Category: books

Slowly making my way through Ernst Cassier’s “An Essay on Man” and ran across this gem which seems particularly useful in our attempts to recover from fake news.

I picked up 6-7 books (and a couple pounds of coffee) from my favorite local bookstore in the height of quarantine to help support them while everything was closed.  Three of them were for me: Hillbilly Elegy, Appalacian Reckoning (notes on those two coming later) and The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry.  I have (and love) several books of Berry’s poetry but the first of his prose I have read.  I will admit to identifying with his work in a way that I don’t with other authors or poets, simply becaise we are both from Kentucky.

I recall having heard the book mentioned in a podcast or something else I had read…but honestly I am not sure what I thought it was about.  When I bought it, I didn’t know it was contained his reflections on race, written orginally  in 1968 with an extensive afterword added in the eighties.

I haven’t looked into other critical reviews of this book, so I don’t know where it fits amongst other more recent books on race issues, nor what may be considered a problem in his views.  That being said, I did find it a compelling read, with a few spots of trouble.  Its rather short, but packs in a lot of ideas.  I’ll only touch on a few of them here.

Berry starts with an extensive telling of his own personal story and two of the black people that were most important to him growing up, Nick and Aunt Georgie.  I got the sense reading this part that he was both trying to establish some credibility, but more so to establish some context for his analysis and reccomendations that come later.  One theme that appears over and over is that whites have also been hurt by our racism (hence the title of the book I believe).  I don’t think Berry is in any way trying to minimize the greater hurt that blacks have and continue to experiences as a resut of racism, but rather to give a reason to white’s to change other than “white guilt”.  Berry builds a really compelling case for diversity, not built on platitudes or virtue signaling, but rather on his own experience of seeing the world through Nick’s eyes:

This much is clear to me: insofar as I am capable of feeling such pleasures as I believe Nick felt, I am strong; insofar as I am dependent on pleasures on the pleasures made available by my salary and the things I own, I am weak.  I feel much more secure in those pleasures for which I am dependent on the world, as Nick was for most of his, than in those for which I am dependent on the government or on a power company or on the manufacturers of appliances.

This is where I felt a bit of unease, concerned that Berry might be heading into some sort of “magical negro” territory or more generally romanticising the poor.  But my read of Berry through the book as a whole is that this is not that.  Berry recognizes that he is better off having had shared, deep experiences with Nick.  Those experiences have made him better than he would otherwise be by letting him see things from another perspective.  I do wonder what Nick might say if asked whether he was better off for his relationship with a young Wendell Berry?

A second theme which stood out to me is Berry’s idea that any solution to racism will start with the individual:

I beleive that the experience of all honest men stands, like these books, against the political fantasy that deep human problems can be satifactorily solved by legislation.  On the contrary, it is likely that the best and least oppresive laws come as a result or the reflection of honest solutions that men have already made in their own lives.  The widespread assumption that men can be set free or dignified or improved by monkeying with some mere aspect of their lives – politics, or economics or technology – promises no solution, but only an unlimited growth of the public apparatus.

This really got my recovering anarcho-libertarian jucies flowing ;-).  From what I can tell, the idea of systemic racism has only recently entered the public conciousness, so I don’t think Berry had anything to say on that idea.  If it he had known about it however, I am guessing from the above that he might see some of the proposed solutions to systemic racism at best as partial remedies.  This is not to say that systemtic racism isn’t a thing.  Rather it is to say that if we want to actually make progress in reducing racism, we have to address both what is in our hearts as well as how we build our institutions.

The afterword outlines four specific problems that Berry sees in actually making progress to resolve racism (with 20 more years of life experience to inform him).  He offers no solutions, rather he hopes to highlight how complicated the problems are so that we aren’t fooled into thinking there are easy solutions.

Since my last post, I have been trying to do more than just read and think and write.  I did march this past Sunday in downtown Cincinnati.  I was motivated by a combination of wanting to see for myself what was going on in these marches and of wanting to do something / anything (more than read and think and write).  I am happy to have done it.  I felt safe the entire time.  I didn’t agree with everything I heard or read, but I got a better (albeit small) sense of what animated those that I marched with.  I also attended a Crittenden city council meeting.  That was less of a life experience, but was still worth doing, simply to see the wheels of government working at the most local and personal of levels.

Reading the Hidden Wound has made me realize that I lack any deep shared experiences or ongoing relationships with anyone of color.  I don’t feel guilty, but rather less than I could be.  I feel blind to an entire way of seeing and experiencing the world.  My instinct to take action kicks in, but I know I need to be careful here – the chance for a mis step seems extremely high.  I am OK with making a mistake, but not with unintentionally hurting someone.  Suggestions are sincerely welcome.

Yes, I read a book about a pandemic during a pandemic. How unoriginal. I heard about Station Eleven on a podcast (forget which one) and it seemed interest and different enough to give it a try. I was looking for some fiction so decided to give it a try. I bought it as an Apple Book (enjoying that platform more and more for my ebook reading) and read it over the course of a few weeks.

Overall it was a good read. Easy to read and the characters were interesting. Mandel uses timeline jumps to great effect, filling the reader in on key background elements from the past immediately before they become relevant to the “main” timeline.

I would say this is a rather hopeful / cheery apocalyptic novel, if there is such a thing. But then again, my baseline comparison is The Road. Not many books more grim than that. Like most good fiction of the genre the story is really about how people relate to each other, in this case using a disease that wipes out 98% of the planet in what seems to be a few weeks, as a backdrop to explore how memory works, why we do/don’t get along with others and the importance of community / tribe.

Since finishing it, I discovered a more recent book from the same author, that uses some of the same characters, but is not a sequel or prequel. Rather she characterized it as an alternate timeline. Reminds me of using the same RPG character in different campaigns. Will have to add Glass Hotel to my list for the next time I am looking for some fiction.

What started as some good posting momentum at the start of the year has slowed slightly. Pandemics will do that I suppose. I would like to say that I have been journaling a lot, but that would be a lie. At the start of things I spent far too much screen time on twitter and reddit. Not sure whether I was trying to actually determine whether this was the actual end of the world or simply basking in the doomer glory of it all. Probably a mixture of both. Fortunately I was able to break out of that cycle, a testament to how quickly the thrilling (even the thrilling for the wrong reasons) can become commonplace, and was able to get back to reading.

I am changing my approach to these posts since I was noticing some resistance to completing them. Rather than a “review” which connotes something of value that I add on top, I am framing these as simply notes – a marker of the books I have read and a few of the impressions I am leaving with.

I first heard of the poet David Whyte on a Sam Harris podcast that I listened to on the way in to work. That should place it in time well enough. I really liked the way he described reality as the frontier that exists between the “self” and the “world” and so I ordered his most recent prose book from my favorite local bookshop and picked it up a few weeks later. Another placement for when I started on this.

The three marriages is not about serial divorce nor polygamy, but rather the relationship one has with one’s spouse, with one’s work and with one’s self. Right off the bat Whyte points out that most people’s first experience of marriage is the one that they interrupt, specifically first children. The images we carry from our childhood of our parents’ marriage stay with us and inform how we see the three marriages throughout our lives.

As a poet, he makes many references to the poetry of others as well as ahis own. In first talking about the marriage to the self, he cites The Prelude by Wordsworth, with whom he shares a particular affinity, calling out the line:

I made no vows, but vows / Were made for me

The Prelude, Wordsworth

to make the point that life comes to find us as much as we go out to find it, but that can only happen if we are awake and aware to the world around us, stopping for even just a minute to pay attention to something besides our selves. He expands on this point is his own work Everything is Waiting for You

To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

Everything is Waiting for You, Whyte

He draws this conclusion about the work we have to do, as well as what is not up to us, in finding a “great work”:

To glimpse our vocation, we must learn how to be sought out and found by a work as much as we strive to identify it ourselves. We must make ourself findable by being seen; to do that we must hazard ourselves and make ourselves available to the world we want to enter.

The Three Marriages, Whyte

This passage struck me since it speaks directly to something I have more and more trouble with as I get older: trying something new and f*(&ing it up. This is an echo of Whyte’s idea from the podcast of reality being a frontier, a conversation, between the self and the world. As I look for great work, as much as I need to learn new skills and new ways of being, I need to put myself in (potentially unfamiliar or uncomfortable) situations even more to let a great work find me.

Whyte touches on the role that worry plays in self discovery, specifically the thing that we I do to battle with worry: make to do lists:

Millenia of worrying under night skies have brought human beings to the point where the complexities of our contemporary societies have almost reached a breaking point. In many ways, our to-do lists have become the postmodern equivalent of the priest’s rosary, the lama’s sutra or the old prayer book – keeping a larger, avalanching reality at bay. Above all, the to-do list keeps the evil of not-doing at bay, a list that many of us like to chant and cycle through religiously as we make our way to work through the commute.

The Three Marriages, Whyte

I totally saw myself in this. When I used to actually drive into the office, “chanting” my to do list was a regular pastime. One of the hidden blessings of CQ (COVID-19 Quarantine) has been my lack of focus on my to do list. There hasn’t been as much to do, and what was on there hasn’t seemed as important. I still check it, check things off and add things now and again, but it is not with the same religious ferocity as “before”. I have not quite arrived at comfort with the “evil of not-doing”, but I can feel myself getting closer. A few more weeks of quarantine and I think I might “arrive” somewhere (which probably means I am fooling myself).

In a chapter on the marriage with work, Whyte takes on the paradox of what seems to be vs. what is about the life of a writer:

From the outside, especially to those that long for a more artistic life, a writer looks to be involved in what looks like an unscheduled imaginative adventure, but what she needs above all else is structure and a goodly amount of space within that structure. It takes a good settled sense of what we are about, first to think that we deserve the time and the to arrange our days so that what we want comes about.

The Three Marriages, Whyte

When I am being honest I know that I am still looking for that settled sense of what I am about and that my to do list is the armor that I put up to avoid not-doing long enough to find it. The hardest part seems to be the feeling that after all this time I should already know what I am about. The sense that I knew once and it either wasn’t real, has left me, or that simply the frontier between my “self” and the “world” has shifted (I like that explanation most of all).

The Three Marriages is gently disturbing. White uses language to point to things that language can’t describe directly. While that is the gift of poetry, the long form of the Three Marriages helped me, who is “poetry-challenged”, to see some things I had been missing and realize some things I already knew.

I have been and still am a “fan” of Buddhism. I think I am allowed to be that and still be an Episcopalian. I think it started listening to Tim Ferris’s talk about the benefits of meditation. I’m not ready to fly to Tibet and renounce all of my earthly possessions, but I do think there are some interesting ways of thinking about things that the Buddhist tradition has to offer.

So it was when I started reading Reboot that I was interested in Jerry’s connection to what he learned from his teacher and added a few of the books he mentioned to my to-read list. It was only a few days later that I found myself in the place where the universe gives me a sign of what to read next when I saw one of the books on the shelf: When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.

I am not struggling right with anything specifically right now, but that’s not what this book is about. While it can help you with a crisis, although probably not if you read it in the middle of one, the essays in this book more wake you up to the idea that things are falling apart all the time. That’s the way of things. Living is dying. It’s only our clinging to the way they are or the way we think they should be that causes problems.

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off-limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

There were a few essays that stood out to me. Three for ideas I found helpful and even comforting. And one that I am still struggling with.

The first in the helpful / comforting category is “The Six Kinds of Loneliness”. The message in this essay resonated with me since it gets right to the heart of how I feel before I start to subconsciously (although more a more, day by day I can at least notice it) look for a distraction.

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we invite in….

…When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and rolling loneliness the turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

The 6 kinds of this cool loneliness are:

• Less desire: the willingness to be be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up
• Contentment: giving up the feeling that there is being able escape from our loneliness will bring any lasting happiness, joy or sense of well being
• Avoiding unnecessary activity: notice when we are keeping ourselves busy simply as a way to avoid the pain of being lonely
• Complete discipline: being ready at any opportunity to come back to the present moment
• Not wandering the world of desire: noticing when we look for food, friends, entertainment and instead relating directly to things as they are
• Not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts: not hiding in the joy of our own inner dialog when things get lonely.

The second helpful essay was about Nonaggression and the Four Maras. This one spoke to me since it gave a label to all the ways I have tried to hide various fears and avoid what is in front of me. The four maras are:

• Devaputura Mara involves seeking pleasure.
• Skandha Mara has to do with how we constantly try to reinvent ourselves.
• Klesha Mara is all about how we use our emotions to stay asleep.
• Yama Mara is fear of death.

I have been visited by all of these Maras at various times and have not responded well. I think that knowing their names will help me see them more easily…and invite them to tea.

The final helpful / comforting essay was the final one in the book called The Path is the Goal. This was a nice wrap up that basically says…where ever you go, there you will be. The path is not preset. There isn’t a manual. The path presents itself in each moment and our only job is to be awake in that moment and do the best we can. Everything is a teacher.

The one chapter I struggled with was on Hopelessness and Death. Big surprise, eh? It actually wasn’t so much the death part as the hopelessness. Chodron seems to be arguing in favor of taking up the position of hopelessness, as it represents a rejection of how things are and/or a clinging to an idea of how they might be. Perhaps its my “American” showing through, but I struggle with the idea of hopelessness being a superior position to having and hope. How would anything ever get better if people had no hope. No clear idea of a better tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, I know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I also know that things are better by many measures today than they were 200 years ago largely based on hope and skill. Perhaps I am missing the point. Or I still have some more work to do. Both are probably true.

Overall, I enjoyed When Things Fall Apart very much and would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the pathless path, the groundless ground and the ways we think ourselves into knots.

I am going to attempt to keep better track of the books I have read with quick posts here. These won’t be full reviews per se, but rather simply a note (perhaps just to myself) that I finished it and a few of the things I am taking away. The idea is that a year or more into the future when I am trying to remember either the title of a book I read or where I picked up an idea, I can just search my own blog. Rather lazy I know and another outsourcing of memory to the machines, but what can I say.

A colleague at work reccomended the reboot.io podcast to me several months ago. It sounded interestin so I added it to my feed, but didn’t get around to listening to an episode until over the Christmas break. Wow. I was interested in the subject mentioned in the title (reclaiming the shadow) but didn’t expect to hear what I did. I had to know more.

Turns out the podcast is a promo for a book of the same name, so a few days later I was absolutely devouring this book. The big idea I walked away from is that many (all?) of us bring our unresolved childhood issues to work for the very simple reason that that’s where most of us are most of the time so where else do we have to work them out. I am a little learly of the line of thinking that blames everything on childhood, but the way that Jerry tells the story drew me in. It’s very personal.

Another amazing take away are the questions that are peppered throughout the book, some in line with the text and some at the end as invitations to journal. Here are some of my favorites:

• What am I not saying that needs to be said? What am I saying (in words or deeds) that is not being heard? What’s being said that I am not hearing?
• How would I act were I to remember who I am? What choices would I make, what actions would I take, if I regularly said the things that needed to be said?
• When our employees and colleagues leave our sides and our company, what do I want them to say about our time together?
• The question “Does my life have meaning” is really another set of questions “In what ways have I been brave? and “How have I been kind?”
• How will I know my work is done?
• What would it feel like to not have to know?
• What might my reluctance about looking inward say about the protective patterns of my life? How might such reticense be shaping my organization and our ability to consider alternative possibilities?

If you are looking for something to shake you out of our ledership rut and set you in the direction of doing the hard, but meaningful work of self discovery with through an amazing combination of real stories from the front lines of startups, developmental psychology and budhism, then this is for you.

I don’t consider myself a philosopher.  I’m more of more a “fan of philosophy” to borrow a phrase from my favorite podcaster.  I still have to look up the definition of meta-physics and epistemology.  I am not sure of the difference off the top of my head between existentialism and positivism.  But that doesn’t keep me from following along, perhaps in the same way that a dog enjoys television.
My latest jaunt into the philosophical realm was “The Myth of the State” by Erst Cassier.  This was a HBP find that I must admit I bought completely based on the title (give me a break, it was something like $3).  What I thought Ersnt would teach me is why the state is an illusion of our collective conscious or unconscious mind.  It doesn’t really exist.  It’s just some people telling other people what to do.  What the book is actually about turned out to be quite different, but just as interesting.
The Myth of the State was published posthumously, and with a little controversy about how it was finished.  It came on the heels of Cassier’s blockbuster (if there can be such a thing in the 20th century as a philosophical blockbuster) Essay on Man (which I happened to add to my tsundoku pile a few weeks back).  In this book, Cassier gives a rather complete (especially for only 300 pages) and fascinating account of how the state has used myth to propagate itself.  If it were written today it might be called something like “Lies the state tells you (for your own good of course)”.
For this review, I will give a brief overview of the first 90% of the book to focus on the concluding chapter.  I think its extremely relevant to what I sense is going on these days.
The opening section attempts to answer the basic question “what is myth” and comes to the conclusion that myth is the stories we create to explain things when we don’t have any better way to understand them. I’ve come to realize how important story or narrative is over the past few years.  Harari argues in Sapiens that its the “one thing” that allowed humans to rule the world (while everything else carries our stuff).  At the top level, narrative seems to decompose into rational stories (aka hypothesis) and mythical stories (aka fairy tales). Cassier completes the opening section with an exploration of the impact that myth has on language, psychology and social life.
With that basis set, the center section, which is the bulk of the book, tells of the different twists and turns in the development of state myths from the time of Plato, who propagated the idea of the “legal” state through to Machiavelli’s contribution of removing the connection between religion and transcendent order (as an aside, the two chapters on Machiavelli contained some of the most interesting analysis of his work that I have ever read) through to the Romantic’s reversal of the Enlightenment view that myth “had been a barbarous thing, a strange and uncouth mass of confused ideas and gross superstitions, a mere monstrosity” to the view that myth was “the mainspring of human culture”.
The final section sets up the few philsophers and thinkers that, in Cassier’s view had the biggest impact on 20th century political myth (aka those that we can thank for the mess we are in).  He begins with a discussion of Carlyle’s theory that Hero Worship is “oldest and firmest element in a man’s social and political life”.  From there, it was just a hop skip and a jump to some of the terrible ideas put forward by Gobineau on race worship and the totalitarian race.
From there of course we end up at Hegel.  I will set the time aside to read what he had to say for himself one day, but I do get the sense that I understand some of Hegel’s ideas better after reading Cassier’s synopsis.  Cassier posits that the form of Hegel’s arguments had for more impact than their content.  What’s more Cassier is of the opinion that Hegel himself would have strenuously objected to the arguments made by people using the form of his arguments after his death (if he could find a way to project from the Absolute Idea…).  That being said, I still can’t get my head around Hegel’s notions about the state being the ultimate expression of freedom.  Perhaps this is an example of what he means that philosophy is only a product of its time, and can’t project forward or backward.
Now to the final chapter.  I am not exaggerating when I say that the concluding chapter hit me so hard I was contemplating the myth of HPB actually being a portal from another universe that sends me things I am supposed to read.  It lays out in 20 or so pages everything that I have experienced in politics as exemplified by the current election cycle.  I am going to attempt to communicate the idea Cassier is trying to get across in this chapter (and arguably in the book overall) with as little commentary as possible.  Just enough to connect the thoughts without just quoting the whole chapter and making a TLDR post RTLDR.
As you read this think about what you’ve just witnessed.  Regardless of who you plan to vote for tomorrow (I’m out of state and darn it if I didn’t forget to absentee ;-), think about the larger context in which this “discernment” process has occurred.  Think about how much or little real content there has been.  Think about how often emotion was employed instead of reason.  Think about who has benefited.  Then let me know if you see any parallels between what Cassier was warning about at the start of WWII and what we’ve all just witnessed from both “sides”.
The chapter starts with a discussion about how “unusual and dangerous situations” drive “modern” man to abandon reason and resort to myth.

The call for leadership only appears when a collective desire has reached overwhelming strength and then, on the other hand, all hope of filling this desire in an ordinary and normal way, have failed.  At these times the desire is not only keenly felt, but personified.  It stands before the eyes of man in a concrete, plastic, individual shape.  The intensity of the collective wish is embodied in the leader. The former social bonds – law, justice and constitutions – are declared to be without any value.

He then claims that “modern” man is too sophisticated to buy into the “simple” myths of our “savage” ancestors:

If modern man no longer believes in natural magic, he has by no means given up the belief in a sort of ‘social magic’.  If a collective wish is felt in its whole strength and intensity, people can be persuaded that it only needs the right man to satisfy it.

Cassier moves on to point to what he views as the most significant development in the 20th century relative to political myth:

…our modern political myths appear indeed as a very strange and paradoxical thing.  For what we find in them in the blending of two activities that seem to exclude each other.  The modern politician has to combine himself into two entirely different and incompatible functions. [He is the priest of a new, entirely irrational and mysterious religion.  But when he has to defend and propagate this religion he proceeds very methodically.  Nothing is left to chance’ every step is well prepared and premeditated.  It is this strange combination that is the most striking feature of our political myths.
Myth has always been described as the result of an unconscious activity and as a free product of imagination.  But here we find myth made according to plan.]
Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon – as machine guns or airplanes.  This is the new thing – a thing of crucial importance.

Cassier’s point seems to be that over time, rationality has replaced myth as the primary narrative structure.  This has happened everywhere except in the realm of politics, where myth still reigns supreme, except now we have scientifically created myths.  Myths on steroids.  GMO myths.
Cassier outlines three changes that happened to allow this myth making machine to come into existence:

1. Change the function of language from conveying meaning (i.e. semantics)  to conveying emotion.  Anyone triggered much these days?
2. Create of new “magical” rites that “lull asleep all our active forces, our power of judgement and critical discernment, and take away our feeling of personal responsibility.”  Remember…you have to vote…or else you won’t get your sticker. 
3. Reinstate “divination” since “Prophecy is an essential element in the new technique of rulership.  The most improbable or impossible promises are made.” Which do you trust more: campaign promises or liars?

The book ends with this, actually somewhat hopeful, view:

I have no doubt that later generations will look back at many of our political systems with the same feeling as a modern astronomer studies an astrological book or a modern chemist an alchemistic treatise.

And, echoing Francis Bacon’s advice that “victory over nature can only be won by obedience”,  he even starts us down the path of how to get there:

We must learn how to obey the laws of the social world before we can undertake to rule it.

Maybe we all need to become at least a fan of philosophy.