Paul Vitols's Blog, page 23

Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You don’t need to accept all of the author’s left-wing enthusiasms in order to embrace his central idea, which may very well be exactly what the doctor ordered for our ailing Mother Earth.

I was pointed to this book by a reference in The Commonwealth of Life: Economics for a Flourishing Earth by Peter G. Brown, and, intrigued by the idea of tweaking capitalism to make it more Earth-friendly, I hastened online to get myself a copy. When I started reading, I was quickly drawn in by Barnes’s brisk, conversational writing style. As a former journalist who wrote for Newsweek and The New Republic, Barnes has ample writing chops and his book is well organized, well researched, and fast-paced. He does not tarry over his points; he makes them quickly and moves on.

After journalism, Barnes moved on to another career: green entrepreneur. In 1976 he cofounded a worker-owned solar energy company, and in 1983 the Working Assets Money Fund. He is a capitalist, but from the beginning he set out to do well by doing good, and developed much firsthand knowledge of the interplay of business and government. It is this knowledge that he has drawn upon to propose a new way of organizing capitalist society so that the profits of business are no longer made at the expense of the “commons”—that is, the total stock of unowned common wealth that constitutes the heritage of all human beings, including intellectual property, civil institutions, and the natural world. Barnes argues that just as the enclosure of the commons in Britain led to widespread poverty and suffering, so the “enclosure” of these modern commons by private companies has led to many of the ills of modern life, notably the various environmental threats that loom over us, such as deforestation, overfishing, and global warming.

How does a business “enclose” commons in the modern world? Anytime a commercial operation extracts goods from the environment, or dumps waste into it, without paying for the full cost of doing so, it has appropriated part of that common wealth to itself without compensating the owners of that wealth—that is, the community to whom that commons belongs, which may be local, regional, or global. According to Barnes, this is where most of the commercial profit in the world comes from, so in a sense the great fortunes made by some capitalists have been purloined from their true owners, people who lacked the awareness and organization to be able to assert their rights and push back.

A more just and more environmentally responsible world will be one in which the owners of the world’s commons can and do assert their rights, so that extraction and dumping can occur only after negotiation, and not as a one-sided appropriation. The specific mechanism for achieving this, Barnes suggests, is the conversion of all these commons into trusts: legal entities that hold the property rights to the commons in question, and who manage the trust so as to preserve and augment its value for its beneficiaries, who include not just the present generation but also all future generations. A defining feature of a trust is that it must live off its income and not erode its capital. The trustees are responsible for achieving this, as well as for making regular reports to the beneficiaries and for distributing dividends. To achieve income from a commons, the trustees may allow extraction and dumping in it, but only to an extent consistent with the aims of the trust, which are always focused on the long term.

In this model, a commercial operator, say a logging company, instead of being granted logging rights by a government over public lands, as happens today in British Columbia, would have to negotiate with the trustees who control any tract of land held in trust. The trustees, if they believe that logging is consistent with the long-term aims of their trust, will stipulate the conditions under which the logger may operate on their land, including money compensation for removing trees and doing other damage. Acting on behalf of the owners of the property, the trustees have a strong legal position with respect to commercial operators, and also have a strong incentive to monitor operations on their land. The logger, forced to pay more for what he’s extracting, will be driven to harvest efficiently and with minimal impact to the land, in order to avoid being pressed for more compensation.

Will this make lumber more expensive? Yes. Our cost of living will go up—and, according to Barnes, it should go up, because our environmental peril has been brought about precisely because its “cost” or value has been set, effectively, at zero. If we’re paying more for lumber we’ll use it more sparingly and more wisely—more “green”ly. We might take more care to reuse lumber from demolished buildings instead of carting it to landfills or burning it.

The trust model works equally well for dumping. A trust established over a river basin, say, could prohibit all dumping in the river, or negotiate with individual farmers and businesses over dumping rights, which again would be allowed only to an extent consistent with the aims of the trust. In the case of farming, the cost of food would go up—as it should.

What happens to the money that forms the revenue stream of such a trust? Apart from the funds needed to operate the trust itself, the revenue would be distributed as dividends to its beneficiaries, and its beneficiaries will be the general public that has an interest in that trust, be it local, regional, national, or global. The guiding principle would be “one person, one share.” Barnes points to the Alaska Permanent Fund as a model. In 1976 Alaska created a fund to capture some of the revenue of oil companies for the benefit of state residents. Since then it has invested oil royalties and pays a yearly dividend to every Alaskan. In 2012 that dividend was $878; in 2008 it reached a high of $2,069. Barnes argues that in a world increasingly parceled into commons trusts, every person will be receiving such dividends, and these will help to offset any increases in the cost of living.

Indeed, Barnes goes further. He believes that one of the negative effects of what he calls Capitalism 2.0 or “surplus capitalism”—the capitalism that has powered consumer society since, he thinks, about 1950—is the growing disparity between rich and poor. In the United States, the wealthiest 5% of the people own more assets than the bottom 95% combined. Since this wealth has been accumulated largely at the expense of the commons, Barnes thinks it just that a portion of the revenue of commons trusts be devoted to funding social programs such as public health-care and education.

In this I found myself more reluctant to follow him. Barnes extols Canada’s socialized medical system, which does indeed have its strong points, but it’s at least questionable whether socialized anything is really superior to what can potentially be provided by private individuals. In Canada the nomenklatura class have instant access to the best care, while the great unwashed have long wait times for even basic services; meanwhile it’s illegal to provide medical services for cash. The system is certainly better than nothing, but here and in social programs generally I think Barnes may have given in to the temptation of believing that government has the answers—a temptation that he avoids when it comes to the environment. For Barnes notes that government has generally been a poor watchdog for the environment because politicians are beholden to corporate donors and also because bureaucrats themselves succumb to “regulatory capture”, and find their own interests increasingly aligned with those of industry. If government is not the answer for the environment, it’s not clear to me why it’s the answer for health or education.

But these socialist dreams are not central to Barnes’s theme. The basic idea is of the emergence of a whole new economic sector—the commons sector—which will act as an equal power along with government and business. The environment and other commons will now have a seat at the bargaining table, a voice in policy, and advocates in court. Through commons trusts, the interests of coral reefs, mahogany forests, and our unborn great-grandchildren could be given their proper weight in how we manage our shared planet. This is a tremendously powerful idea, and eminently practical. No matter what else we might do for the environment, we should be doing this.

Mr. Barnes: I’m with you. I will promote this idea. I will seek out ways that I can help commons trusts come into being and prosper. Your book is very good, but maybe too short for the wealth of ideas it contains. The philosophy and morality and economics of all this need to be worked out in greater detail. Maybe I can help with that too.

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Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An oversized book about oversized men overindulging in larger-than-life adventures.

I first read this book in 1980 or 1981 when a roommate had a copy. I had already formed the intention of reading the classics. I was surprised at how zany and absurd the book was, and how filled with wild exaggeration and bathroom humor. Lacking a central story line, the book is a long series of heterogeneous episodes, and I found it a challenge to make it all the way through its 712 pages. But I did.

Now that I’m reading the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, the book again appears on my list, and because I didn’t remember much of it, I decided to read it again. Now more mature, educated, and patient, I was able to get more out of it, but I still found it to be a chewy read that took discipline to get through.

Gargantua and Pantagruel seem to have been figures of local legend that Rabelais (ca. 1492–1553) seized upon as heroes for his work. At their respective births (Pantagruel is Gargantua’s son) they are described as enormous giants of King Kong-like proportions, but in the rest of the narrative they seem to blend in more or less easily with their normal-sized human companions.

Gargantua is the king of a small realm in the south of France, and his upbringing and adventures are related with a special emphasis on his bodily functions—a persistent concern of Rabelais. For example, a chapter is devoted to describing all the things that Gargantua uses to wipe his bottom with. There is also a lot of attention to food and drink, and the consumption of these in huge quantities. The narrator often refers to his readers as his fellow boozers, and there is a strong sense that this is a book by, for, and about bon vivants. If you’re not feasting, drinking, and wenching, then step aside and make room for someone who is.

Only Book 1 is about Gargantua; the last four books focus on Pantagruel and his retinue of roguish friends. They engage in wars, go on travels, and spend a lot of time in debate that is both learned and bawdy. They are not characters though in any proper sense, lacking qualities that make them individually distinct. With one exception: the character Panurge, who makes his appearance in Book 2. A mischievous, arrogant, cowardly wastrel, Panurge stands out in strong relief against the backdrop of the shadowy cast of characters—including even Pantagruel himself, who is not nearly so vividly portrayed. Much of the book’s interest comes from Panurge’s views and exploits.

The translator, J. M. Cohen, says in his introduction that there is no one Rabelaisian style, in the same way that there is no one Joycean style (James Joyce was reportedly an admirer of Rabelais, and when I read the book this time I thought I could see this connection). But I will try to summarize Rabelais’ style as it manifests in this translation. The Rabelaisian style is scatological, irreverent, and larger than life. It is characterized by wild exaggeration, lists, and allusions to classical works. It sees the central concerns of human life as eating, drinking, excreting, and copulating; all else is in a dim penumbra around these things. For while there is plenty of talk of things religious and priestly, it is clear that the lives of priests and monks are as centered on these four activities as much as anyone’s.

The five books were all published separately (and always to the official disapproval of the Church) during Rabelais’ lifetime (Book 5 may have been published posthumously), so reading them separately might make it easier than taking them all in one go. As it is, I found that the antics of the characters started to wear thin for me long before the end, even as I continued to appreciate the satirical repartee and learned references. I laughed out loud several times while reading this book. But I found it wasn’t in me to give it more than 3 stars.

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The Commonwealth of Life by Peter G. Brown

The Commonwealth of Life: Economics for a Flourishing Earth by Peter G. Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An inspiring vision is presented in a technical and academic work that contains some possibly troubling implications.

In January 2008 I was making one of my infrequent trips to Chapters-Indigo, a local big-box bookstore, and I saw this book set up for display in the social-science section. My eyes locked on the title, The Commonwealth of Life, and I felt a stirring of excitement. Even before I saw the endorsement by David Suzuki both printed on the cover and added as a sticker by the store, I knew I wanted to have this book. So I picked it up and shelled out the $19.99 (plus GST).

At home I eagerly dove in, highlighter in hand. My enthusiasm for the author’s idea and my own passion for the global environment carried me most of the way through the book, but before I got to the end I found that my enthusiasm had waned, and I left off reading it until I picked it up again just a week or so ago, in May 2013.

I hadn’t forgotten about the book in the meantime. Indeed, it had provoked me to do some more thinking of my own about the environment and my relationship with it. I found myself inspired by Peter Brown’s vision, but also found that I was taking issue with many of his points.

The basic idea is that the biosphere of Earth is in dire shape and rapidly getting worse, all because of human activity, but most especially because of the economic activity of the richest human societies. The root problem is philosophical: we degrade the environment because of how we understand our relationship with it. In the Judea-Christian West, the belief that God created man to be master of the world has led to the idea that the resources of Earth are all fruit put there by its creator for our enjoyment. The advent of a more secular, scientific outlook has not really changed this view, for now man, instead of representing the pinnacle of God’s creation, is seen rather as the product of evolution, whose technological prowess gives him a natural command of his habitat—which happens to be coextensive with Earth. Man has the same “right” to build factories and drag nets over the bottom of the oceans as giraffes have to browse leaves from high up in trees. Our respective natural endowments have led us to these behaviors.

Peter G. Brown proposes a radical revision of this philosophical view. In order to change our behavior as a species, we need to see ourselves, and our place in the natural world, differently. We need to see that the world and its life were not simply “put there” to serve our short-term ends, but that we ourselves are only a part of the great tapestry of life, and that if we want our own species to flourish in the long run, we must assume a responsibility that is commensurate with our powers. Eager to act on our “rights,” we have ignored our duties. We need a new philosophy that takes adequate account of these duties.

Brown’s vision is of the commonwealth of life: the biosphere as a single realm and each living thing as a kind of citizen of it. And as a “citizen” of the commonwealth of life, each living thing has certain rights. Humans, however, are in the unique position of having not only rights, but also duties. Those rights of other living things are also the duties of humanity; and our duties extend equally to those living things,human and other, that are not yet born. The overarching idea is that of stewardship: we are part of the environment of Earth, but we are also its trustees.

And what exactly are the rights that we humans are responsible for protecting? According to Brown, they are three, and they are adapted from the writings of the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke:

1. the right to bodily integrity

2. the right to religious, moral, and political choice

3. the right to subsistence

The second right, as stated, would apply only to humans, but I believe that Brown would say that living things should, in general, be allowed their own freedom. But certainly the first and third rights, Brown says, are held by all living things, and we humans should honor these rights because in these respects all other living things are our equals. We all equally wish to avoid physical harm and to nourish ourselves. And justice requires that equals be treated equally.

It’s a bold and seemingly reasonable thesis, but even though I am strongly attracted to this idea, I found that I was resisting certain aspects of it. One question for me is about the right to subsistence; I doubt that there is any such thing. For while I earnestly wish for all living things to be nourished, and I donate money to a charity that works to feed desperate people, I can’t find that anybody has a right to other people’s food or other property. I would say rather that everyone has a right not to be obstructed in his pursuit of subsistence. I have a right not to be blocked in trying to feed myself, but I can’t just show up at your door and say, “I’m hungry, where’s your fridge?”

I had an issue as well with the second right. Here my question is, why place limits of any kind on my freedom? Why are religious, moral, and political choices the only ones I have a “right” to? It might be answered that these are the most important freedoms, but when I see my freedoms being potentially curtailed in any way, I become wary. When I’m told which freedoms I’m getting, I wonder about the ones I’m not getting. For some reason, I don’t have a “right” to those other ones.

Because these three basic rights are the foundation of Brown’s commonwealth of life, I have some serious issues with it. I discovered as I read on that I also have some serious issues with how the commonwealth would be implemented. For while Brown is a proponent of private property and the operation of markets, he believes that the commonwealth of life can be realized only by the more or less severe curtailment of these institutions, and by the establishment of large new transnational bureaucracies. Who knows, maybe he’s right—but I hope not. The idea that our problems, including environmental problems, can be solved only by adding more government is one that I find both bleak and implausible. Whatever mess we’re in, to a large extent it’s been governments that have got us here. My view of government now is that it’s a necessary evil; if we are relying on it for our salvation, then we are in deep trouble indeed.

But the important question is whether the vision is worth realizing in the first place, and I’m enthusiastically in support of it. I still find the phrase the commonwealth of life to be evocative, poetic, and inspiring. The book itself mostly lacks those qualities, being rather wonkish, academic, and dry; but the vision is as strong as can be. I would love to help realize it. My hope is that it can be done not through the agency of an authoritarian world state run by some Green Stalin or Green Mao, but by inspired individuals who see that their own happiness, and that of their descendants, depends on their assumption of stewardship of our gorgeous mother Earth.

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The Histories by Herodotus

The Histories by Herodotus

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This chatty account of the first great clash of East and West demands an interest in, and preferably a knowledge of, the people and places of that time.

I acquired my Penguin Classics paperback of the Histories in April 1987 as part of the research for my novel-in-progress, Truth of the Python. At that time I got about 300 pages in, then stopped, having arrived at the end of the material that I felt was useful to me, but also at the end of my patience with a story that seemed to be meandering far and wide without showing a clear purpose.

But Herodotus’ work forms part of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World (it’s in volume 6, along with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War), and I have formed the goal of reading that set, so this time I was not going to be put off. Starting again at the beginning, I settled in to a pace of 12 pages a day and read the whole thing.

It was easier this time. For one thing, I have learned more about the ancient world since my first try, so the names and places were more familiar to me. For another I appreciated the plan of the work better; it didn’t seem so loose or rambling as I found it before. But there were a couple of further reasons that it sustained my interest better, and these had to do with the book’s inclusion in the Great Books: for there are important ideas in it.

One has to do with History itself as an idea. Herodotus is known today as the Father of History, and his book is the oldest surviving work in that genre. The Greek word historia, which was the label written on the outside of the original papyrus scrolls, actually translates as “researches”; Herodotus saw himself as a researcher whose findings he set down, as he puts it in his opening sentence, “to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict.”

As Mortimer J. Adler says in his introduction to History in the Syntopicon to the Great Books, what made Herodotus’ work the first work of history in our modern sense was that he made a conscious effort to find and compare sources of information, and to subject his findings, at least sometimes, to certain critical tests. He’s seeking the truth of the matter.

And what a matter it is. In 1889 Kipling wrote “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”; and more recently there has been talk—and more than talk—of the “clash of civilizations”; but Herodotus was the first to weigh in on this freighted topic. For his subject is the attempted conquest of Greece—and Europe beyond—by the Persian Empire in the early 5th century BC, first in an expedition by Darius, and finally in a huge invasion by his son Xerxes, culminating in the famous battles of Marathon and Salamis. That the vastly outnumbered and fractious Greeks were able to defeat such a mighty foe continues to intrigue historians; the topic has lost none of its interest or importance down to this day. Neoconservatives are still obsessed with trying to relive the same conflict 2,500 years later.

Herodotus sees the reason in the difference between freedom and slavery. The Greeks were free men fighting for their homes; the Persian force was an army of slaves, driven from behind by whips. He spends time showing the early antecedents of the main conflict in Asia Minor, where cities of Greek colonists found themselves either hard against the border of the Persian Empire, or actually engulfed within it, as was Herodotus’ own city of Halicarnassus in his lifetime. The hotheaded machinations of Greek municipal politics and the vast, centralized imperial might of Persia proved to be an explosive combination, especially when a few other minor kingdoms and the cities of the Greek mainland are also thrown into the mix. Interestingly, though, as Herodotus portrays it, Xerxes was not interested in invading Europe, and had to be inveigled into it by an ambitious courtier.

But analysis is not really Herodotus’ long suit. He seems to be a raconteur by nature, and enjoys spinning a yarn, and sometimes the more far-fetched, the better. A number of times he reminds the reader that he himself does not testify to the truth of these stories; rather, he presents accounts, including conflicting ones, as he has received them, so that the reader may make up his own mind. Here and there Herodotus does offer his own conclusions, and he does so with disarming modesty. Overall he gives the impression of being a traveler who has been everywhere and spent many an hour jawboning with locals, collecting stories and traditions, and now passing these on to the reader for his entertainment and edification.

It didn’t take long after the Histories appeared for Herodotus-bashing to become popular. Apparently it began with Thucydides (although I haven’t encountered that yet, having started his own masterpiece) and continues down to the present day. Indeed, instead of the Father of History Herodotus has been called the Father of Lies, so rubbishy do critics regard his effort. Certainly in the few pages of Thucydides that I’ve read so far it’s clear that an altogether different and more analytical mind is at work, admittedly on a different subject. And apparently Plutarch really gives Herodotus a thumping.

But I think such critics are too harsh. Herodotus perhaps comes across as more of an “amateur” than later historians, but he is their forerunner, and they are benefiting from his pioneering work. I suspect that the criticisms of Herodotus are somewhat anachronistic, applying the standards of a later time on an earlier one when they did not yet exist.

The prose style, as presented by the translators Aubrey de Sélincourt and A. R. Burns, is readable but nothing special in itself. The book is structured, but that structure gets lost sometimes in the meandering accounts of various races and tribes, and action tangential to the main story. For these reasons I marked the book down to 3 stars.

But I’m glad to have made it through another of the Great Books, and I consider it to be time well spent. When next you hear of the Clash of Civilizations, give a thought to Herodotus and his book, and maybe consider giving it a look.

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prose sketch: Lonsdale Quay, in the style of Rabelais

Sun. 5 May 2013 ca. 1:30 p.m. Lonsdale Quay Market

In the style of Rabelais:

We arrived at the quay of the North Vancouverites, where a pedestrian ferry docks and people stream off to visit the waterside market, established in a mass of curious buildings made up of great blocks and cylinders. At one end is a tower of red steel at the top of which rotates a great white letter Q. Why no towers for P or R or any of the other letters? Don’t ask me, my dear Pantagruelists, for I can’t tell you. But the letter Q stands as a beacon over all here: people climb the stairs up the tower to be closer to it, and stand under it looking out over the harbor. For these North Vancouverites are a healthy, wholesome lot—if you regard a life of sunshine and exercise as wholesome, and I know you’ll have your doubts about this, my dear friends and boozers, much more acquainted as you are with the inside of a pub than you are with the back of a bicycle. And none of that about having gone on the wagon—save that nonsense for your doctor or your priest or your wife. I know better. But we know something that these healthy North Vancouverites don’t—that wine is the supreme tonic for all manner of illnesses, from catarrh and cancer to dropsy and depression. We have this on the authority of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. A good Pantagruelist can squeeze out a good skin or two and awaken the vital spirit that will have him seeking—and finding—a game of the two-backed beast in short order. When was the last time any of these North Vancouverites experienced such hearty, vital fun? Watching the water, sipping their soft drinks, passing the time, they prefer to leave the actual living to those who know how to do it!

prose sketch: Victoria Park

Sat. 4 May 2013 ca. 12:30 p.m. Victoria Park

The park is surprisingly deserted for a summerlike day: a lone woman has left a bench across the concrete plaza around the cenotaph, hair a rich synthetic copper-chestnut, reading a hardback book as she strolls uncertainly forward.

The wide boulevard is an island in the flow of traffic. Lonsdale Avenue is the main stream off to my right: an insistent thrum of vehicles motoring up and down the hill. Almost steady.

The cenotaph itself is of concrete or stone, a mini–art deco skyscraper maybe 6 meters high, enclosed by low drooping lengths of chain hung between four black posts. Battles and wars are inscribed in sober black capitals on its lower faces. Visible from here: CAMBRAI, SOMME; KOREA 1950–1953; and, above that, a new addition: AFGHANISTAN 2001–2011 PEACEKEEPING. The rest of it is naked to the top, ready for more war dead.

The many mature trees are all in young leaf: pairs of stately copper beeches flanking the paved walks to the cenotaph, trunks like great elephant legs; the green hands of chestnut leaves; the prim little leaves of decorous lindens.

Another woman has come and gone from the plaza, this one a dark-skinned Filipina, wearing heavy brown clothes and speaking her own language into a phone. Two teenage girls have arrived to toss a Frisbee on a sunny section of lawn, laughing and talking as they throw. A helicopter gargles somewhere unseen overhead. Gulls cry. A thin Asian teenage girl strides quickly through the plaza, entirely absorbed in manipulating her phone.

But now the plaza is empty again: half sunk in shade, a place that people mostly just pass through as they cross the park.

The Angels and Us by Mortimer J. Adler

The Angels and Us by Mortimer J. Adler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short philosophical text examines the idea of angels from different points of view, and shows why angels matter—whether we believe in them or not.

In the preface to this book, published when the author was 79, Mortimer J. Adler describes the reception he got from the publisher and the editor-in-chief of the Great Books of the Western World when, in 1945, he submitted his final list of the 102 Great Ideas of Western civilization. At the top of the alphabetical list was Angel, and the publisher, Senator William Benton, then president of the University of Chicago, was “flabbergasted”. Robert Hutchins and other members of the editorial advisory board also protested. They did not agree that Angel belonged in the list of Great Ideas.

Adler must have talked them into it, for if you open up your set of the Great Books right now, you’ll find that Angel still heads the list of the Great Ideas. From their reaction, it seems safe to say that neither Benton nor Hutchins believed in angels, but, as Adler points out repeatedly in The Angels and Us, the idea of angels is important in itself, not only because they form part of a fully developed cosmology that takes account of a spiritual realm, but also, and even more importantly, because in understanding the nature of angels we come to understand the nature of man.

The book is developed in five parts:

1. a prologue in which Adler discusses the importance and possibility of angels

2. an examination of angels as objects of religious belief

3. an examination of angels as objects of philosophical thought

4. a look at what Adler calls “angelistic fallacies” in modern thought, or philosophical errors based on the false attribution of angelic qualities to man

5. an epilogue in which Adler makes some final suggestions about the implications of angelology for the spiritual life of man

The material is handled briefly and with great authority. When Adler refers to the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and others, he is discussing works that he has studied in depth and in their entirety over the whole course of his long adult life. He knows what he’s talking about. Few indeed are the people whose depth of knowledge rivals Adler’s on any subject, and still less on so many subjects (Adler was also the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica). The result is that he is able to pick the key relevant thoughts and words of these authors and use them to make his points.

And what are his points? One is that angels can be viewed from two main aspects: the theological aspect, in which angels are part of the belief system of the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and the philosophical aspect, in which angels are a possibility rather than as an article of faith, and the implications are worked out logically from the assumption of their existence. The theological aspect is grounded in the evidence of sacred texts, such as the Bible; the philosophical aspect is grounded only on the definition of angel as a purely spiritual being. If one’s thinking about them is to be clear, it’s important to keep those two aspects distinct—something, it turns out, that few thinkers have actually achieved, not even the great Aquinas.

Adler does a good job of examining each of these aspects. On the theological side, angels show up often in both the Old and New Testaments, and thus provide lots of material on which theologians have drawn to flesh out the theory of angels. Adler notes, though, that the celestial org-chart of nine orders of angels, laid out by someone writing under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, is not actually canonical, although many writers, including Aquinas, regarded this writer as authoritative. So those orders have no true scriptural basis. Also, the notion of guardian angels, and in particular the idea that each of us has a unique guardian angel devoted to us alone, is based on slender evidence from scripture, and many authorities don’t regard it as scripturally based.

On the philosophical side Adler, a professional philosopher, is in his element, but he acknowledges that not very much can be stated with certainty based only on the assumption of the existence of angels. He spends time showing that the best thinker about angels was indeed Aquinas, and that Aquinas made persuasive arguments that angels, as purely spiritual beings, must also be purely intellectual in nature; that is, they must lack those mental faculties that arise from having a physical body, such as sensations and imagination, as well as faculties that depend on these, such as discursive reasoning. What angels know they know immediately by infallible intuition, based on the ideas with which they were endowed upon their creation by God.

Angels experience love, but only of the highest kind—the charity that wills good for another. And they communicate, but only telepathically, not via any bodily means.

Adler doesn’t say whether he himself believes in angels, but I get the feeling that he does. He admits that the philosophical idea of angels is hard or impossible to visualize; all of the representations of angels in art and literature have been poetic analogies to express the qualities of angels. At the same time, though, the Bible does assert that angels can appear in human form; Adler discusses how this can be so without the angels’ having to assume actual physical bodies.

Adler has strong opinions which he is not shy about expressing. The assertions of many of the greatest thinkers, such as Descartes, Locke, Kant, and others, he deems to be erroneous. So much for them. And I think you would have to agree—if you accepted all his premises. For my part, I’m not sure I do. For example, the idea that angels have free choice, but only in the first instant after their creation (it was after this instant that certain angels were thought to have “fallen” and become demons), seems like an unreasonable limitation that exists only because of philosophers’ faith in their starting premises. Can angels really be less free than humans in this respect?

Still, this book is richly illuminating and extremely well informed on its subject. Plus there’s a really nice discursive bibliography at the end for the interested reader.

Do I believe in angels? I think I do. And as against the philosophers I’ll stand with Hamlet:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Amen.

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prose sketch: Ottawa Gardens

Last week I wrote part of a post about the movie Dead Poets Society, then lost it when something went wrong with the WordPress auto-save feature. So to get myself posting again, here is a sketch from today’s walk in the neighborhood.

Sun. 28 Apr 2013 1:45 p.m. Ottawa Gardens

The bench is of weathered wood, spotted with lichen. The dedicatory plaque reads:

In honour of

Nann & Alex Wilson

from their highland dancers

The bench rests on a level pad of concrete set into the grass slope of the boulevard. A man in a green ball-cap walks by with a black Labrador on a leash. The dog’s tag jingles and he drags his left forepaw, which is flaccid and useless.

It’s quiet here on 6th Street. Traffic purrs from busier streets that are out of sight. At the west end of the block, to my right, stands the Catholic church, a wooden building painted a cream color and surmounted by the witch’s hat of its steeple. The boulevard is planted with shrubs and small trees: all with pale yellowish spring leaves.

A lone white subcompact car makes its way east, joggling over the speed-bump. Then quiet again.

The sky is cloud-filled: cumulus humps dense enough to have dark-gray bottoms, and beyond them some milky overcast high above. A single pale band of blue runs over the city like a crack of open water in pack-ice.

The houses here are mostly old and valuable, though set close together. The one opposite me is mocha-colored and partly hidden behind a shaggy larch. The architecture is unusual, for the west side of the house is a vertical cliff of two stories, whose roof slopes away to the east in an arc, as though a cylindrical building had been cut in half lengthwise. To its right: a staid Craftsman box; to is left: a rectangular block of a house with four large identical windows along its upper floor that make it look like a little yellow motel.

A light breeze flows over the boulevard. There is faint birdsong and the grating caw of crows. Very young children laugh in a park somewhere out of sight. A skateboarder deploys his board behind me with a loud clap and rolls in pulses up the street, against the sense of traffic that isn’t there.

Mastery by Robert Greene

Mastery by Robert Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Drawing lessons from the lives of accomplished people, this book offers practical, organized advice for how to realize your own Life’s Task.

If a friend had not recommended this book to me, I doubt I would ever have given it a look. I bought Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power a few years ago but quickly found it to be repugnant. It struck me as being a manual for psychopaths: handsome, well laid out, well thought out—and chilling. I wondered what sort of a person Robert Greene must be.

I probably still don’t know the answer to that, but I have now finished reading one of his books, and it is written from what feels like a different point of view. For while the earlier book was about how to gain and hold control of other people, this one is about how to find, develop, and fully realize one’s own Life’s Task. There is still one section of the book devoted to the politics of “mastery”—how to deal with the envious, the lazy, and the clueless—but most of the advice concerns how to apply one’s own effort.

The author’s method was to study the biographies of those who have achieved mastery—command of a particular discipline or skill. The masters he looks at range from the historical, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Michael Faraday, to the contemporary, such as the architect Santiago Calatrava, the boxer and coach Freddie Roach, and the autistic animal psychologist Temple Grandin. To get material on the contemporary masters, of whom there are nine in the book, Greene conducted in-depth interviews with each. The book is laid out as a step-by-step sequence of explicit rules, each illustrated with case studies from the lives of the masters. The structure is clear, effective, and engaging. Indeed, I was impressed when I first opened the book to its table of contents, which is laid out as a miniature outline of the whole, with text summarizing the flow of the argument. Nice.

So what exactly is mastery, and how do you achieve it? Greene defines mastery as a heightened form of power and intelligence which any of us can attain, and which almost all of us experience from time to time under suitable conditions, such as the urgent need to solve a problem or to meet a deadline. A master is someone who, through long training and discipline, has acquired the ability to enter this state of mind at will, and whose work therefore has a characteristic stamp of authority and innovativeness. According to Greene, such mastery represents the fullest realization of our human potential in the world, and all of us, whether we know it or not, aspire to it and are capable of it.

But not without a great deal of effort, of different kinds, over a long period. My first awareness of this book came a couple of years ago when I heard the soundbite that it takes 10,000 hours of practice at something to achieve mastery of it. Greene does mention this figure (it’s not original with him), but notes further that those 10,000 hours must be of a certain quality in order to count toward mastery. The effort must be focused, disciplined, and goal-oriented. In general this can’t be achieved on one’s own; one needs the guidance of a mentor.

Greene breaks the whole process down into 6 steps:

1. Discover your calling
2. Undergo your apprenticeship
3. Accept training from a mentor
4. Develop “social intelligence” to cope with people
5. Expand your knowledge beyond your own field
6. Fuse the intuitive with the rational to perform at peak

He breaks these into specific subtasks or “strategies,” each illustrated with case studies from the lives of real masters. Curious about how to find your life’s task? Greene gives 5 separate strategies. The emphasis though at this stage is self-knowledge. You can’t become who you truly are unless you know—or in some way intuit—who you truly are. The good news is that there are abundant clues in our lives as to who we truly are. If we don’t know who we are, it is because we have not cast off the brainwashing that each of us undergoes in the process of growing up.

Such casting off is easier said than done. I think back to a conversation I had in my mid-20s with a former schoolmate. I had dropped out of university to pursue a career (I cringe now to type that word) as a writer. He said that that was what he had wanted to do, but instead, under pressure from his parents, he had gone through law school. He did become a lawyer—a prominent and successful one—but I think back to our conversation in 1986 and wonder whether he has second thoughts (God knows I do).

Greene implies that the path of mastery is only for the few. This is not due to the rarity of innate talent, the importance of which Greene downplays. For what we call prodigious ability or genius is most often the product of long, diligent effort—Edison’s “one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration” (and Thomas Edison is one of the masters profiled in the book). The child Mozart by age 10 had probably already amassed his 10,000 hours of focused practice due to his early monomania with music. The bigger obstacles are fear and conformism, and we all have fear, and we all have some desire to conform. It is these obstacles that lead the great majority of us through our lives of quiet desperation.

Here too, though, there is good news, for Greene says more than once that it is never too late to start on the path to mastery. At a couple of points I felt that he might be contradicting himself when he stresses how long it takes to get through the steps to mastery. But that might just mean that while you can always start, you might not be able to finish the path to mastery before the clock runs out.

The idea of a Life’s Task brought to mind a comparison with Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential by Caroline Myss, which is also concerned with helping one find one’s life mission. The contrast between these writers is great. Myss’s point of departure is the spirit: she sees human life as fundamentally a spiritual journey, and whatever careers or tasks we might undertake must be part of that spiritual journey, if we are to find them fulfilling. Greene’s outlook, in contrast, is worldly. He does speak of world problems and acknowledges the importance of solving them, but he sees the human enterprise as a result of evolution, and mastery as the most enjoyable state for a human brain to be in.

There is no real conflict between these points of view, but they are distinct. Greene’s chapter on social intelligence might just as well have been called “dealing with dickheads in the workplace.” Here there is a taste of the Machiavellian tone of The 48 Laws of Power. But if human beings really are just naked apes, then Machiavelli is exactly whom you need to get to the top of the pile.

Greene writes in an authoritative, even apodictic style, as though he really does see himself as a latter-day Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. Time will tell, I suppose. For my part I enjoyed this book and I respect it. Furthermore, it has inspired me to take courage in my own Life’s Task, and I expect to turn to it again and again on that lonely but rewarding journey.

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The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Too much of Dostoyevsky’s “greatest work” is protracted melodrama.

As I type these words there are 4,116 reviews of this book on Goodreads. I’m writing this one to add a note of 3-star dissent to the avalanche of 5-star ratings.

At age 13 I was awakened to the existence of great literature by reading Crime and Punishment, a pocket-book edition of which stood in the living-room bookcase and whose title intrigued me. The story grabbed me and did not let go. I was shocked and fascinated by a protagonist who was a cold-blooded murderer, and when I finished the book, lying in my bed one night, tears swam in my eyes.

So when I got myself a copy of The Brothers Karamazov in December 1984, I was expecting great things: another Crime and Punishment, but more (913 pages). I started reading the book twice over the years, but bailed out both times a couple of hundred pages in. But now that I have a set of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, and since The Brothers Karamazov forms the content of volume 52 of that set, and I have committed myself to reading the whole set, this time I was not going to bail. If I could read all of Capital by Karl Marx, reading any novel by Dostoyevsky would be a pleasure.

And, in the main, it was. But it was also, here and there, a push. I could see why I had given up on my previous attempts: there just wasn’t enough nourishment in there for me. What was I not happy with?

One problem is with the narration of the story. The narrator, while never named, is nonetheless a distinct person who lives in the town in which the story takes place, and who freely refers to himself as “I.” He often admits ignorance about details of the story, just might happen if he were telling it to you in a pub: things like, “whether he got the money that way or some other way I don’t know.” But in many other places he describes scenes—scenes that the narrator never witnessed—in great detail. True, this way of doing things might just be part of the “personality” of the narrator, but for me it created dissonance, and a feeling that the author did not have a firm control over the way he was telling his story.

The story itself is surprisingly slight for a work of this bulk. The main plot is about a murder, an arrest, and a trial. The murder, however, is more than 400 pages in, so the reader spends much time beforehand learning about the characters involved and following story lines that turn out to be subplots. There is an aimless quality to the action until the murder, a feeling of, “okay, but so what? why are we doing this?”

In brief, the story concerns a wealthy, dissolute self-made man named Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons Dmitry, Ivan, and Alexey. Only two of these sons had the same mother(and both mothers are now dead), and all three were raised apart from each other, mostly away from their father. Dmitry, the eldest at close to 30 years old, is a soldier; Ivan is an intellectual and a socialist; and Alexey, just over 20, is a softhearted humanitarian with religious leanings. Also, among the servants at the house is an epileptic named Smerdyakov, who may or may not be a half-brother to the Karamazov boys. While Alexey has been living as a lay resident at a local monastery under the guidance of his mentor Father Zossima, the elder two brothers have only recently returned to town, and they both, in their different ways, are locked in conflict with their father. In the case of Dmitry that conflict extends to rivalry for the love of a young demimondaine named Grushenka.

There are complexities surrounding this situation which involve other characters as well, and the whole is well conceived and lifelike, a testament to Dostoyevsky’s creative powers. But somehow he did not make it all gel together into a coherent whole. For example, much of the early part of the book concerns Alexey and his relationship with Father Zossima, with more than one chapter devoted to Zossima’s account of his own early life; but Zossima is gone before the main action starts, and Alexey’s role in that main story is really nothing more than that of a bystander and confidante.

According to the translator’s introduction to this edition, The Brothers Karamazov was the final blending-together of 5 different novels that Dostoyevsky had been working on or considering over the previous 10 years or so, each dealing with a major theme that preoccupied him: things like the existence of God, the fate of Russia, and the calamity, in his opinion, of a new jury-based trial process. These things are all here, but with a feeling of being merely added together rather than integrated.

But my real problem is with the story’s drama itself: the actual portrayal of the character interactions. By the time I was halfway through, my dominant impression was one of mentally unstable characters making histrionic speeches. This is a book full of flighty, emotional people who talk big and do little. For example, opening the book at random, I find this:

“He’s a fledgling to you, Rakitin, and you know why? Because you’ve no conscience. That’s why! You see, I love him with all my soul. I do, indeed! Alyosha, do you believe I love you with all my soul?”

“The shameless hussy! She’s making you a declaration of love, Alexey!”

“What about it? I do love him.”

“Just like a woman!”

“Don’t make me angry, Rakitin,” Grushenka cried warmly. “I love Alyosha in a different way. It’s quite true, Alyosha, I had designs on you. For I’m a low, violent creature, but there are times, Alyosha, when I look on you as my conscience. I go on thinking how a man like you must despise a bad woman like me.”

For me this writing is much too “on the nose”; there is no subtlety, no subtext. It’s like living with someone who has a personality disorder: the passionate declarations get wearing after a while. There is page after page of flirtations, anger, and reproaches, mostly signifying nothing. Characters make ardent avowals of their undying love, only to switch in the next moment to venomous hatred—and back again.

I waded through the inconclusive talk in hope of catching the characters doing things, and occasionally they do—but only occasionally. And when it comes to descriptive writing, Dostoyevsky here does not shine; far too often he relies on adjectives and adverbs to convey the effects he’s seeking, including dulling words like very and suddenly. He’s not above resorting to cliches like beating a hasty retreat or at a bound.

In all, I found this book to be overwritten in just about every sense. It’s much too long for what it contains, and the quantity of scenes presented at what is intended as a high emotional pitch causes the effect to wear off quickly. Robert McKee calls writing melodramatic when characters lack motivation for what they do and say, and such motivation is often lacking here.

The Brothers Karamazov is a soap opera written by an author of unusual talent and power. The characters talk at length but we don’t really glimpse their inner lives. For much of this novel I felt I was witnessing exchanges and watching action, but I felt little. For me the most interesting character was Father Zossima, and he was gone all too soon.

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