Book Review: "These Truths" by Jill Lepore

I find it appropriate that to close a year that has been marked by personal highs & lows and by so much national political tumult, despair, and existential questioning, I should read the book These Truths by Jill Lepore. This is a book that I got as a birthday gift from my family within 12 months of the publication of this book, but I didn't get around to reading it until these winter holidays because I didn't want my busy schedule at work to lead me to start reading it and never finish, and because in truth I was intimidated by its length & subject matter to start it during the summer (even though I had a lot of time before starting my new job in the fall). As discussed in the preface, the book aims to be a comprehensive political history of the US, starting with the explorations & conquests by Christopher Columbus and then moving mostly chronologically forward from there, and frames this history with the overarching question of the extent to which the US has lived up to its founding ideals over the centuries. The author makes clear that the focus on political history, in conjunction of the length of the book, will require lessening focus from military & cultural history, but I felt that aspects of military & cultural history were adequately covered to support the main arguments, and I didn't feel like I missed those things so much. The author puts forth the ideal that history should be a form of inquiry that goes beyond record-keeping and her hope to be neither blindly praising nor blindly disparaging of the US, while acknowledging that her prioritization of available written records will bias the discussion toward the narrative told by people in power.

The book is rather long, spanning more than 800 pages (in the original hardbound edition) from the preface through 16 chapters and the epilogue. However, as this book is for laypeople as opposed to scholars (the latter exemplified by the book The Invention of Science by David Wootton, which I have reviewed here), the font is a little larger and has generous spacing, making it easier to read. Furthermore, the content of the writing itself flows smoothly, and this is a very engaging read. Thus, I was able to finish the book faster than I originally anticipated. Also, I initially wondered whether such a long book would be useful, because I usually like to seriously grapple with the ideas presented in a book like this, and I envisioned that every page of this book would be so chock-full of ideas that it would be too long; however, as I came to see that the narrative was a bit more fast-paced as opposed to dense, my concerns were allayed.

As I have understood, the main points of this book are as follows. In the opening statement of the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal", there have been endless debates about who "we" are and to which "men" these "truths" should apply. The questions about "we" and "men" have been seen from the beginning through the conflicts about slavery and about the treatment of indigenous tribes, immigrants, and women, and in disputes since then. The questions about "truths" have been seen relatively more recently, since the 1890s, with the rise of political consultants who aim to shape public opinion to their own ends even if such actions lead to divisions that destabilize the country and lead to rejections of notions of objectivity; the author makes this point clear, drawing a straight line from the political consultants of the 1890s to the pollsters of the 1930s to the misguided idealistic computational social scientists of the 1960s to the cynical conservative political strategists of the 1970s to the conservative media personalities of the 1990s to companies like Facebook in the 2010s. Initially, I thought these points could have been made in a better way to form a more coherent narrative through the book. However, I am now more convinced by the book that further reduction of these ideas into a narrative that seems too neat would do a disservice to the complexity and dynamism of US history.

Although the author aims to stay ideologically neutral, it is clear that she writes from a more liberal perspective. This is of course obvious from the central thesis, framing issues of race, gender, and class as central to understanding US history, but it also becomes clear at various points through the text in which the author decries liberal electoral losses or things like that. While the author doesn't hesitate to criticize liberals for hyperbolically overreacting to certain conservative beliefs or public figures or for going so deep into identity politics as to reject the very notion of objectivity, the author's criticism of conservative politicians since the 1950s is more pointed, explicitly casting many such politicians & movement leaders as acting cynically even though many liberal politicians, movement leaders, and political consultants have acted in similarly hypocritical & cynical ways (giving the example of how many consultants for the Obama campaign have been hypocritical in their denunciations of Republican corruption & profit); perhaps it is true that since the 1960s, conservative politicians, movement leaders, and political consultants have behaved more cynically (in frequency and intensity) than their liberal counterparts, and I certainly learned a lot about how extensive Nixon's cynicism was, how early he developed such cynical instincts, and how much it influenced the Republican Party after his presidency, but I would still have preferred to see explicit characterizations as appropriate of certain liberal political actions as cynical. At the same time, the author's moderate stance on racial issues, decrying the ways that conservatives in the 1980s denounced "welfare queens" and the epidemic of police brutality against black people that only became broadly visible beyond black people in the 2010s while also decrying the ways that liberals sanctimoniously call conservatives racist buffoons and the splitting of racial justice movements into racial factionalism via identity politics, liberal stance on gender issues, decrying the ways that women were stymied by men in power in the quest for equality while also looking skeptically upon women who wanted to be free from male society altogether, and apparently progressive stance on economic issues, looking for real antitrust action as well as welfare, seems to align in many ways with my views; I don't know if that is due to real alignment or if that is because people of different political persuasions can feel like they align with the author, because the latter would be an act of genius on the part of the author, and in any case, it all adds up to a striking criticism of liberal politics from the 1950s onward (and especially in the 1990s).

This book illustrates how US history rhymes, even if it doesn't repeat exactly. I found myself surprised at many junctures to see how even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so many of the debates about the nature of facts, polling, partisanship, economic inequality, civil rights, and things like that are echoed in current affairs. For example, I was surprised to see how so many court cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1870s involved questions about the extent to which corporations can legally be considered to be persons, and to see how the Republican Party of the 1880s supported trickle-down theories of economics (using almost the same terminology). In this way, there were a lot of things that I learned about US history that reaffirmed my view that arguments based on history must go beyond the last 7 decades and must properly contextualize the circumstances of the last 7 decades within the full 244 years of this country's history. Plus, the author seems to have written this book in a way that makes clear to laypeople with even a passing interest in current affairs how so many past events resemble current affairs. With respect to the point about proper contextualization, the author also does a good job of avoiding common traps of simplistic conventional wisdom. For example, the author clearly shows how the supposed consensus from people watching the same TV news sources in the 1950s & 1960s was an artifact of the Cold War and of lack of racial & ideological diversity, because the first decade of the Cold War largely forced both major political parties to become essentially indistinguishable, preserved a status quo in which positions of power in politics & the media would be held by old white men, and thereby ensured in practice that any deviation from these norms would be implicitly censored. However, the author isn't perfect in this regard, and I think the author's lapses in this way could have been solved by more explicitly connecting discussions of later events to previous discussions in the book of earlier events. Using the same example as before, the author contrasts the partisan media fragmentation of the cable TV environment of the 1990s with the unified network TV environment of the 1950s but fails to connect this with the earlier discussion of why the supposed consensus of the 1950s was actually artificial to a large degree.

There are some bigger problems that I have with this book given its central thesis, and these are all about what the book doesn't discuss in sufficient detail. First, the book doesn't properly discuss the electoral college of relevance to electing the president. There are mentions of electoral shenanigans in the elections of 1796, 1800, 1876, 2000, and 2016, but given how the author clearly shows the expansion of the president's powers and the growing dysfunction of the political system at the federal level in the US, I think there should have been much more discussion of when, why, and how the electoral college shifted from an meaningful body of electors selected by state legislators to a winner-take-all (except in Maine & Nebraska) accounting of the presidential winner & congressional representation in each state. Second, there isn't much mention of Native American affairs following the ratification of the Constitution, nor of the systems of government by Native American tribes before then. Perhaps it can be argued that Native American systems of government didn't really inform and therefore weren't really relevant to the system of government laid out in the US Constitution, or that Native American affairs weren't central to US political disputes after that because those tribes' populations were already so small after the genocides & pandemics committed by & following Christopher Columbus, but this should have been made clearer. Perhaps the relatively small number of extant written records by Native Americans influenced the author's focus, as the author herself admitted could be a possible source of bias, but if the author anticipated that, then she should have consulted other Native American sources too as is evident from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in DC. Third, there could have been a much more thorough discussion of race in the context of immigration from Europe, treatment of Native Americans, and slavery: I've already read about many of these subtleties in the book The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist (which I have reviewed here), and read on Wikipedia about how even Native Americans owned black slaves, so I think at least a bit more discussion of these issues would have greatly strengthened the central thesis of this book.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book, and I learned a lot about US history from it, even as I felt that it reinforced some of the facts that I already learned as well as some of the views that I already held. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has even a passing interest in current affairs & US history.

Book Review: "Michael Polanyi" by Mark T. Mitchell

I've recently read the book Michael Polanyi by Mark T. Mitchell. (As an aside, it may be worth noting that some listings of this book carry the subtitle The Art of Knowing, but the usage of this subtitle within the copy of the book I got was inconsistent.) The book gives a relatively brief summary of the life and times of the physical chemist-turned-economist/philosopher Michael Polanyi in the first chapter, and then goes into a little more detail about his philosophies on economics, politics, science, morality, knowledge, religion, and other things in the second through fourth chapters, concluding in the fifth chapter with a comparison of his philosophical views to those of his contemporaries along with a little discussion about the implications of Polanyi's views for the present day.

The book is fairly short, well-written, and engaging even for a layperson like myself. The overview of Polanyi's life is quite interesting, and as I am considering the next steps for my own career (more on that in a future post), I was particularly taken by the story of Polanyi's career change so late in life. The discussion of his philosophy avoids unexplained jargon and very heavy technical arguments, instead clearly laying things out in simple terms & examples, and I was surprised (mainly as I was previously unacquainted with Polanyi's work per se, even though I have already read works about some of the people who influenced him and whom he may have influenced) to see myself having come to similar conclusions as Polanyi even before reading this book. With respect to the latter point, though, I do have a few criticisms, which are attributable in parts to Polanyi or to the author of this book. For one, the appeals to common sense & simple examples lead to the situation where the defense of Polanyi's theory of tacit knowledge against charges of subjectivism or circularity (i.e. begging the question) isn't necessarily as tightly constructed or satisfying as possible; some of this comes from Polanyi's own quotes, while the remainder comes from the author (who seems to agree with and follow Polanyi's philosophy). For another, some of Polanyi's defenses of Christianity and critiques of evolutionary theory, with respect to their implications for constructing meaning out of human existence, aren't clear as to how broadly they should be applied in his more general framework, and it isn't clear whether this very opacity is in itself the fault of Polanyi versus the author of this book. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a nontechnical clear read about a sometimes-overlooked figure in Western philosophy of the 20th century. Follow the jump to read more detailed summaries per chapter and about my thoughts regarding the book as well as Polanyi's philosophy (warning: it may be quite roughly organized).

Book Review: "Our Declaration" by Danielle Allen

I recently got to read Our Declaration by Danielle Allen. It's a book that carefully goes through every word, sentence, and passage of the US Declaration of Independence from 1776 to argue that the broad notion of equality of all people, not just of white landowning males, was embedded in the text even then (and are not simply hopeful modern reinterpretations), and that such a notion of equality is a precursor, rather than subjugate, to liberty (the latter point being more commonly found in today's political culture).

The first few chapters seem rather distracting, because while it's nice to hear about the author's own passion for and history with this subject, those plus the next few chapters obscure the structure of the argument of the book; only when the author starts to analyze the text of the Declaration starting from the beginning of the first sentence does the book really pick up and the structure of the argument of the book actually become self-evidently clear (which is in some sense appropriate, given that the author herself took time to conclude that this methodical and structured reading of the Declaration is the correct one, so it would likely take others quite a bit of time to reach the same conclusion too). Most of the book is structured as a detailed, slow, careful, methodical exegesis of the text of the Declaration in the service of a defense of equality as a companion, not subjugate, to liberty; its drawing forth philosophical arguments and examples through only the text and the immediate history surrounding the drafting of the text, rather than focusing too much on the broader events surrounding that time, makes this a compelling alternative view of the Declaration, and seems carefully crafted to essentially be a liberal form of the originalism and textualism espoused by conservative jurists today (of the mould of Antonin Scalia), so for these reasons, I rather enjoyed the argumentative style of the book. While there are some parts of the book that may seem repetitive, given that the Declaration is covered from start to finish in order, the structure of the Declaration is almost like a fractal, and I appreciated the author making this structure evident: at many different scales (whether within a sentence or over the entire text itself), arguments emerge like that of people having the right to good government, that bad government does not respect those rights, and that people therefore have the right to alter their government in such cases.

There are a few main criticisms I have of this book. Throughout the book, the author argues that the essence of democratic government is that everyone has a qualitatively equal capability of judging their own happiness and considering their past and present to then judge their own futures, and that these come together through communication, giving the example of how the drafting of the Declaration required the revolutionary framers to rely not only on their own judgment but mostly upon the experiences of ordinary people from all of the American colonies. While the author presents this as a model of democratic information-collection going into democratic writing, I think the confirmation bias inherent in this approach is actually the main flaw of the book: the author tries to be too clever in separating qualitative from quantitative statements of equality, forcing her to sweep under the rug the issues of demagoguery & mob mentality overwhelming critical thinking (especially in conjunction with lack of education among large groups of people), as well as of different marginalized groups (whether poor white people, black slaves, or native peoples) perhaps feeling differently about continued British rule than those who were more willing to share negative feelings therein — these issues of mob rule, factionalism, and guaranteed rights would be fleshed out more in the Constitution, but they are not so self-evident in the Declaration as the author seems to suggest. Furthermore, the author argues that the dissonance between the lofty ideals of equality in the Declaration and the brutality of chattel slavery and genocide committed upon black and native peoples, respectively, is only due to the lack of willpower and desire at that time to bring those lofty ideals into concrete action applicable to black and native peoples, and that would come later; while that may be empirically true in a historical sense, from a philosophical standpoint it seems strange to give the revolutionaries such a pass on those issues given that the author argues in the same passage that the Confederacy was founded in the Civil War using words that made explicit the opposition to notions of equality in the Declaration (thus justifying a more expansive reading of equality from the Declaration even in those days), and given that the author takes care to point out the many drafts of the Declaration that explicitly speak out against chattel slavery and brutality in war. Additionally, people complain about those who say one thing and do another, exactly because those who put forth a call to action can be reasonably be expected to be most likely to take such action, so such dissonance makes one wonder whether such action is really feasible at all, or whether those calling upon others to act in some way but themselves act differently are trying to exploit a loophole (like dehumanizing black people to justify their continued enslavement as being consistent with the notion of human equality). Moreover, while the author does point to several drafts denouncing slavery to mitigate the reality of slavery in the face of the ideals of the Declaration, there seems to be no such argument with respect to women or native peoples, and the latter is especially troublesome given that the Declaration does make a few extremely negative references to native peoples (appropriating land, or fighting "savages").

Overall, while my criticisms do make me feel a little less certain about some of the specific arguments promulgated in the book, I did rather enjoy the methodical textual analysis with only the most relevant external information injected when appropriate. I should admit that I read through this book perhaps a little faster than the author wants readers to read it, but having gotten a new view of the Declaration, I'd be more inclined to reread both the Declaration and this book at a more deliberate pace at a later date. The arguments are interesting and clear, so I'd recommend this to anyone who's interested in the subject, especially those who may be feeling a bit down on the notion that the US is a country for them too. Follow the jump to see a few more of my specific thoughts about this book.

Book Reviews: "Modern Liberty" by Charles Fried & "Development as Freedom" by Amartya Sen

I recently finished reading the books Modern Liberty by Charles Fried, and Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen. The first was part of the "Issues of Our Time" series, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., of which Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele (which I recently reviewed) is also a part; the second was one I chose as a comparison book mentioned in a review for the first on Amazon. Both deal with liberty and freedom, but in rather different ways. Below are my brief, decidedly nonspecialist thoughts on these books (content and style). After the jump will be some musings about issues related to these books. I am not a philosopher, nor am I an economist or sociologist, so many of the things that I say will probably be wrong or inconsistent; please feel free to point out issues in the comments below.

The book by Fried is a detailed defense of what appears (to my untrained eye) to be a centrist libertarian conception of liberty. The author essentially posits that human actions, and therefore the liberty to do so, are essentially individual in origin, so individual liberty should be held paramount, and can be taken to exist even in the absence of the state. He acknowledges the legitimacy of the state to tax and spend (even when the taxation is progressive), but argues that people should keep in mind that the state can simultaneously be the best friend and worst enemy of liberty. Additionally, he argues for equal application of the law as much as possible, and for the state to not interfere with people's choices when such interference would reduce choices that they would otherwise have no problem making, especially when those choices do not directly harm others in a criminal manner, focusing on three examples in particular throughout the book. With this in mind, he argues that the state should discourage certain behaviors through taxation rather than through heavy-handed direct intervention, and that stability in the laws and tax systems enforced is the least bad thing that the state can do with respect to liberty. Though I've focused specifically in pointing out things related to the state, he focuses on more abstract philosophical notions of liberty while simultaneously bringing the reader's attention to more mundane matters such as work, market transactions, and even sexual intercourse to better illustrate these points.

The book itself is fairly short, and moves along reasonably quickly (though I admit that I did get lost in some of the finer philosophical points). When introducing each justification for its conception of liberty, it also introduces each common criticism of that justification, and tackles almost every criticism head-on, without fear. There are quite a few things that I don't agree with about the ideas in the book. The overarching difference that I have is that this conception of liberty focuses on its origin within individuals, whereas I see the manifestation of liberty as being more dependent on societal contexts. An example of this would be in his contention that things like language, music, and culture originate within individuals; I would posit that these things would be meaningless for a single human in vacuum without any human contact, and it is only contact (and the history of such contact) with other humans that gives these things meaning. This is what I see as further leading to the author's general neglect of the consequences of liberty, choosing only to talk about the origins and processes of liberty; while I can see that this is philosophically consistent with the axiomatic treatment of the individual origin of liberty (and this also seems to be consistent with the desire for a static, predictable state due to its focus only on the unchanging processes of liberty, though I wouldn't agree with that either), the biggest issue that I have is that the author brings up the problem of the homeless person who has liberty but cannot make use of it if all property in that person's area is privately owned (and would therefore lead to the homeless person being kicked off of that property), but dances around this issue without really addressing it in a satisfactory way. With all of that said, I did enjoy reading this book overall, as it got me to think about the fundamental origins and processes of liberty in a new way, because before that, I was really only thinking about its manifestations/consequences.

The book by Sen is a longer exposition into how economic and political freedoms have to go hand-in-hand if they are to both be meaningful, and how human development is part and parcel of both. The author goes into how while utilitarian consequential formulations and libertarian process formulations of liberty are both important, both must be taken together instead of taking one or the other for liberty to be meaningful in the context of economics or politics. He further discusses how measures of economic development based solely on income or GDP/GNP per capita are quite flawed, so more nuanced, granular metrics are required, based on how different people's "functions" and "capabilities" operate, are fulfilled, and can be altered. Ultimately, he demonstrates that free markets and economic liberty, in conjunction with institutional corrections for certain glaring inequalities in capabilities, would allow the greatest human development leading to the greatest freedom.

Reading this book made me realize that I had intuitions for many ideas that the author clearly put into words (so I guess for now my lay economic views have a lot in common with those of Amartya Sen); in particular, I was already thinking about how Fried's neglect of the consequences of liberty made his treatment somewhat incomplete, and how humans being social animals means that the circumstances of one's political and economic existence cannot be ignored when considering the meaning of liberty, even before picking up Sen's book. However, there are a couple of issues that I have with this book. One is that there are several times where he repeats a point overly much. I don't mean that he just just repeats few words over the course of the book: I mean that he sometimes repeats entire multi-paragraph passages for no good reason, so the book could be a lot more terse and concise than it is. The other is that he argues that loss of income can affect a person mentally and physiologically in more lasting ways than simply by loss of purchasing power, especially if that person is ill, disabled, or so on, so he argues that specific institutional safety nets (presumably like social security, food stamps, and so on) and not simply lump-sum transfers of money (or increases in income) are necessary for countering poverty and promoting human development. I'd argue instead that if he can say that loss of income (and not just low income) is enough to push people into that downward spiral, then it would stand to reason that providing a strong enough guaranteed safety net through a simple money transfer (essentially, a minimum income, which I will discuss farther below) should be sufficient to prevent that, while simultaneously giving people the choice as independent agents to spend it as they like. Finally, at vary points, he promises to discuss how lessons from development in underdeveloped countries can be applied to the development of marginalized groups in more developed countries, yet as far as I could tell, that promise was never satisfactorily fulfilled. (Also, as a minor quibble: he makes reference to Madhavacharya having catalogued various schools of "Hindu" thought, including Buddhism, Jainism, and various atheist schools of thought, while calling him a Vaishnavite. A simple Wikipedia search shows that this Madhavacharya was a follower of Advaita philosophy, and was a separate person who was born only in the last few years of the life of the Dvaita founder Madhvacharya. It seems odd that Sen, who seems familiar with the "atheistic schools of Hinduism" catalogued by the later Madhavacharya, would make this error, so perhaps this was an oversight by the editor, or maybe the distinction between the two only became clear with scholarship after the publication of this book.)

In the Amazon review that I read, it seemed like these two books would oppose each other, but I would instead posit that they complement each other nicely. That brings me to the end of the review. Follow the jump to see some further thoughts on minimum income and related things that have been bouncing around in my head of late.

Kennedy, Edward Moore (1932-2009)

Folks, Ted Kennedy died last night. He was suffering from brain cancer and had been out of the Senate for a few months.
I really admired him because he was able to back up his natural charisma and his heritage with real legislative accomplishments (which was something his brothers didn't really do, to be followed). He was truly committed to helping the poor through health care reform and bringing them up the economic ladder. He really wanted to help immigrants get decent jobs in this country and work their way towards citizenship. He helped outlaw most forms of discrimination against the disabled and helped them have a better life through more supportive school and work environments (I directly benefit from this). He wanted to make sure racial and ethnic minorities are not targets of discrimination.
However, though I am a liberal, I do not worship JFK like so many other liberals do. I find it somewhat appalling and on the same level as GOP worship of Ronald Reagan. He never really had any notable legislative accomplishments like Ted did. As President, he totally botched the Bay of Pigs invasion and was only saved by the waiting game (or, as the Germans say it, sitzkrieg) that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Though he tried to contain communism in Latin America through humanitarian means, he started the disaster that was the Vietnam War. His mediation of the conflicts between Britain and Ireland were tainted by his own Irish background. His efforts to rid Iraq of communism brought the Baath Party (and ultimately Saddam Hussein himself) in power through bloody civil wars. He allowed the FBI to wiretap MLKJr because J. Edgar Hoover suspected he was a communist (and Hoover and JFK were close friends, somewhat negatively affecting JFK's progress with civil rights). Furthermore, he essentially wiped out the Seneca nation through relocation due to the building of a dam, making him break a campaign promise.
Please comment if you are a liberal who does not admire JFK (or even comment anyway)!