Two New Titles: Girard & B. Alan Wallace

Two New Titles

This weekend served as the anniversary of our local independent bookstore, Prairie Lights, and they offered 20% off everything, so time for a couple of new titles. It’s fun to browse there, and since my spouse and I, not to mention offspring, are well known there, we get plenty of recommendations. On this trip, I went with two familiar authors with new titles. The first is Rene Girard, with Pierpalo Anotnello and Joao Cezar de Castrol Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (2007). This title was new to me, and it looked good. Like a bloodhound with a new scent, I was off into it (notwithstanding the fact that I have a pile of unfinished books already). The book is an extended interview with Girard after a short summary introduction. The first chapter recounted Girard’s career. He was trained initially as a librarian-archivist, came to the U.S. (from his native France), received a Ph.D. in history from Indiana, then to John Hopkins, while along the way moving his attention to literature. From there, he went on to develop a very unique theory of culture and religion. He completed his career (at least as far as academic appointments go) at Stanford in the Department of French Language, Literature and Civilization. It’s interesting how this inquisitive and original thinker broke academic boundaries.

Girard is a hedgehog (in the Isaiah Berlin sense); only he has two big ideas: mimetic desire and scapegoating. In short, we learn from one another, often to the point where we mimic the desires of another, thereby establishing conflict (most easily recognized as envy). When social cohesion becomes frayed through rivalry, societies resort to scapegoats, a sacrifice to placate the social (or religious) order. Fascinating stuff, as I’ve read some of this stuff earlier. A theory of human culture and relations that is profoundly intriguing. The interviewers believe him to be the “Darwin of the human sciences”. Well, I’m not sure about that, but he is profoundly interesting. BTW, he came across his insight while reading the great 19th and early 20th century novelists, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, and Proust, among others, which he published as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

The other new title is B. Alan Wallace’s Mind in the Balance: Mediation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity (2009). Wallace is a former Buddhist monk, translator for the Dalai Lama and of Tibetan texts, a Ph.D. from Stanford in religious studies, and an undergraduate major in physics. With this combination, he’s an excellent conduit of perspectives between East and West, more specifically, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and Western science. This book, as he explains in the beginning, has an interesting genesis. He reports that his stepdaughter, a practicing Christian, wanted some guidance on going deeper into her tradition. He wrote this book for her, which includes not only history and theory behind Western and Eastern meditation traditions but also alternating chapters on meditation techniques and practices. I’m not quite halfway through, but the meditation guidance is some of the best that I’ve read (and I’ve read some of his other books). The combined tour of the traditions with the additional insight from Western science makes for a great learning experience, and it certainly serves as an aid to practice.

On a Lighter Note . . . to Shangri-La

The internet has many amazing qualities. The speed at which we can access information, for good or ill, is amazing, absolutely amazing. Further, the development of blogs has changed my reading habits a good deal. I find myself reading more and more blogs, as one will often reference another. Of course, this can lead to overload, and one must constantly cull one’s reading. However, we do discover some gems, at little or no price (especially as opposed to the cost of a book, and with a much wider gate than limiting oneself to what the NYT Book Review, TNR, NY Review of Books decide is worth considering, as much as I appreciate all of those sources). All of this is leading me to Seth Roberts, whom I discovered, I don’t remember from whom, via a blog. Roberts is a professor of psychology @ Berkley, a blogger, and, perhaps most importantly, a self-experimenter. That’s right, Roberts experiments on himself (and I’m sure lots of lab rats and other such things as psychologists do). He tests, reports, measures (a challenge, but he pursues it), and he reports.

One problem he got into was weight loss. Like many of us, he got heavier than he wanted. He began experimenting with small changes. Then he went to Paris, not normally considered the weight loss capital of the world. But he drank a new (to him) sugared drink with a strange new flavor, and despite his culinary enthusiasm, he had a limited appetite and actually lost weight. From this personal episode, combined with the ability to due to scientific research (he’s on the editorial board of Nutrition, for example), he came to the conclusion that flavors not associated with calories (but containing calories) decrease the body’s set point for weight (the body has an internal thermostat of sorts to maintain a set weight). Drinking the strange drink, not earlier associated with calories, lowered his set point, thus reducing his appetite. Later, testing further, he found that sugar water did the same trick, but for some quirk of evolution, sweetness as a taste didn’t count as a flavor, so drinking sugar water a couple of times a day allowed him to continue his weight loss. He later discovered that unflavored oils did the same thing without the extra sugar calories and allowing greater consumption of some healthy, although virtually tasteless oils. He, and many others, continue to lose weight.

Roberts published his findings and theory in The Shangri-La Diet: The No Hunger, Eat Anything Weight-Loss Plan (2006) after getting a boost from the Freakinomics blog site at the NYT. Anyway, it’s a fun read, an interesting guy, now on a kick in favor of cultured food that put bugs (good ones) in the gut, such as yogurt and kim-chee. Anyway, I’ve just started his regiment, and no results yet. But we’ll see, and I think that’s also a good thing by his way of thinking. A fun, quick read with a very easy application if you want to try it out.

Lukacs on Marx

"We must not kick a man when he's down. Marx was an unattractive man but--at least intellectually--he was taking the side of the downtrodden and poor, especially of the industrial workers (but not the peasants). Moreover, most of his critics miss the vital points, the inherent weaknesses of the Marxist body of dogma. The accepted intellectual or politological view is still that Marx was a utopian, that his ideas could hardly be put into practice, and when some leaders tried to do that, the result was an economic and humanitarian disaster. . . . Marx and Marxism failed well before 1989--not in 1956 and not in 1919 but in 1914. For it was then that internationalism and class consciousness melted away in the heat of nationalist emotions and beliefs. . . . The First World War marked the defeat of International Socialism; it led, instead, to the rise of National Socialism." (42-43). 

Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (2005)

Rev'd 8.22.2019

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Lukacs on Patriotism & Nationalism

Today I offer quotes on an insight that John Lukacs has provided many times before. It's not new to me from reading Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred (2005), but the distinction he makes bears repeating, especially in light of what so many so-proclaimed "conservative" commentators want people to think. I happily consider myself a patriot, but a nationalist? No. Nationalism, as much or more than any misguided Marxism, was the bane of the 20th century.

When . . . Samuel Johnson uttered his famous (and perhaps forever valid) dictum that Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel, he meant nationalism, even thought that word did not yet exist. One of the reasons why there exists no first-rate book about the history of nationalism is that it is not easy to separate it from old-fashioned patriotism. And these two inclinations, patriotism, and nationalism, divergent as they may be, still often overlap in people’s minds. (When, for example, Americans criticize a “superpatriot” what they really mean is an extreme nationalist.) (35-36).

. . . . 

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people”, justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at time and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. In one sense patriotic and national consciousness may be similar; but in anther sense, more and more apparent after 1870, national consciousness began to affect more and more people who, generally, had been immune to that before—as, for example, many people within the multinational empire of Austria-Hungary. It went deeper than class consciousness. Here and there it superseded religious affiliations, too. (36).

Lukacs on Right & Left & Hitler

More snippets from Democracy and Populism as food for thought and as a taste of Lukac's mind at work:

“[Hitler’s] example was, and remains, proof that the ancient categories “Right” and “Left” have become, at least in one important sense, outdated.” (21)

“Hitler, for one, was an idealist, not a materialist: an idealist of a dreadfully German and frightfully deterministic variety, and a believer in the power of ideas over matter. These men [Hitler, Mussolini, and Peron, etc.] knew how to appeal to the masses—something that would have filled Maistre with horror. They knew (as did Proudhon and not Marx) that people are moved by (and at times even worship) evidences of power rather than by propositions of social contracts.” (23-24)

John Lukacs on Democracy & Populism

Over an extended weekend during a trip to the Pacific Northwest, I was able to read and complete Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (2005) by John Lukacs. The book is an extended essay built around the topics of the title, looking primarily at nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe and the United States. Lukacs is challenging to summarize. In his more recent books, he tends to offer opinions and conclusions without much in the way of argument, citation, or development. Some support for his views and conclusions, of course, but brief, and often all too fleeting. However, whatever these shortcomings, he challenges and inspires thought and consideration on just about any topic he touches upon. Thus, to give a sense, some quotes from the book to provide a sample of what he and his book are about:

“Perspective is an inevitable component of reality; and all perspective is, at least to some extent, historical, just as all knowledge depends on memory.” (7)

“As always, Samuel Johnson is right: ‘Definitions are tricks for pedants.” Still, Right and Left retain some meaning, even now. . . . The “Right”, by and large, feared and rejected the principle of popular sovereignty. The “Left” advocated or supported or at least would propose democracy. It still does. The “Right” for a long time, was not populist. But now often it is—which is perhaps a main argument of this book.” (18)

rev'd 08.14.19