The Reading List - March 7th 2021
Hello everyone!
As many of you know, Texas had a rather interesting February, and I spent the week I’d ordinarily have written this review helping push cars on icy roads, walking around finding hot food, and reading by flashlight. Here are a few pictures from our sudden, severe winter storm: Downtown from Griggs Park The pool froze for a week Our neighbors left their sprinklers on the night before it hit -1F, and their fire alarms went off for 24 hours straight
I hope all of you had a warmer, better-stocked month than we did, and thank you to the many, many people who reached out to help or check in! Without further ado, here is a very late roundup of the books I read in January.
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different” - William James
Andrew Sullivan recommended this book in his remarkable political essay The Psychedelic Election late last year. I found Michael Pollan’s latest book illuminating - with no other substance involved. As quoted above, the potential that there are forms of consciousness entirely different than our quotidian, ego-driven one, tells us at the very least that no completely mechanistic view of the universe is entirely complete. I have found it easier to navigate and make sense of our shattered cultural tradition since this shift in perspective. As our brains develop from childhood to adulthood, our ways of seeing and comprehending the world harden, allowing us function more effectively, but at a cost to our flexibility and perceptions. Partisanship, rancor, loneliness, depression, obsession, world-alienation, addictions (including to work-as-source-of-meaning), are all features of our overactive dominant pathways (default mode network), of the stories that our conscious brains tell themselves (or are told by other media) hardened into something pathological. It does not matter how we break this constricting, stifling rigidity of thought and experience - it only matters that we do so. That we make an effort to lift our eyes from the business of our everyday lives to feel again a lost or slumbering wonder at the world and our consciousness to observe it.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
“Fungi digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies… mycelium is a living, growing, opportunistic investigation - speculation in bodily form.”
Merlin Sheldrake has all of the energy, attention and expertise of a very passionate obsessive - and something of a missionary’s sense of destiny. The subject of his life’s work is the mysterious existences of fungi; his Gospel is their elided, immense importance to our conception of the natural world. It is a huge testament to the author’s knowledge and skill that I had to apologize constantly for excitedly listing facts to Kirsten… while reading a book about fungi. She has now had more than a bearable number of breakfast conversations about lichen, mycelium, mycoremediation, the ‘stoned ape hypothesis’, and fungal networks between the roots of trees. I highly recommend this extremely engaging book about a subject I was wholly ignorant of.
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
“Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul” - Alexander von Humboldt
This is a biography of the tragically overlooked life and afterlife of visionary Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Though largely forgotten by the English-speaking world today (partly due to WW1-inspired book burnings), he has more things named after him than any other individual, invented and diseminated the first conception of nature as an interconnected whole, and was (by far) the most influential scientist of his age.
Andrea Wulf has two excellent strategems for demonstrating her subject’s impact on his world: first, by tracing the web of correspondents that made him the one-man social network of his time; second, by illustrating his influence on later scientists and naturalists. Humboldt was the indispensible correspondent for any naturalist of his age (along with his friend Joseph Banks), sending over 50,000 letters during his long overactive life, and receiving perhaps double that. For Humboldt, as for Darwin after him, this vast chorus of minds constitute a vital part of his thinking, as well as his willingness to support yoiunger scientists or explorers at any cost.
The author closes this volume with five miniature introductions tracing her subject’s influence on the lives of Darwin, Thoreau, Marsh, Haeckel and Muir. By doing so she not only demonstrates the tremendous import of Humboldt’s ideas on the development of scientific thought, but also restores his place as a formative influence on that better-remembered clan.
The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
This lovely book on oceanography is a constant remonstrance to observe our planet with wonder, to say with Humboldt that all is interconnected, entwined, locked in chains of mutual advantage and dependence. Rachel Carson is best remembered today for her environmental call to action Silent Spring, but her real career and expertise focused on marine biology. Sea Around Us attempts to introduce her knowledge of the geological history, evolution of life, and glories of our oceans. Many sections of this book, most notably the pre-techtonic theory of continental formation, have since been overtaken by new discoveries or theories in earth science. Yet as a snapshot of the best science of her time, I found this ‘wrongness’ bracing, and humbling: we have no guarantee at all that the scientific consensuses of our own time will prove more durable than those of her not-so-distant one.
Bonus: if you’re interested in oceanography, especially by sailing weather and wind patterns, check of this podcast about the English pilot broadcasts on the BBC
Bonus 2: Fritz Haber - the inventor of artificial nitrogen fertilizer and mustard gas for the Germans during WW1 - had a third act attempting to pay their war debt by purifying gold from ocean water
Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson
In this book Erik Larson applies his usual narrative nonfiction formula to a major event in the history of the Gulf states, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. His writing is crisp and the topic is fascinating, but by focusing his reader’s attention on individual suffering and miraculous survivals, he loses sight of the real lessons of the storm just as his subjects did. The heartwrenching stories that he tells here for entertainment served the same interests he wants to condemn, when it came time to decide whether or not to rebuild Galveston at all. It was never Isaac’s storm, and for as long as we continue to take such horrible, painful lessons as personal affronts, we will keep building homes in harm’s way, and we will continue to reap the whirlwind.
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
“Money… is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man.”
Underneath seventy years of cultural baggage (and a really ridiculous number of prefaces), Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work remains a cogent critique of the economic and political currents of his time, and their likely consequences. Hayek saw economic freedom - the unimpeded rule of the price mechanism and freely entered contract - as the only true guarantor of individual freedom. He was incensed by his opponents’ equation of “economic freedom” with “freedom from want”, because creating authority with the power to declare (and enforce) such a “freedom” actually makes everyone involved less free. Securitization or the piecemeal assurance of more-than-basic “standard of living” to some people within an economy (such as full-time employees of certain companies, members of unions, etc), was Hayek’s other major bugbear. As he saw it, guaranteeing benefits to some only shifts those individuals’ natural exposure to chance or misfortune (“their fragility”, to use Taleb’s term) to others. This makes life gradually more impossible for any people who can’t find some kind of corporate protection.
On one hand, the individually independent political universe that Hayek craves reminds me of Arendt’s yearning for an Athenian-style public realm for politics. Yet on the other, his training in classical economics and his eye-witness revulsion from events like the Vienna uprising makes him vilify the urge for security without seeking to understand where it comes from. The creation of an essentially superfluous “working class” was not an old phenomenon then or now, but he passes over the mass of men with no natural political or economic niche in silence. Similarly, Hayek draws no distinction between property, which I believe can guarantee something like the liberal state he desires, and wealth, which has many of the same centralizing and securitizing tendencies as socialization. Since the time this book was written we have seen where the outsize power of such superfluous and unchecked wealth can lead. It may not be the totalitarian tyranny that he most feared, but it is hardly his heart’s desire.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
“It did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life. Our answers must consist, not in talk and meditation but in right action and right conduct.”
This year I am hitting the shelves to reread some favorites from the past five years. Frankl’s world classic of Holocaust testimony and psychology remains as powerful now as when I first read it early in college. Through his survival tale of the extermination camps, and his reflections as a psychologist on what we might learn from them, Frankl seeks to smuggle meaning, virtue, and purpose back into therapy and counseling. He insists that every human mind is the author of a story, not a piece of machinery to be fixed up and shuffled back into the assembly line of societal usefulness. By his own experiences of those who lived and those who died, those who rose towards sainthood and those who descended into beasts, Frankl calls to question many of the easy assumptions of what makes a ‘successful’ life in the West.
Misc.
Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke is a great piece of speculative fiction - I couldn’t figure out how to review it without spoiling the real plot, so I’ll just put it here. Recommended.
About Looking by John Berger, a collection of his essays about art and aesthetics from the 1960s and 1970s. The opening number, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ has stuck with me.
That’s the list! Thank you for reading. If you have a friend who you think would enjoy this, please feel free to forward it along.
Alex
These books, and those from previous lists, can be viewed or purchased here.
To check out my other writing, have a look at https://alexandermcauliffe.com
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P.S. - if you have any feedback about the format or recommendations I make here, I’d love to hear it.