Since I was late getting last week’s letter out I wanted to get back on track with a little extra somethin’ somethin’ for you.
My note-taking system has improved drastically in the last couple of years. While there’s still much room for improvement, this has helped me better keep track of and draw connections and contrasts between the things I read.
A lot of the books that had the biggest impacts on me came into my life before this paradigm shift though. Occasionally I think about revisiting some of them to see what I may have missed before and where the gems and nuggets would fit into the broader scheme of connections. I thought I might list some of them, not so much as a list of recommendations, but as a record of what the imprint they left on me was. I plan on spending some time with most of these again someday. Since “you never step into the same river twice,” I expect that I will get new insights, make new connections and [hopefully] find new areas of conflict, friction and disagreement.
The Religious Case Against Belief- By James Carse
James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games has been hugely influential within certain circles, making it something of a cult classic. The work of his that resonates most personally for me is The Religious Case Against Belief, however.
In it he elaborates three types of ignorance.
Ordinary ignorance: there are facts we simply do not have access to.
Wilful ignorance: there are facts that we choose not to believe because of the implications we would have to deal with.
Higher ignorance: an epistemic humility born of the recognition that there will always be greater mystery than we have satisfying answers for.
For Carse, the difference between a genuinely “religious” outlook on the world and a “belief system” masquerading as a religion is the disconnect between the stages of wilful ignorance and higher ignorance. The belief system I grew up in became unsustainable for me when I encountered too many facts that couldn’t be accounted for by its constraints. Like a lot of people who go through this sort of deconstruction, I spent many years feeling pretty unmoored and spiritually adrift. Carse’s book was extremely helpful in helping me embrace a sense of wonder again without feeling like I’d have to lie to myself and others to avoid a total descent into nihilism.
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning- Rene Girard
Girard’s theory of Mimetic Desire-> Mimetic Rivalry -> Mimetic Scapegoating is -to my mind - one of the most critically important mental models to use in making sense of the hypernetworked world we live in and the particular challenges and existential threats we face.
In the manner of many French theorists, Girard’s writing isn’t always extremely accessible, but this book helped me wrap my head around his argument more succinctly than his classic Violence and the Sacred. Relying less on anthropology and more on literary analysis, this work discusses the instances of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating in myth and fiction, leading up to the one myth that turns it on its head. The story of the Christian gospel, where we discover for the first time, that the Scapegoat was innocent all along.
Answers for Aristotle- Massimo Pigliucci
Pigliucci, though a practicing Stoic, is an atheist and secularist. He is both a practicing scientist and a practicing philosopher. Here he discusses the proper relationship between science and philosophy and how the two complement, complete and enrich each other in ways that neither alone can afford to ignore. He makes a case for epistemic humility from a different angle than Carse. This time relying more on the philosophical tradition of Socrates and Aristotle and why their approach to knowledge is still relevant today. His writing is aimed at normal people without any particular grounding in philosophy and so is a very accessible introduction to engaging with some very deep ideas.
The Wisdom of Insecurity- Alan Watts
It’s been a long time since I read this one- and my painful breakup with the religious belief system of my youth was fresher when I did- but this was another book that helped me deal with the dissolution of a system of simple answers to the big questions. This time the angle of approach is drawn from Eastern cosmology, particular Vendata and Taoism.
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is one of the very few books I think most people should read. However, it is also a book I suspect that many people who read it will hate. This is the centerpiece of Taleb’s four volume Incerto- which is an exhaustive exploration of the subject of uncertainty and risk-management in the face of that uncertainty. (Is it me, or is there a theme emerging here?…).
The basic argument of Antifragile is that things and systems either benefit from, or are harmed by volatility. Drawing from mathematics, wisdom literature from the philosophical and spiritual traditions that have most influenced western thought, and observations of approaches to risk both wise and foolish, this is Taleb’s most interesting and engaging work, as far as I’m concerned. He has a way of really pissing people off, but I don’t look at that as a negative at all. There are huge categories of bullshit it becomes much harder to fall for once you’ve grasped the central thesis of Antifragile, but they happen to be the most ubiquitously offered varieties of bullshit in our society, and the most dangerous.
Playing Ball on Running Water- David K. Reynolds
I have tended toward anxiety and neuroticism for most of my life. This book by David K. Reynolds outlines some of the most useful tools I have found for managing this tendency. This is part of his “Constructive Living” framework, which is a reframing of the work of Japanese psychologist Masatake Morita, aimed at western audiences. Morita took a contrary opinion to the western psychoanalysts who were his contemporaries, believing that insight into the causes and sources of our problems is often less useful than having actionable approaches to outmaneuvering them. For Morita the primary tool was the cultivation of a Zen-informed habit of fixing one’s attention on the present moment and focusing on what action is appropriate to take “right now.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love me some psychoanalysis, insight and depth psychology (this is obviously a CG Jung Stan-account) but the Constructive Living approach has been immeasurably helpful for me (but it’s often one it’s easy to drift away from.)
Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina
This book examines the interiority of our fellow creatures in a way that tries to get us to think outside of our anthropocentric view of consciousness. It’s a mixture of scientific research, beautifully sketched out character study, and impassioned polemic. It changed the way I thought about not just the subjective experience of other animals, but also my own.
Eric Hoffer- The True Believer
Hoffer’s book is a classic of sociological writing. He argues that the content of particular ideologies is less important to their appeal than the way the fit themselves to the psychological make-up of their adherents, recruits and foot soldiers. At the time he wrote it, the world was still dealing with the upheaval caused by Fascism and by Soviet style Communism, but his observations are even more relevant today.
Hoffer is also somewhat of a personal hero of mine. He wasn’t an academic for most of his career, instead doing most of his important work while employed a longshoreman. For a working-class guy who just happened to like to read and think about important things a lot, he did pretty well for himself. It’s nice to see that it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Hardin is another figure whose very name makes people mad, but this is a very useful book for me. When Hardin published it in 1985 his intention was to arm people with the tools needed to evaluate the claims of experts and technocrats on subjects in which they had no specific expertise. He proposed three Filters, or lenses, by which to examine claims in areas outside of our specialized training or familiarity.
The Literate Filter- Do the words they are saying make sense?
The Numerate Filter- Do the numbers add up?
The Ecolate Filter- What are the second-order factors that need to be accounted for?
By 1985 life had become both so complicated and so complex that no one could possibly hope to adequate insight into all the domains in which they’d be tasked with making decisions on.
He really hadn’t seen nothin’ yet…
Now in 2021 that already staggering complexity and complication has grown exponentially. Our social feeds and news streams relentlessly prod us to be public health experts, virologists, foreign policy authorities, economists, and sociologists of race and gender relations, among many many other things.
Hardin’s Filters are more relevant than ever in this climate. Much of the information that we are given- regardless of whether it derives from mainstream or alternative sources- uses one or ,at most, two of these filters in order to persuade us. That alone should tell you something.
Squat Every Day- Matt Perryman
This may seem like a radical departure from most of the other books on this list, but it isn’t really. In this book Perryman -a personal trainer and strength coach who just happens to also have a doctorate in philosophy -examines the merits and benefits of a strength training protocol that contradicted most of the accepted dogma of the time about what constituted a safe or productive training methodology. In making an inquiry into how and why people could get positive results by doing something that- by all the conventional wisdom at the time- seemed almost precisely the opposite of a good idea, we get insight into a lot of other things.
We gain interesting perspective on theoretical vs practical knowledge. A lot of our assumptions about stress, resiliency, adaptation and the connection between our biological and mental/emotional states get thrown into a new light in the process.
There’s a LOT to take away from this, not just about physical training but also about human potential and flourishing in general…. it doesn’t hurt that if you do what it says there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself more tempted to wear shorts, skirts and/or pants that show off your fabulous curves to the world. That’s what happened to me anyway.
So, there you have it. These are some books that I found a great deal of value in at one point or another and would like to go back to again someday. Thanks for reading!
See you next time.
So…..this was A LOT of reading! I picked out two that really caught my interest and added them to my “want to read” shelf. Once I absorb those I hope to revisit the list and choose another. I chose https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244754.Playing_Ball_on_Running_Water and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2968424-the-religious-case-against-belief?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=HX2XXK0SIL&rank=1. I’ll let you know ☺️