FiveBooks

Tyler Cowen

alexascherson — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:25:03 +0000

Academic, economist and co-author of economics blog Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen says the internet is even more Platonic than Plato – this democracy doesn’t need philosopher kings. He chooses the best five books on information.

Key Points of this Week`s Debate

Tyler Cowen: Decentralisation: If you think of web production and the producers of ideas, everyone is at a separate node and there’s no central planner. A lot of ideas are put forward and most of them are terrible. But something about the web and its mechanisms of linking and commenting and information being passed along, and use of Twitter and what gets blogged, where in essence there is a process of spontaneous order that selects some of those ideas, that decentralised mechanism is extremely powerful and I think that is the key to understanding ideas on the internet. Continue Reading...

Carlos Eir: St Augustine of Hippo was one of the first thinkers to struggle with the concepts of time, memory and eternity. The Confessions, written between AD397 and AD398, is the first real autobiography ever written and it has a very strong philosophical and psychological dimension. One of his obsessions in the book is looking at memory. He tries to remember his past life and to figure out how it is that the past and present and future are related, and especially how the past stays in his memory even though it has ceased to be. Continue Reading...

Phillip Vannini: Think of financial capital, for example: it’s something you accumulate over time by collecting pieces of it, money in this case. Once you have enough you can make certain claims: you claim to be a millionaire, to be successful, to be a VIP, and maybe even demand that you be allowed into that exclusive country club. Subcultural capital works in similar ways. Over time you become an insider by acting like an insider, by displaying conspicuously elements of that scene. Continue Reading...

Darius Rejali: The Rumsfeld Memo authorising the use of torture was issued to the American military at Guantanamo in December of 2002; the draft was begun in October 2002, and Rumsfeld rescinded it in January of 2003. Continue Reading...

Jonathan Haidt: Gilbert Brim has this phrase that I’ve never forgotten: he advises us to live life ‘at the level of just manageable difficulty’. So, if you live life at 50 per cent of your capacity, you’ll be bored and disengaged; if you live it at 100 per cent of your capacity, you’re going to be burned out, but if you live at about 85 per cent on average, with some fluctuations, that’s about the best you can do. Continue Reading...

Adam Haslett: What sets Moby-Dick apart and makes it a great work of literature is that, like Milton in Paradise Lost, Melville paints his villain with such a richness of language that the portrait becomes a kind of celebration of the figure despite his actions. The entire adventure is bathed in reverence for the natural world through which Ahab, Ishmael and the rest of the sailors move. Ishmael’s descriptions sing with awe for the ocean and the whales. And in this light, Ahab’s fixation, however distorting it is of life, comes to be seen as a kind of respect for the majesty of the creature he’s pursuing. And so there is nothing simple about his avoidance. It has its own dark dignity. Again, as Kahn points out, evil and love are deeply interwined. Continue Reading...

Tyler Cowen

alexascherson — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:17:48 +0000

The co-author of economics blog marginalrevolution.com explains the beauty of decentralised information, mass collaboration and spontaneous order. Examine the detail and don’t look for the big dramas, he says. Cowen chooses five books on the new information.

Tell me about the Clay Shirky book.

First of all, I’m choosing Shirky as a writer and thinker, rather than choosing that particular book. If you had to pick one individual who was the sharpest and most prescient commentator on the web and the internet it would be Clay. I like most of all his notion that the old mode was something like ‘filter then publish’, and the new mode of organising the production of ideas is ‘publish then filter’. Here Comes Everybody is Clay’s very successful attempt to write a popular book for people who weren’t just tech geeks or web nerds, and it’s very clear and very to the point. It’s about spontaneous order and decentralisation, and just how powerful the web can be. I’d say first and foremost that the prize goes to the individual rather than to that book, and Clay’s new book, Cognitive Surplus, is also likely to go down as a classic.

Decentralisation. What do you mean by that? Or, rather, what does he mean by that?

Well, if you think of web production and the producers of ideas, everyone is at a separate node and there’s no central planner. A lot of ideas are put forward and most of them, almost all of them, aren’t very good, or they’re trivial or pointless or they’re terrible or they’re even destructive. But something about the web and its mechanisms of linking and commenting and information being passed along, and use of Twitter and what gets blogged, where in essence there is a process of spontaneous order that selects some of those ideas and that decentralised mechanism is extremely powerful – I think that is the key to understanding ideas on the internet.

So it’s a kind of Platonic democracy?

Well, that’s right, but unlike Plato’s Platonic democracy you don’t need philosopher kings to decide what’s best, so it’s much more competitive.

But wasn’t it all completely chaotic until Google started to give it structure and order and to be a philosopher king?

Search engines have helped a lot, but even before search engines there was an order where some things would get e-mailed around to other user groups and forums and that led more interesting items to get more play. Google, of course, was just the beginning. There’s Facebook, there’s Twitter, there are a lot of other ways to find that which is powerful and ignoring that which is trivial.

Isn’t most content on the internet pornographic?

It depends what you mean by most content. If you count the number of sites, and I don’t know what the numbers are, perhaps. But I would say the ideas on the internet that have impact are mostly not pornographic. If you just count up domain names you might get some other result. Personal journals are the most singular common item but they are not necessarily influential, just more expressive.

Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together by Clay Shirky

Buy Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Let’s move on to the Hayek book, Individualism and Economic Order.

This is the most abstruse and obscure pick on the list. It has nothing to do with the internet per se, it’s really about decentralisation. The key essays in the book were written in the 1930s and Hayek puts forward a general theory of how decentralised processes work, why they are so powerful and can use and mobilise and distribute information so well. He focused on the price system and the market economy. A lot of these ideas are in Shirky, but if you want to go back and read the ideas in their most powerful original form there’s Hayek and there’s Adam Smith, and that’s a lot of what the web is built upon.

Nobody knows what the price for something is going to be. There will be a price in the store for bananas, for steel, for stocks and those prices reflect information, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, but they are the result of many people bidding and communicating the personal information they have and aggregating it into one tiny small number which everyone watches.

Is he a libertarian? This is basically a conservative thing, isn’t it?

He’s broadly a libertarian, but I don’t think you’d have to read the book in a political way. Most Democrats in America believe in the price system and using markets for a lot of things, and you need a way of explaining how that works and there you look to Hayek.

So you see the internet as working on an economic model?

Economic model is a loaded phrase. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. If the economic man is motivated by the desire to express himself or herself and the desire for recognition, then I would say yes.

And is it a readable book?

In many ways not, which is why I picked it. I think there is a lot to be said in any area for having at least one book which isn’t very readable. And there Hayek is my pick. But it’s brilliant, it won a Nobel Prize, and it’s one of the most important books of the century. Is it clear and fun? No.

Individualism and Economic Order by F A Hayek

Buy Individualism and Economic Order

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.

David’s book is brilliant, but I think it raises an important question. We’re doing five books and not five blog posts or five user threads or whatever, so why is a book the most important organising medium for talking about or reading about the internet? Weinberger is a guy who gets this – that the internet is a way of ordering or not ordering reality, that you stack things in a pile, that it appears to be very chaotic, that this is a fundamental change in information processing and it’s not in every way book-like or driven by narrative. I think Weinberger is an important and underrated thinker – this is a book that is easy to comprehend and is also fun. I don’t think it’s made the big splash of Clay Shirky or Sherry Turkle or some other people, but if you want my list of five then it’s got to be on it.

Tell me something in it that’s interesting. What’s the most original point he makes?

I would say the focus on how the web works so well in spite of not having the additional message of being ordered the way, say, an encyclopaedia would or a lot of old media would be. It’s like a very messy office where we stack things in huge piles and we find new ways of making sense of it, and it looks like chaos to outsiders, but people working within the system – linking, hyperlinking, lists of favourites, bookmarks – recognise that it really does work and that it’s a revolution in how we process and order information.

Does he think it will supersede the book? Or perhaps it already has?

I don’t recall him making a prediction on that count, but I think most wise observers see the book and the web ultimately as complements. Some books will vanish, like the encyclopaedia, but the internet gets people excited about reading various books, just as your website may interest some people in reading these books.

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger

Buy Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Wikinomics.

This is a very popular, very applied book. It basically says wikis work and wikis are important and wikis are the way of the future. Maybe it’s the least deep book on this list, but it makes the point and it makes it well.

What are wikis?

Take Wikipedia. It’s content generated by a large number of users and readers. There may be some amount of central planning and editing, but for the most part it’s decentralised content and everyone edits their bit. If you had asked people or economists 15 years ago, could Wikipedia ever work, where editors are not paid and with its semi-open comments, most of us would have said no and we would have been totally wrong.

What does mass collaboration really change? Have our lives really changed since the internet?

Well, it depends who the ‘our’ is. Google you can also think of as a form of mass collaboration – there is a kind of underlying wisdom of crowds that gives us all information. So, if you use Google or you use Wikipedia, which I do and I suspect you do too, then it has changed your life. If you met a spouse on match.com then that also has changed your life.

Next time, maybe.

Has it changed everyone’s life? To some extent it’s a generational thing and for the people growing up now, will it change most of their lives? Absolutely, yes.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams

Buy Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

The Book of Disquiet.

This is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think, gets at the idea that the internet and the stories we follow are, to a lot of us, extremely important and exciting and meaningful, though really they are just a few changes of characters on a little screen somewhere.

Is it a philosophical tract?

It is a philosophical tract. A collection of aphorisms, observations. It’s very rewarding to read and I’ve found that most people have not read this book, but everyone who has tried it, around 20 people that I know, have loved it.

And his point is that beauty is in small things?

Absolutely. Something that might seem a small change to a lot of observers is a big change to the person watching it and that we should think about our lives in those terms and not look for the big dramatic exciting moment, that interest and excitement can be found in other ways.

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Buy The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)

What about the Herman Hesse?

This is about the beauty of organised structures and how we play them in game-like fashion and how much they entrance us. So it’s about a kind of priestly cult that played a game called the glass bead game, which you can think of as a mix of chess and music and mathematics and much more, and he has compelling descriptions of just how spellbound and into this game people would get. And I think indirectly he was the first person to put his finger on why we so often find the web such fun. It’s like this game for us, but it’s also deeply serious and it holds our interest and can be suspenseful and, even though he’s not writing about the internet at all, this is a literary treatment of what we’re doing now and why we find it so intriguing.

What about the internet do you find so intriguing?

Every day I can learn something new.

What have you learnt today?

I have learnt quite a bit about how the German economic experiment of unification in the 1990s reflects the advantages and disadvantages of fiscal policy. I have learnt a lot on that topic.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

Buy The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel

Carlos Eire

alexascherson — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:06:08 +0000

Professor Carlos Eire grapples with the past, present and eternal future with the help of Meister Eckhart, St Augustine, Eusebio Nieremberg, Kurt Vonnegut and Milan Kundera. All living beings are seeking a divine consciousness, he says.

Key Points of this Week`s Debate

Last Week's Topic: Israel and Palestine

Carlos Eire

alexascherson — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:59:37 +0000

The historian takes us from St Augustine to Milan Kundera in an attempt to pin down a fleeting spark of eternity in the present. He chooses five books on time as a philosophical concept and our tenuous understanding of the same.

Tell me about your first book, St Augustine’s Confessions.

St Augustine is a good place to start because this is the oldest book that I have chosen. It was written between AD397 and AD398. St Augustine of Hippo was one of the first thinkers to struggle with the concepts of time, memory and eternity. The Confessions is the first real autobiography ever written and it has a very strong philosophical and psychological dimension. One of his obsessions in the book is looking at memory. He tries to remember his past life and to figure out how it is that the past and present and future are related, and especially how the past stays in his memory even though it has ceased to be.

And this struggle leads him to the question of eternity – how it is that we are somehow already in eternity. But we only experience it sequentially one little bit at a time. Augustine is the very first person to try to dissect time and in one chapter he comes up with the insight that the present really doesn’t exist because the present is ever moving and by the time you say the word now and get to the last letter it is no longer now. So his take on it as a philosopher, and also by that time as a Christian theologian, is that the only real time is eternity. For human beings our minds and wills, every part of us is programmed not to live eternally, and time for him ends up being a great disappointment.

The Confessions by St Augustine

Buy The Confessions of St. Augustine

Your next book is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.

This book is at the other end of the spectrum – written in the 20th century. Kurt Vonnegut, through fiction, takes up the same questions as Augustine all those centuries before. He is also looking at the relationship between the present moment and what had happened before. And then he takes it one step further than Augustine to look at the future. His main character, Billy Pilgrim, is constantly unstuck in time. He is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. And the alien’s experience of time is very different to the earthling’s experience of time. They experience time almost as if it was a mountain range. It is just there. Everything that happens is there and solid. And on earth human beings can see just whatever moment they are in. But, Billy Pilgrim has the ability to do what the Tralfamadorians can do. He can transcend time.

What I find intriguing about all this is that Vonnegut tried so many times to write the story of his memories of the bombing of Dresden and he kept failing. And, finally with Slaughterhouse Five, he wrote this outrageous story about time travel. That was his way of getting to grips with the horror that he lived with. His character Billy Pilgrim lives through the bombing of Dresden and he goes back and forth to Tralfamadore. There is one beautiful bit where he describes how Billy Pilgrim experienced the bombing of Dresden backwards. The bombs fly up to the airplane, then they go back to the factory and the parts go to the places where the parts came from and eventually back to the mines where the metal is mined. And all this is seen in slow motion.

Even though he is no philosopher Vonnegut is still able to ask the questions that all of us think about – how time affects our lives.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Buy Slaughterhouse-Five

Let’s move on to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

This is another novelist and a lot of the book is not about time and eternity. It is more about human relationships. But Kundera does keep picking up the question of human existence in time. The title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, comes from the main character’s obsession with the fact that all we have is the now, nothing else except the ever moving now. He wants to know what is happening about our existence in relation to the ephemeral present, which comes and goes so quickly. Since we are stuck in this ever-moving moment, how do the past and future relate to that, and what difference do moral choices make over a lifetime? What is the meaning of our existence? We are stuck in this ever-moving moment, and how does the past relate to that?

One meditation in there is where he takes up Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return – an ancient Hindu concept – in which everything that happens continues to happen eternally, an infinite number of times, over and over, like a broken record. And then when he considers that he asks himself whether Nietzsche was serious about this, and what difference it would make if he was right. He says, yes life is meaningless because you have no way to get out of this cycle. It is hell because all the bad things will happen again. And he puts it this way: if every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect… There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off heads.

Kundera was living in Czechoslovakia at the time of Soviet occupation. In a way, it is a very Eastern European cold war take on what it is to be stuck in time. The eternal he considered is Nietzsche’s eternal, which is the eternal return, which is very frightening. The main character is paralysed between life at that moment and whatever there might be that has meaning.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Buy The Unbearable Lightness of Being

How does your next book tackle the question of The Difference between Temporal and Eternal? This is the book by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg.

This was written in the 17th century. Nieremberg was a Jesuit priest and his parents were Austrian and part of the Habsburg court in Spain. The book is a very lengthy meditation and one of the most depressing and scary tomes anyone could ever read! He is taking Augustine to the extreme and saying that, rather than time being meaningful, it is non-existent compared to the eternal. This is a very Catholic, 17th century point of view. For him it is all about preparing yourself for eternity and, in true Catholic style, how you fare in your eternal life depends on how you lived your time on earth.

It is really a book about the connection between your time on earth and eternity, which comes down to ethics. Some of the meditations on the temporal and the eternal show up in James Joyce’s Ulysses, because the Catholic clergy kept referring to him in their sermons.

But, there is a flipside which I think is the one thing that kept it going for so long. And that is that these sermons and meditations were one of the few places that the clergy could preach to the wealthy and the powerful and tell them it was time to share their goods. There are meditations in there about rich people and their cool cellars which keep them comfortable in the hot summers. But there is this idea that they will get their roasting later in hell!

A Treatise on the Difference between Temporal and Eternal by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg

Buy A Treatise On The Difference Between Temporal And Eternal (1833)

Your last book is Meister Eckhart’s From Whom God Hid Nothing: Sermons, Writings and Sayings.

Meister Eckhart was a Dominican priest in the 14th century. He spent most of his time in Germany, especially in Cologne. We are told that he was an immensely popular preacher which I find hard to believe. His sermons are incredibly difficult and they are very philosophical and focused on this idea of the now versus forever. What he comes up with is an idea that led to him being accused of pantheism. He had this idea that inside every human being there’s a spark of the divine. We all participate in God’s existence. And at the core is what he called Fünklein, the little spark of the soul in which God is fully present. If you are able to get there by divine practice itself, and by praying and meditating, you actually get to God’s state of existence which is eternal.

So you get to the eternal now moment.

It almost sounds Buddhist, doesn’t it?

It does and there are quite a few people who have tried to compare Eckhart to concepts of eternity in Buddhism. There is this sense that in the eternal realm we are beyond time. One of his sermons is entitled ‘Get Beyond Time’.

Of all these books, which is the one which most chimes with your views about time and eternity?

I would like to say Eckhart. Of the five, who do I hope is really right? Eckhart! The problem is he doesn’t tell you how to get to the eternal now moment. He just speaks about it. There is this passage where he says: ‘When God created the world all creatures floated through me.’ Eckhart also speaks of the birth of the Son in the soul, by which he means to say that when one gets to that eternal now moment, one can experience the begetting of the Son in the Trinity. Eckhart fills his sermons with such radical talk, where God and creation merge. He has a beautiful passage in one sermon where he says: ‘Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, all creatures seek God.’ As Eckhart saw it, all living beings are linked to the divine, and in search of consciousness of this fact. So he is saying there is no difference between an ant and a human being. All creatures are sacred.

From Whom God Hid Nothing by Meister Eckhart

Buy Meister Eckhart from Whom God Hid Nothing

Vannini

alexascherson — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:37:11 +0000

Professor Phillip Vannini talks about music from an ethnographic point of view – music scenes give us a sense of identity and belonging, defining who we are even down to our mood. He chooses five books on the ethnography of music.

Key Points of this Week`s Debate

Last Week's Topic: Israel and Palestine

Phillip Vannini

alexascherson — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:52:35 +0000

The Professor of Communication and Culture says music is a technology of the self, a set of tools and techniques which we use to work out harder at the gym or set the tone for a date. ‘I think anyone can relate to that. Can anyone bear listening to Phil Collins while they’re trying to pump some iron at the gym?’ he asks. He chooses five books on what music means.

What do you mean by an ethnographic approach to music?

There are many different social scientific methods to research music. There are approaches that focus on historical dynamics, others that focus on the semiotic (either lyrics or sound structures) components of songs, and others that focus on what people do with music and how they interact with music and with one another with regard to music. The latter is called ethnography. It is a research tradition – typical of anthropology and related fields – used to write about people’s ways of life. Of course it’s not just used for the study of music, but within this context it works particularly well because of its elegance and simplicity in revealing the everyday life dimensions of musical production and consumption. Imagine going to a concert. What would you do there? You would watch the show, listen to the music, sing along, cheer, interact with friends, and all that jazz, right? Well, you couldn’t get a sense of all that by way of historical or semiotic analysis. Ethnography is about being where the action is, and taking part in it. That level of participation, combined with observation, when repeated over and over, allows you to scrutinise what people take for granted.

On to your first book: what does Tia DeNora argue in Music in Everyday Life?

DeNora makes an incredibly simple, but incredibly compelling argument: within the domain of everyday life we utilise music as a technology. We do not always do so in an overly rational way, of course, but for the most part we act towards music in light of what it does for us. On the basis of a lot of interviews about how people listen to music DeNora finds that music is a technology of the self, a set of tools and techniques, which we utilise, for example, to work out harder at the gym, clean up floors to, or set the tone for a date. DeNora’s focus in especially on how music is used to mould our emotional states, or to play into them. I think anyone can relate to that. Can anyone bear listening to Phil Collins while they’re trying to pump some iron at the gym?

She argues that music plays an important role in shaping human behaviour. How does music affect the way we behave in society today?

One of the most interesting ideas that arise out of her work is the strategic use of music to set or modify emotions. Music, in this sense, is used as a means to an end – whereas traditionally, as a form of art, music ought to be made and consumed for its own sake. What that means is that we now have an incredible amount of choice of music made and consumed for a specific purpose. Take for example workout music: it has become a genre in its own right.

Music in Everyday Life by Tia DeNora

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Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience looks at the effect of personal music devices on the people who use them. Tell me about the book.

Michael Bull is a very influential writer in a new field called sensory studies. Scholars of sensory studies examine the social and cultural aspects of the human senses and sensations. Here the study of music takes a very strong embodied turn. This book, in a way, is thus less about music and more about aurality and hearing. This book is a classic in this field, especially because of the remarkably contemporary topic. Bull’s argument and findings – again based on ethnographic research – point to the ways in which people create personalised urban soundscapes through their portable music players. The city, in this sense, becomes a very unique soundscape that each of us can choose.

Is it a good thing that iPods allow us to escape our immediate reality into the world of music any time we choose?

I am incredibly old fashioned about these things. Personally, I always like to tune into the soundscape as it comes, rather than craft one of my own. To a great degree it has to do with where I live. I live on a very small island, populated by few people who tend to live quite apart from one another. With the exception of the occasional seaplane humming over my head or the ferry horn when the boat leaves, all the noises I hear on a daily basis are natural: birds, the winds, and things like that. So when I go to a city I like to feel like I’m escaping. It’s an adventure, really. I wonder if I’m going to last the day in Vancouver – or some other metropolis – or if my ears are going to blast before I’m due to go back home to my soundscape heaven. So what I’m trying to say is that whether I love it or hate the soundscape that I’m in is always fascinating to me.

Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience by Michael Bull

Buy Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (International Library of Sociology)

Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital looks at the cultures which emerge around music. Tell me about Sarah Thornton’s argument.

The key argument here revolves around the concept of subcultural capital. Thornton examines the insiders of a much maligned scene: the dance scene. Ethnography pays attention to insiders, and it does so by asking something unique from the researcher: to view the world from the perspective of those she is studying. In doing so Thornton finds that insiders to these scenes share a meaningful taste culture – regardless of what others think of it. A taste culture is a community made of people who have similar taste, and that taste is a shared disposition towards not only music but also a host of many other individual characteristics, such as clothing and make-up, for example, and even bodily shape. Taste cultures emerge around coalitions of people’s determined shared definitions of these things.

She talks about how certain youth cultures emerge from shared tastes in music. How does this process occur?

Besides what I mentioned, Thornton argues that individuals become members of a club culture, a scene, or a subculture – these terms are all very interrelated – by accumulating subcultural capital. What does she mean by it? Think of financial capital, for example: it’s something you accumulate over time by collecting pieces of it, money in this case. Once you have enough you can make certain claims: you claim to be a millionaire, to be successful, to be a VIP, and maybe even demand that you be allowed into that exclusive country club. Subcultural capital works in similar ways. Over time you become an insider by acting like an insider, by displaying conspicuously elements of that scene.

Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital by Sarah Thornton

Buy Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Music/Culture)

Tell us about Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual.

This is a different book, compared to the others, because it is a reader. As an anthology its purpose is less to advance an exhaustive argument than it is to generate ideas and give a sense of evolving traditions, concerns and concepts. Thus, the beauty of this book comes from its own internal diversity. There are essays on the ‘tween scene’, on London’s salsa scene, on riot grrrl, on karaoke, etc. What holds all these essays together is the focus on the concept of ‘scene’. A scene is a lot of things: it’s a group of people, it’s a shared taste, it’s a system of rituals, of common values and practices, and it’s also a place. But of course scenes aren’t just anchored in places intended in the traditional sense: there are internet-based scenes, and also scenes that travel – like bluegrass communities, or like transplant scenes.

The authors argue that music scenes are good for the participants. In what way?

To a great extent this is one of the key concerns of all ethnographic research: music scenes are ways for people to make sense of the world around them, to give and find meaning in life. Music scenes are also ways that people have of building bonds with like-minded others. In this sense scenes give us meaning and they give us identities, a sense of who we are in relation to others.

Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual by Andy Bennett and Richard A Peterson

Buy Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual

What is Inside Subculture: The Post-modern Meaning of style about?

This is a crucial book in the field of subculture studies and cultural studies. Its importance comes from the finding that members of subcultures – or subculturalists – are a lot less coherent than they were originally thought to be. Coherence was a critical component in earlier studies. A subculturalist chose a certain music and a certain style because it carried a coherent set of ideological values. You couldn’t be into both punk and trance, for example, and if you were, well, you were a true fan of neither. But this is no so true in postmodern times any more. It’s quite common for many people to have eclectic tastes, and therefore to have eclectic styles, and diverse cultural elements to choose from and combine together. This is not a form of incoherence, however. Rather, it is a form of pastiche, of bricolage. Subculturalists are a lot more playful than originally thought, and lot more diverse – within their own scene – than previously argued.

Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style by David Muggleton

Buy Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style (Dress, Body, Culture)

Violence

alexascherson — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:12:12 +0000

Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, says the widespread and sanctioned use of torture in the US military, not the CIA, is one of the least investigated legacies of the Bush regime. He chooses five books on violence.

Key Points of this Week`s Debate

Last Week's Topic: Israel and Palestine

Darius Rejali

alexascherson — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:59:02 +0000

The author of Torture and Democracy gives a harrowing interview on the effects of violence, torture and trauma on the human being. He says many army torturers can’t confess for fear of losing their pensions, and if they don’t confess they can’t get help. Torture, he says, is a slippery slope.

Tell me about your first book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by Philippe Sands.

This is a book about the genesis of a single memorandum authorising what I would call torture. It was called the Rumsfeld Memo and it was issued to the American military at Guantanamo in December of 2002; the draft was begun in October 2002 and Rumsfeld rescinded it in January of 2003. What is wonderful about this book is that it’s written like a detective mystery – how was this memorandum composed, how did people come to write a memorandum which authorised torture? But it also is a legal analysis that implicitly identifies and pins responsibility on different actors within the Bush administration.

It is written by a very sharp member of the Queen’s Council. I can’t imagine any of the Bush administration officials he interviewed knew QCs were among the élite of the barristers in Britain and, in Sands’s case, very knowledgeable in international law. Had they, they might never have talked with him. Nevertheless, they did.

So what happened to them during the interviews?

Well, what happened was that he recorded all of them on tape describing their roles in the production of the memorandum, and he pieced together how the memorandum was written, identifying who the principal players were. Once the book came out it created a sensation in Congress. You had the principals implicated in drafting this memo volunteering to testify before Congress to ‘clarify’ what they had said, which is unheard of for Bush administration officials when it comes to the torture question. For me it is a very powerful book, both a really good read and a really insightful legal analysis. But, professionally speaking, and what is important for me, it is a really fine discussion about a well-known problem in the study of violence generally – which is ‘the problem of many hands’.

Most violence today isn’t done by a single person. It is usually organised by many people and this enables them to take less responsibility for what they do. In this case we are looking at how actual agents higher up used bureaucracy to massage, intimidate, cajole and generally get lower-downs to do or say things they would not have originally set out to do. In the end the lower-downs end up taking the blame if things go wrong while the higher-ups walk away untainted. Sands’s book reverses all this, showing the complicity of the higher-ups. Another point to remember is that Rumsfeld didn’t actually write the memo. The person who, according to the book, had primary responsibility for this was General Counsel for the Defence Department, William Haynes II. The book ends with Sands meeting Haynes and explaining his conclusions after which he is informed by the GC’s office that he may not refer to the conversations they had that day. I would say this book brought Haynes’s government career to an end and it makes clear that Haynes himself realised he was deeply vulnerable to future war crimes litigation.

Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by Philippe Sands

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Let’s move on to your next choice, None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture by Joshua E S Phillips.

This book is a different kind of book entirely. It is the intersection of war journalism and human rights. It takes the story of a tank unit in Iraq and this was a tank unit that didn’t end up doing much fighting with tanks after the first few days of the war and the members of the unit were assigned to prison detail and in the process ended up doing terrible things which they didn’t tell anyone about.

And when they came back to the United States, one of the members, Sergeant Adam Gray, became a disciplinary problem wherever he was stationed, and he eventually committed suicide. Another one, Jonathan Millantz, an army medic, approached the author, a war reporter, and asked him to look into this matter. Eventually Millantz too committed suicide. What emerged is that the unit had been immersed in torture and people were feeling guilty, and guilt is one of the most toxic emotions we know of, and whether you feel it is not in your power to control. In this way soldiers become a danger to themselves as well as, potentially, to others like their families. So it is a really important book on atrocity-related trauma and the blow-back effect from Iraq, as well as the importance of seeking help for these conditions as soon as possible.

There are many things in this book that are fascinating and generally unknown. One is that these soldiers were afraid to report what they had seen and done for fear of losing their military pensions, but without reporting it they couldn’t receive any medical help for their trauma. And so they were caught in that Catch 22 which is where torturers often find themselves.

And had the order for torture to do this come from above?

This is another very important feature of this story; there was no order in that sense. There was a sort of implicit understanding that you had to be tough and that is one of the points that the book makes and I think this is where my take comes in. One of the things that this book shows is that torture had begun in Afghanistan well before the memos were even drafted. It also shows that torture in the US military was far broader and more extensive than torture in the CIA but it remains the least investigated part of the Bush era legacy. The book goes through all the ways the US military managed to evade allegations of torture within the army so it is a very good antidote to a myopic approach on memos, water-boarding and the CIA.

It also shows something that we all know, which is that torture has a slippery slope and once you authorise it, or even create the atmosphere to encourage it, it rapidly runs out of control. That happens for a number of reasons. For example, people who are tortured become desensitised to pain, the body can only take so much damage. Faced with the limits and variability of pain, torturers say, ‘I know I am only authorised to do seven techniques but what if I go beyond that? If I overtake his pain threshold I know I will be successful and it will be hard to blame me for success.’ So they begin to disregard the rules. Another problem is they become competitive amongst themselves and each wants to be the one who breaks the victim, and this leads to a spiral of competitive brutality. Lastly, torture has a well-known deprofessionalisation effect – why would you want to learn the hard, hot work of a normal investigation when you have a bat? So all those reasons combined lead torture units to be less responsive to those who encourage them to torture. This book really shows how a situation can drive a unit that has no background at all in torture to start down a very dark road.

None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture by Joshua E S Phillips

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What about Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self by Susan J Brison?

Well, now we move away from the world of state torture to the world of rape.

This is a story of a female academic who goes jogging one day when she is on sabbatical in France. She is brutally attacked and left for dead in a ditch. Her assailant is captured and tried and she is a witness at the trial. In that sense it is a very simple story but the important thing is that the woman in question is Susan J Brison, a Dartmouth Professor.

She is also a very trained and skilled philosopher who had at her disposal the full resources of her training – the resources of Western thought. And she describes in a way that I really appreciate both the experience of her breakdown and the experience of reconstituting herself in a way that I don’t see in a lot of personal trauma writing. In this case you could say that the philosophical becomes personal.

It is a very powerful book in which the essays are ordered in the way she wrote them so you get her raw emotion at the beginning and then see how she works through the process. For people like me who think they can think through everything, the encounter with violence is a very powerful thing because thought itself shatters in the face of it. And I think she captures this in a way I haven’t seen a lot of places.

Towards the end of the book she talks about the relationship between tragedy and time which reminds me of a book from my childhood James Thurber’s Thirteen Clocks. For those who have experienced violence, time stops and what sets time back in motion and allows you to live again is love, laughter and serendipity. Things that are not necessarily at hand to the victim of violence. The other thing that is extremely moving about the book is that it shows that good is not all of a piece, evil is not all of a piece and self certainly is not all of a piece. And she talks about outliving yourself where you even experience the death of yourself in order to try and reconstruct a new one. So my first selection was on the organisation of violence, the second was on torturers and what happens to them, and this one is a deeply thought-provoking insight into the world of victims.

Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self by Susan J Brison

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Where are we going with your next book, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity by James Dawes?

This one is a book about human rights workers and the world that they inhabit and it captures all the inner tensions that human rights work involves. Many of us who work in the human rights world know how many young people are frustrated with the world of ordinary life and its injustices and how much they want to change things. This book asks what the cost of that desire is. We all expect human rights workers to do good but Dawes shows the dark side of the world of human rights through a series of interviews with Red Cross workers, UN soldiers, refugee intake officials, and young activists.

We now live in a world in which we institutionally organise people to go out and stand by terrible events, genocide, famine and they are in many ways bystanders because their mandate does not allow them sometimes to intervene. So human rights workers experience secondary trauma and the book looks at the ways in which different types of workers try and deal with this. It deals with the kinds of narratives that they tell, the way that they move between betrayal and attachment.

Basically, human rights work seems to begin with caring for a human being and attachment, looking at what is available to solve this problem and it seems to end with a feeling of betrayal or cynicism. So how do people get up in the morning and carry on doing this work in light of this?

What I think is important about this book is that nobody had thought through the cost of having a world full of young people who go out and do this work. These young people, like soldiers too, live off cigarettes, sex and alcohol and the book looks at the impact this life may have on them. It is a short book that is written with a lot of empathy. What leaps out for me particularly is how easy it is for the category of victim, violator and bystander to become interchangeable. So human rights workers who go out into the field and, say, do refugee work, confront people making refugee claims who might be lying. So all of a sudden the victim becomes a deceptive opponent. Then, when agents deny the refugee claim, refugees stalk them, so they become the victims and the refugees the violators!

The book discusses, horrifically at one point, a refugee applicant in Turkey who takes his baby and throws it under a car in front of the human rights worker who wouldn’t give him refugee status. If we draw the world of violence in black and white we tend to miss the complexity of the world we live in. The book also draws attention to a vexing ethical paradox that all human rights workers must face, which is this: whoever puts cruelty first in one’s life and sets out to end it wherever one finds it, also makes himself vulnerable to deep misanthropy. One comes to judge and dislike human beings, even victims, because one sees them as manipulative, whiney or infinitely needy. Confronting one’s own growing misanthropy is one of the most difficult ethical challenges that anybody who works in the field of human rights has to deal with.

That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity by James Dawes

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What about your final book, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness which is edited by Carolyn Forché.

This is a completely different book. It is an edited collection of poetry of those who witnessed violence. It starts with the Armenian genocide and goes to the end of the 20th century and it covers poetry of witness from every major known and often obscure conflict that has happened around the world.

Carolyn Forché is a well-known poet who has had to drink very deeply from the well of sorrow and I respect that greatly because I do that too and I know how hard it is! What I think is very powerful about her book is that her selections are very morally surefooted. There are so many poems, and so much sadness, one can feel overwhelmed when one starts a project like this. But Forché takes to heart the idea that in Hades there is very little light except that which comes from your own story. If you don’t know your own story you get lost in the dark. The poems bring together people who are about to go to their death, but who aren’t willing to give up their story and who leave behind testimony, whether it is Lorca’s last poem before they arrested him in the Spanish Civil War or Akhmatova’s wonderful four-line poem about the Stalin era, where she affirms how she is a witness to the common lot of those times and that place. For people who are not familiar with the range of the poetry of witness, this is incredibly powerful reading, so powerful I read just a few pages each night. The book shows that even in the darkest moments, imagination remains alive. When I read this book, as someone who also writes poetry, I find in it a great cure for misanthropy because it focuses my attention on the grace of the living moment, no matter where it happens, and the thoughtfulness of a human being’s story. Even the people who have no hope of living have the power of witness and they know this.

Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness by Carolyn Forché

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Jonathan Haidt

alexascherson — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:32:13 +0000

Psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt tells us how to be happy – we need to understand that we are not just the rider on the elephant, we are also the elephant, which makes for a great deal of confusion.

Key Points of this Week`s Debate

Last Week's Topic: Israel and Palestine

Jonathan Haidt

alexascherson — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 06:26:31 +0000

The author of The Happiness Hypothesis says there is an eternal battle between the Apollonian spirit of order and the Dionysian spirit of revelry and collective ecstasy. Even though Apollo has the upper hand in the West, you can’t stamp Dionysus out completely.

Tell me why you started with the sayings of the Buddha.

The Dhammapada is one of the greatest psychological works ever written, and certainly one of the greatest before 1900. It is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied. You can turn to it – and people have turned to it throughout the ages – at times of trouble, at times of disappointment, at times of loss, and it takes you out of yourself. It shows you that your problems, your feelings, are just timeless manifestations of the human condition. It also gives specific recommendations for how to deal with those problems, which is to let go, to accept, and to work on yourself. So I think this is a kind of tonic that we ambitious Westerners often need to hear.

Is there a specific saying that you particularly like?

There are two big ideas that I found especially useful when I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis. One is an idea common to most great intellectual traditions. The quote is: ‘All that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.’ It’s not unique to Buddha, but it is one of the earliest statements of that idea, that we need to focus on changing our thoughts, rather than making the world conform to our wishes.

The other big idea is that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. Buddha uses this metaphor: ‘My own mind used to wander wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it, but now I have it tamed, I guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant.’ That’s the most important idea in The Happiness Hypothesis – I just adapted the metaphor slightly. What modern psychology shows us is that our minds are like a small rider on the back of an elephant: the rider doesn’t have that much control even though he thinks that he does.

And once you accept that you are much closer to understanding happiness?

Exactly, because it helps explain why you can’t just resolve to be happy. You can’t just resolve to quit drinking, you can’t resolve to stop and smell the flowers – because the rider does the resolving but it’s the elephant that does the behaving. Once you understand the limitations of your psychology and how hard it is to change yourself, you become much more tolerant of others, because you realise how difficult it is to change anyone…

Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha by A rendering by Thomas Byrom

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Let’s go on to the book about ambition.

Gilbert Brim is possibly the wisest person I’ve ever met face to face. I interviewed him for a report I did for the MacArthur Foundation in 1994. He was running a research network on midlife, on the psychology of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and he had written this wonderful book called Ambition – How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout our Lives. In it, he brought together research as well as his own insights that he had collected in his own 75 or so years. It fits very well with Buddha because Brim recognises that our basic psychology is one of striving. When we get what we hoped for, we don’t celebrate for more than a minute – or a day at most. Right away we ratchet up our expectations, and move on to the next goal. Which is why we’re never really satisfied. The book is about how to be a Westerner who is going to strive, who is going to get great pleasure from work. It’s about how to violate the advice of the Buddha, while still respecting the psychology that the Buddha told us about. Brim has this phrase that I’ve never forgotten: he advises us to live life ‘at the level of just manageable difficulty’. So, if you live life at 50 per cent of your capacity, you’ll be bored and disengaged; if you live it at 100 per cent of your capacity, you’re going to be burned out, but if you live at about 85 per cent on average, with some fluctuations, that’s about the best you can do.

So he’s disagreeing with Buddha?

Let’s say that if the Buddha had been born in the Midwest of the US he would have written Brim’s book. Brim has a Midwesterner’s work ethic, and Americans moralise work quite a lot…so Brim says don’t drop out of the game, play it, but play it so you don’t get trapped, play it wisely, so that you get to enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives by Gilbert Brim

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You wanted to talk about Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness, next.

These are two of the recent books on positive psychology by two of the top researchers. They are very different books and they appeal to very different readers. The Gilbert book is just so much fun to read. He’s one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology – he’s just endlessly witty, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster. He’s describing very good research that he’s done along with my colleague here at the University of Virginia, Tim Wilson. It’s a single big idea that is very, very important, which is that we make a lot of errors in our expectations of what will make us happy, and therefore we make a lot of errors in our choices.

What’s a common mistake that people make?

One of the things Gilbert looks at is consumer behaviour – for example, he was involved in a study where they asked people if they would want to be able to return a product or not. And of course most people would like the option of being able to return a television that they had bought. But those who elected for that option actually then enjoyed their product less – they were less committed to it.

This is the idea that you don’t want too many options?

I think Americans in particular think they want a lot of options – but once you get above a small number, it actually cuts down on our enjoyment. That work was done especially by Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. That is just such a good book…if I’d had six books, I would have included that one. But the main point that Gilbert is making is that in so many of our choices – in work, in love and consumer behaviour – the things we think we want before we make the choice, lead us to choices that make us worse off…

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

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And The How of Happiness is more of a self-help book?

The How of Happiness I would describe as the state of the art in evidence-based positive psychology. Sonja Lyubomirsky has done the best studies on how simple interventions, simple things you can do, on a daily or weekly basis, have measurable effects on your happiness. So if your goal is to actually raise your happiness level, then this is the best book to read – it has very concrete suggestions of what you can do.

Can you give an example?

One example is that doing good deeds for others does raise your happiness – but not if you try to do it every day. If you do it every day, it can get kind of tedious, it can make you resent people. So she found that assigning people to do one or two good deeds a week is more effective than doing it every day.

The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky

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On to your last book, Dancing in The Streets.

This is one of the most original and interesting books I’ve read in the last five years. Barbara Ehrenreich had written a book on war and got intrigued by the rituals and the group cohesion that results from war. So she wrote her next book on this human capacity and even need for group cohesion. What she found is that just about every society, at the time of Western contact, had some way of altering their bodies, and dancing around a fire or totemic object to some sort of rhythmic beat, music or a drum. Almost every traditional society had ways of using motion and music to bind themselves together and to achieve states of collective ecstasy. Europeans were generally disgusted by this, and tried to stamp it out as best they could. She shows how Christianity used to be a danced religion, but in the middle ages that got stamped out too. And what we’re left with is this rather dry and puritanical fear of ecstasy and loss of control.

The reason I have found this book so wise is that I am interested in the possibility that human beings are products of group level selection. That’s the idea that we evolved in part by groups competing with other groups. I’ve come to believe that we have a variety of mechanisms in our minds that allow us to temporarily become like bees in a hive, and these experiences of collective merger are among our most prized and important experiences. Ehrenreich’s book gives a full account, looking at the history, the anthropology and the psychology, of why this is true.

When you read this book, you feel as though you have discovered additional rooms in your mind, or in your heart, that are almost never used. It helps explain things like the rave phenomenon, and it can help explain silly things like line dances – why we like to move in synchrony so much.

But aren’t we moving further away from this, just sitting behind our computers all day long?

Yes – but most likely we will soon find ways to move in synchrony through our computers. One of Ehrenreich’s points is that there is an eternal battle between Apollo and Dionysus – as Nietzsche put it – the Apollonian spirit of order and the Dionysian spirit of revelry and collective ecstasy. Even though Apollo has gotten the upper hand in the West, you can’t stamp Dionysus out completely.

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich

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Adam Haslett

alexascherson — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 03:23:39 +0000

Bestselling writer Adam Haslett says King Lear rejects Cordelia because she addresses his mortal humanity and not his immortal omnipotence – something many people have a problem with. He chooses five books on the origins of evil.

Key Points of this Week`s Debate

Last Week's Topic: Israel and Palestine

Robin Yassin-Kassab (With Video): The Jews are not, in fact, a race – that is a 19th-century idea that comes out of the same environment as fascism. There was never a mass exodus of Jews from Palestine – there was the decapitation of the political class but no exodus. The direct descendents of the Jews of Judea are, in fact, the Palestinians. Ashkenazi Jews are converts from the Khazar Kingdom in Russia (Arthur Koestler wrote a book about this) and the Sephardis are converted North African Berbers and the Yemeni Jews are, obviously, Yemeni. Continue Reading...

Chibli Mallat: On Israel, Kamal Joumblatt proposed that it wasn’t a democracy and that until it becomes one, integrating the Palestinians for whom it has forced an existential denial since its inception in 1948, then it can’t be dealt with as a democracy. His answer politically to the lack of democracy was to say: ‘We’ll solve the problem, the conflict, when we fight for Israel to become a democracy.’ Continue Reading...

Alon Hilu: Shmuel Agnon is the only Israeli writer who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is still regarded as the best writer in modern Hebrew literature. Continue Reading...

Gideon Lichfield: In 1967 when the Israelis had captured all this territory and felt like it was on top of the world, and then there was the question: ‘What should we do with all these territories?’ And Ben-Ami recounts the episode of four men from Mossad who did some research and said, ‘If we hold on to this land it’s going to turn into an albatross around our necks. The Palestinians are interested in negotiating independence and we should negotiate with them. We should give Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians and let them set up a state right now.’ There was some initial interest from the Israeli cabinet in this solution, but within a few weeks, for a number of different reasons, that interest faded and the notion that these territories were of strategic value took hold. And that was it. Continue Reading...

Stephen Walt: Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was Israeli foreign minister in the late 1990s, says in his own book on the conflict, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, that the two American presidents who did the most for Israeli-Arab peace were Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush. He goes on to explain that the reason they were able to make progress is that they didn’t pay as much attention to Israel’s supporters in the United States, and they were able to put pressure on both sides as a result. They were not able to do it hard enough and long enough to produce a final peace deal, but I think there’s no question we made more progress when the US was acting in an even-handed way and willing to twist both Israeli and Palestinian arms. Continue Reading...

Susan Abulhawa: Ramzy Baroud is a political commentator and historian, editor of the Palestine Chronicle and editor of a book called Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion about the events of 2002. He grew up in the Gaza refugee camp and is very familiar with the psychology of the people in the camps – to this day they’re holding out hope and still dreaming of going home. He captures this delightfully and his descriptions of place and people are just magnificent. Continue Reading...

See Also: Fivebooks on American Conservatism with Johnathan Rauch

Adam Haslett

alexascherson — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:14:34 +0000

The bestselling author defines the existential origin of evil as the refusal to acknowledge and confront our own mortality. The murderer, he says, is the person who tries to avoid the inevitability of his own death by taking the power of life into his hands. He chooses five books that give a secular definition of evil, always intertwined with love.

Tell me about your first choice, Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the problem of Evil by Paul W Kahn.

The question concerning the nature of evil is a longstanding one but I would go so far as to say that in this profound book, the philosopher Paul Kahn has gone a very long way in answering it. He argues that in our secular age we have given reason such a dominant place in our understanding of modern politics that we can only understand evil acts by individuals or nations as deficits of rationality. If the Hutus were simply rational, they wouldn’t have killed the Tutsis, and so forth. Thus, our response to what we see as evil takes an essentially pedagogical form. We first try therapy to increase the malefactor’s rational capacity, and when that fails, we turn to legal punishment. But this leaves us with no conceptual framework for distinguishing between the simply bad act and the evil one. In short, secularism has no explanation of evil.

Kahn, who, over his last several books, has been working to articulate what he calls a political theology of modernity, fills that void with his own compelling explanation of the existential origin of evil: evil is the refusal to acknowledge and confront our own mortality. The murderer is the person who tries to avoid the inevitability of his own death by taking the power of life into his hands. Such an avoidance and its resulting violence is not limited to physical abuse or attacks. There is evil inside marriages and families whenever one person tries to crush another mentally in order to ward off a sense of his or her own entrapment in a dying body, ‘a wasting asset’, as Kahn calls it, ‘pregnant with non-being’. Thus, evil and love exist always in close proximity.

Modern politics tries to cabin love and evil as the realm of private life and psychopathology, respectively. But what Kahn shows brilliantly is how quixotic this effort is, because popular sovereigns, just like kings and emperors, still demand allegiance and the sacrifice of their citizens in war if necessary to sustain the state. And ultimately these are not rational choices but acts of love for country that often result in what others regard as acts of evil visited upon them.

It’s difficult to do the book justice in such a short space because it not only raises but brilliantly explores some of the deepest issues of human meaning and political life.

Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the problem of Evil by Paul W Kahn

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Disowning Knowledge by Stanley Cavell.

Stanley Cavell is a philosopher who has written a series of essays in this book on plays written by Shakespeare. At the centre of the book is an essay on King Lear called ‘The Avoidance of Love’. What I find so compelling about it is that it offers a reading of that play which really strikes at the core of everyday experience. He says the reason that King Lear rejects Cordelia in the first scene is not because she’s failed to give him the kind of showy demonstration of love that her sisters did, but that, in fact, she showed him real affection by being honest and clear.

What he can’t stand is the evidence of someone’s actual love and actual call to intimacy. The evil that is at work is the inability to tolerate another person’s recognition of one’s own humanity and mortality. He prefers the false coin of Regan and Goneril’s affections. I think that this is a compelling reading of the play. Cavell also explains why Edmund doesn’t reveal his identity to Gloucester while he is leading his blind father across the heath. To be recognised by his father at that moment would make clear his own lack of trust in him, having not gone to him at the outset of the play to ask about Edmund’s claims about their father.

Do you see this inability to let people get close as a common human trait? For example, I think there are similar types of characters in your book, Union Atlantic, with the 21st-century hard-nosed power-hungry New Yorkers.

Yes, there is a lot in the book about people who are avoiding being recognised by each other. They are not literally in disguise but intimacy is difficult to receive and when it is offered it is sometimes more of a threat than something which people can readily accept.

Disowning Knowledge by Stanley Cavell

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Let’s move on to Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

Paul Kahn’s book suggests that evil derives from the violent avoidance of the realisation of our own mortality and there could be few better examples of this in literature than Melville’s portrait of Ahab in Moby-Dick. On first appearance the evil Ahab represents would seem to be that of obsession and delusion: he’s unable to let go of his need for revenge against the great white whale that took his leg from him and he’s willing to risk the lives of his men to taste that revenge. But the wound, of course, is about more than a missing limb. The whale has robbed him of his own sense of deathlessness and mastery over his world and he would sooner die trying to avoid that recognition than accept it. Others will be caught up by and killed in that very avoidance. The blindness of the powerful is always more dangerous than the blindness of the powerless.

What sets Moby-Dick apart and makes it a great work of literature is that, like Milton in Paradise Lost, Melville paints his villain with such a richness of language that the portrait becomes a kind of celebration of the figure despite his actions. The entire adventure is bathed in reverence for the natural world through which Ahab, Ishmael and the rest of the sailors move. Ishmael’s descriptions sing with awe for the ocean and the whales. And in this light Ahab’s fixation, however distorting it is of life, comes to be seen as a kind of respect for the majesty of the creature he’s pursuing. And so there is nothing simple about his avoidance. It has its own dark dignity. Again, as Kahn points out, evil and love are deeply intertwined.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Buy Moby-Dick (Bantam Classics)

Your next choice is very pertinent – this is Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass.

Yes, this was written before the spill in the gulf but it is a very well-written and detailed account of how countries have been affected and infected by the oil industry and how their politics have been distorted. It covers places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, New Guinea and Ecuador.

They are all places where, particularly with those last three, the power of the corporations is larger and more organised than the structure of governance. It shows the way in which business of that scale, even if practised under what passes for law in those countries, ends up as corruption. So there is this evil of greed and disequilibrium of one substance taking over an entire economy and the effects that has on the possibility of any other kind of development.

What is interesting to me is how different countries deal with this situation. It is so different in Africa to, say, in the United Arab Emirates or in other places where populations are less dense and the existing clan structure means the wealth is spread through a somewhat larger network of people; of course, those people then hire millions of guest workers to perform the labour of their budding service economies, and that creates a different, more nominally legal form of exploitation and neglect.

Do you think the reaction to the BP oil spill is very different because it has happened in the US rather than in a country like Nigeria?

It is certainly true that press coverage changes everything so that the amount of attention it gets is a function of how much media the US has to spend on it. But I think the quantities are so high at the moment that it’s difficult to overestimate the long-term consequences of this event.

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil by Peter Maass

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Your last book is Nick Reding’s Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town.

This is a book which I have just finished reading. I don’t know how much methamphetamine there is in Britain. It’s a drug that in World War II was used by soldiers on both sides of the war in milder doses. It is basically something that keeps you awake and charged up and gives you a high. This book is an account of how it has become a plague of sorts in American farming communities.

There are many reasons for this: the massive consolidation of the farming industry in the last 30 years, increasing dependence on illegal immigrants from Mexico for things like meat-packing, Mexico being the place where most meth is now produced. The drug has really rotted away towns that were already damaged by unemployment and lower educational levels.

What is strange is that it has such a different profile from the way that Americans are used to thinking about drugs. Normally drugs are associated with urban communities, primarily African-Americans. The vast majority of meth users are white, it is out in these rural communities and for a long time, unlike other drugs, much of it was produced domestically. It’s an awfully damaging drug which burns people out very quickly and destructively and is highly addictive. It began as a working-class drug to keep people awake but now it is sold in much more potent, pure form for the high rather than the ability to concentrate.

With these five books we have looked at the many different faces of evil. What fascinates you about evil as a subject?

As you may be able to tell from my descriptions, it was Out of Eden that got me thinking about it most forcefully. It echoed Stanley Cavell’s point about the avoidance of love as a source of evil, and it made it clear that we really don’t have a coherent way of conceptualising evil in our secular, rationalist culture. And yet we all have an intuition that there is such a category of action, something that exceeds mere bad behaviour or selfishness. Hannah Arendt’s thesis that at the bottom of evil lies banality seems too thin a description of the phenomenon to account for its psychological force. It’s a messier business, more closely tied to everyday life. And to that extent I suppose these books represent more than anything what I’ve been dwelling on lately, perhaps in preparation for what I’ll write next.

Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town by Nick Reding

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