- Popper, Karl R.
The Open Society and Its
Enemies. Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx.
London: Routledge, [1945, 1962, 1966, 1995] 2003.
ISBN 0-415-27842-2.
-
After tracing the Platonic origins of utopian schemes of top-down
social engineering in
Volume 1
(December 2003), Popper now turns to the best-known
modern exemplars of the genre, Hegel and Marx, starting
out by showing Aristotle's contribution to Hegel's
philosophy. Popper considers Hegel a complete charlatan
and his work a blizzard of obfuscation intended to dull
the mind to such an extent that it can believe that the
Prussian monarchy (which paid the salaries of Hegel and
his acolytes) was the epitome of human freedom. For a
work of serious philosophical criticism (there are more
than a hundred pages of end notes in small type), Popper is
forthrightly acerbic and often quite funny in his treatment of Hegel,
who he disposes of in only 55 pages of this book of
470. (Popper's contemporary,
Wittgenstein, gets much the same treatment. See note 51 to chapter 11, for example, in
which he calls the Tractatus
“reinforced dogmatism that opens wide the door to the
enemy, deeply significant metaphysical nonsense…”.
One begins to comprehend what possessed Wittgenstein, a year
after the publication of this book, to
brandish a fireplace poker at Popper.)
Readers who think of Popper as an icon of libertarianism
may be surprised at his remarkably positive treatment of
Marx, of whom he writes (chapter 13), “Science progresses
through trial and error. Marx tried, and although
he erred in his main doctrines, he did not try in vain. He
opened and sharpened our eyes in many ways. A return to
pre-Marxian social science is inconceivable. All modern
writers are indebted to Marx, even if they do not know it.
… One cannot do justice to Marx without
recognizing his sincerity. His open-mindedness, his sense
of facts, his distrust of verbiage, and especially of
moralizing verbiage, made him one of the world's most
influential fighters against hypocisy and pharisaism. He had
a burning desire to help the oppressed, and was fully conscious
of the need for proving himself in deeds, and not only in
words.”
To be sure, this encomium is the prelude to a detailed critique
of Marx's deterministic theory of history and dubious
economic notions, but unlike Hegel, Marx is given credit for
trying to make sense of phenomena which few others even
attempted to study scientifically. Many of the flaws in
Marx's work, Popper argues, may be attributed to Marx having
imbibed too deeply and uncritically the work of Hegel, and the
crimes committed in the name of Marxism the result of those
treating his work as received dogma, as opposed to a theory
subject to refutation, as Marx himself would have viewed it.
Also surprising is his condemnation, with almost Marxist vehemence, of
nineteenth century “unrestrained capitalism”, and enthusiasm for
government intervention in the economy and the emergence
of the modern welfare state (chapter 20 in particular). One must
observe, with the advantage of sixty years hindsight, that F.A.
Hayek's less sanguine contemporary perspective in
The Road to Serfdom
(May 2002) has proved more prophetic. Of particular
interest is Popper's advocacy of “piecemeal social
engineering”, as opposed to grand top-down systems such
as “scientific socialism”, as the genuinely scientific method
of improving society, permitting incremental progress by
experiments on the margin which are subject to falsification
by their results, in the same manner Popper argues the
physical sciences function in
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Permit me to make a few remarks about the physical properties
of this book. The paperback seems to have a spine made of
triple-reinforced neutronium, and cannot be induced to lie flat
by any of the usual stratagems. In fact, when reading the book,
one must either use two hands to hold it open or else wedge it open
with three fingers against the spine in order to read complete
lines of text. This is tiring, particularly since the book is
also quite heavy. If you happen to doze off whilst reading
(which I'll confess happened a few times during some of the more
intricate philosophical arguments), the thing will pop out of
your hand, snap shut like a bear trap, and fly off in some random
direction—Zzzzzz … CLACK … thud!
I don't know what the problem is with the binding—I have any
number of O'Reilly paperbacks
about the same size and shape which lie flat without the need
for any extreme measures.
The text is set in a type font in which the distinction between
roman and italic type is very subtle—sometimes I had to take off
my glasses (I am nearsighted) and eyeball the text close-up
to see if a word was actually emphasised, and that runs the risk
of a bloody nose if your thumb should slip and the thing snap
shut.
A U.S. edition of this volume is now back
in print; for a while only
Volume 1 was available from
Princeton University Press. The
U.K. edition of Volume 1
from Routledge remains available.
- Spencer, Robert.
The Politically Incorrect Guide
to Islam (and the Crusades).
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2005.
ISBN 0-89526-013-1.
-
This book has the worthy goal of providing a brief,
accessible antidote to the airbrushed version of Islam
dispensed by its apologists and echoed by the mass media,
and the relentlessly anti-Western account of the Crusades
indoctrinated in the history curricula of government
schools. Regrettably, the attempt falls short of the mark.
The tone throughout is polemical—you don't feel like you're
reading about history, religion, and culture so much as that
the author is trying to persuade you to adopt his negative
view of Islam, with historical facts and citations from
original sources trotted out as debating points. This runs the
risk of the reader suspecting the author of having
cherry-picked source material, omitting that which argues
the other way. I didn't find the
author guilty of this, but the result is that this book is
only likely to persuade those who already agree with its
thesis before picking it up, which makes one wonder what's
the point.
Spencer writes from an overtly Christian perspective,
with parallel “Muhammad vs. Jesus” quotes in each chapter,
and statements like, “If Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard the
Lionhearted, and countless others hadn't risked their lives
to uphold the honor of Christ and His Church thousands of
miles from home, the jihadists would almost certainly have
swept across Europe much sooner” (p. 160). Now, there's
nothing wrong with comparing aspects of Islam to other religions
to counter “moral equivalence” arguments which claim that every
religion is equally guilty of intolerance, oppression, and
incitement to violence, but the near-exclusive focus on Christianity
is likely to be off-putting to secular readers and adherents of
other religions who are just as threatened by militant,
expansionist Islamic fundamentalism as Christians.
The text is poorly proofread; in several block quotations,
words are run together without spaces, three times in
as many lines on page 110. In the quote from John Wesley
on p. 188, the whole meaning is lost when the
phrase “cities razed from the foundation” is written
with “raised” instead of “razed”.
The author's earlier
Islam Unveiled
(February 2003) is similarly flawed in tone and
perspective. Had I noticed that this book was by the
same author, I wouldn't have read it. It's more
to read, but the combination of Ibn Warraq's
Why I Am Not a Muslim
(February 2002)
and Paul Fregosi's
Jihad in the West
(July 2002)
will leave you with a much better understanding of the
issues than this disappointing effort.
- Thorpe, Peter.
Why Literature Is Bad for You.
Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1980.
ISBN 0-88229-745-7.
-
Techies like myself often have little patience with students of
the humanities, particularly those argumentative types ill-informed
in anything outside their speciality often found around university
campuses. After escaping from an encounter with one of these
creatures, a common reaction is to shrug one's shoulders and
mutter “English majors…”. I'd always assumed it
was a selection effect: a career which involves
reading made-up stories and then arguing vociferously about
small details in them just naturally appeals to dopey people who
those more engaged in the real world inevitably find
tedious and irritating. But here's a book written by
a professor of English Literature who argues that immersion
in the humanities manufactures such people, wrecking
the minds and often the lives of those who would have otherwise made
well-balanced and successful accountants, scientists, physicians,
engineers, or members of other productive professions.
This is either one of the most astonishing exemplars of academic
apostasy ever written, or such a dry satire (which, it should be
noted, is one of the author's fields of professional interest) that
it slips beneath the radar of almost everybody who reads it.
Peter Thorpe was a tenured (to be sure, otherwise this book would
have been career suicide) associate professor of English at the
University of Colorado when, around 1980, he went through what must
have been a king-Hell existential mid-life crisis and penned this
book which, for all its heresies, didn't wreck his career: here's a
recent
biography.
In any case, the message is incendiary. A professor of English
Literature steps up to the podium to argue that intensive exposure to
the Great Books which undergraduate and graduate students in English
and their professors consider their “day job” is highly destructive
to their psyches, as can be observed by the dysfunctional behaviour
manifest in the denizens of a university department of humanities. So
dubious is Thorpe that such departments have anything to do with
human values, that he consistently encloses “humanities” in scare
quotes.
Rather than attempting to recapitulate the arguments of this short and
immensely entertaining polemic, I will simply cite the titles of the
five parts and list the ways in which Thorpe
deems the study of literature pernicious in each.
- Seven Types of Immaturity
“Outgrowing” loved ones; addiction to and fomenting crises;
refusal to co-operate deemed a virtue; fatalism as an
excuse; self-centredness instead of self-knowledge; lust for
revenge; hatred and disrespect for elders and authority.
- Seven Avenues to Unawareness
Imputing “motivation” where it doesn't exist; pigeonholing people
into categories; projecting one's own feelings onto others;
replacement of one's own feelings with those of others;
encouragement of laziness—it's easier to read than to do;
excessive tolerance for incompetence; encouraging hostility and
aggression.
- Five Avenues to Unhappiness
Clinically or borderline paranoia, obsession with the past,
materialism or irrational anti-materialism, expectation of
gratitude when none is due, and being so worry-prone as to risk
stomach ulcers (lighten up—this book was published two years
before the discovery of
H.
pylori).
- Four Ways to Decrease Our Mental Powers
Misuse of opinion, faulty and false memories,
dishonest use of evidence, and belief that ideas
do not have consequences.
- Four Ways to Failing to Communicate
Distorting the language, writing poorly, gossipping and
invading the privacy of others, and advocating or
tolerating censorship.
That's a pretty damning bill of particulars, isn't it?
Most of these indictments of the rôle of literature in inducing
these dysfunctions are illustrated by fictionalised
anecdotes based on individuals the author has encountered
in English departments during his career. Some of the stories
and arguments for how devotion to literature is the
root cause of the pathology of the people who study it seem a
tad over the top to this engineer, but then I haven't spent
my whole adult life in an English Lit. department! The writing is
entertaining and the author remains true to his profession in
invoking a multitude of literary allusions to bolster his
points. Whatever, it's comforting to believe that when you
took advantage of
Cliff's Notes
to survive those soporific equation-free requirements for graduation
you weren't (entirely) being lazy but also protecting your sanity and
moral compass!
The book is out of print, but used copies are readily available
and inexpensive. Special thanks to the visitor who
recommended this book.
- Hitchens, Peter.
The Abolition of Britain.
2nd. ed. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.
ISBN 1-893554-39-2.
-
History records many examples of the collapse of once great and
long-established cultures. Usually, such events are the consequence
of military defeat, occupation or colonisation by a foreign power,
violent revolution and its totalitarian aftermath, natural disasters,
or other dramatic and destructive events. In this book, Peter
Hitchens chronicles the collapse, within the span of a
single human lifetime (bracketed by the funerals of Winston
Churchill in 1965 and Princess Diana in 1997), of the culture
which made Britain British, and maintained domestic peace
in England and Wales since 1685 (and Scotland since Culloden in 1746)
while the Continent was repeatedly convulsed by war and revolution.
The collapse in Britain, however, occurred following victory
in a global conflict in which, at the start, Britain stood alone
against tyranny and barbarism, and although rooted in a time
of postwar privation, demotion from great power status, and loss
of empire, ran its course as the nation experienced unprecedented
and broadly-based prosperity.
Hitchens argues that the British cultural collapse was almost entirely
the result of well-intentioned “reform” and “modernisation” knocking
out the highly evolved and subtly interconnected pillars which
supported the culture, set in motion, perhaps, by immersion in
American culture during World War II (see chapter 16—this argument
seems rather dubious to me, since many of the postwar changes in
Britain also occurred in the U.S., but afterward), and
reinforced and accelerated by television broadcasting, the perils of
which were prophetically sketched by T.S. Eliot in 1950
(p. 128). When the pillars of a culture: historical memory,
national identity and pride, religion and morality, family, language,
community, landscape and architecture, decency, and education are
dislodged, even slightly, what ensues is much like the “controlled
implosion” demolition of a building, with the Hobbesian forces of
“every man for himself” taking the place of gravity in pulling down
the structure and creating the essential preconditions for the
replacement of bottom-up self-government by self-reliant citizens with
authoritarian rule by élite such as Tony Blair's ambition of U.S.-style
presidential power and, the leviathan where the
road to serfdom leads, the emerging
anti-democratic Continental super-state.
This U.S second edition includes notes which explain British terms and
personalities unlikely to be familiar to readers abroad, a preface
addressed to American readers, and an afterword discussing the 2001
general election and subsequent events.
- Gingerich, Owen.
The Book Nobody Read.
New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
ISBN 0-14-303476-6.
-
There is something about astronomy which seems to invite
obsession. Otherwise, why would intelligent and seemingly rational
people expend vast amounts of time and effort to compile
catalogues of hundreds of thousands of stars, precisely measure
the positions of planets over periods of decades, travel to the
ends of the
Earth to observe
solar eclipses, get up before the crack of noon to
see a rare transit of
Mercury
or
Venus, or
burn up months of computer time finding
every planetary
transit in a quarter million year interval
around the present? Obsession it may be, but it's
also fascinating and fun, and astronomy has profited
enormously from the labours of those so obsessed,
whether on a mountain top in the dead of winter, or
carrying out lengthy calculations when tables of logarithms
were the only computational tool available.
This book chronicles one man's magnificent thirty-year
obsession. Spurred by Arthur Koestler's
The Sleepwalkers,
which portrayed Copernicus as a villain and his
magnum opus
De revolutionibus
“the book that nobody read”—“an all time worst seller”, followed by the
discovery of an obviously carefully read and heavily annotated
first edition in the library of the
Royal Observatory in
Edinburgh, Scotland, the author, an astrophysicist and Harvard
professor of the history of science, found himself inexorably
drawn into a quest to track down and examine every extant copy
of the first (Nuremberg, 1543) and second (Basel, 1566) editions
of De revolutionibus to see whether and where
readers had annotated them and so determine how widely the book,
of which about a thousand copies were printed in these
editions—typical for scientific works at the time—was read.
Unlike today, when we've been educated that writing in a book is
desecration, readers in the 16th and 17th centuries often made
extensive annotations to their books, even assigning students
and apprentices the task of copying annotations by other learned
readers into their copies.
Along the way Gingerich found himself driving down an abandoned
autobahn in the no man's land between East and West Germany,
testifying in the criminal trial of a book rustler,
discovering the theft of copies which librarians were
unaware were missing, tracking down the provenance of
pages in “sophisticated” (in the original sense of the word)
copies assembled from two or more incomplete originals,
attending the auction at Sotheby's of a first edition with
a dubious last leaf which sold for US$750,000 (the author, no
impecunious naïf in the rare book game, owns two copies of
the second edition himself), and discovering the
fate of many less celebrated books from that era (toilet
paper). De revolutionibus has survived the
vicissitudes of the centuries quite well—out of about 1000
original copies of the first and second editions, approximately
six hundred exemplars remain.
Aside from the adventures of the Great Copernicus Chase, there
is a great deal of information about Copernicus and the
revolution he discovered and sparked which dispels many
widely-believed bogus notions such as:
- Copernicus was a hero of secular science
against religious fundamentalism. Wrong!
Copernicus was a deeply religious doctor of church law,
canon of the Roman Catholic Varmian Cathedral in Poland. He
dedicated the book to Pope Paul III.
- Prior to Copernicus, astronomers relying on Ptolemy's
geocentric system kept adding epicycles on epicycles
to try to approximate the orbits of the planets.
Wrong!
This makes for a great story, but there is no evidence
whatsoever for “epicycles on epicycles”. The authoritative
planetary ephemerides in use in the age of Copernicus were
calculated using the original Ptolemaic system without
additional refinements, and there are no known examples of
systems with additional epicycles.
- Copernicus banished epicycles from astronomy.
Wrong!
The Copernican system, in fact, included thirty-four
epicycles! Because Copernicus believed that all planetary
motion was based on circles, just like Ptolemy he required
epicycles to approximate motion which wasn't known to be
actually elliptical prior to Kepler. In fact, the Copernican
system was no more accurate in predicting planetary positions
than that of Ptolemy, and ephemerides computed from it were
no better.
- The Roman Catholic Church was appalled by Copernicus's
suggestion that the Earth was not the centre of the cosmos and
immediately banned his book.
Wrong!
The first edition of De
revolutionibus was published in 1543. It wasn't
until 1616, more than seventy years later, that
the book was placed on the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum, and in 1620 it was permitted as
long as ten specific modifications were made. Outside
Italy, few copies even in Catholic countries were
censored according to these instructions. In Spain,
usually thought of as a hotbed of the Inquisition, the
book was never placed on the Index at
all. Galileo's personal copy has the forbidden passages
marked in boxes and lined through, permitting the
original text to be read. There is no evidence of any
copy having been destroyed on the orders of the Church,
and the Vatican library has three copies of both the first
and second editions.
Obviously, if you're as interested as I in eccentric topics like
positional astronomy, rare books, the evolution of modern
science, and the surprisingly rapid and efficient diffusion of knowledge more than
five centuries before the Internet, this is a book you're
probably going to read if you haven't already. The only flaw is
that the colour plates (at least in the UK paperback edition I read) are terribly
reproduced—they all look like nobody bothered to focus the copy
camera when the separations were made; plates 4b, 6, and 7a
through 7f, which show annotations in various copies, are
completely useless because they're so fuzzy the annotations can
barely be read, if at all.