vulnerable. It can and has been destroyed. It makes for a tidy narrative, but you really have to wonder whether the story is really that neat, that accurate. But as Pollard and Reid make clear, the importance of Alexandria in the history of ideas cannot be underestimated, "If the Renaissance was the 'rebirth' of learning that led to our modern world, then Alexandria was its modern birthplace…in our minds, we are all children of Alexandria."

Author: Pollard, Justin and Reid, Howard

Date Published: 2006

Length: 352 pp & 11 hr 31 min

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Narrator: Vance, Simon

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--vol. 1

I just kind of got sucked into this one. I saw a free version for the kindle and downloaded it. I thought I'd just look over the first few pages, but I stayed with it through the end, at least of volume 1. I had expected Gibbon to be dry, desiccated, and a bit of a bore, kind of the way I found Burkhardt. But the zingers just kept rolling off his pen: "the Roman world was indeed people by a race of pygmies, when the fierce giants of the north broke in and mended the puny breed." It's not exactly the picture of the Roman Empire I had come to expect, and reading Gibbon has turned out to be a delight so far.

Of course, we all know how the story is going to end, and it's not going to come out well. In this first volume, Gibbon covers from the accession of Augustus to the reunification of the empire under Constantine in 325, but really, the story begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius. The period leading to his death is the high point of civilization for Gibbon: "If a man were called to fix the period in which the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." But this same period also sowed the seeds of destruction of the empire: "This long peace…introduced a slow and secret poison to the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was exterminated, and even the military spirit evaporated." Of course, during this time, the Roman legions were off on campaigns, either extending or consolidating the borders of the empire in Dacia, Mesopotamia, or other hot spots hundreds or even thousands of miles from Rome.

It seems a bit strange to me that the beginning of the decline has been laid at the feet of Marcus Aurelius, the philosophic emperor. "It has been objected to Marcus that he sacrificed the happiness of millions to a fond partiality to a worthless boy." That boy, of course, was Commodus, of "Gladiator" fame as portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix. He wasn't really killed in the middle of the Coliseum by Russell Crowe, but he spent his time "in a seraglio of three hundred beautiful women, and as many boys." Ain't it grand to be the emperor?

After that, the Praetorian guard and then the legions took control of the empire, even selling the office of Augustus to the highest bidder after Commodus was strangled in his bath by his sparring partner. After another bloody civil war, the empire landed in the hands of Septimus Severus, of whom Gibbon says, "Posterity…justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire." But I think that Gibbon makes clear that the groundwork was really laid by Octavian/Augustus when he took the reins of the empire: "whilst he thus restored the dignity, he destroyed the independence of the senate. The principles of a free constitution [were] irrevocably lost." And it was Augustus who brought the Praetorian guards into Rome to protect him from assassination. "The Praetorian bands, whose licentious fury was the first symptom and cause of the decline of the Roman empire:…the person of the sovereign the authority of the senate, the public treasure, and the seat of the empire, were all in their hands." 

The eminence and authority of the senate, degraded by August, became quickly irrelevant with the ascendancy of Severus. "The emperor was freed from the restraint of civil laws [and] could command by his arbitrary will the lives and fortunes of his subjects." Essentially, the city of Rome and its people became insignificant to controlling the Roman empire. Only those leaders who could pay legions well could run the show, and even that could prove insufficient when the Germanic peoples and the Persians began to besiege different parts of the empire. "The introduction of luxury had enervated the vigor, and a spirit of disobedience and sedition had relaxed the discipline of the Roman armies."

So at times appeared that the empire would topple under outside pressure or even collapse under its own weight. "The whole period was one uninterrupted series of confusion and calamity."

Yet it rose again under a series of emperors including especially Diocletian, who "deserved the glorious title of Restorers of the Roman World." Diocletian saw that the empire was not really one entity but at least four, and he split the empire--and more importantly, the command of the legions--under four separate rulers. This arrangement fell apart very quickly, however, when Diocletian resigned the office of Augustus, and it was up to Constantine to put the pieces back together under one rule--his. And what did he do but change the whole complexion of events and history by moving the capital elsewhere. But that's the story of the next volume.

In the final two chapters of volume 1, Gibbon goes back and covers the birth and development of Christianity up until the ascendancy of Constantine. And really, he doesn't have a whole lot of good to say about either Christianity or Judaism. First off, by refusing to any homage to the Roman gods and then condemning the rest of mankind to eternal torture, they sat out from the "common intercourse of mankind," disrupting the "religious harmony of the world." The Roman empire was a pastiche of many different beliefs and religious practices that were able to live in harmony by mutual indulgence of each other. All that was required was paying due homage to the gods of the state at civic occasions. Jews and Christians refused, and this left them open to persecution, "The rights of toleration…were justly forfeited by a refusal of the accustomed tribute." 

Romans found this refusal especially puzzling for the early Christians since they weren't following the practices and beliefs of their ancestors: "Christians…dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country and presumptuously despised whatever their fathers had believed as true or had revered as sacred." (Wait just a second. Isn't that the same thing that was said about me and my generation?) By doing so, Christians stood outside the life of the empire and "refused to take any active part in the civil administration or the military defence of the empire."

This refusal to take part in the everyday affairs of the commerce of life was driven, of course, by the apocalyptic nature of their beliefs. The world was coming to an end very shortly and affairs of this world were to be despised. "The ancient Christians were animated by a contempt for their present existence." This devaluation of life really bothers Gibbon: "The acquisition of knowledge, the exercise of our reason and fancy, and the cheerful flow of unguarded conversation…were rejected with abhorrence…as a criminal abuse of the gift of speech." Gibbon also disparages Christian belief in the afterlife, "The conduct of [the eminent persons of the age] was never regulated by any serious convictions of the rewards or the punishments of a future state," as well as the prevalent belief in signs and miracles. Why was it that none of these miracles and wonders were not observed by other thinkers of the age? Probably because only the totally incredulous saw them. No wonder, then, that Christianity was scorned by the most prominent thinkers of the times: "all these sages [Seneca, Pliny, Tacitus, Plutarch, Galen, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius] overlooked the perfection of the Christian system [and] those among them who condescended to mention the Christians consider them only as obstinate and perverse enthusiasts."

Finally, Gibbon takes up the issue of the persecution of the early church by the empire. After repeating the adage that the blood of the martyrs provided the seed for the growth of the church, he asserts that their numbers have been grossly overstated: "The learned Origen…declares…that the number of martyrs was very inconsiderable." Romans had some cause for their anger at the Christians, this "recent and obscure sect" who was willing to declare all of mankind except themselves in error and to condemn everyone to eternal torture and damnation. But in the end, Christians have done a lot more damage to each other than was ever experienced in the Roman empire: "Christians, in their course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other, than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels." And if there were any doubts left about Gibbon's opinions on the church, he concludes the first volume with his take on the church's legacy: "The Church of Rome defended by violence the empire which she had acquired by fraud, a system of peace and benevolence was soon displaced by proscriptions, war, massacres, and the institutions of the Holy Office." It will be interesting to see where Gibbons goes with this as Constantine embraces the church and Theodosius outlaws all religions but the Church.

Author: Gibbon, Edward
Date Published: 1776
Length: 486 pp
electronic print

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Travels with Charley is a revisit with an old friend. I first read the book in high school--actually, probably the summer after my senior year. And, really, it was the first Steinbeck that I had read--I don't count acting in a cutting from "Of Mice and Men" or racing through "The Pearl" in less than an hour as the final exam in a speed reading course that I took. I also remember desperately wanting a pickup truck with a camper on it so I could travel around the country. It was probably the first travel book that I read, and it made me want to get out and explore. Later would come "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and John Graves' "Goodbye to a River." Then I traded my dreams of a pickup for dreams of a canoe. I didn't get either.

One of the highlights of our visit to the John Steinbeck Museum in Salinas a few years back (which really isn't all that much of a museum) was actually seeing Steinbeck's actual truck, Rocinante, on the floor. It seemed smaller in person, especially compared to some of the mondo cab over campers that now ply our national highways. And that brings up the question of how much time Steinbeck actually spent in Rocinante.

What called to me and seemed so fresh and inviting over 40 years ago seemed a bit dated this go around. Listening to the book was enjoyable for both Sara and me, but it just didn't have the special qualities that have made reading and listening to Steinbeck's fiction so enjoyable. I'm not sure why. Is it a kind of nostalgic yearning for the past (even the past of the Joad family) over a more contemporary time? Or does it have to do more with characterization? Do the characters come up too fast and are gone too quickly to be developed in the detail to make them come alive? There are a number of poignant scenes in the book, such as when he revisits his old boyhood friend Johnny Garcia in the Monterrey bar, or when he spends the night with a father and son feuding about the future, or meeting the Shakespearean actor who channels John Gielgud, or sharing drinks with the Canadian migrant workers picking apples. The memories that stuck most with me over the past 40 years, besides Rocinante, are Charley getting sick, and Steinbeck's tossing the racist hitchhiker out of the truck. I had not remembered much of "the cheerleaders" in New Orleans, but its clear that that scene and the lead up to it almost serve as the climax of the book. Charley stole the show for me this time around, as I'm sure he did 40 years ago, with his "pfffft" commentary on Steinbeck's thoughts, his areas of exploration around the different campsites, his going apeshit over the bears in Yellowstone, etc. etc.

So, did Steinbeck find America? Probably not. There is, of course, the whole brouhaha of how much of the book is a reliable recollection of his trip. Did he really just sit in the camper and make most of it up, as his son avers? Did he really spend a lot more time sleeping in hotels with his wife than he lets on? Does any of it really matter?

Then there's the whole realization that I'm older than Steinbeck was when he went on the trip. Shit! Steinbeck felt himself to be dying and wanted to get out and see the country and the people one more time. And it turned out to be his last work. And to realize that maybe he really didn't have the energy or the focus to pull the book together like he wanted. Part of the comedy of the book is his not having decent urban survival skills when he hits the big cities. Or setting out to search for America but finding himself getting bored and driving straight through to exhaustion. "Ah, the hell with it," I hear him saying, sometimes, and wanting to shut it down. Is that where I'm headed, too?

So, if I look at "Travels with Charley" too closely, I say, OK, it's not great literature. It's not "A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack" for the Cold War generation, and it's probably not as good as "Goodbye to a River," written about the same time. But it is John Steinbeck, and it has the powers of description, of metaphoric language, of story telling, that sets him apart. No, it's not anywhere near his best work, but it is still so incomparably well written to make it a good time.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1962

Length: 7 hr 58 min

Narrator: Sinise, Gary

The Science of Leonard: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig/Phaedrus wanted to explore philosophy before it bifurcated into the primary subjective/objective ways of looking at things. He called this state of thought "Quality," and looked to the pre-Socratics for its historical antecedents. Fritjof Capra suggests, I think, that really Leonard Da Vinci is the prime example of the man what represents Quality in all senses of the word, including Pirsig's metaphysical Quality, the first and foremost example of l'oumo universale, the man who "can do all things if he will." Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man says that "God made men at the close of creation, to know the laws of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no iron necessity, but gave him freedom to will and to love." If anybody exemplifies Pico's vision of man, it is Leonardo, who, if Capra is to be credited, really represents the apotheosis of what it means to be a human in the fullest sense of the word. Leonardo came at at time when it was possible to loosen the fetters of old thinking and learn to see and to think for himself, coming up with observations that would not be repeated for sometimes hundreds of years.

"Five hundred years before the scientific method was recognized and formally described by philosophers and scientists, Leonardo Da Vinci singlehandedly developed and practiced its characteristics." Leonardo combined detailed skills of observation with his exceptional drawing abilities to puzzle out many phenomena before science developed the language to see and deal with them. He was at that unique vortex in time before the different branches of knowledge went in their various directions, requiring more and more specialized knowledge, and so he could hold a more holistic view of the world. He combined those close observations with a deep awareness "of the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the interdependence and mutual generation of all parts of an organic whole." (This sounds suspiciously like co-dependent origination to me.)

In addition to discovering the scientific method and anticipating many of the advanced principles of mathematics, such as calculus or topology, or establishing a neurological theory of visual perception, or by anticipating some of the modern findings of cognitive science, Leonardo was the first "deep ecologist" who intuitively understood the gaia hypothesis and saw the "underlying conception of the living world as being fundamentally interconnected, highly complex, creative, and embued with cognitive intelligence." Leonardo was a deeply spiritual person in whom a sense of "all life is holy" reigned supreme.

Leonardo's a fascinating character, obviously, and Capra presents a fairly unique way of approaching him through the notebooks, where Leo uses his drawings to express what would words or the mathematics of his time could not. Perhaps there was something in his visual perception and conception of the world that allowed him to see the unity in things, as Capra asserts. But ultimately, I'm not convinced. For me, Capra was not able to express in words what Leonardo saw. Perhaps Capra is a bit too enthusiastic in his presentation, maybe a little journalistic? In any case, I didn't feel the depth of knowledge to be ultimately satisfying. Perhaps in making connections between seeming disparate ideas--Leonardo and modern science, Buddhism and modern physics (in the Tao of Science) there are really too many points, too many dissimilarities at the end of the day, that get glossed over. The book succeeds in piquing my interest in Leonardo and perhaps as seeing him more of a precursor to modern thought than I would have supposed, but ultimately the book doesn't convince me, doesn't make those connections with the depth and authority needed to make the argument. I bought the book last year for the high school library, and that's about the right level for this book. Somehow, I expected more from Capra.

Author: Capra, Fritjof

Date Published: 2007

Length: 352 pp

electronic print

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Isn't the fifteenth century Renaissance in Italy the most important period in modern history? I mean, it was the time when our culture experienced a rebirth of learning, of curiosity, of individuality after centuries of the "Dark Ages." As Sir Kenneth Clark remarked in the first episode of "Civilisation," we came through by the skin of our teeth.

Of course, that is a gross simplification of history. Clark, after all, was talking about Charlemagne in that first episode, and we can really look back to the 12th century, to the "Children of Aristotle"--Averroes, Abelard, Aquinas et al--as igniting the sparks of the rebirth of learning. Still, something extraordinary happened in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that did lead to the opening of the west in the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on past the modern age and on through to our post-modern predicaments. Outside of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini, what happened? And why Italy at that time?

Jacob Burkhardt gives one of the first modern interpretations of the Renaissance. In fifteenth century Italy, Burkhardt says, "man became a spiritual individual…and recognized himself as such." Men became devoted to their own individual development as summed up by the great artist, architect, engineer Alberti: "Men can do all things if they will."  Burkhardt's main thesis is that this development was "due above all to the political circumstances of Italy." Whereas the other states of Europe were beginning to coalesce into modern nations or empires, Italy was still fragmented into a number of warring factions that were able to resist incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire. Much of that fragmentation was due to Rome, ironically enough, and the continuing struggle between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufen family ruling the empire. The Papacy still had illusions of political power, even though it had so recently returned to Rome after the "Babylonian Captivity," and had even more recently ended the "western schism" of the church, when as many as four different popes or "anti-popes" claimed jurisdiction over the Church, in 1417. This was the age of the condottieri who either worked as thugs for hire for any number of political factions or would grab power on their own and rule the state with force of arms. "Intrigue, armaments, leagues, corruption, and treason make up the outward history of Italy at this period." Men grabbed and held onto power through their own "fitness…worth and capacity," than through birthright or law. There was "no other nobility than personal merit."

This age of political intrigue and moral chaos fostered the growth of skepticism and individualism. "The spirit of the people, now awakened to self consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to rest." This coincided with the recovery of a number of Latin and Greek texts that sought for the answers to life's problems and mysteries outside the church.  Eventually these texts "were held in the most absolute sense to be the springs of all knowledge." Humanists became the speech writers and the spin doctors of their day while employed by the princes or the papacy, but more importantly, educating those princes and their families. "Social intercourse…was based simply on the existence of an educated class."

The breach in medieval thought and religion by humanism was the opening for great art and for modern science. Now artists and courtiers began to experience the world more objectively and to experience the outward world as "seen and felt as something beautiful." The discovery of nature led to close observations of the external world, and "Italy…held incomparably the highest place among European nations in mathematics and natural sciences." "The great earthly task of discovering the world and representing it in word and form absorbed most of the higher faculties."

The great reawakening of fifteenth century Italy was the discovery of the individual. Burkhardt tells us that "the human spirit had taken a mighty step towards the consciousness of its own secret life." Individuality was sought for its own sake, not in the mastery of a particular skill or branch of knowledge, but for the whole man, the l'uomo universale, who "mastered all the elements of the culture of the age." The foremost example, of course, is Leonardo, who was not only a great painted, a great engineer, a great architect and city planner, a great inventor, a great party planner, but he also played a mean lute, sang beautifully, and was a good athlete to boot. And although Benvenuto Cellini was a crook and a murderer, Burkhardt tells us, "He is a man who can do all and does do all…he lives…as a significant type of modern spirit." As with ancient Greece, this individualism led to an emphasis on glory and the "cult of historical greatness." It was "the burning desire to achieve something great and memorable."

This grasping after glory, this boundless ambition and thirst for greatness, had a dark side. "The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism." Individuals saw themselves as freed from the restraints of law and justice.  Premeditated crime, murder, assassination, and revenge were symptoms of a "grave moral crisis." It was Machiavelli who objectively understood the realities and necessities of power politics--whatever it takes to help the state survive and thrive. He said, " We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above all others." And Burkhardt makes it clear that this moral morass finally caught up with them when the condottieri/usurper Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro, who was one of Leonardo's major patrons, ignited  an invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France, setting off a whole series of French-Italian wars that eventually resulted in the sack of Florence and Rome in 1527.  With that defeat and the "Spanish enslavement" of Italy, the civilization of the renaissance in Italy began to shut down. "The Sack of Rome in 1527 scattered scholars, no less than artists, in every direction." Eventually the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent put an end to it all: "the Counter-Reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the people." But, Burkhardt adds, it probably saved the papacy from being totally secularized as it had come close to being during the term of the Borgias, and it probably also saved Italy from "relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it under Turkish rule."

So the conditions for the development of the Renaissance are the same conditions that eventually led to its destruction. On the one hand, "the Italian Renaissance must be called the mother of the modern age," and on the other, it is an amoral "school for scandal, the like of which the world cannot show." The conditions for greatness are also the conditions for evil and depravity. Great creativity and freedom come at the price of great destruction and suffering. Do we want greatness? Do we want safety and civility? Are they incompatible?

Author: Burckhardt, Jacob

Date Published: 1860

Length: 385 pp

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Ulysses

Well, OK, it's taken over 40 years to get through my first reading of Ulysses, and my first take is: I read it, but I don't get it. I don't mean that I didn't understand the writing, although there was a lot of tough sledding in some of the sections. What I really don't understand is why so many people wax eloquently about its being the greatest novel ever written. I'm going to assume that the fault lies not in the book but in myself, so really, I feel the need to start reading it all over again, at least with some idea of what lies ahead. Only, maybe I'll wait a bit first, maybe revisiting Dubliners and Portrait first.

I decided early on to just tackle the book on its own terms and just plow ahead without a whole lot of scaffolding. I bought a copy of "Ulysses Annotated" to help elucidate some of the more obscure allusions and references, but it just slowed me down, and I decided that I could decipher enough of them to get by. Likewise, I decided to eschew any online help until I had finished the book. One major prop that I used was an audio reading of the book by Jim Norton, so I listened to the book while reading the text. I found out early that I could not listen without reading, but the listening certainly enriched the reading. Things really picked up for me when we purchased an iPad this summer, and I kept the book cued up with both text and audio on the same device. Unfortunately, the electronic version of the text wasn't all that great, however, and it was a bit irritating when the audio and the text weren't saying the same thing. I'll stick with print the next time around, although I do have to say that I thought that the audio version was a fairly masterful reading, especially Molly Bloom's soliloquy by Marcella Riordan.

So, just some initial reactions here. You may not wish to proceed any further if you have plans on reading the book and want to approach it with a fresh outlook. And if you have read the book, you'll probably wonder how I can be so dense.

First, and most obviously, it took me quite a while to catch on that Leopold was a Jew. Put this in the doh! category. Did I ever feel foolish when it finally dawned on me. Like when "The Citizen" decides to sic his dog on Poldy. And then it took me quite a bit of time to realize that Molly was getting banged by Blazes Boylan. That very day. Another big doh! And then that led to this whole question of whether Bloom was really pimping Molly to Blazes. I'm still not quite so sure about that. I do think that he stayed away from their apartment all day  to avoid a confrontation with Molly and Boylan. He would have had to make a stink about it, and Boylan was bankrolling the musical tour featuring Molly. So maybe Bloom was whoring her all along.

But then Leopold has thoughts, fantasies really, of lawsuits, revenge, divorce, and murder just before dropping off to sleep, and he implies that Boylan is just the latest in a long, rather long, string of inamoratti that Molly has taken over the past few years. At the same time, Molly implies that Leopold has pushed her into the affair with Boylan and has talked of her posing for nude photos in the past. She also intimates that poor old Poldy is pretty much a ne'er do well who can't keep a decent job, perhaps because he has been something of a political agitator. But Molly is pretty much out of her depths in trying to understand Bloom. As he with her. She says that he could no longer get it up with her since the death of their newborn son some years ago, and she's ready to move on with her life. So then I'm wondering whether Joyce is really just parodying the mistrust and misunderstanding between all married couples, or even between all people. Is that running commentary really the voice that runs below all relationships?

When you get right down to it, Leopold and Molly are a couple of middle-class, middle-aged gits. Their concerns are so banal and their wants are conventional and predictable: "Every summer we can rent a cottage/In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear." Bloom's chasing around for the Keyes ad was demeaning, not to mention the little money making schemes he was continually cooking up in his head, and his comments with Stephen in the cab stand as well as his own kitchen were commonplace. Molly struck me repeatedly as a mindless, if somewhat horny, twit. But maybe we are all banal, mindless, horny twits with conventional and predictable wants (gfree says from his own little cottage in the mountains).

Then I wonder, geez, is there anybody admirable in the book? I mean, there are times that Stephen seems like an entitled little bastard, although he hasn't got anywhere to turn. He got his nose bent out of joint at Buck Mulligan and Haines and managed to kick himself out of his own lodgings, and then he pretty much spends most of his salary on whoring and boozing that night before being "rescued" by Bloom. And he certainly can't go back to Simon Dedalus' house, who doesn't seem to have the money or the gumption to provide a decent meal for his two younger daughters. Others in the book are either contemptible, like "the citizen" or Deasy, or relatively minor.

But there is the language. Has anyone described taking a shit as well as Joyce? Or trying to hold back farts, like Molly, so as to not wake Bloom? I did have to do a double take when I realized that Bloom got his rocks off when getting a sneak peek at Gerty's bloomers. Many of Stephen's musings were dense and packed with so many allusions juxtaposed next to each other that they were difficult to puzzle out. So many styles, so many voices. I found some to be entirely tedious, like the succession of newspaper headlines describing the action in the offices of the Freeman, and some I just had to let wash over me, hoping for some clues about what was happening, like the dream/nightmare/hallucination sequence just outside the entrance to nighttown. It friggin' went on for 170 pages.

So, yes, obviously I've missed something, and I need to plunge into the book yet again. But at least I'll do so with some idea of what to expect. But for my understanding of the novel right now, after the initial foray, is that it is nowhere near the stature of "Grapes of Wrath" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls", or "To the Lighthouse," but I'll withhold making any further judgment until I give it another shot.

Author: Joyce, James

Date Published: 1922

Length: 783 pp & 27 hr 19 min

print, electronic print, and audio

Narrators: Norton, Jim and Riordan, Marchella

Human

Why do we act, think, and feel the way that we do? That's what Michael  Gazzaniga sets out to explain in "Human," using the latest research in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. But it's one thing to look at the evolution of structures in our brains, or at antecedents of our behavior in ape behavior, or even at the activation of neurons during different aspects of our consciousness, but Gazzaniga wants to elucidate what it is that makes human beings unique and to do so without any reference to ego or soul or psyche or supernatural agency. And its kinda interesting that he kind of ends on a concept of "left brain interpreter" that sounds suspiciously like it could be any of those.

Gazzaniga comes with some major bona fides as the head of a cognitive science institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he has done some major research on the cognition of people with split brains. The roster of people he has worked with is something of a who's who of neuroscience, people like Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Dennett. He cites the big guns in the field, so much of the important reseach going on in cognition and neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

So why is it that I'm being talked down to with this book? It's like Gazzaniga decided to write a book on neuroscience for a popular audience and felt like he had to adopt a popular voice and make a number of cutesy asides in order to reach his audience. This was a book that I enjoyed a lot more in retrospect when I was able to look over my highlights and see past that voice. It does have a lot of good information that I was able to pull together better through reflection than on first reading.

Gazzaniga begins by looking at evolutionary antecedents for different stuctures in the brain, making a number of comparisons with ape brain and behavior. He presents evidence that the brain is continuing to evolve, with major growth spurts occurring as recently as 40,000 years ago coinciding with the development of speech and culture or even 6,000 years ago with the rise of urbanization and agriculture. (So where would that leave a climatolgical explanation of the domestication of emmer or eincorn wheat as advanced by someone like Jared Diamond?)  Perhaps as importantly as growth, however, has been a number of structural changes such as hemispheric differentiation, allowing more specialization and automation of certain brain functions, or the growth of particular areas of the pre-frontal cortex, especially those involved with memory, planning, abstract thinking, and cognitive flexibility.

Part of the "relentless progression of increasing relative brain size during the evolution of hominids," came about as "an adaptation to the complexities of social living." Groups became larger and more complex, and the cognitive demand for living in these groups "drove brain size expansion." I think that this gets at the heart of a lot of what Gazzaniga has to say: "what the human brain does best, what it seems built to do: think socially." Our ability to live in large, complex groups really depends on what seems to be a uniquely human characteristic, the "Theory of Mind," or our ability to accurately predict another person's moods, intentions, states of mind. Theory of Mind now seems pretty dependent on the existence of "mirror neurons" in our brain that are specifically attuned to others, especially allowing us to mimic them, perhaps the root of language and learning. 

Language facilitates social reciprocity with larger numbers of individuals (it's a whole lot easier and more efficient to talk with people than spend an inordinate amount of time picking lice from their fur), increasing the odds of survival, but also introducing the ability to lie and cheat. Protecting the validity of social reciprocity underlies what Gazzaniga and others (like Jonathan Haidt) call "universal moral modules," built on feelings of guilt or shame to prevent our own cheating, or on rage and anger to deter cheating in others. Patricia Churchland calls this "constraint satisfaction" in her new book, and it leads to a whole discussion about how much of our morality is biological and how much is rule-based, how much of our moral thinking is based on the kinship based hunter-gather groups that dominates so much of the human past, and how germane that past is to living in large multi-ethic urban environments.

For if we are left with biological constraint satisfaction for basing our morality, we also have to deal with the fact that we are hardwired for nonreflective beliefs and a bias toward negativity in our preconscious apprehension of new things and novel stimuli. First off, we have a "hot" emotional system that responds quickly and automatically to fear, anger, rage, and disgust. It operates directly through the amygdala, bypassing the "cooler," more reflective circuit operating primarily in the hippocampus and frontal lobes. But even then, most of the information that reaches consciousness has already been processed, classified, stored as a memory, and compared to other memories  prior to its emergence into our awareness. Most of our beliefs about the world have already been formed before we even know that they exist. "Nonreflective beliefs are the default mode of our thinking." Not only that, but they control most of our reflective thinking, since "the better  a reflective belief merges with a nonreflective belief, the more plausible it seems, the more intuitive and easier to learn or accept." We look for these plausible explanations, then, even if our information isn't all that accurate, making any approach to analytical, non-intuitive thinking extremely difficult, and in Gazzaniga's eyes, extremely rare. I guess that Nietzsche was right all along. We continually seek bad reasons for confirming what we already know.

If Gazzaniga seems to confirm Nietzsche on the one hand, he perhaps confirms Kant on the other. For what sounds kind of like "a priori" thinking to me comes from the idea that a major part of our nonreflective belief system is built on the concept of essentialism: we are hardwired to believe that things have inherent properties and characteristics, "a thing perceivable to the senses can have an embodied unobservable essence that is real," a quality that develops in our thinking by about the age of four or five. We also seem to attribute consciousness to animate objects investing them with "theory of mind" much like our own. We naturally assume that they have agency and purpose. Gazzaniga is saying that while we endow our pets with personalities, it just ain't necessarily so. We do the same with nature, a trait that Richard Dawkins calls  our HADD, Hyperactive Agent Detection Device: "we hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent." (Dawkins, The God Delusion) We are Idealists and Cartesians before we are even aware of it.

One of the major essences that we buy into is the idea of ourselves, that which I feel makes me, me and you feel makes you, you (Spinoza called  it the conatus.) We each of us believe first of all in our own essences, which Gazzaniga says comes from specific processes in the brain. But then he gets a bit vague about these processes. When we take in information and store it as a memory, we first try to make sense of it. We fit it in with what we already know and use this knowledge to construct scenarios and give meaning to things and events. Gazzaniga says that we have a "left hemispheric interpreter" that forms hypotheses about all sensory inputs and processes going on, continually constructing meaning and narrative: "the left hemispheric interpreter constructs theories to assimilate perceived information into a comprehensible whole," even if the information turns out to be faulty and the theory demonstrably false. That's just  a part of who we are. And one of these theories is the sense of self: "I submit that it is the left-brain interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative, and the self-image, taking the information from various inputs, from the “neuronal workspace,” and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input."

But this left brain interpreter is a theoretical construct on Gazzaniga's part. There is no specific part of the brain, other than left hemisphere, where it might reside. It seems to be an "emergent property" that comes from "distributed processes throughout the brain." So, really, you could call it ego, or psyche, or soul, or whatever, and it would have as much validity as "left brain interpreter."

So, yes, Gazzaniga's book has a lot of good information, so much more than I've touched on here. But I guess I'm still left with a number of questions about its significance. Do I not have any say in the way that I think and the way that I feel? If I've already made up my mind before I make up my mind, then where does that leave the ideas of free will and responsibility? I feel like I've made a lot of important decisions, both good and bad, that have determined the directions my life has taken, and done so after a lot of careful thought and deliberation, at least sometimes. I guess that I need at least the illusion that I have some control over my life. It might be one of those demonstrably false theories developed by my left brain interpreter, but it does give me a reason to keep on keepin' on.

Author: Gazzaniga, Michael S.

Date Published: 2008

Length: 464 pp

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Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

Is Rick Perry the next Ferdinand II? I mean, Ferdinand was taken up, in at least his later years, with a messianic vision of himself as the "Bat" who would defeat the antichrist, drive the Moors out of Grenanda, and then free Jerusalem from the Muslims, heralding the second coming. Rick Perry, as I understand it, wants to recapture the "seven mountains" of culture, including the government, also in preparation for the second coming.

So what becomes of heretics like me? Ferdinand's response was to reinvigorate the inquisition (its roots run back really to Theodosius I, and it had been used sporadically until the Albigensian crusade, but Reston makes a case that the "old" inquisition had been sporadic and occasional whereas the "new" Spanish inquisition was systematic and habitual) and use it to spread terror, enforcing thought control. Under the instigation and direction of Torquemada, who became the first Grand Inquisitor (is it he in Ivan's parable?), Ferdinand saw the inquisition as unifying the Spanish kingdom, bringing the recalcitrant and sometimes rebellious nobility under his control, and increasing the revenue available to fight his war against the Moors through confiscation of property. How many "heretics" were burned in Torquemada's auto de fes? How many people turned in their neighbors under torture or the threat of torture? How many of them confessed to acts they never committed? Do Rick and his brethren have that in mind for me?

It's hard to say how much Ferdinand's zeal was driven by his belief or how much of it was a cynical politician's use of religion to bring about his political ends (hmmm…so just how is that different from Perry?) While Reston does suggest that Ferdinand came to believe his ordained role as the trigger man for the apocalypse, he also notes that Machiavelli used Ferdinand as his model of the Prince in creating the "first modern political state." After joining the kingdoms of Aragon and Castille and then defeating the Portugese, Ferdinand and Isabella brought about centralized authority and taxation with the help of a national police force manned by a religious brotherhood, the Hermandad: "the effect was to centralize power and spread fear throughout the land."

And what are the best tools at hand for a politician to accomplish the building of a unified state? A common enemy and a convenient scapegoat will generally do the trick. The common enemy was the Kingdom of Grenada, the last stronghold of Al Andalus in Europe. The "Reconquista" had been a major goal of almost every king in Europe since Charles the Hammer finally stopped the Islamic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 732. And the inquisition played on popular bigotry by targeting mainly the Conversos--Jews who had forcibly converted to Christianity in earlier pogroms--for being insincere in their conversions or for having lapsed back into Jewish practices. That Ferdinand could latch onto the Converso's property to help fund his wars was a real bonus.

This led to the "other 1492," the expulsion of Jews from Spain. But what counted now wasn't religion but blood, "limpieza de sangre," purity of blood. Which, of course, is a total farce. The people of Spain were a mixed blood lot from the earliest of times: paleolithic hunter gatherers with a mixture of Anatolian pastoral and agricultural peoples, overlain with major migrations/invasions from Celts, Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Romans, Alans, Suebi, Vandals, Visigoths, Arabs and Berbers--to cite only the most obvious and numerous--except for the Jews, of course, who migrated here early and interbred with most of the different people. Reston points out that Ferdinand, Isabella, and Torquemada all had Converso heredity in their own backgrounds, as did the majority of the Spanish nobility.

Persecution of the Jews had gone back to at least Hellenic times, with Greeks and Jews killing each other in the streets of Alexandria, and Jews were slaughtered by the thousands during the Crusades. Spain experienced a major outbreak of antisemetic zealotry in 1391, leading to forced mass conversions of Jews to Christianity (a widespread practice in Spain since Visigothic rule), but with the centralized authority of the state joined with the revitalization of the Inquisition, wholesale skepticism and eventual denial of converso sincerity held public opinion, especially with incitement from the pulpit. All Jews were forced to convert or to leave Spain in 1492. Those who converted and remained behind then made up the overwhelming majority of the cases tried by the Inquisition panels.

But that's just one strand running through the book. The defeat of Grenada, with its own cast of characters, including the last emir, Boabdil the Unfortunate, who was clearly unsuited for the task of ruling Grenada or fighting the Spanish, and who essentially sold out his people and his kingdom for a comfortable retirement. Add in Columbus, who comes strutting on the stage with his grandiloquent plans of finding a shorter route to the palace of the Great Khan, but unable to find anyone to take him seriously until after the Moors are defeated, eventually limps off disgraced and disillusioned, but not until whole tribes began to go extinct. The book covers a true "hinge of history" when Ferdinand and Isabella take their small feudal kingdoms and turn them into the Spanish empire.

Reston tells this story by drawing on multiple personalities, including not only Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada and Columbus, and also Boabdil the Unfortunte, but so many others, including King Joao II of Portugal, Enrique the Impotent--Isabella's brother, Muley Hassan--who contended with Boabdil, his nephew, for control of Grennda, Abraham Senior and Don Abravano--Jews who worked as advisors to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella but nonetheless suffered the fate of their fellow Jews, and Rodrigo Borgia--who later became Pope Alexander VI, infamous in his own right but even more famous as the father of Cesare and Lucretia Borgia. It really is quite a formidable cast of characters, and I find so little to admire in any of them.

Perhaps that is a major weakness of this book, then, that in trying to tell a good story, Reston overplays his details and maybe plays a bit loose with the facts. He certainly bends the tale in a modern, secular direction. He has often been accused of the novelization of history--sometimes an almost breathless "in media res" approach to history, surmising what his characters thought and how they reacted to one another--you can almost sense the animal magnetism of Isabella for Columbus or feel the scornful rage of Torquemada for Ferdinand and Isabella when he thought the expulsion ediict was being compromised. I guess the most egregious example, though, is Boabdil's mother, Ayxs, whose contempt Reston imagines as driving Boabdil into a disastrous battle with Ferdinand, and then who heaped further scorn on him for being such a wimp, or something to that effect.

But the bottom line is, Reston tells a good story. I quite enjoyed the read and got a better understanding of the time and the events. I came to the book wanting a better idea of what drove Spinoza's thinking, as Rebecca Goldstein makes it clear that his Converso background gave him the questions and the concerns culminating in the Ethics and the Tractatus. This book didn't really give me any insight in that direction, but it has lead me onto further inquiry into the history of antisemitism. For the truth is, I just don't get it. You can draw a straight line from Ferdinand (and Isabella, though Reston doesn't really impute any kind of cynicism on her part) and the Spanish Kingdom to Hitler and Nazi Germany, and I continually draw a blank on how such atrocities can happen. All I can hope is that we're not on the cusp of some new catastrophe.

Author: Reston, James

Date Published: 2005

Length: 384

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