Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide

A friend recently took a class with Bikku Analayo at the Barre Center For Buddhist studies.  The class was based on the Analayo's interpretation of the Satipatthana-sutta -- the Buddha's discourse on the foundations or establishment of mindfulness.  As both a scholar and a monk, this is not the first time Analayo has written about the Satipatthana-sutta.  This time though, instead of focusing on academic questions of textual scholarship, or comparing the Chinese and Pali version of the sutta, Analayo has written a book to help us put the instructions in the sutta into practice.  The book is tremendously helpful in doing this.  The Satipatthana-sutta itself talks about various components of mindfulness, or various things one can be mindful of, but it doesn't really make clear how they are linked and why these are the particularly important ones.  In addition, like other suttas, the terminology used can be a bit arcane.  In other words, there's quite a distance to cover between the text and a set of meditation instructions.   

Since I haven't read them, I can't compare Analayo's success in covering this distance to older and more traditional approaches.  For me though, this book really brought a fairly obscure text alive.  Analayo turns the sutta into a connected set of meditation instructions that build upon one another as they go.  The instructions are clear and easy to follow, especially if you use the guided meditations that accompany the book.  There's also a lot of wisdom and experience contained in the book's extended reflections on what the various meditations are meant to offer us.  For example, meditating on the body as simply composed of skin, flesh, and bones can help us avoid becoming obsessed with our physical appearance.  Meditating on what becomes of the body after we die can help us face our own mortality.  Focusing on feeling can help us see how transitory all our reactions are.  Etc ... 

As the book progresses, we move into more and more abstract contemplations, and as an inevitable result, deeper and deeper into the Buddhist interpretation of meditative experience.  In fact, by the end, we are really getting a crash course in Buddhist philosophy or religious doctrine by contemplating the five hindrances and the seven factors of awakening.  Of course, as one one of the world's great spiritual traditions, Buddhism has a lot to offer.  In fact, for me at least, it pretty clearly has the most to offer.  And Analayo's explanations of the way the various lists that so obsess orthodox Buddhism complement one another is very insightful.  But I still believe that we should be mindful of our movement along a continuum from observation to interpretation.  That our feelings change and our body is composed of the same stuff as everything else seems to belong as firmly on the side of observation as anything could.  That a certain five or seven states of mind form the on and off ramps of the road to a fairly mysterious endpoint called awakening seems to me to belong equally firmly on the side of religious interpretation.  Which ultimately makes this one of the most explicitly religious meditation books I've read.  This is not meant to be a critique, but an observation.  Analayo is upfront about the establishment of mindfulness being only one aspect of the soteriological path to awakening.  In other words, he is guiding us towards establishing a specific type of mindfulness, focused on specific aspects of our experience, that will lead us towards specific moral and philosophical conclusions.  We have to remember to evaluate this practice and its fruit based on our own experience of it, just as we evaluate everything else in life.  

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After reading The Good Lord Bird, I felt inspired to go back and read the classic it reminded me of.  Or perhaps it was re-read; I don't have any memory of this book from high school, and perhaps they had stopped assigning it by the time I got there (towards the end of the neolithic revolution). It's a thoroughly entertaining read.  There are some spots (mosty the parts with Tom Sawyer) where it drags things out for longer than I would have thought necessary.  Though maybe this pacing is appropriate for a novel about floating down the Mississippi on a raft?  I also really enjoyed the vernacular language of it and plan to incorporate "warn't" into my daily speech.

The basic story is simple.  A 14 year old Huck Finn runs away from his drunken and dangerous Pap near Hannibal, Missouri.  In his escape, he crosses paths with Jim, a negro slave who has run away from the family who took Huck in when his father proved to be a drunk.  Together, the two of them float down the big river 1,100 miles to somewhere near Point Coupee Parish, Lousianna, on a homemade raft, having various adventures along the way.  At the end of this journey the two stumble upon the family farm of Huck's good friend Tom Sawyer, and Jim is recaptured.  Since Tom arrives soon after for a visit with his Aunt, he and Huck lay a plan to free Jim and let him escape to the North.  The plan is an epic and hilarious failure, and leads to Jim's recapture, but it turns out that he is actually not a runaway slave after all.  His former owner declared him a free man when she recently passed away, a fact which Tom knew all along.

Thematically, the novel is one long sardonic take on the idiocy of antebellum South.  The characters Huck and Jim come across in their travels range from narrow-minded to mendacious.  And while some of them may mean well and even help them out, there are no heroes along the way.  Which observation indirectly brings us to the central controversy that today surrounds this once banned classic -- is it a racist book?  

To begin with, true to its vernacular, it features the N word prominently.  Since that alone will keep you off the college cheer squad these days, we're not off to a good start.  In addition, the few slaves depicted in the book are uniformly portrayed as uneducated and superstitious, often with a tinge of a mocking or comic element to them.  Of course, some of this can be defended as Twain accurately picturing the realities of the language and culture he grew up in.  But using black characters as comic relief is harder not to see as anything except playing off and reinforcing every stereotype of the era -- minstrelsy!  However, when you consider in addition that most white characters in the novel often see even less flattering, and equally stereotypical, portrayals, you might be willing to say that the novel depicts a racist world, but is not itself racist.  

However, this lukewarm defense seems to miss a key point.  The central tension that holds the whole book together is the 'sivilization' of young Huck Finn.  At the outset, Huck chafes at the strictures imposed by his guardian the widow.  Under her roof, he can't cuss, has to use a knife and fork, wear shoes, and go to church.  His escape down the river with Jim liberates him from all of these rules that just seem like nonsense to a 14 year old boy who loves to be in the backwoods.  At the end of the journey though, it seems likely that Tom's aunt will end up adopting Huck and finishing what the widow started.  Set within this context, all the Huck's many reflections on what to do about Jim take on a special significance.  On the one hand, Huck knows that he's supposed to follow the moral rules these women lay down.  These include not lying, and not stealing, both of which he is contravening by not turning in a runaway slave.  So Huck constantly feels guilty for helping Jim.  On the other hand, he and Jim have a great time together, and Huck knows he's a true friend who has bailed him out many times over during their adventures.  In other words, his first hand experience of Jim finds a full human being, and not a piece of property.  So throughout the whole novel, Huck has to struggle against what he sees as the morally correct thing to do -- turn Jim in -- which constantly wraps his teenage conscience in a knot.  He can't ever bring himself to quite do it, but he knows it's wrong and attributes this moral failure to his terrible upbringing.  

I think it's impossible not to see Huck's journey as gradually moving away from the absurd rules of 'sivilization' and towards an appreciation of the humanity of Jim.  Huck is taught to be a racist, but he fails at it.  And we see the entire process by which a young mind wrestles with and overcomes the stereotypes it began with.  This culminates in the tension of the final jailbreak.  Tom Sawyer concocts an elaborate and almost quixotic plan for freeing Jim.  It takes weeks to prepare.  But of course, for him it's all fun and games, since he knows that Jim is already free.  Huck, Jim, and the reader, however, don't know what Tom knows.  Which makes the ridiculous plan, and the too many pages spilled on its comic execution, a double edged sword.  It's funny and absurd and makes an adult Jim seem crazy for going along with some adolescent fantasy.  But you, Huck, and Jim can also all feel the frustration with this absurd plan build into a panic -- stop fucking around or they're going to sell Jim down the river tomorrow dammit!  So in the end, you get to really feel the commitment of Huck Finn.  He's going to lie, cheat, and steal from people who have treated him well.  He's even going to risk getting himself killed.  Now that he's made up his mind, he is going to do whatever it takes to free his friend Jim, 'sivilization' be damned.  It's hard to see how Twain could have more thoroughly dramatized the process of overcoming of the racial attitudes of the day.

Anatomy of Breathing

About six months ago I started to explore non-dual awareness by using Michael Taft's collection of guided meditations.  Each of these videos starts with an initial period of deep belly breathing where you focus on making the exhale longer than the inhale.  Initially, manipulating the breath in this way felt effortful, but once I got the hang of it, I found it shockingly and viscerally relaxing.  The effect was powerful enough that just about every morning I found myself wondering what the hell was going on and remembering that I had seen physical therapist and shoulder guru Eric Cressey recommend a book about the anatomy of breathing.  

So finally my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up Blandine Calais-Germain's book.  It is just exactly what it says it is.  She goes through all the terminology that a physical therapist or voice coach would use to describe types of breathing (tidal volume, inhale and exhale reserve volume) and then goes on to describe and provide an anatomical sketch for every muscle and bone that has any role in the process of breathing.  Since I knew next to nothing about this stuff, I found it surprising and enlightening -- it's amazing how much is involved in this simple motion that we take for granted.  The book ends with a series of exercises you can do that allow you to actually feel the action of each of the muscles involved.  

Overall, I found it well worth reading.  If you're a physical therapist or have already studied this anatomy for some other reason, I imagine that it would mostly be just a review.  My only disappointment was that there weren't more exercises that describe specific breathing techniques from various traditions -- meditation, yoga, opera, martial arts.  She mentions these traditions in passing during her anatomical explanations, but it would have been great to see a survey of those techniques linked directly to the anatomy they use.  

The Lion in the Living Room

We just got cats, so I thought I'd read journalist Abigail Tucker's history of the domestication of felis lybica.  It's a quick and breezy read with a lot of interesting anecdotes and some science tossed in along the way.  While she only has partial success in making the argument of the subtitle: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over The World, that's kinda beside the point for a book that just wants to humorously explore our relationship with our feline friends.  There are chapters on what we know about the history of cat domestication, the effects of cats on the natural environment (not good) as they've propagated around the world, toxoplasmosis, the effects of modern cat breeding, and finally, on cat's conquest of the intertubes.  Generally recommended if you are a cat person.  And if you are a dog person, what's your problem?

The Gateless Gate

It seems that the only good way to write about a koan is to produce another koan.  At least, this is what you might conclude from the format of this classic collection of Zen koans and commentary.  Obviously I'm not up to that task, so you'll have to settle for some more standard Western conceptual fare here.

Mumokan composed The Gateless Gate in 1228.  He collected 48 koans from various sources that he was using as a teaching aid and added a bit of his own cryptic commentary and a short poem to each.  I'd imagine there are many translations of this base work into English, but the one I read was made in 1979 by Yamada Koun.  Like Mumokan, since he was using the series of koans as a means of instruction, he added his own commentary.  It's a lot less cryptic than Mumokan's, but of course he is still faced with the same basic problem that the core goal is to use words to go beyond words.  

Despite this, I learned a ton about the particularities of the Zen mindset from the book.  In fact, I find myself drawn to this type of mystical non-dual practice.  It has a much looser feel than other Buddhist sects' obsession with lists and precepts.  As a result, it comes off as much more philosophical as well, probably in part because it resonates with the anti-systematic style of my favorite Western philosophers like Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Spinoza.  The ongoing question is always how to conceive everything as one, and one as everything.  In some sense, the "non-dual" probably refers as much to the duality of the one and the many as it does to the subject and the object, so it's important to read that formula both forwards and backwards.  Yamada begins to make clear that if all the varied events of the phenomenal world share an essential nature, this unity also spontaneously expresses itself as every phenomenal instance.  It's a tricky and paradoxical idea that never lets you rest because it inherently involves a sort of circulation or movement.  Presumably this goes a ways towards accounting for Zen's artistic and literary fecundity.

I haven't really spent much time trying to use the koans as an actual meditation technique.  But I have felt a hint of how this might work by following the advice he gives to simply bring a koan to mind during meditation or even as you go about daily life.  

 

A monk asked Joshu in all earnestness, 'Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?'  Joshu replied, 'Mu!'  

The more I noodle that one, the more I feel it open up like a flower whose beauty I hadn't noticed at first.  Does the funny looking dog sitting in the doorway at Med Mix have Buddha nature right now?  Can you have Buddha nature, or is it something that you are?  How am I different from the dog?  What exactly does negation have to do with emptiness?  Maybe I'll have to update this review when I've got it all figured out.

 

#reread

The Name of the Wind

The first volume of Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles was an entertaining action adventure story.  The writing is a cut (or several) above the typical fantasy fare about magic and dragons and damsels in distress.  In fact, it has all of these, but it manages to put a slightly ironic distance between itself and the worn out tropes of the genre by using a frame story -- the main character relates his own autobiography to a scribe in grandiose and yet self-deprecating fashion.  It also sets itself apart by treating magic as if it were a fully explainable science.  Most of volume 1 is set in The University, the sole institution of higher learning in a superstitious medieval world.  There they teach various arcane disciplines like naming and alchemy and such.  This gives Rothfuss the chance to elaborate on how magic and dragons actually work instead of settling for the usual mysteriousness of the genre.

All that said, it's a bit long-winded as action adventure books go, and doesn't really seem to have any of the novel ideas I love in science fiction or fantasy.  So I don't think I'm going to read volume 2. 

Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason

Generally, I'm a fan of Manuel DeLanda, but this book was a disappointment.  After reading Difference and Repetition, I really wanted to pursue two ideas that were touched on fairly briefly there -- the idea of the simulacrum and its relation to simulation, and the idea that Kant takes for granted the conscious unity of a priori synthetic reason, precluding its emergence from the interaction of smaller, passive, unconscious syntheses.  You can see from the title why I picked this volume off the shelf.  Unfortunately, it is misnamed.  DeLanada does very little philosophy in this book.  The simulation bit only refers to computer simulations of systems like the weather, or fluid dynamics, or Kaufmann's autocatalytic sets, or Axelrod's autonomous Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments -- an idea of simulation that is related to what Deleuze had in mind, but only tangentially.  And finally, DeLanda thinks he addresses the problem of the subtitle by using modern assembly line automation software to discuss how the Egyptians learned to build pyramids.  So while he discusses interesting stuff, it wasn't at all what I was looking for.

DeLenda devotes most of the book to reviewing a number of computer simulations that try to model how various puzzling phenomena may perhaps have emerged in evolution.  So he summarizes, in a kind of pop-science style, toy models like those that attempt to explain how a population of replicators, or cell membranes, or memory, or altruism, or language, could have emerged spontaneously from the blind interaction of lower level components.  These summaries are fine as far as they go.  DeLanda seems perfectly competent to explain this stuff (judging from his explanations of the ones I was familiar with).  But he has none of the wit or literary skill to make these explanations very interesting.  It's dense, dry reading even if you already understand how the NK model or the perceptron work.  It kinda reminded me of my father's explanations of battery chemistry -- simultaneously way more than you ever wanted to know, but still not enough to feel confident you wouldn't blow yourself up if you tried it on your own.

Which makes you wonder who the target audience is here.  On the one hand, these mathematical simulations are pretty technical and far afield from my impression of what interests the average philosopher.  On the other hand, DeLanda's summaries are just scratching the surface of all the work that's been done on each of these, and I don't see how his recaps would contribute much to the understanding of someone who already knew the models well.  Is he trying to interest philosophers in computer science, or computer scientists in philosophy?  Or is he just trying to make the case that scientists should embrace simulations more?  Don't they already do quite a lot of this though?  Since it's not clear who the audience is, you start to get the impression that maybe you're just reading DeLanda notes to himself.  He spent a lot of time understanding each of these simulations, and he just wrote down what he learned in compressed format.  The impression is amplified by the fact that the book is absolutely chockablock with typos and missing commas that make sentences needlessly difficult to parse.  After all, who edits their personal notes?  

For me, the most interesting part of the book was actually the appendix, where DeLanda pulls back to summarize the summaries and link them to the larger project which he calls "assemblage theory".  In fact, the appendix really contains all the philosophy that the book has to offer.  If you've read other DeLanda, you already know that he's a popularizer of Deleuze and Guattari who takes their key insight to be that the virtual is the structure of a space of possibilities of some system.  I think this is a fine interpretation of the virtual (though hardly the only possible one).   DeLanda has done a lot of good historical and philosophical work with this concept in both A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.  The question is really what new insight it has to offer us in the present context.  

Unfortunately, this is where the book really falls down philosophically.  Because here DeLanda does little more than reiterate the idea that assemblages (systems of interacting elements) have both a concrete mechanism, as well as a mechanism independent structure of their space of possibilities.  The latter may sound esoteric, but it's actually quite familiar -- we call it math.  For example, the mechanism independent structure of the space of possibilities for a system composed by the coupling of two liquids of different temperatures is just ... equilibrium.  The hot side gets cold and the cold side gets hot (that's exactly what made the McDLT such a revolution!).  Of course the possibility space could be more complicated, and we could get interested in the time course by which the system approaches equilibrium, or what happens if it is held away from equilibrium, but basically in all these cases, we're just saying that the virtual is nothing more than the structure of the phase space of a dynamical system.  Since you can use the same math to describe, say, the way a liquid approaches thermal equilibrium and the way a market achieves a clearing price, then, sure, there is a "universal mechanism independent structure" of what these types of systems can do.  That's a truly fascinating observation that amounts to being blown away by the fact that math works.  I too am blown away by this fact.  Some hairless chimps came up with a symbol system whose space of possible behaviors exhibits the same structure as waves and planetary motion.  That is to say that a bunch of grey matter in the human skull can simulate other matter.   How does this work?  Great question, but one DeLanda doesn't even really try to address.  He states that since they can be shared, these virtual structures must exist objectively, outside the systems that incarnate them.  On the other hand, the structures themselves need some concrete mechanism to be visible, so we should consider them immanent in matter itself.  Again, I'm not arguing with this conclusion at all.  I'm just asking whether we've posed the question adequately enough to advance.  It seems to me that DeLanda hasn't even begun to address the really deep philosophical problem this implies.  If some matter can run a simulation of other matter by repeating some (portion of) a universal structure immanent to it, then matter is nothing much like the bunch of marbles we normally imagine it to be.  So do the simulations go all the way down, or is there some sort of 'base matter' that would be like the hardware of the universe?  And how would we be able to identify this with the simulation software installed in our brains?  

"Society Must Be Defended"

Our first book club selection was a transcription of an 11 lecture course Michel Foucault gave back in 1976 at the College de France.  I don't know if the course really had an official title, but in any case, the quotation marks are part of the title of the book.  They're meant to convey that it's not M. Foucault who believes society must be defended.  Instead, he traces the history of this concept of society; how would you come to imagine society as something that requires defending?  Who would defend it?  And against whom?

There's quite a few interesting ideas and a lot of good history presented in the lectures.  Foucault has some particularly penetrating analysis of Hobbes idea of the social contract and the way it ends the "war of all against all".  He also outlines the birth of what he calls historicism -- the idea that history is a struggle and the interpretation of history is necessarily a weapon in that struggle -- in 17th century England and 18th century France.  Fortunately, all this is presented in a pretty accessible style.  You don't need to spend much time scratching your head about what in god's holy name he is blathering about.  

Unfortunately, the course doesn't live up to Foucault's idea of what he set out to do.  You can see this best if you compare the 8 page "Course Summary" that appears at the end of the lectures with the course itself.  This summary is a real gem, but it turns out to be more a description of the overall problem that interested Foucault, and which situates what he tried to say.  There's only one page reserved for summarizing what the course actually contained, which, in retrospect, makes the whole class appear a sort of long-winded digression on a particular sub-topic.  

His goal was ultimately to analyze concrete power relations.  To do this, he had to think beyond our typical abstract understanding of how power functions in society, which involves the fiction of a sovereign individual giving up some of their god-given rights in order to form a more perfect union called the State.  In fact, there are all kinds of power at work within society, the field changes all the time, and none of them really operate on the basis of some fabricated contract that creates or transfers "rights".  Foucault calls this type of thinking the juridical model of sovereignty.  While we might think of this today as a type of social contract theory, he points out that it is historically much older, being associated with the old image of the king as a sovereign representation of the social body.

If we're going to avoid this kind of abstract, almost magical, thinking about power, we have to look at real concrete relations of power that are not based on right but on force.  In other words, it seems like we have to take violence and war as our fundamental model of how power works.  If all political power can always ultimately be traced to relations of domination, then it seems like we arrive at an inversion of Clausewitz's famous formula: politics is simply war by other means.  

Foucault summarizes how this is a fairly radical shift in perspective for a number of reasons.  First, it makes power a matter of historical contingency and not juridical inevitability.  The story of power has a history, that of the historical struggles between different factions within a society.  Kings and emperors and social contracts, on the other hand, don't have a real history.  They have a mythical birthplace and an eternal divine right (regardless of whether the divinity in question is some bearded dude or "reason").  Second, since history is real and ongoing, someone has to actually write it, interpret it, produce it.  This production of knowledge is never neutral, but is always itself a weapon in the struggle of history.  In other words, the historian doesn't merely describe, he acts.  Third, this type of thinking changes the form of explanation we give for the political world we find ourselves in.  We no longer try to explain the present by reference to some simple, timeless, and universal principle that makes it seem natural, inevitable, and commonsensical.  Instead, things stand as they do because of a long and convoluted history of real struggles replete with alliances, betrayals, and accidents.  That is, the explanation of the present becomes a lot more complex and obscure.  Finally, as a sort of corollary to these others, the idea that politics is a form of war means that there is a dark violence constantly churning below the superficial appearance of order in our society. 

All of this is very interesting stuff, and probably feels like a very modern perspective on history.  None of it is really discussed at length in Foucault's lectures.  In other words, with one important exception I'll get to presently, he doesn't actually try to show us how our society, today, our politics, is structured by an ongoing war of some sort.  Remember, "society must be defended" is not Foucault's thesis, it is his problem.  So the actual lecture is not devoted to using this framework to explore how power operates concretely today.  The actual lecture is 80% devoted to figuring out where this idea came from historically.  In other words, who was the first to come up with the concept that power is all about war and history is all about struggle?  What is the history of this concept of history?

As I already mentioned, Foucault locates the birth of the idea in two places.  17th century English historians saw their world as structured by the fundamental conflict of the Norman invasion of the Saxons in 1066.  18th century French historians like Boulainvilliers understood their world by reference to the war between a Frankish aristocracy and a Gaulish peasantry.  Most of the class is devoted to examining these contexts, in particular the French one, in considerable detail.  It's interesting history that I am hardly in a position to argue with.  It's also a very complicated story, because Foucault wants to understand not only how this idea of politics as war arose in the context of a particular history, but also how it mutated as it gained currency and became a whole genre, or way of looking at history.  Because, after all, each war has at least two sides and therefore two histories.  And, more importantly, in a world of many real struggles, there will be a history of each one.  Which means that Foucault is most interested in tracing the genealogy of a certain form of history, a form that can serve many ends once it has been invented.

Tracing this complicated genealogy takes up most of his lecture time.  Like I say, it's an interesting story in itself, and Foucault fills it with many interesting digressions (like the one about how Hobbes was not, as is commonly thought, the guy who put war into politics).  But I found myself wishing that he would have shortened this genealogy, which is, after all, just one piece in his broader project.  The takeaway point of it all is really just that this type of history always posits some binary relation of forces that represents society as structured by a struggle between two "nations", or "peoples", or "races".  This last idea -- that placing war into politics ultimately becomes a matter of placing race into politics -- turns out to be the main thesis of the whole course, as well as the point where it touches contemporary political discussion. 

But what exactly does Foucault mean by race?  He uses the term in a deliberately slippery way in this class.  At first, he just means the word to refer to the two sides of any binary structure.  The "us" and the "them" locked in the war we call politics.  For example, the French aristocracy and the peasants.  So it starts off being much more abstract than our modern understanding of race.  A synonym would be "people" or "group".  Foucault's genealogy of this whole way of looking at politics as war is aimed, however, at showing us how the term can gradually morph into the two great State racisms of the 20th century -- the Nazis and Stalinism.   In other words, he asks: how does race become race-ism?  

Unfortunately, he spends only the last two lectures trying to outline this connection, so it remains a bit vague and tenuous.  The connection seems to consist of two parts.  

First, the universalist modern State -- the bourgeois State -- had to get a hold of the idea that it is animated by some sort of internal war.  The way Foucault has told the history, these two concepts should not get along.  The modern State claims to be the universal and inevitable form of political organization.  Its form of sovereignty, and its monopoly on violence, gives it the same structure of juridical justification as the absolute kings of old.  But Foucault's genealogy of politics as war was meant to challenge precisely this juridical and universal concept of political power.  So how was the idea that power is a struggle of races absorbed by the modern universal State?  Foucault's answer to this question is basically "Hegel".  He doesn't literally credit Hegel (in fact, his name is never mentioned) but he claims that the two concepts can be wedded if we adopt the dialectical interpretation of history we associate with Hegel.   The idea is that the sovereign right of the State stems from the institutions of governance that it provides.  Instead of interpreting these institutions as constructed through a historical process though, Hegel conceives them as existing in embryonic form amongst a nation or a people even before there is a formal State.  Actual history, and all the struggles it represents, is just the progressive self-realization of this embryonic form.  This neatly squares the idea of war with that of universality.  History is indeed struggle and opposition, but these only serve to fully give birth to the inevitable and universal that was already latent at the beginning.  

Second, once we have this idea of an internal struggle whose inevitable conclusion is the birth of the State, the State needs to start taking matters into its own hands to hasten the process along.  Like many things "dialectical", this doesn't make that much sense as a historical explanation.  I mean, how does the non-existent State pursue a war to bring itself into being?  Perhaps this is part of why Foucault doesn't give us a detailed history of the State, but spends the final lecture giving us a more abstract theory of how our modern political world is secretly structured by the division and violence internalized by a State that nevertheless still sees itself as universal.  

Here he quickly introduces his two pronged theory of how power operates in our society -- through individual bodily discipline, and through mass biopolitical regularization.  A disciplinary society operates by controlling the individual bodies of its subjects in various ways.  The idea seems to be to describe the techniques of surveillance and control that are implemented at factories, prisons, schools, etc ... in order to organize society.  Foucault mentions this concept only briefly, I think we are presumed to have read his other works on the topic.  Biopolitics is the name he gives to the systems the State sets up to control the social body considered as a statistical aggregate of individuals.  For example, when the State designs various systems of public health for reducing mortality, or for increasing the birth rate, or for insuring against natural disasters, that is biopolitics at work.  Foucault alludes to some quite complicated relationships between these two forms of power, but in this context the distinction isn't actually that important.  Both of these forms of power are ways that the State disciplines and regulates every aspect of life itself.  In effect, they are just fancier French names for Seeing Like A State.   But the concrete operation of these techniques of control are how the idea of an ongoing war creeps back into a universal State.  In trying to control life individually and collectively, the universal modern State begins to posit that some individuals deserve to live more than others, and that for the collective health of the population, certain segments may need to be eliminated.  That is to say that, "society must be defended".  Even though it is universally and inevitably triumphant, it still needs to be defended against any elements that would undermine its discipline and any irregularities that would complicate its trajectory.  As Foucault puts it:

It is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States ... What in fact is racism?  It is primarily a way of introducing a brak into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die.  The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and the other, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.

From this vantage point we can finally see why Foucault so belabored the history of the idea that politics is war.  An idea that begins as a real historical war between various groups ends as an internalized war against dissent and irregularity.  Race is the concept that allows for this gradual transformation from a cultural to a biopolitical war, and it is precisely race that gives the "universal" State a concrete power structure.  Foucault clearly sees this racism as a force running through all modern States.  But of course the Nazi obsession with racial purity and the Stalinist obsession with evoloving a stronger people took this logic to its extreme.

After writing this, I can see that the lectures were actually more coherent than they appeared at first.  Understanding the larger problem Foucault was working on helps to clarify which bits are essential and which we should regard more as discursive tangents.  You may still say that it's quite a leap to go from discussions of 18th century aristocratic historians in France directly to Hitler and Stalin.  All I can say is that my faulty exegesis is not (wholly) responsible for this impression; Foucault manages the jump in just a few highly abstract pages.  Maybe we have to come back for the Fall term to get the full story?

The Good Lord Bird

James McBride's terrific novel tells the tall tale of Osawatomie John Brown from the perspective of a 12 year old negro boy who spends the whole story pretending to be a girl.  It's an interesting device, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, and it permits the same type of candid, commonsensical observation of the absurd lives of adults.  As a result, I felt like it dramatized the terrorism at the core of the slave era even better than something like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad.  Telling the story from the often comic perspective of a child takes away some of the explicit moral outrage, but more effectively conveys the humanity of the situation.  And pairing the childish self-centeredness of Henri/etta off against the laughably insane Christianity of the white savior John creates a complex symmetry that ends up being really powerful.  

Also, it's a great shoot-em-up action-adventure story.  Go read it.

Ghangis Khan and the Quest for God

I have no idea why exactly this one landed on my shelf.   I was interested in the revaluation of the "barbarians" in James Scott's Against the Grain.  I enjoyed Ian Morris's reflections on the importance of steppe conquerors on much of recorded history in Why the West Rules -- for Now.  And of course, Deleuze and Guattarri's idea of the nomad war machine and its connection to capitalism is intriguing.  So maybe I was just thinking vaguely that I really should learn a bit more about the Huns and the Tartars and the Mongols.  Or maybe I was just spending down the enormous credit I have at the cat book store.  At any rate, I do now know a little more about the most famous barbarian of them all -- Ghengis Khan.  And it's actually fascinating to know more about him and the interesting moment in history he inhabited.

It's just too bad that I had to read this whole long-winded and poorly written book to find it out though.  

Jack Weatherford begins his saga (and takes his title) with the idea that a wave of 17th century histories and dramas about The Great Khan might well have influenced John Locke or George Washington on the question of religious freedom.  However, even as he tosses this out there, he himself doesn't believe it, and the book mercifully spends no time trying to establish that tenuous connection.  Mostly, he just relates a long history of the life of Ghengis, beginning with his humble childhood, his unification of the Mongol tribes into a nation, his conquest of much of the Chinese and Islamic empires, his death in 1227, and the inevitable fractious division and decay of the Mongol empire under his heirs.  It reads much more like a biography than a history book.  There's no real attempt to grapple with the forces that led to Mongol unification and conquest at this particular time in history.  Nor is there much real discussion of the innovative way The Great Khan ran his empire.  Beyond the biographical, the only real argument of the book is that Ghengis Khan let the people he conquered keep their respective Gods.  Somehow Weatherford thinks that this means he invented the idea of "religious freedom".  It seems lost on him that this is the same idea of religious freedom that might appeal to any intelligent toll road operator -- believe whatever you want when you cross, but fuck you pay me.  

So it was a pretty disappointing book.  Nevertheless, along the way, I absorbed a little history I was completely unfamiliar with, and this is why I didn't drop the book after the first fifty flowery pages speculating on what Ghengis was feeling as he married his third wife.  The main observation that will linger with me is how different a nomad empire is from a sedentary empire.  Ghengis Khan was not a farmer.  He wasn't interested in controlling territory or a large population from which he could extract labor.  Instead, his wealth and power were connected with movement, with the circulation of people and goods.  This really was a completely different type of empire, one that was even in some cases welcomed by the mass of 'vanquished' population as a significant reduction in the State's ability to extract surplus from them.  This concept of a classic liberal empire, if you will, seems to me a much better way to connect the Mongols to modernity than any legalese about religious freedom.

If anybody comes across a really good history of the Mongols and Ghengis Khan, let me know.  I would happily read much more about this period.

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Difference and Repetition makes heavy use of the system Kant lays out in his Critique of Pure Reason.  Since, to quote another philosophically minded friend, my understanding of Kant is shallow, I wanted to go back and see if I could better grasp what Deleuze saw in a man who was so systematic he even had suspenders for his sock.  However, reading the entire Critique of Pure Reason as a footnote to Deleuze seemed too daunting a task right now.  Luckily, Kant himself wrote a shorter and clearer version that is meant to frame the project of his Critique and introduce us to its basic ideas --  the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Science.

Since the Prolegomena presents an abbreviated version of Kant's system, I don't think I can claim a deep understanding of it yet.  But I found the basic outline of the system easier to grasp and more interesting than I was expecting, and I certainly understood something more about how it relates to Deleuze's project in Difference and Repetition.  

Kant claims that the Prolegomena addresses four questions:

1. How is pure mathematics possible?
2. How is pure natural science possible?
3. How is metaphysics in general possible?
4. How is metaphysics as a science possible?

But he really only addresses the first 3 of these in this book, and refers us to the Critique as the answer to the fourth.  The importance of the words "pure" and "science", which appear in 3 of these 4 questions cannot be overstated.  For Kant, they mean roughly the same thing, namely, our ability to establish completely certain a priori knowledge that does not need to make reference to any particular empirical experience (which Kant terms intuition or sensibility).  This distinction between what can be known a priori and what we have to discover empirically is intimately related to the central distinction in Kant's philosophy -- that between the mere appearance of things, and the things in themselves.  

Now, even my shallow understanding of Kant already had an adequate grasp of the difference between the in-itself and the for-us, perhaps because he beats this point like a dead horse.  Kant reasons that we cannot know anything about how things are in themselves because all our concepts only pertain to how we represent those things for ourselves in our experience.  Since we only know how things appear to us, it may at first seem like all of our knowledge must therefore be empirical and derived from the habits of our experience.  Indeed, this was Hume's skeptical argument about our ability to ever infer something like causality from correlation.  Kant begins with Hume's skepticism, but thinks we can overcome the problem by observing that all of our experience fits into a limited set of general forms, regardless of what its particular content might be.  For example, our sensible experience occurs in time and its objects in space, and our thoughts about those sensible experiences are always related by the form of cause and effect.  Kant calls these forms are the "categories of the understanding".  They operate as a general background or structure of our experience and enable connections between its particular contents.  In fact, since Kant thinks that these categorical forms are necessary for all possible experience, they actually provide the solution to his problem of what we can know a priori and prior to all possible experience.  In other words, we can know these forms of experience without having had any experience.

To me, this sounds a bit like Athena being born fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.  The idea almost perfectly captures the essence of what the Enlightenment took for granted as the new center of the universe.  An adult white upper class European male who just appears on the scene with no development and no history.  This type of parthenogenesis is crucial for Kant's universalizing project.  If you want to systematize all possible experience, you are ultimately forced to believe that it is all just like the particular experience you know best -- your own.  The quest to close the door on experience, to render some parts of it impossible and literally unthinkable, will always have both a normative and a mystifying dimension.  After all, if you believe an  experience is so different as to be unthinkable, you will certainly never be able to explain how it happened.

But I digress.  The universal forms of experience become Kant's categories, and form the basis of his answer to those first two questions.  Mathematics is possible because all our sensory experience must occur in space and time, and mathematics, according to Kant, is nothing but an elaboration of these a priori forms of intuition (sensibility).  And Natural Science is possible because all conceptual experience takes the form of causally linked representations appearing to a unified subject in our understanding.  This second part sounds weird at first, because it seems to define "natural science" in a way that removes all reference to empirical measurement and experiment in disciplines like physics and chemistry.  However, since Kant is not concerned with founding actual physics but only the possibility of physics, he's really only interested in proving (a priori of course) that there is a natural world to begin with, and that it follows certain laws.  In other words, for Kant, nature simply is the law-like connection of the appearances; asking to know nature in itself is meaningless.

We must, however, distinguish empirical laws of nature, which always presuppose particular perceptions, from the pure or universal laws of nature, which, without having particular perceptions underlying them, contain merely the conditions for the necessary unification of such perceptions in one experience; with respect to the latter laws, nature and possible experience are one and the same ...

So then what about question three: how is metaphysics  in general possible?  Since the universal forms of experience Kant has discovered are concepts only apply to actual experiences, Kant is adamant that we will only fall into error if we try to apply these concepts to anything that cannot be an object of possible experience.  This seems to make metaphysics, insofar as its objects are sure to be meta-physical, impossible.  Basically by definition, we can't have any possible experience of metaphysical entities like, say, God.  So at first it seems like the book should end here; metaphysics is bunk.  But the great Kant is too wily for that, and this is actually where the book starts to get more interesting.  

Kant explicitly limits the categories of the understanding to their application in sensible experience.  However, he claims that our reason is more difficult to tame, and is not satisfied by these limits.  The goal of reason is the unbounded application of the categories to everything, even those things that we cannot possibly have an experience of, namely, the things in themselves.  Basically, reason aims for extrapolation to completeness and totality, and the harmonization of all of our experience (including the stuff earlier discarded as illegitimate because it couldn't refer to a possible experience).  The Prolegomena doesn't make super clear why we have this (seemingly counterproductive, and practically speaking useless) mania for completeness, or exactly why Kant decided the mind was carved into exactly the three domains of sense (intuition), understanding, and reason.  Surely the a priori inevitability of this division is all cleared up in the Critique?  At any rate, the concepts that reason comes up with as it extrapolates the categories of the understanding beyond sensible experience are called Ideas.   There are basically three Ideas which structure the complete possibility of experience, but whose objects we can really say nothing about -- God, Self, and World. 

I say that the book gets more interesting when Kant introduces the concept of Ideas for two reasons.  First, this is where you can start to see how important Kant's scheme is for Deleuze's definition of Ideas in Difference & Repetition.  Unfortunately, fully fleshing this out goes way beyond what fits in a book review, and anyhow I'd probably need to read the whole Critique to accomplish it to my satisfaction, so I won't go into these connections.  Second, it's at this point that Kant's system gets weird and complicated.  He has introduced some fundamental tension or split within us where we inevitably strive for something we cannot reach and need to discipline ourselves with respect to it.  He calls the production of the Ideas a natural or transcendental illusion which we can only overcome ... by reading his Critique I guess.  Without this, reason remains trapped in a war against itself which he sees taking the form of the "antinomies of pure reason", which are his way of describing the classic philosophical paradoxes like whether the unstoppable force can push the immovable object.  

As you might expect from this structure, things get complicated quickly, and I'm not sure I quite understand all the ins and outs and whathaveyous.  Kant's goal is clearly to restore to us all our common sensical ideas of the unity of our ego and our belief in God and a world of unified objects in interaction with one another.  But since he's already pronounced these illusions (albeit transcendental and inevitable), he can only give these Ideas back to us by analogy.  We can't know our ego in itself, but we can know that our experience is structured as if we possessed a substantial unity of soul.  Likewise, we can't know anything about a Supreme Being in itself, but we do know that the world of experience is structured as if it had a plan and hence a creator.  In the end, Kant is as conservative as he can be.  However, I understand better now what Deleuze saw in him.  While the damage may be repaired and the conclusions may look much like what came before, on his way to them, Kant has completely cracked open the unity of our most cherished concepts.  

A Brief History of the Paradox

Roy Sorensen's history of paradoxes wasn't really quite what I was expecting.  Nevertheless, I still found it entertaining.  It's actually more a history of philosophy as told through the lens of the concept of the paradox that it is a deep exploration of the concept itself.  Sorenson spends quite a lot of time on the ancients, including discussions of Pythagoras, Sextus Empiricus, and perhaps most interestingly, Parmenides.  But the story stretches all the way up to the modern era, ending with Wittgenstein's philosophical suicide and Quine's reign of logical terror.  

Sorensen is an analytic philosopher.  Sometimes this unfortunate fact shows up in his terse writing style that leaves everything interesting unsaid.  But most of the time he avoids delving too deeply into argumentation and keeps the tone light; there are humorous examples and little biographical thumbnails of the various thinkers he discusses.  Despite this lightness, you can still get a flavor for the overall philosophy of each of these thinkers.  I'm not sure there's anything particular from his book that will stay with me, but if you want to read a quirky history of philosophy, this might be just the thing.

The Weather of the Pacific Northwest

I discovered Cliff Mass's invaluable weather blog shortly after moving to Seattle.  The blog is great because it goes far beyond merely trying to predict the weather and includes a lot more data and explanation of what's happening, often including a discussion of how the prediction was made.  So when I saw that we wrote a whole book about our regional weather I was too intrigued to pass it up.

Unfortunately, the book is a bit of a disappointment.  I don't regret reading it and learned a bunch of interesting things from it.  There are good explanations of interesting geographic anomalies like the Oregon banana belt and the Sequim rain shadow effect.  There's also a lot of good stuff about general tendencies in the weather around here.  For example the correlation of El Niño with warmer, drier winters, the way fog develops and what it portends, the wind tunnel effect of the Frasier River Valley, and so on.  The explanations are scientific, but ably presented in a way that I think most anyone could understand.  

The disappointment is that the book contains so much useless weather trivia.  For example, after spending a few pages discussing the unusual conditions that produce heavy snow in lowland Seattle, there are even more pages devoted to discussing the details of the half dozen largest storms, complete with dollar damage estimates and number of downed electric lines on Columbus Day, 1962.  Who cares!?  Who is really into that kind of trivia about "largest" and "highest" and "record-breaking"?  I guess we expect this sort of doom loop from the TV weatherman.  But why bother to put so much of it into a book?  It could have been half as long, or better yet, twice as good, with more technical discussion of specific local weather features.  This is what the blog is like when it's at its best.  

And when it's at its worst?  Well, you just have to ignore his Statler and Waldorf impression when it comes to anything other than the weather.

Difference and Repetition

Well, it's finally done.  Despite spending the past 2 years reading Deleuze's magnum opus, I'm still not sure how to review it.  It hardly makes sense to get involved in some long technical discussion here.  I could try to write a pithy summary of the thesis, like, "difference in itself is repetition for itself", but that isn't going to convey much without a lot more backstory.  Deleuze creates some amazing concepts to flesh out that thesis, but these individually resist summary because they are so intimately tied together that it's nearly impossible to explain just one without slowly being forced to unravel the whole ball of twine.  

So perhaps the only thing to do is to take Deleuze's own advice on reading philosophy, "If you haven't found the problem to which a concept corresponds, everything stays abstract. If you've found the problem, everything becomes concrete."  The problem in Difference and Repetition is how we can think of a world that has no innate or essential forms.  We begin to understand the stuff around us insofar as we start to realize that it didn't just fall from the sky readymade.  Everything that is was constructed.  This problem leads immediately into others: how was it constructed? from what? what can it do?  And from those we move into the more directly practical question at the heart of his philosophy: how could it be constructed differently?  All the book's seemingly very abstract concepts like differential ideas, and simulacra, and the dark precursor, and the eternal return, respond directly to this problem.  

It's a deceptively simple question.  Often we approach it in ways that are not so much wrong as just terribly incomplete.  We try to control the question, to answer it finally, once and for all.  Objective atoms.  Subjective ideas.  Divine plan.  These are responses meant to close the problem by positing some necessary forms of being.  Deleuze tries to take us beyond these responses, to open the problem and think of a world where nothing is necessary, and everything is ultimately formed by chance.  This might sound like a world of pure chaos in which anything is possible, and in some sense that's exactly what it is.  But even this chaos-god conceived as a totality can become a kind of necessity that limits the world unless we are prepared to conceive the structure of its perpetual unfolding in detail.  And maybe that's all that Difference and Repetition wants us to do -- think all the way through the chaos so that we stay open to it.

 

#reread 

The Stone Sky

In the third and final volume of the Broken Earth Trilogy, the whale wins.  Just kidding.  Actually the trilogy gets a little pulpier and more action adventure oriented as it goes, and so it predictably culminates in a final uber-battle in which the good gals win (though of course not without great sacrifice).  I found the finale a little over the top, though not as goofy as, say, the third Matrix film.  Still, all in all, the books are quality sci-fi, and once you read the first, you're bound to eat all the stones.

War is a Racket

Back in 1935, retired General Smedley Butler told it like it was.  If only we had more retired generals with this level of curiosity for how war works and compassion for those affected by it.  85 years later this short book will probably not come as a surprise or shock to most folks, accustomed as we are to cynicism about every part of our government.  It is still worth the quick read for the wonderfully ironic suggestions Butler makes about how we might stay out of wars.  For example, why not stipulate that anytime there is a draft, every politician and every executive of a company that sells to the Pentagon are to be paid the same wage as the soldiers?  These are, after all, the people who actually undertake the decision to go to war and profit from it, without any risk to their own lives.  Wouldn't we have fewer wars if they were asked to sacrifice something as well? 

The Road to Reality

I didn't actually read all 1,136 pages of Roger Penrose's magnum opus.  I'm only writing a review now because I know I never will.  Not that the book was so atrocious or anything.  I actually quite enjoyed the first 300 pages and learned a lot.  Penrose, however, bit off more than most of us can chew.  He wanted to give a high level, but still mathematically accurate, view of all of the laws of physics in a single volume.  This is not just undergraduate physics here, but extending all the way up through general relativity, the standard model, and string theory, etc ...  

A noble, but ultimately somewhat quixotic goal.  Just who is the audience he is tilting at here?  I know more physics than approximately 99.8998% of Americans (33.4% of people have a bachelor's degree, 0.3% of those degrees are in physics).  I followed the first 250 pages reasonably well, though Penrose presents some of the things I vaguely remember learning 25 years ago in a completely different light (this is not necessarily a critique).  I sorta followed the next 50 pages, but shortly after his math outran what I remember learning his explanations became too terse for me to really understand what was going on.  I did enjoy the fact that the math at the beginning of the book was presented as a physicist, rather than a mathematician -- as something one wants to understand intuitively and ultimately use, not simply a bunch of definitions and arid proofs with nary a hint of why anyone would ever get interested in anything as abstract as the Riemann Sphere.  In fact, this last was really the high point of the book for me.  I never knew what these surfaces were, and yet they were just beyond what I'd learned, so his explanations were enough to give me some glimmer of how interesting the structure is.  After that, as he moved in Grassman algebras and his own special type of tensor notation, it became pretty hard for me to follow.  I guess we can conclude that he was writing for the .001002%?  Talk about being an elitist!

The Obelisk Gate

The second book in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy is not as tightly woven as the first.  It kinda reminds me of the second Matrix movie in this respect -- a few really interesting new ideas are introduced, if not quite fully developed, but there's a whole lot more fighting.  Maybe this specifically befits the setting of the deeping Season in this novel, or maybe this is just a general problem with the second books in trilogies; they are always the hardest to get right.  It's still a very fast and entertaining read though, so I will certainly see whether the third book can surpass the execrable third Matrix.  Rusting Earth, I hope so!

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles' classic about an American trio traveling in North Africa just after WW2 actually gets off to a really slow start.  Not that the first half is completely uninteresting, but it has a sort of pedestrian feel to the way it sets the scene.  I won't say much more than that here for fear of ruining the twist that really sets the novel off and running midway through.  By the way, don't read the introduction.  The rest is a highly recommended, almost existentialist, study in the creation (or lack thereof) of personal meaning.

The Fifth Season

Describing a book as "an instant classic" is usually the sort of thing reserved for breathless dust jacket marketing.  But the first book of the Broken Earth trilogy really deserves it.  N.K. Jemisin creates a complex multi-generational character (as it were) that you care about right from the start and who you can root for as she grapples with the end of the world.  The cataclysmic backdrop provides many page turning twists and maintains the pace of action despite allowing Jemisin to convincingly fleshing out an entire fantasy world.  You really can't ask much more than this from the genre -- a good story about people who are not quite us, in a setting that is not quite ours.  Our own world always comes into better focus when someone is able to double it like this.  So yeah, join the bestseller bandwagon and go read it.

On a side note -- I'm hard pressed to think of other sci-fi that takes gelology as its central science, even though I always feel like geology is already sci-fi all by itself; I mean, if the idea of Ohio being tropical isn't science fiction, then what is?  

 

#reread 

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I'm not sure how I managed to avoid reading Gabriel García Márquez's most famous novel for as long as I did.  Perhaps it was simply because I have some vague memory that Love in the Time of Cholera was only okay.  I enjoyed this one more.  There are a lot of beautiful and amusing descriptions, and despite their cartoonish outlines many characters are believable enough that you get drawn into caring what happens to them.  I guess this is how a good telenovela is supposed to work though.  In a sense, that's what mostly the book is. Passion. Intrigue. Mystery. Scandal.  Humor.  Drama.  It has it all.  And then it has it again with the next set of characters in a slowly evolving cast of Buendías.  The long multi-generational arc of the story is enjoyable, but don't feel too bad if you miss a few episodes in the middle -- you'll have no trouble picking it back up.

The End of the Myth

Greg Grandin is nominally a professor of history at Yale.  However, the fact that his book won this year's Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction should have tipped me off that it was not a history book.  And indeed, if the book deserves any prize, it should certainly have been in the category of "editorial writing".  Because it simply isn't a history book; it's an op-ed that was too long for the NYT to publish all at once.  

The basic thesis of the op-ed is pretty straightforward.  Grandin inverts Frederick Jackson Turner's grand frontier thesis of American history.  Turner claimed that the whole character of the US was created by the history of its gradual expansion across the North American continent.  The ever moving frontier bred the American belief in individual self-reliance, its focus on an egalitarian democracy (as opposed to an old European class system), and its suspicion of elite culture and too much centralized government.  From Turner's view in 1893, these were all good things that made the US the good place that it was.  

Grandin puts this theory on its head, the same way that Hegel put Marx on his head.  The pun is intended here, because whereas Turner thinks that the material and economic conditions of expansion created the character of America, Grandin thinks this 'American character' (whatever the fuck that is) has always been inherently racist and bloodthirsty, and that this national psychological character caused the material expansion.  So insofar as the book has a theory of history, it runs as follows.  America was bad from the beginning.  It expressed this badness by conquering it's inland empire, so to speak.  After that, the badness went off seeking further conquests like the Philippines and Puerto Rico.  Then, when there was no more land to conquer close at hand, whitey appointed himself a brutal chief of police for the world, which dovetailed nicely with the rapacious expansion of post-war American capitalism.  Finally, Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer, and the always malignant spirit of America turned in on itself to give us Donald Trump.  Befitting an op-ed, the thinking is pleasingly black and white, and lends an inevitability to our current political moment that Hegel's Prussian-State-as-ultimate-expression-of-Absolute-Spirit would be proud of.

As history, I think this is just drivel.  Turner's thesis already operated at a hugely abstract level, trying to convince us of the unified history and character of 63 million people (88% of whom were white).  But at least Turner offered an explanation of American spirit based on facts specific to American history.  Grandin is trying to work at a similarly abstract level with a nation of 330 million people, 40% of whom are now not white at all.  On top of that he's trying to reverse the equation and claim that all the facts of American history proceed from the bloodthirsty spirit of a white supremacy that extends unbroken and uncontested all the way back to angry settler mobs.  Beyond being absurdly reductive, this doesn't even count as an explanation at all because it never really addresses the original question of why (what he presumes to be) the Anglo-Saxon core of the US started off so damn nasty (I say presumes because he never mentions the other 2 early immigrant groups, nor the huge cultural difference between Angles and Saxons that Albion's Seed discusses).  

I can try to read more generously and turn Grandin's thesis into a real explanation.  Instead of arguing that the US is just inherently fallen, perhaps due to our twin original sins of African-American slavery and Native American genocide, Grandin could try to argue that the fearful and violent individualism that (partly) characterizes the country stems from its endless series of frontier wars.  The US started as a small and weakly fragmented state in a big continent so always felt itself under attack from Natives as well as larger European powers.  The result was a fragmented national character that only found unification in facing some external enemy (at first real, later imagined).  So to hold the union together and give its people any sense of social or national solidarity, it had to keep crossing the frontier, even as this kept moving, and going to war.  This history would account for the insecure, fearful, and violent streak our country possesses despite its current wealth and power, and is also meant to explain why we never developed enough solidarity to convert to what Grandin obviously sees as the one true political system and ultimately end of history -- Socialism, or at least Scadinavian style Social Democracy.  

The book doesn't really lay out that thesis explicitly.  As I said, it's fairly uninterested in causal explanation in general.  It operates mostly at the level of trying to capture the "national mood" of the past, as if what editors write in op-eds and politicians say in stump speeches was the most important component of history.  But -- "Americans are violent racists whose endless wars are both cause and consequence of their never discovering Socialism" -- is the thesis implicit in the story Grandin tells.  I think this is a lousy explanation of history, but at least it would count as something of an explanation and not just turn all of US history into a battle for white supremacy that for some reason we've been inexplicably "losing" for 250 straight years.

So it's a flimsy history book.  Maybe we should ask instead: what does this op-ed think we ought to do?  Of course, the book can't make any explicit policy prescriptions because it's posing as a history book.  But it's completely clear that the good guys are the Social Democrats of Europe, and the bad guys are, well, the inflexibly racist character of Americans.  So I guess if we were to read positive policy prescriptions into it, these would include better healthcare, social security, unions, etc ...  And of course it's easy to turn steps meant to vanquish the enemy into negative policy proposals -- less voter suppression of minorities, fewer foreign wars, less border and customs enforcement, etc ...  These are all fine ideas, but you hardly need to read this book to make you think they're important.  The book also leaves you with absolutely no reason to think that the US could ever change.  After all, Grandin's history is of a uniform descent from Native American genocide to Trump's wall.  So his opinion mostly just boils down to, "everything sucks" and his book to a long list of things that suck, followed by things that suck even more.  Naturally, Grandin is entitled to this opinion.  In many ways it's hard to argue with.  Right now, the US really does suck.  In fact, it sucks so obviously right now that they literally gave this guy a Pulitzer Prize for claiming that it has always sucked.  Sign of the times.  

But I ask you, for as much as the US indeed sucks, for as horrendous as Trump's presidency has been, do you really believe that it demonstrates a uniform downhill trajectory from slavery and genocide?  

The Mindful Geek

I know of Michael Taft as the canny editor who helped put together Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment and as the host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast.  I've gotten lots out of both of those, so when I happened to see that he was giving away a book of his own on his website, I figured there wasn't much to lose.  Taft is a long-time student of Young's, so a lot of what's in The Mindful Geek is just a beginner level introduction to his teacher's more complete system.  Nevertheless, it might be an even better starting place for the absolute beginner meditator.  

True to its title, the book is aimed at the geeky tech types who Taft often teaches in CA.  It contains not the least hint of the religious aspect of meditation.  It relies heavily on selling meditation as a general form of self-improvement whose effectiveness is increasingly documented scientifically.  Given my sympathy for Thompson's critique Buddhist modernism, you might have imagined that this way of looking at things would not appeal to me.  But Taft actually doesn't fall quite into the trap Thompson describes.  Perhaps, as his interview of Thompson suggests, because he is aware of it.

Yes, he does spend some time referencing the scientific research on meditation's physiological and psychological effects that was covered more extensively in Altered Traits.  This is fine though as far as it goes -- that is insofar as we understand that this research is still pretty preliminary.  I read through these parts fairly quickly, simply noting that the book is also intended to convince busy tech bros to give meditation a try.  In other words, since I already meditate, I was not the target audience for these discussions.   Mostly one can just ignore them, or read them at the level of the latest pop science regarding what supplements one should be taking.  Personally I use the ginger-psilocybin-lovingkindness stack to get shredded.

More crucially though, Taft evades the Buddhist modernist problem because he doesn't try to tell us that meditation shows us, "how things really are".  The book carries little religious or philosophical baggage.  It's a purely practical self help book.  Everything is phrased as, "try this and see if it makes your everyday life any better".  While this is a pretty limiting way of looking at Buddhism as a whole, and doesn't address a lot of the questions that come up once you've been meditating for a while, I actually think it's a great way to get started.  Since the book does not profess to be anything other than an introduction, it mostly stops short of where the problems with Buddhist modernism begin.  And as far as introductions go, I thought it was quite concise and useful.  Taft picks out just a few of Shinzen's techniques, teaches us how to do them, and tells us what we might hope to gain from these practices.  He even includes 10 and 30 minute guided meditations that cover these on his website.  I particularly liked the way he explained the practice of investigating subtle bodily emotions by relating them to body language and our ability to recognize emotions in another person.  

So while I don't think the book advanced my understanding a ton, I would still recommend it as a starting point for someone who fits its target -- a science minded religious skeptic who wonders what all the hoo-haa with meditation is about.  You can cut through most of the clutter surrounding the question for these folks by simply saying, "just try it".  You don't need to believe anything or change any of your opinions to try it.  Just do X and see what you think.

Why I am Not a Buddhist

Evan Thompson's new little book makes a wonderful foil to all the reading I've been doing lately about Buddhism.  It gives clear voice to a number of the problems and reservations I've encountered for myself in studying meditation and its accompanying theory.  However, unlike the Bertrand Russell essay from which the title derives, Thompson is quite sympathetic to Buddishm.  He himself has significant meditative experience and a deep knowledge of Buddhist history and philosophy (studying this is his profession after all).  In his introduction, you almost get the sense that he would like to feel comfortable calling himself a Buddhist, but for reasons of intellectual honesty and precision just can't get there.  Perhaps surprisingly, the problem for him lies less in the fact that he doesn't believe in the classic metaphysical concepts we associate with Buddhism -- karma, rebirth, enlightenment -- than in the fact that he doesn't believe in the philosophical underpinnings of the peculiar form of "Buddhist Modernism" that has arisen in the past century of East-West interaction.  These underpinnings turn out to be, essentially, scientific materialism.  So the subtitle of the book could almost have been "Why I am also not a Scientist". 

Consider his own summary of the book:

My argument has been that Buddhist modernism distorts both the significance of the Buddhist tradition and the relationship between religion and science.  Buddhism gained entry to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century by being presented as a religion uniquely compatible with modern science.  Now, in the twenty-first century, Buddhist modernist discourse is at its height.  But this discourse is untenable, as we've seen.  It's core tenets -- that Buddhism is a "mind science"; that there is no self; that mindfulness is an inward awareness of one's own private mental theater; that neuroscience establishes the value of mindfulness practice; that enlightenment is a nonconceptual experience outside language, culture, and tradition; and that enlightenment is or can be correlated with a brain state -- are philosophically and scientifically indefensible.

 

None of these points is really a critique of traditional Buddhist beliefs.  They all center on the blending of Buddhism and science that has become the default public face of a newly missionary Buddhism as it expands around the globe.  Thompson's point is not the simple political one that the West has culturally appropriated traditional Buddhism.  His first chapter -- "The Myth of Buddhist Exceptionalism" -- outlines a fascinating history of Buddhism, starting with its Indian philosophic backdrop, and explores the very real ways in which it evolved though its encounter with Western ideas.  The punchline though is that most of what we today call "mindfulness" was invented in Burma in the past 100 years.  Buddhist modernism is not a European or American invention; it's an import.  His point is not to complain about modern "inauthenticity" but to combat the conflation of religion and science that this globalization of Buddhism has produced.  

In addition to that historical chapter, the book has: a wonderful rebuttal to Robert Wright's misguided and forgettable Why Buddhism is True; a great discussion of various concepts of the self in both Buddhism and cognitive science that debunks "the self is an illusion" idea as an oversimplification; a compelling critique of the idea that meditation is a purely empirical "first-person science"; and an extended discussion of the philosophic problems you run into if you try to think of enlightenment as simultaneously some particular state of the brain and some transcendent means of being-in-the-world.  

I did find the final chapter of the book a little bit weak or insipid.  Thompson tries to move beyond critiquing the scientific and universalist tendency implicit in Buddhist modernism, and to offer a positive vision of what Buddhism actually can teach us.  His answer to this is actually fairly simple.

In my view, the significance of the Buddhist intellectual tradition for the modern world is that it offers a radical critique of our narcissistic preoccupation with the self and our overconfident belief that science tells us how the world really is in itself apart from how we're able to measure and act upon it.

I think this is a fine statement of what Buddhism offers.  But  it comes wrapped up in a long discussion of a philosophical vision he calls (following Kwame Anthony Appiah and others) "cosmopolitanism".  Maybe he didn't do the theory justice, but it sounded like a whole lot of why can't we all just get along, kumbaya, beautiful soul stuff.  Sure, it would be great if we all learned from different traditions and maintained an open and non-dogmatic mind about what the ultimate truth might look like.  We could see Buddhism as contributing some interesting ideas, science contributing others, with philosophy and art and other religions throwing things into the mix as well.  And when I'm sitting in my armchair I may even be able to juggle all these perspectives and look at the world through many eyes.  In fact, as a confirmed dilettante, I feel like I specialize in this sort of juggling.  I think it's an inspiring vision as far as it goes and we could really use more of this sort of "paradigmatic agnosticism".    But of course, we also have to act in the world.  And no amount of open and honest conversation is going to put to rest all the questions that arise when that action has to be based on your paradigm or my paradigm.  A dialog of differences without a clear hierarchy is a good first step, but you will not remove questions of power with nothing more than good intentions.

Gilles Deleuze's ABCs: The Folds of Friendship

Shit Sandwich.

I grabbed a cheap used copy of Charles Stivale's book because I discovered a very interesting "quote" from Deleuze's L'Abécédaire interviews in it.  Stivale subtitled these interviews for the English edition, and I thought that this book was mostly going to be excerpts of that.   Unfortunately, since Deleuze prohibited their publication as a transcript, Stivale is forced to summarize Deleuze's comments rather than truly quote him.  In itself this wouldn't be so bad, and there are a number of useful summaries like this in the book.  But even more unfortunately, Stivale is not content to merely indirectly quote Deleuze, or relate the comments in the interviews to his publications, but instead feels that he has to play the philosopher himself.  This is how Continental philosophy gets a bad name.  Hack professors try to ape the difficult style of the subject they're writing about and end up producing something closer to a parody of the original.  I'm sure Stivale speaks French real good, but his commentary did not improve my understanding of Deleuze's philosophy at all.  This is the sort of book that makes me want to become a philosophy professor as a sort of public service, so that no one else has to be subjected to this level of academic wankery ever again.  

Sex at Dawn

How could I resist?  I heard this was a best-seller; it has a blurb from Dan Savage on the front cover; it was cheap at the used bookstore with all the cats; and it has "Sex" in the title.  I like sex.  It can be a natural, zesty enterprise.  All of which is to say that I went in with low and prurient expectations and was pleasantly surprised.  The book has many problems, but it stimulated a lot of thought.

Most of Sex at Dawn is taken up with refuting the idea that humans are a naturally pair-bonding monogamous species.  The "dawn" in the title accordingly refers not to a time of day but to our long prehistory as recently descended apes foraging in small bands.  Ryan and Jethá (the couple co-authors -- please don't call them married) argue that before the advent of agriculture human mating was promiscuous.  Chimps and Bonobos, our closest relatives, are both promiscuous species where females sleep with many males (and vice-versa).  Bonobos in particular seem to use sex as a tool for cementing cooperative bonds and defusing tensions within a group.  They are not worried about keeping track of paternity, and women and children are not treated as property of the males.  The authors think early humans behaved much the same way, and that this is our 'natural' state.  Then civilization came and fucked us up.  

I'm sympathetic to this counter-cultural perspective, and not just because I've long considered sex a very friendly sort of activity.  I've read a number of things in the past decade that have convincingly painted the Neolithic Revolution as a quality of life disaster.  This distrust of the innate greatness of civilization and progress is the message of books like: Against the Grain, Sapiens, Why the West Rules -- For Now, Dirt,  and Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers (any of which I would recommend).  And if we follow Deleuze -- with his propertyless nomads and monstrous paternity of interbreeding Ideas -- the strictures of civilization are even a quality of thought disaster.  Maybe, provisionally, the scientific and industrial revolutions have finally made the whole enterprise of civilization look like it was worth it.  5,000 years later.  Maybe.  Provisionally.  If we can adapt to some of the strains that our imperfect self-domestication has created. 

Sex at Dawn extends this same theme about how much better life was before agriculture.  Not only were humans better fed, healthier, more cooperative, and less oppressed by a surplus-harvesting elite, but even the sex was better and more plentiful.  Truly, they contend, it was the good old days.   Naturally, this sounds almost too good to be true, and one has to guard against some idealization of the noble savage.  Also, as anyone sympathetic to revisionist history is already aware, if you criticize civilization like this it will criticize you back.   So it's not surprising that the book has been the subject of some controversy, including a whole 'nother book rebutting it.  Given that I'm not a primatologist, anthropologist, or evolutionary biologist, I'm poorly placed to adjudicate a scientific dispute.  Certainly, the pop science tone in which Sex at Dawn is written does not make it able to do much more than make suggestions and ask rhetorical questions.  Nothing is being proved here.  In fact, there are plenty of gaping holes and missing nuances in their argumentation.  But then, that doesn't make it wrong either.  We should be equally wary when we see scientists circling the wagon to defend their discipline against interlopers, especially when there is a charged political question at stake.  For example, a review of Sex at Dusk (the refuation) seems to contain many valid specific points, but also some bullshit about how Ryan and Jethá, "suffer lacunae in even rudimentary understandings of evolutionary theory".  I'm sure that's what the Social Darwinists said to anyone who objected to white supremacy.  There's nothing in the book that merits this sort of sneer; their entire theory of the pre-history of human sexuality may be substantially wrong, but then so might the vast bulk of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.  In fact, in the latter case, most of it has already been wrong. 

Ultimately though, the point of reading a book like this is not to figure out the truth about 'human nature'.  Not least because there is no such fucking thing.  Some things change fast, some things change more slowly.  That's it.  With our limited imagination and experience, we call the slow stuff 'natural'.  The distinction between natural and artificial is only useful when we understand it this way.  We normally lose this perspective though, and instead lend whatever status quo we are accustomed to the force of a natural moral inevitability.  The best thing about Sex at Dawn is that, in throwing the history of our species' sexuality into question, it enables us to imagine a world in which sex and power are distributed differently than our own.  You might say that this is purely an imaginary exercise, a pipe dream about a new and different kind of ape society.  But then again, so was civilization back in the day.  The deeper question is not which of these visions of society is more accurate or realistic, but about how we might move from one to the other, and what the change might feel like.  

On this front the book unfortunately falls totally flat.  They spend 268 out of 312 pages trying to call into question the "standard narrative" of human sexuality that centers around the differential investment strategies of men and women.  Eggs cost a lot, while sperm is cheap.  Therefore, game theory dictates that women should look for sap guys who will help raise children, but cuckold them with genetically superior strangers.   Men, in turn, should try to control a woman's sex life to ensure that they are really the father of any kids they care for, while slipping out the back door to hit it and quit with the ovulator next door.  As a result, monogamous pair-bonding is an uneasy but evolutionarily necessary detente that dictates distinct steroptypical attitudes towards sex for men (horny and casual) and women (frigid and calculating).  The book spends the bulk of its time giving grounds to doubt this story about the 'natural' inevitability of these attitudes, and providing reasons to think they may have instead originated with the 'artificial' imposition of agriculture.  

Then, with their last 44 pages, they try to imagine what men and women might think about sex if their views had not been poisoned by civilization.  And they pretty much don't know.  They have a puzzling chapter about the 'inscrutability' of female desire, which, despite their attempt to level the playing field, they agree is not the same as male desire (even in what they assert is its 'natural' pre-civilizational state).  Basically, they assert that female sexuality is complex and contextual.  They also have a weird chapter about what men would be like in this brave new (old) world.  Here, they do have a clear vision; men would be the same but they wouldn't feel guilty about sleeping around.  And maybe, since they would never need to pull up in a Ferrari to impress chicks they'll never get to control anyhow, they would stop stressing over, you know ... having Ferraris.  After spending so much time taking down the standard narrative of sex, would they offer in its place feels a bit anticlimactic.  Jajaja.

Now, don't get me wrong.  Everybody (consensually) getting what they want sexually without having to be ashamed of what that is, sounds like a fine idea to me.  And functioning as less of a tournament species sounds like a great idea all around (especially since I don't own a Ferrari).  I have no sympathy for people who dismiss possible changes in sexual behavior as unnatural or immoral or just plain hippy pie in the sky.  The future is always 'impossible' until it happens.  But how are we going to get there from here, and how does their 'naturalization' of promiscuity help us do that?  In fact, all you can say for this is that it renders the concept thinkable for those who don't do a lot of thinking.  Do we really believe that the polayamorous hoards would be unleashed if only they were to realize that monogamy is 'unnatural'?  Do we really want to base ethical and lifestyle choices around this concept at all?  Wouldn't we rather just have people think about whether a different set of sexual mores might be right for them?  Go read Esther Perel, or consider becoming an Ethical Slut, or a full blown practical polyamorist.  Why would you take science's word for what should happen naturally in your bedroom?  I know there's a critical mass of societal disapproval to overcome here if we want to try these ideas out more thoroughly.  So perhaps breaking the spell of natural inevitability that clings to our current arrangement serves a larger purpose.  But I'm deeply wary of the desire to let what will always be a fairly dubious science of evolutionary prehistory -- whether it be the standard or the alt narrative  -- be the guide to our present day actions.  In this sense, I think it would have been more useful if Ryna and Jethá had written in less polemic fashion.  If they weren't busy trying to prove to us how 'natural' promiscuous sex really is, they might have been able to spend more time telling us if studying this science might actually help us recreate this world in detail.  

P.S.  I took a moment to look back at Richard Prum's recent book The Evolution of Beauty.  He argues compellingly that sexual selection is a far more pervasive force in evolution than strict Darwinian adaptationists have given it credit for.  Most of the book is about the evolution of the amazing mating displays in birds, but it also contains several chapters about the evolution of human sexuality.  While his discussion neither refutes nor confirms the hypothesis of Sex at Dawn, it does fit well with its political agenda of increased female sexual autonomy.  It's also a much more tightly argued with respect to the science of evolution -- Prum is an expert, though with a very out of consensus view.  While Sex at Dawn is a quick thought provoking read, I would definitely recommend The Evolution of Beauty as the better book overall, and hands down the more scientifically accurate.