Review: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

This is a book for readers. Italo Calvino slips into your mind and examines every part of your relationship with books, showing you that you are connected with countless other readers through our mirrored experience in reading. 

Your never-ending reading list and the comfort of your reading routine. Word frequencies, and the way word choice characterizes a work. Reading a book alone, versus reading a book with another reader, versus being read to. Reading as a metaphor for social connection. Reading as a communication with the writer. Reading as a political activity. Reading a work only in translation and wondering what is lost. Reading as a spiraling activity:

If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.

One of the most unique of these, that I have felt but had never seen expressed so evocatively, is the difference between reading as a reader and reading as a writer or editor: 

Now you understand Ludmilla’s refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to “the other side” and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed.

I choose “the other side”, that privilege of the editor or the writer. The ability to see the seams of a work, to see what could be tightened, that makes reading more enjoyable to me, not less. But I am not immune to a little sentimental reflection on those days gone by when every book was a wonder, every scientific paper a flawless addition to the literature.

These meditations on reading, all told in second-person, are interspersed with segments of lost novels, all told in first person. The overall plot that ties together this ode to books is that due to publishing house mishaps, political strife and various other interruptions, you, the reader, can never finish any one of these books despite desperately wanting to. The lost fragments range from the creative and thought-provoking to the cliche and boring. Portrayal of women left much to be desired. Portrayal of political topics was also disappointing; when writing on this vein, Calvino reads like any other disillusioned twentieth century socialist. I mostly found myself awaiting the next frame story, for when you, the reader, or I, the reader, could next discover what aspect of our relationship with books would be probed next.

Review: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Philosophical beats repeat throughout history. Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment traces anti-foundationalism from the Ancient Greeks through the modern era, and acts as a vaccine against such thought. Having read this work, I recognize it easily, and I can send out my metaphorical T cells to fight it.

J.S. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man plays a similar role against race science, tracing the bad philosophy and bad science to uphold the imperialist and racist status quo through a few hundred years. Indeed, his first edition (1981) anticipates the 1994 version of mismeasuring man, The Bell Curve. Gould highlights the factors that make this train of thought return to prominence: the need to justify cutbacks in social resources or explain increasing inequality by means of anything but social policy (“they deserve their fate, they’re just not smart enough to compete”). I think we will have many more years of such worsening social outcomes, so it’s a good vaccine to take.

Gould’s examination of some of the key figures and concepts of scientific racism (Broca, Goddard, Spearman's g, etc.) reveals a number of patterns. For example, data confirming a hypothesis is easily accepted and poorly scrutinized (Gould re-analyzes the raw data for several flawed but influential studies). In contrast, data showing the role of environment over genetics are tortured or waved away with absurd explanations like “intelligent Blacks move to where living conditions are better.” Politically or socially convenient findings are accepted and applied, despite pushback from contemporary critical scientists. Experimental protocols are poorly designed and often not followed.

Gould writes like a scientist (he was a professor at Harvard), for better or for worse. He is precise, cautious, meticulous, thorough. But he writes like a scientist with political convictions, who knows his work matters, who recognizes a personal stake in communicating the message. His presence throughout the book emphasizes this, such as his experience with a son with learning disabilities and how testing in education played a positive role in this case. Anticipating criticisms of bias, he cautions the reader not to conflate neutrality and objectivity: 

It is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.

Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. Moreover, one needs to understand and acknowledge inevitable preferences in order to know their influence—so that fair treatment of data and argument can be attained! No conceit could be worse than a belief in one’s own intrinsic objectivity, no prescription more suited to the exposure of fools. 

It’s a work that bridges science, philosophy, history and politics in a way I found very satisfying, and still very important to the questions of today.

Review: The Dialectical Biologist By Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin

Although it is possible to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in a field like biology without taking a single post-secondary philosophy course, I don’t think it should be. Through practice, biology can teach you how to think, but I don’t think it teaches you how to think about how you think. Philosophy helps you step outside your thought patterns and examine assumptions or limitations you didn’t realize you were making. 

The essays in this book take as their target scientists who are correct in applying their craft — at least by conventional standards of logic and statistics — but nonetheless draw incorrect conclusions. These vary from incorrect models of evolution (e.g., one-way adaptation of creatures to their environment instead of a dynamic relationship between creature and environment), to deductions of processes that fail to consider the contingency of an observed relationship, to the chauvinism of expecting a western model of science to be universally optimal.

This anthology is now several decades old and biology has necessarily abandoned some of its insistence on what the authors term Cartesian science — a reductionist approach that fails to account for mutual interdependence, interconnectivity, and change. My own PhD research examined some of this: how do certain relationships change while other environmental variables are also in flux? In trying to navigate such a problem, I found myself becoming more fluent in dialectical materialism, although I didn’t know the term for it. 

Although biology has progressed, Cartesian reductionism remains prevalent. I find myself butting up against it often when I try to communicate the work I do. The essays felt cathartic to read: here, too, were other scientists fighting the same fights I fight (particularly chapter 4).

Because this book is a collection of essays not intended to be read together, the essays sometimes repeat metaphors or examples or concepts. An abridged reading of my favourite chapters that retains the sweeping scope and remains feeling fresh and pertinent would be the Introduction, followed by chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13 and the Conclusion.

Review: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The various currents of American identity jump out of this novel’s pages, and then sing you to sleep with flowery, melodramatic Victorian prose.

The first of these currents is puritanism, sharply criticized by the narrative for its hypocrisy and unneighbourliness. That this streak remains within American culture despite the novel’s consistent place in school reading lists suggests the critique doesn’t quite land. Do readers laugh at the townsfolk who snub the lovechild of an adultress until she becomes a rich heiress (I certainly did), but not see themselves in these small-minded, selfish folk (I certainly didn’t)? 

Another current is the pride and tenacity in standing up for one’s beliefs, no matter the social opposition — even if it demands braving the Atlantic to reinvent oneself. This theme, too, the author weaves into his work with intention. Adulteress Hester Prynne’s quiet rebellion in transforming the scarlet letter she is forced to wear into something beautiful, her refusal to cover the letter in shame… these passages are touchingly written, heroic.

Combining these two currents together, there is a deep mistrust in the state — which is, after all, composed of people, who tend towards being cruel puritans. Highlighted secular institutions are the prison and the cemetery. Elections are pompous, revered, capricious rituals. Social interventions callously and sanctimoniously try to part mother and child. Through personification in Hester, the virtues elevated by the narrative are individual charity and truthfulness to oneself.

Some currents perhaps less intentionally flow from the author’s pen. The noble savagery of the indigenous neighbours is an artifact of the author's era. There is a heavy christian morality that coats every character’s emotions — particularly that of guilt. It weighs so leadenly on the characters that I find the novel almost not worth reading for its lack of insight into human psychology, the focus of the novel.

Review: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

This is an ambitious, vivid debut novel. The retelling of the story of Buddha’s son was clever and fresh, and meaningful even if you are not acquainted with the mythology. The prose was elegant and evocative and flowing. The world felt packed with mysteries, swirling with people and politics. The fantasy version of Sri Lanka felt so fun to explore, and the author deftly wove in the scars of colonialism, and its relationship to fascist popular uprisings and religious fundamentalism, and the way political violence is given cover by a liberal tolerance more concerned with bureaucracy and comfortable vacations in the mountains than halting pandemics and pogroms. The pandemic setting also felt eerily familiar: the narrative is very aware of who is masked, which strangers intrude within breathing distance.

But I felt like overall it came together not quite right. Some scenes had awkward transitions and some events were unclear; I had to reread a passage to confirm that a key character had actually died, and it didn’t always feel natural why a chapter started where it did. The mysteries didn’t unravel at the right rate; given the prominence of the Bright Doors, their connection to other worlds felt insufficiently dwelled upon, and was overshadowed by a somewhat out-of-nowhere appearance of a long-lost lover. I expected more coherence between the various mysteries of time shifting, doors, devils and prophecies. Perhaps their seeming disjointedness is given cohesion by familiarity with South Asian folklore. 

The ending also came a little suddenly. From the very first pages of the book, we learn Fetter’s shadow has been torn from him. At the emotional climax of the book, we suddenly learn the narrator has been Fetter’s shadow all along, and we cease seeing the world through Fetter’s eyes as the shadow sets out to complete its own goals. This reveal was well done, and I enjoyed revisiting parts of the story with this knowledge. It was also a clever way to resolve the contradiction between Fetter swearing to never kill again with the prophecy that Fetter would end his father’s life: Fetter’s shadow played the role of assassin (via an ignominious mode of death) while Fetter played the role of non-violent dissenter. Fetter is lighter than air, the shadow operates by causing pain, disgust, indigestion, shame. They form a yin/yang. 

However with this thesis/antithesis established, I felt the lack of synthesis at the end rather unfulfilling: Fetter remains blocked off from his shadow, and more distant and difficult to read than ever. Perhaps it is the author’s intent for Fetter to fully reject forever the use of violence as “the only way to change the world” — his mother’s mantra. A permanent separation of shadow and body achieves that. On the other hand, a synthesis of shadow and brightness would indicate an acceptance of both violence and non-violence. However, in the final page Fetter indicates that he has achieved nearly this latter transformation — he continues to reject violence by his hands while supporting a movement that is willing to use force when necessary to overthrow their government. So then why did his shadow leave him, separate from him?

The crux of the issue is, I think, how the author tried to approach the problem of political revolution in fiction. An author has, broadly, two choices: (1) the main character(s) can play the central role, acting as world-changing heroes (Babel), or (2) the main character can play a small role, some side battle in a bigger war (For Whom The Bell Tolls, Wheel of Time). The Saint of Bright Doors tries to have it both ways: (1) the main character is prophesied to kill his father, and (2) the main character is but a small part of a dynamic, growing movement. While the objective of (1) is completed, the day is not yet saved, and the movement built by Fetter’s friends (2) is poised to contest power. However, Fetter is strangely absent in both aspects: (1) it is his shadow that takes agency in the first arc, and (2) Fetter’s friends who take agency in the second arc. As a result, Fetter’s arc is mainly to drift through the story, and come to terms with his relationships with his parents, while others get the political work done.

Review: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

This history of the United States is familiar history, in the way that Wicked is familiar to The Wizard of Oz fans: the formation and development of the United States told from the perspective of those indigenous to the continent. Rather than extolling the inventions of liberties and freedoms, this history is a tragic devastation of a rich network of communities, and their struggle for survival, recognition and restitution.

One of the key themes of this work is how genocidal ideology doesn’t spring out of nowhere. The dehumanization of peoples in Europe preceded the dehumanization of peoples of the Americas, if to a less radical degree. England used bounties to capture priests (who they would then kill) as part of its conquest of Ireland; to conquer the vast distances of the Americas, this practice turned into scalping (Chapter 2). A religion whose God called upon them to wander the wilderness, defeat the heathens, and to occupy a promised land, went on to do just that in the New World (and then later, in Palestine), calling it Manifest Destiny (Chapter 3). The dispossession of peasants across England during the birth of capitalism reverberated in the dispossession of indigenous people of the Americas, using many of the technologies of capitalism — debts, cheap commodities (Chapter 3) — and benefitting from a self-interested volunteer army of settlers (or squatters) instead of the compelled labour of feudalism (Chapter 7). 

Another key theme is that this ideology is not a thing of the past. As the conclusion argues beautifully, the same techniques of quelling insurgencies, the same dehumanization of the barbarous enemy are present in United States imperialist wars of the 20th and 21st century (Vietnam, Iraq, Yemen, the Philippines, Kora, and others). Manifest Destiny developed into a belief that is the United States’ right to have military bases across the world, to bend the world to its will through legal tools and economic tools and, of course, violence. 

I think everyone should read this book.

Review: Heidegger and the Ideology of War by Domenico Losurdo

When we say we are anti-fascist, it doesn’t mean we are only against the specific forms of fascism that developed in Italy and Germany in the mid-twentieth century, but that we are against all forms of fascism—an ideology of war and violence to benefit the community of the privileged off the subjugation and genocide of the out-groups. Fascism adapts to the specific conditions of a time, and it is happy to put on disguises to best appeal to the needs of a nation. That means we cannot be so reductive as to divide philosophers into camps of “Nazi” or “not Nazi” (or “fascist” or “not fascist”), but must understand and recognize those schools of thought that give birth to fascism, or otherwise nurture it and give it cover. 

To do so, we must correctly understand the political currents of these proto-fascist philosophies at the time they were written. Philosophy fails particularly spectacularly at this task with Heidegger, a philosopher still widely upheld and read today, as Losurdo lays out:

The debate regarding Heidegger and his relationship with Nazism is still unsettled, and it encompasses several unique aspects. Usually, the historian of philosophy tries to single out the interlocutors and the concrete targets of a certain position, and then tries to reconstruct the real historical framework, even for propositions that have the ambition of being valid sub specie acternitatis. He does this not for the sake of historicist reductionism; on the contrary, his starting point is the awareness that even the excess of one theory with respect to its time cannot be grasped and evaluated without a preliminary attempt at historical clarification. In the case of this debate, however, many interpreters of Heidegger seem dominated by the opposite preoccupation: that of relegating all of his texts, even those in which the political dimension is explicit and declared, to a rarefied, politically aseptic sphere. In this way Heidegger, who not only in his letters and occasional speeches, but also in his theoretical writings, tirelessly comments upon the events of his time, is subjected to a purifying process that is supposed to cleanse him of any worldly contamination.

Losurdo places Heidegger in his historical context again, connecting his philosophical work with his political commentary, and comparing him with both his colleagues that clearly denounced the Nazis (Jaspers, Adorno, Horkheimer, Husserl, etc) and those whose philosophy is much more broadly accepted as aligned with Nazi ideology than Heidegger’s (Schmitt, Spengler, Junger). Losurdo traces themes of community and belonging, historicity, epistemology, identity, modernity and war through the philosophical developments between the start of the war in 1914 through the end of the war in 1945.

One of the difficulties with understanding fascism is that within their political movements, at any given time and over the course of time, different strands of philosophies become expressed. For example, the Nazis upheld a bucolic ideal, but then facing the pressures of war, had to elevate mechanization and production, its antithesis. Heidegger’s relationship with fascism is sometimes excused by pointing to these different currents. His denunciation of the Nazis for giving into mechanization and modernity is hardly a damning blow against fascist ideology. It is not particularly exonerating to criticize certain Nazi ideologues for being too liberal: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) — have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’,” (1935) nor is his rejection of specifically biological racism much consolation given his strong antisemitism. His philosophy elevated the transformational aspects of war and volkische community throughout the war, and he shows little self-criticism for his relationship with the Nazi movement after the war.

Losurdo’s argument here hits similar beats as his masterpiece on Nietzsche, however where that work demolishes Nietzsche as a possible pillar from which to build progressive politics, this blow to Heidegger landed as less fatal. This might be partly due to the length; at only one fifth the page count, Losurdo doesn’t have the space to prevent a full intellectual development of Heidegger. Are there parts of Heidegger that can be salvaged, developed towards some other end? It seems unlikely, but Heideggerians might follow their lodestar in doing a poor job of self-critique.