Review: True Grit by Charles Portis

I'll remember this book for its lively and distinctive narrator voice, and the way it (unintentionally?) captures so much of the American psyche.

Mattie Ross is headstrong, principled, and speaks in folksy idioms. She narrates her story as if called to the witness stand. She regularly caveats information she knows only secondhand or scenes she cannot recall with great certainty. Those moments she recalls with great precision she states her willingness to swear on. Her narrative voice reflects her worldview: except for her close ties with her family, her relationships with people are largely transactional and her assessment of morality emphasizes its consistence with the law.

Lawful society versus the state of nature is a major theme of the work. Mattie's worldview comes into conflict with her life experience when she underestimates a bandit's willingness to defy her arrest and overpower her physically, thrusting her into a state of nature. In an effort to escape her captors she finds herself in a pit filled with snakes and bats. Forced by necessity, she rips the arm off a corpse (an act she views as unlawful desecration) and fights her way out.

The story itself is quintessentially American, both in the positive and negative sense. Mattie's quest symbolizes the importance of fighting for justice, although it is a retributive justice. Mattie values grit, and because of grit even a trigger-happy and vindictive bad cop may be the key to achieving justice. It's important to live by your principles, and everyone is unscrupulous and out to get you. Perhaps there is a work out there that venerates these positive qualities without also promoting these negative qualities; America is unlikely to fix its problems while instilling True Grit morality.

Review: Democracy or Bonapartism by Domenico Losurdo

This is an incredibly relevant work for understanding modern day democracy and its discontents. Losurdo traces history from the French Revolution through the 1992 US Presidential election to show the development of Bonapartism. We see how soft Bonapartism of the US and other countries of the West (versus the war Bonpartism of fascism) is remarkably stable, and yet fails to deliver on the emancipation and social welfare one might expect would come of universal suffrage.

Bonapartism is a political structure characterized by a powerful and charismatic executive, who legitimizes their power through the support of the masses, and who becomes the interpreter of the nation — that is, power is personalized. To pave over internal strife between economic classes within a nation, conflict is externalized, and the Bonapartist leader is imbued with a mandate to protect (and expand) the lofty ideals of the nation. Soft Bonapartism is able to shift from states of exception to states of normality, and part of its stability comes from its ability to change out heads of state when the current Bonapartist leader no longer can point to popular support. This is accomplished by having competitive elections between multiple factions of a single party.

Along with the increasing power of the Bonapartist leader comes a reduction of the power of political parties, if not through overt legal means, via the implementation of single-member districts over proportional representation. We also see increased monopoly over theoretical production, i.e., the consolidation of mass media under the control over a few billionaires. Though soft Bonapartism comes with universal suffrage (first for just white men, and now for nearly all adults), we also see a disemancipation in our ability to participate in political decision-making and debate.

Readers may be particularly curious about Losurdo’s assessment of the socialist states of the twentieth century. Losurdo argues that none of these leaders were Bonapartist figures (though Mao at one point came closest), in part due to the role political parties play in mediating power. Because political parties act as forums for political education and debate, they maintain the political engagement of the masses and act as insulation against the personalization of power.

Losurdo notes that we are currently in a wave of disemancipation, and that the end is not yet in sight. He has few answers for the steps going forward, although reading between the lines it seems like fighting for proportional representation and re-taking control over the means of information dissemination (education, news, etc) are likely bets. I’d recommend this book as a good introduction to Marxist critique of modern political structures, and as a first book by this author.

Review: A Safe Girl To Love by Casey Plett

This little anthology paints for the reader raw and honest emotion. The painful, everyday kind. The small, wrenching dramas of getting through the world. Plett introduces us to a series of trans characters. Most of them deal with returning to small town life, familial relationships, poverty, substance [ab]use, and romantic/sexual relationships. A surprisingly recurrent scene is for a character to get drunk and have their nipples twisted. A slightly less recurrent beat is for a Canadian to immigrate south of the border. (The author is Canadian, and has lived in the US.)

I was a little disappointed in the writing style. The prose was not particularly literary. The story-telling leaned a little too much on dialogue, perhaps hoping to capture in amber the way trans women of the 2010s spoke. Some parts seem overly explained, like the author isn't confident the reader is with her. For example, in one of my favourites—"Portland, Oregon", told from the perspective of a woman's cat—there's a scene included seemingly only to clarify for the reader that only the woman can understand the cat's speech, breaking the magic and mystery of the story unnecessarily.

The stories often ended without warning—sometimes even in the middle of a scene. Perhaps this is a commentary on life as a twenty-something going through transition. There is no end, you just continue going and changing and growing. But it makes for unsatisfying reading.

Review: An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital by Michael Heinrich

The reason you would pick up this book is because you have not yet read Marx’s Capital and you would like an introduction. Presumably you hope to read only one such preparatory work before embarking on this journey, and so you are wondering if Heinrich’s offering suits your needs.

Heinrich checks a lot of boxes; at only 240 pages, this book is approachable yet quite comprehensive and precise in its overview of Marx’s three volumes. Despite these qualities, I wouldn’t recommend it as an introductory volume, because I think it fails to adequately present the discourse surrounding Marx’s work. Heinrich’s Introduction pushes the reader along a western chauvinist and nihilistic path that might take more than 240 pages (perhaps as many as 363 pages) to correct.

Heinrich intervenes in both the academic discourse as well as the practical Marxist discourse surrounding interpretations of Capital. However, he rarely names his opponents and even less frequently quotes them at length. Heinrich’s unnamed foes seem to be the weakest representatives of their various tendencies, resulting in strawmanned arguments. Heinrich declares easy defeats, positioning himself as the one true understander of Marx. At the level of academic discourse, the worst of these sins is his comparison of value form theory versus what he calls “substantialism” — always in scare quotes, and not (always?) a term his opponents would use to describe their own interpretation of the labour theory of value. His situation of Capital in practical applications of Marxism is even worse (particularly Chapters 11-12). During the twentieth century, revolutions guided by Marxism produced socialist states across the globe. This wave swept under-developed and colonized nations, not the industrialized nations early Marxists expected to see lead worker's revolutions. Heinrich has a sneering disdain for these efforts:

It is not sufficient for the transition to a communist society to conquer and defend state power during a weak phase of bourgeois rule, like Russia in 1917. Without the corresponding social and economic preconditions, a socialist revolution might be successful as a project to maintain the power of a political party, but not as a project of social emancipation.

Heinrich’s solution is, implicitly, that these workers not attempt to liberate themselves, and instead suffer under colonialism while they wait for the lazy western movements to figure things out first. The futility and illegitimacy of their movements being clear, Heinrich barely engages with Marxist economists and philosophers hailing from the USSR, China or the Global South. To the extent he gives a nod to non-Western interpretations of Marx, he continues his practice of battling unnamed foes, referring to them obliquely as, for example, “worldview Marxists.” To be safe, Heinrich also dismisses dialectics (an important philosophical foundation for Soviet and Eastern socialism) as useless at best and sophistry at worst.

Heinrich’s vision of a post-capitalist society (which he emphasizes is not at all inevitable) is one of full democracy, zero scarcity, and abolition of the value form. But what does the transition to this state look like? Heinrich has no answer.

Heinrich’s dismissal of Marx’s (non-Western) successors is mirrored by the absence of his precursors; Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc, feature little in Heinrich’s overview. As a result, Marx’s brilliant critique (understood properly only by Heinrich, of course) springs from nowhere.

So here we see the seeds of the misconceptions readers introduced to Marxism via Heinrich may be imparted with: a smug sense of western superiority, a depressed sense that nothing can be done to bring about a better world, an elevated sense of Marx’s genius severed from his intellectual context, and a certainty that all other interpretations of Marxism (by critics left unnamed) are patently absurd.

For readers who want less of an introduction and more of an interpretation, Heinrich’s book has some valuable insights. For example, I appreciated his reframing of the debates on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) as questioning if it even matters if it falls. (Heinrich says no, see above regarding the non-inevitability of the fall of capitalism. I agree no, there are many other reasons to end capitalism.) Heinrich also emphasizes that not only workers but capitalists too are subject to domination by capital, a crucial point frequently elided by leftist anti-capitalists. Chapter 8 (“Interest, Credit, and ‘Fictitious Capital’”) and Chapter 10 (“The Fetishism of Social Relations in Bourgeois Society”) were clear treatments of complex subjects.

But for those looking for a preparatory read, where to turn? My experience was Marx’s Inferno by W.C. Roberts, which presents Volume 1 in the fiery discourse of its time, and also emphasizes the impersonal domination of capital (following Heinrich), while refraining from smug strawmanned arguments. However, Roberts’s text is academic, and assumes familiarity with basic Marxist concepts. Perhaps instead start with Wage Labour and Capital, a pamphlet written by Marx with the intent of introducing his work to a popular audience.

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.