Category: Books

Andrew Sullivan quotes a beautiful challenge to his book.

Leaving aside all quarrels about the meanings of words, the central fact is that any intellectual position is subject to the danger of authoritarianism. Clearly that happened to Enlightenment liberalism with communism. The right is at least equally susceptible,  however. For me, the right is more susceptible precisely because of this business of privileging tradition and longing for the past [….] Our only real hope is constant agitation against tradition, however much loss we risk by it. Don’t worry that it will be overwhelmed – plenty of powerful people will defend it, and love will defend it, too. In almost every age of the world it’s the other side that needs help, I believe. 

The author might have added that timid and fearful people will always defend tradition, too. In striving for a creative balance between liberalism and conservatism, the odds have always been stacked against the liberals.

Here’s an interesting web thread. (I picked it up from PZ.) The idea is to copy this list of The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002, and then boldface those that you’ve read.
Now, why does this “definitive” list work where the music list I wrote about earlier didn’t? Obviously it addresses a relatively limited domain. It doesn’t try to lump together, and then rank, everything from novels to cookery books to religious tracts to poetry to manga to biography…. However that can’t be the only reason, because even in this list we have a wide range of styles, from the Silmarillion to Snow Crash to Harry Potter. I suspect that it’s something about the media involved. Words and music – the stuff you read and the stuff you listen to – are just very different, and we organize our thoughts about them differently. (Or is that simply a cop-out?)
Anyway, the list is below the fold….
Continue reading “A less contentious list….”

While I’m on the subject of Simon Blackburn, here’s his review in TNR of the posthumous collections of essays by one of the most important philosophers of the last 100 years, Bernard Williams. I was particularly struck by Williams’ elegant treatment of the difference between science and the humanities. For example… but no, I shall resist the temptation to excerpt the piece. It’s worth reading in full.

This is going to be a busy week. (And I’m not talking about work – although that, too, will be busy.) When I was back in Brookline last week, I picked out all of the books that I wanted to ship to Seattle (about 250 of them). They should be arriving around the middle of the week, so in order to make space to arrange them, I went to IKEA yesterday and ordered a couple of shelf units. They are due to be delivered on Monday. And then the new HDTV that I ordered should get here on Tuesday, so tomorrow I’m going to call Millennium Digital and get them to upgrade my set-top box to an HD+DVR unit. Somewhere in all of this I need to pick up a couple of HDMI cables. (Can someone explain why Monster and Belkin think they can charge $100+ for a cable that I can buy for under $20 elsewhere?)

The writer Brian Cathcart recently wrote a short priece for the New Statesman entitled A history lesson. It begins:

Not many authors publish a book at the age of 90, and fewer still do so when they are already halfway through another book. Can there be more than one in that position, and who is also virtually blind?

The author he’s talking about is my mother, Lorna Arnold (about whom Alec and I recently blogged). The first book to which he’s referring is Britain, Australia and the Bomb: The Nuclear Tests and Their Aftermath, which is the new (and substantially expanded) edition of her classic book about the British A-bomb tests in Australia. And “another book” is the volume of memoirs that all of her friends (and I too) have been urging her to write for many years.

Occasionally people will ask me what I plan to do when I retire. I have always replied that I don’t understand the question: what is this “retirement” of which they speak. Perhaps my mother’s example explains my attitude….

I just arrived back in Brookline for a quick visit over Thanksgiving. I’ll be returning to Seattle on Sunday.
U.S. newspapers and TV always make a great fuss about the fact that the day before Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year. These reports are inevitably accompanied by film of long lines at airport security, and interviews with frustrated people who’ve been stranded somewhere.
My experience today was… different. I caught a bus from Seattle to the airport, which arrived on time. I’d checked in online, and I only had a carry-on bag, so I walked up to one of the security checkpoints. There was nobody there, except for some bored TSA staff. Several of them competed for the chance to inspect my photo ID, and then advised me to go to a particular X-ray/metal detector because “they haven’t had any customers.” As I approached, three TSA staff sprang to attention, offered me plastic trays for my lap-top and my shoes, and waved me through the metal detector with a smile.
It all felt very strange… and rather spooky.
After that, everything went beautifully. I had time to hang out at the Red Carpet Clubs in Seattle and Chicago. My flight to Chicago was full, but conditions were smooth and it arrived 30 minutes early. My connection to Boston was 60% full, and arrived on time. Everything was completely uneventful (the highest accolade).
I’m still trying to work it out. Maybe it’s just me.
—
Music and reading made it all even more pleasant. At Seattle I found the new Jack McDevitt novel, Seeker, which came out in paperback a couple of weeks ago. I’ve already reached page 176. And for the first part of the SEA-ORD flight I got out my iPod and listened to Concrete: In Concert at the Mermaid Theatre by the Pet Shop Boys, which arrived from Amazon.co.uk last week. Most of it is excellent: the only problems are a couple of the “special guests” who aren’t all that special. But the rest is outstanding; Neil is in great form, and the sound (with a live orchestra) is wonderful. Highly recommended.

The last few days here have been unrelentingly wet, and so I’ve been oscillating between work and the apartment without getting up to much else. Among the minor stuff:
I received and assembled the penultimate bit of furniture, the TV stand. I was able to go from:
to
The 19″ Samsung monitor looks rather lost in all that space…. The sound is great, though. I finally wired up all the speakers and tested the 5.1 audio with a wonderful new DVD, Arriving Somewhere by Porcupine Tree. Highly recommended.
Other things I’ve been watching, reading and listening:

• Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks (A relentless, devastating account of “pounding the square peg of the U.S. Army into the round hole of Iraq”.)
• The Tragic Treasury: Songs from a Series of Unfortunate Events by The Gothic Archies (Stephin Merrit and Lemony Snicket) (My first Stephin Merrit recording: I have a feeling that in time I’m going to acquire quite a few, including 69 Love Songs.)
• BEEP: The Definitive Guide by Marshall Rose (A geek’s book about a networking technology that, like Jini, is sadly underused.)
• Learning the World: a Scientific Romance by Ken MacLeod (A thought-provoking first-encounter science fiction story.)
• Woman of the Year with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (Purchased as part of this collection. (Their first joint venture, and a wonderful, sparkling, and brave film. Even though the revised ending lets it down it’s still a powerful statement. In the original, which Louis B. Mayer objected to, Spencer Tracy’s character tells Hepburn to “just be yourself”; the revised version has her cooking her husband’s breakfast…)

And finally my Washington State driver’s license has arrived. The photo is classic “deer in the headlights”, but I wasn’t looking for a work of art.

The two hottest books for thinking persons are Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (currently #2 at Amazon.com) and Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul. I don’t have a lot to say about Dawkins’ book, beyond noting that I admire and agree with almost all of it. (Check out his website for various comments, pro and con.) So how about Andrew Sullivan?

I’d been thinking how best to frame my opinion of Sullivan’s core idea when I read David Brooks’ review in the New York Times. The following observation leapt out at me:

Sullivan’s next guide is Michael Oakeshott, the great British philosopher, who brilliantly exposed the limits of rationalism. As Sullivan says, “There is no way, Oakeshott argues, to generate a personal moral life from a book, a text, a theory. We live the way we have grown accustomed to live. Our morality is like a language we have learned and deploy in every new instant.”

Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in this view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one’s balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths.

Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.

Exactly so. Sullivan is so consumed with this single idea – an idealized conservatism – that he fails to recognize that creative genius is rooted in two great impulses: the conservative, and the liberal. Great political and social – and artistic – achievements spring from the tension between these two.

So obsessed is he with his one-dimensional view that Sullivan event tries to attribute to pragmatic conservatism such initiatives as the extension of the franchise to working men and then to women. As Brooks notes, this won’t wash. The great social and political leaps of imagination and courage did not spring from conservatism, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. Yet in Sullivan’s world view, liberalism is squeezed out: it’s either an economic aspect of conservatism (in the spirit of The Economist, perhaps), or a barely-restrained flavour of socialism.

Over the last two hundred years, we have seen plenty of examples of conservatism uninspired by liberalism, and of liberalism spinning out of control for want of the steadying skepticism of conservatism. The key is balance. However Sullivan keeps hopping on one bad leg, unclear on how to fix it. Blogging today about the Washington Post review of his book, Sullivan writes:

But he’s right on the second point. I see no easy political way to get the soul of conservatism back in the near future. McCain is, at best, a tenuous hope. But I do try and describe a positive, skeptical conservatism that is a vibrant alternative to what “conservatism” has now become: a “conservatism of doubt” and a “politics of freedom”.

Sullivan has misunderstood the situation. The problem is how to restore the soul of the polity, not the soul of conservatism. Fixing conservatism is a means to that end, but it cannot be achieved without confronting the larger question.

Sullivan and many others misdiagnosed the disease back in the 1980s: like Margaret Thatcher, they thought that there was no such thing as society, identified liberalism with socialism, and concluded that everything apart from conservatism should be flushed down the drain. What we can now see is that conservatism without liberalism cannot stand: it is too easily warped by the forces of reaction, just as it has been for the last two hundred years.

The challenge is simply this: how do we restore the creative balance between liberalism and conservatism: between compassion and prudence, between idealism and skepticism, between inventing the future and learning from history? Andrew Sullivan has grasped part of this. It is, perhaps, ironic that he pins his hopes upon a politician – McCain – who has not.

UPDATE: Sullivan’s response is here.

So the flight from Denver to Boston was lousy: the guy in the middle seat next to me kept poking me (and the man in the aisle seat, I suspect) with overactive elbows. I got hardly any sleep, arrived in Brookline around 6am, and tried (and failed) to have a brief nap. As a result, after a busy Friday I slept for over 12 hours.

This morning was spent clearing out tons of stuff from the attic, carting most of it to the kerbside but shredding things like old tax returns and bank statements. (I hate emptying shredders; the stuff inevitably goes all over the floor.) Then Kate and Mark brought Tommy round, claimed some of the stuff from the attic (thanks!), and drove it home, leaving Tommy with us. (Here’s one picture for now; I’ll upload some more when I get back to Seattle.)

Eventually they returned in a noticeably emptier car, and we all went out to dinner.

As I think I’ve mentioned, one of the few drawbacks of living in Seattle is that all of one’s Amazon.com purchases are subject to Washington sales tax. So I decided to order a book and have it delivered to me here in Brookline, and although I still have a couple of other books in progress (Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, and Rob Harrop’s Pro Spring), I couldn’t resist dipping into my new acquisition this evening. It’s Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back. I fully intend to write a longer review of it when I finish (although I’m well aware that I said the same thing about Richard Dawkins’ wonderful book The God Delusion). However thus far I can say that Andrew Sullivan has produced a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of conservatism, followed by a devastating indictment of fundamentalisms, both religious and political. Since a significant part of his criticism is directed at the contemporary Roman Catholic church, it will be interesting to see how he manages to square this with his avowed Catholicism. Perhaps he will resort to more creative semantics – we’ll see.

Four recent delights in four different media:

• Film: “Little Miss Sunshine”: The Fellowship had to choose a film to see before I head off to Seattle, and this proved to be a wonderful selection. No spoilers – just go and see it!
• Music: “White Bread Black Beer” by Scritti Politti: Green Gartside was responsible for two of the most perfectly crafted albums in pop history: Cupid & Psyche 85 and Provision. After the relative disappointment of Anomie and Bonhomie, he’s bounced back with another near-perfect collection of songs.
• Television: “Life On Mars” on BBC America: You can enjoy this wonderful series on three levels: as a cracking good “police procedural”, as a mystery about out-of-body (and out of time) experiences, and as a social study about how life in Britain has changed over the last 30 years. Brilliant.
• Book: “Impossible Things” by Connie Willis: I bought this collection of short stories years ago, mislaid it, and only rediscovered it as I was sorting out books for packing. I read the whole thing in two sittings. Beautifully written, thought-provoking, and above all sheer fun!!!