Reading Log

Following on from Peterson’s popular book 12 Rules for Life, Beyond Order continues with a further 12 rules to live by. The book is similar in its use of popular cultural and religious stories to explain the reasoning behind each rule. I loved this summary from The Atlantic’s review:

This book is humbler than its predecessor, and more balanced between liberalism and conservatism—but it offers a similar blend of the highbrow and the banal. Readers get a few glimpses of the fiery online polemicist, but the Peterson of Beyond Order tends instead to two other modes. The first is a grounded clinician, describing his clients’ troubles and the tough-love counsel he gives them. The other is a stoned college freshman telling you that the Golden Snitch is, like, a metaphor for “ ‘round chaos’ … the initial container of the primordial element.” Some sentences beg to be prefaced with Dude, like these: “If Queen Elizabeth II suddenly turned into a giant fire-breathing lizard in the midst of one of her endless galas, a certain amount of consternation would be both appropriate and expected … But if it happens within the context of a story, then we accept it.” Reading Peterson the clinician can be illuminating; reading his mystic twin is like slogging through wet sand. His fans love the former; his critics mock the latter.

Jokingly you could title the book “The Bible and Disney Movies: The 12 Bits you Damn-Well Ought To Have Thought About!”. Still, I enjoyed reading the book and despite sometimes flimsy or fantastical arguments, or too much reliance on faith, the rules themselves seem solid to me.

See also Making Sense Podcast #178 – The Reality Illusion – A Conversation with Donald Hoffman and Annaka Harris

I struggled to finish this book… it is a fairly relentless onslaught of facts and data that are concerning and alarming, but unfortunately intermingled with one-too-many slips where an ideological (i.e. socialistic) position taints the argument.

This is frustrating because a book like this has the potential to be a great consensus-builder; but sporadic attacks on “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” creep in, unbalanced by any thorough examination of how the presumed-alternative socialism or communism fared worse when it came to environmental impact (and also, you know, quality of life and the needless death of millions). Holding the opinion that capitalism has been bad for the environment may be fine, but it certainly should not be presented as fact.

Still, a recommended read.

A short book laying out Harris’ argument that Free Will is ultimately an illusion; and that we can prove this to ourselves. It’s a solid argument but probably better read with the surrounding context of Harris’ meditation app Waking Up and discussions surrounding consciousness and free will in his podcast, Making Sense.

Owens makes many bold claims, some truly horrifying and unfortunately true parts of our history. Still, I find some of her arguments to be overtly hyper-partisan and at times even confusing – attacks on ’neoliberalism’ being an example (are the Democrats neoliberals? I think not).

Still, Blackout is worth reading for a drastically different angle on the politics of race afflicting America. I don’t think it’s a book to be dismissed on its weaknesses – it is more important now than ever before to challenge critical race theories and a historical revisionism that repaints the Democratic party as the long-time ally of black America and the Republican party as natural foe.

I found this small book rather inaccessible; I’ll try to come back to it after reading more Žižek, but didn’t get much from a first reading.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic tragedy of truth covers both the most egregious and the most petty outrages committed within the Soviet Union against its people in the name of the same. The rape, murder, brutalisation, torture, starvation, enslavement, deceit and betrayal of untold millions is revealed in this book through the telling of collected experiences from the Zek diaspora of the Soviet Gulag system from the union’s founding days until the late 20^th century.

It is inexcusable to have an opinion on the evils or false-virtues of Communism without having read this book.

Delicately written, refreshing. The book follows Chatterton-Williams’ own experience growing up thinking of himself as a black man in America, and confronting the question of what, if anything, it actually means to be “black”. He makes the case that we should unlearn the fragile construct of distinct, enumerable races; of “black” and “white”, and reflect that these only really tell us about ourselves, and nothing about those we label.

Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.

Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbour.

p.208-209

This book is part a history and part a memoir. It tells the story of the origin of Unix, explaining what Unix is, how it came about, and why it matters.

Thoroughly recommended for anyone with an interest in statistics, reasoning & formal logic. The book introduces the history of causality within statistics and then introduces Pearl’s causal reasoning framework – tl;dr: Correlation is never sufficient to establish causation!

See also Making Sense with Sam Harris #163 – Cause & Effect – A Conversation with Judea Pearl

Provides the flip-sideThough, Enlightenment Now was of course published before The Madness of Crowds to Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds by stating the case for the Enlightenment, continuing with science, reason and secular liberal progress, and not worrying too-much that everything is going to shit.

I approached this book with a healthy sense of scepticism that it would not be much more than a neocon rant, or something else to that effect.

Unfortunately, it is instead the list of everything that is wrong with modern societal and political discourse. All the mines in the metaphorical minefield were underfoot – gender, feminism, race, sexuality, culture, religion, and identity &c, and all the interplays and tensions that exist between them exposed and brought in for questioning.

This will be a book to revisit at the end of this decade, hopefully to see what progress instead of regression we’ve managed to make.

Christopher Hitchens’ (1949-2011) candid, funny and revealing memoir of his astonishing life, recounting his time as a student activist; a member of the Marxist Trotskyist yet libertarian left – although he would come to feel an outcast from the modern left; friends and colleagues; and his journalism which took him seemingly everywhere that was happening at the time – Cuba, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina, Chile, Israel and Czechoslovakia to name a few.

One of the joys of living in a world filled with stupidity and hypocrisy was to see Hitch respond. That pleasure is now denied us. The problems that drew his attention remain – and so does the record of his brilliance, courage, erudition, and good humor in the face of outrage. But his absence will leave an enormous void in the years to come. Hitch lived an extraordinarily large life. (Read his memoir, Hitch-22, and marvel.) It was too short, to be sure – and one can only imagine what another two decades might have brought out of him – but Hitch produced more fine work, read more books, met more interesting people, and won more arguments than most of us could in several centuries.

I will certainly come back to read this again, and can only say that whilst Hitch’s life was one well-lived, it is a great loss to us all that it was cut short. His premature absence brought-about by perhaps over-living the tobacco and alcohol parts of life, is sorely felt.