Book Review: "Speak Freely" by Keith E. Whittington

I've recently read the book Speak Freely by Keith E. Whittington, but it has been sitting on my bookshelf for nearly 3 years. This is not a book that I chose for myself, nor is it one that someone to whom I'm close chose for me. Instead, this book is one that the Princeton University president Christopher L. Eisgruber chose for the then-incoming undergraduate class of 2022 as well as all other students, staff, and faculty to read. This in itself was typical; examples include the book Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele, which I have reviewed here, and the book Our Declaration by Danielle Allen, which I have reviewed here. Less typical for this book was the fact that the president personally ordered that physical copies be sent to every student (including graduate students, which included me at that time), staff, and faculty; it was commonly understood that the president is a personal friend of the author, who is a professor of constitutional law in Princeton University, and did this as a favor. Furthermore, there was a lot of chatter about this book in the middle of 2018 when this book was mailed to all students, staff, and faculty, just because so many people read it. In such a university with students & faculty who have very progressive (in the US context) political views, a conservative defense of unpopular free speech on university campuses, as expected, was seen as controversial. Personally, a few of my friends did read it and recommended that I not read it because it would be a waste of my time. I admit that these occurrences may have prejudiced my view of this book to some degree, but I genuinely tried to read & understand this book as fairly as possible. Follow the jump to see more.

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: "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt

Before I get into the review, I'd like to point out that it has been exactly 10 years since I published my first post on this blog. I've significantly matured since then, and my general interests and specific goals for this blog have shifted, but writing here is still something that I enjoy doing. No matter how many people read this blog, if it's a positive number, I'll be grateful for each and every one of you.

I've recently read the book "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt: this was a book I saw on the SMBC reading list a while ago. This book is about the human psychology of morals at individual and group levels, and is divided into three parts. The first part is about how people's rational minds are actually driven by their emotions and intuitive views of the world, as opposed to the other way around, so any discussion of morals with people of different worldviews must start at the level of values, emotions, or intuition, not calculated reasoning. The second part introduces the framework of "fundamental flavors of morality" in a historical context and describes how this can be used to explain the ongoing tensions particularly in politics in Western countries. The third part, in contrast to the first and second parts focusing on individual behaviors and thought processes, focuses on how people can be so driven to partake in group activities, why this means religion could have a useful place even in contemporary society, and how this leads to more tribal & polarized politics too.

The book is fairly well-written and is a rather engaging narrative; I especially liked the overall division into three coherent parts as well as the summaries at the end of each chapter. Additionally, I found it interesting to see just how many beliefs and symbols even supposedly rational, atheistic, or otherwise "modern" liberals hold with a similar intensity to conservatives. There is one overall major issue, along with some minor quibbles, that I will state here. The major issue is that while the author does a good job of presenting a variety of studies in different situations to support his points, it isn't clear how robust those studies really are to changing conditions: I would have liked to see a clearer acknowledgment of the crisis of replication in experimental psychology (and in fairness, I should also apply this critical view even to things like the stereotype threat effect which may align with my political views, as was expounded in the book Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele which I reviewed here, as well as to popular psychology books I read in the future). This is related to the minor quibble that especially in the first part, but also at various points throughout the book, the narrative seems to fit together a little too neatly without necessarily considering alternative explanations as carefully; this may be fine given that the book is meant to convey a particular message to a general audience, and to his credit, the author does acknowledge the likely incompleteness of this book in this regard, but even though I agree with the author's praise of Hume's idea of rationality serving emotion rather than the other way around, it would have been nicer to not feel like I was in an epistemic bubble. Another quibble is that in many parts, the author seems to be comfortable using casual superlative language; again, this may be fine given that the book is meant for a general audience, but in some places it struck me as a somewhat less than evenhanded treatment of the historical context. Finally (and this is a very minor quibble), the author claims originality in the metaphor of reason as a rider sitting atop the elephant of intuition: even the author makes reference to Plato's metaphor of the rider of reason steering the horses of emotion, and the Bhagavadgita (which the author does not reference) uses the same metaphor, but even here I must credit the author for novelty in the use of an elephant rather than horses to show how this much bigger animal will more likely steer the rider than the other way around.

The first part went over ideas that I've seen before in other contexts, touching upon epistemic closure, values-based conversations to bridge political divides, post-hoc rationalization, and so on. I didn't feel like I necessarily learned much from that part, but it was still nice to see those ideas again. One issue I had was about the discussion of how upon hearing a story that may generally invoke moral revulsion even in the absence of victims in the story, people from more liberal or educated backgrounds would admit to revulsion but still tolerate it, while people outside of such backgrounds would invent victims to justify their intolerance of such behavior as a post-hoc justification for their revulsion. Yet the same discussion seemed to also suggest that the differences between those two groups grew larger after controlling for the possibility of "invented victims". The section may have just been poorly written, but even if that is the case, it seemed to give the wrong idea. Another issue I had was with the author's accusation that Marxist psychological theorists from a few decades ago were essentially exhibiting post-hoc rationalization of their own beliefs when criticizing evolutionary psychologists, yet he demonstrated no self-awareness in his own lavish praise for evolutionary psychology (unless his willful blindness was a deliberately ironic example of such post-hoc rationalization, in which case this book is a work of genius).

The second part felt a lot more novel to me in its introduction of "fundamental flavors of morality", discussion of how broad labels like "utilitarianism" or "deontology" focus almost exclusively on one of those "flavors" to the detriment of others, and how in Western countries, liberal politics tends to focus exclusively on one or two specific "flavors" while conservative politics tends to appeal to all of them, explaining why conservative politics may tend to be more deeply rooted in the broader population. This was an eye-opening introduction to how modern Western liberal/progressive politics may need to work with rather than denigrate alternative flavors of morality if it is to succeed more broadly, though it is also hard for me to see how that would work if progressive politics aims to tear down oppressive power structures that conservative voters appreciate for inspiring loyalty and obedience to authority that they see as keeping their communities functioning smoothly. Perhaps the solution is to listen with an open mind to people who may have been oppressed by those in power abusing the moral "flavors" of loyalty, authority, or sanctity, and recognize their own oppression while still valuing those "flavors" more broadly; this may allow liberals to more concretely mesh well with those "flavors" instead of dealing with oppression by proverbially throwing out the baby with the bathwater. My only quibble in this regard is that the author consistently describes Western society as a monolith which prizes autonomy above larger group virtues while simultaneously showing how poorer communities in developed Western countries have more in common with more community-oriented mindsets outside of the West.

The third part described links social behavior in humans to eusociality in bees in order to show why humans may be so prone to prizing group interactions far above what they can do individually, and how this can explain a lot of the observed behaviors and potential benefits of tribalism in religion and politics, but I felt that the way the author tied these ideas to evolution as well as political history made this the weakest part of the book. In particular, in the discussion about group-level selection versus individual selection, I felt the analogies to bee eusociality were undercut by the lack of clarity regarding the extent to which bees in one hive are actually related to each other (so a lot of the behavior could be explained through kin selection — presumably the point of eusociality is to transcend this, but it would have been nice to see a clearer explanation bolstering the analogy), how comparable human division of labor & tribal identity really are to the rigid caste division & hive mind of bees, and why the author didn't consider the perspective of taking individual human behaviors as the results of kin selection among constituent cells. There's probably a lot of basic evolutionary biology that I'm missing here, but I would have expected to see such explanations if these analogies are so important to the main argument. Additionally, the author argued that it is a logical fallacy to say that fascism and other ugly political outcomes could possibly be an endpoint of hive-like group instincts among people, but I completely disagree with this, given the long history of large nationalistic or smaller corporate "hives" with leaders who create the illusion of equality & moral rectitude to lead constituents to do horrible things in the name of an abstract ideal while covertly ensuring that they (the leaders) ultimately unfairly benefit. Finally, the author seemed to use a lot of motivated strawman reasoning in defense of the benefits of religion. One example would be the use of college football to then claim that "rational liberals" argue against sports in general and are therefore blinding themselves to the potential benefits of tribal belonging, when from what I've seen, the arguments are more against American football (for the injuries) and the current collegiate athletics setup in particular. Another example would be his retort to the claim that the Catholic Church is exclusionary by pointing to how many colleges are more exclusive in their acceptance rate; this obtuse remark completely ignores how many organized religions have cultivated group cultures which, one way or another (whether between "nonbelievers are sinners who will be damned to hell" all the way to "the righteous believers must kill the infidels"), systematically sees out-groups as lesser than the in-group, whereas college admissions committees don't cultivate these sorts of attitudes in admitted student bodies.

As a final comment, given my own liberal predisposition, I noticed that the author spoke of his growing reverence for traditionally conservative moral "flavors" being sparked by his long-term stay in India conducting moral psychology experiments and surveys. It's hard to say whether people in lower positions in such cultures (like maids or street sweepers) truly like being in such positions as opposed to feeling like they have no choice but to accept their lot in life, and it is easy to project Western ideas of individual liberation onto people in such circumstances, but even so, I was struck by how little he directly reflected on the circumstances of such people in the context of respect for societal hierarchy and how easily he came to accept the existing power structure there, because he was in a position where that would have no negative consequence for him. (This critique of his seeming conservative disposition leaves aside some of the other US policy-specific arguments he made, such as about health care, where it seems clear enough to me that the inherent properties of human health and its treatment are fundamentally incompatible with the characteristics needed to sustain a truly free competitive market.) At the same time, being of Indian descent, I know that when I visit my relatives there, I feel the need to suppress any discomfort with how household help and other people in lower stations in life are treated mainly to avoid friction with relatives (especially given that I didn't grow up there, so there's a good chance that any contrary words I say will be met with references to that fact).

Overall, this is an interesting book of great relevance to the current political climate. Given this, I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about why we think the way we do.

Book Review: "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

I generally don't read works of fiction, as I don't have as much interest in them as I do in well-crafted nonfiction works, but Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is one of the classics of dystopic science fiction; in particular, many comparisons have been made to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, with the latter surging in popularity in the last few months in the context of the current political climate in the US, so I figured I might give this one a read instead. This book is set in a time where society is explicitly stratified into castes and everyone is conditioned, through physical, chemical, and psychological means from [artificial] fertilization through death at age 60, to behave in ways that would never lead them to question their roles in society; this is further helped by the omnipresence of a pleasurable drug called soma and by the omnipresence of this very conditioning, such that social ostracism is feared perhaps above all else. With that in mind, the main story primarily involves two characters, one named Bernard Marx who is born and raised in this society but finds himself dissatisfied with the society and his role in it, the other named John the savage who is born to a woman (named Linda) outside of this society and becomes repulsed after understanding the superficiality of the existence of members of that society.

The initial parts of the story seem to drag a little bit as it isn't initially clear to which character the reader's attention should primarily be drawn, but after the introduction of Bernard Marx, it becomes much clearer that the initial parts paint the setting of this world to make it clear why Bernard Marx is out of place. Additionally, in terms of movement of the narrative, the extended dialogue between John the savage and the controller Mustapha Mond drags a little, but it provides a fascinating glimpse into the author's true view of such a futuristic world. What I found most interesting is that both Bernard Marx and John the savage keep trying but failing to escape the oppressive social confines of their world, though the issues at play are different. Bernard Marx feels socially isolated due to his short height relative to his upper caste and due to his (perhaps related) desires to have time from himself, away from the rest of society. However, his psychosocial conditioning is fairly thorough, such that even when he visits the tribe of savages and has a chance to live a simple and isolated life among them, he chooses instead to bring John the savage as well as Linda back to the main society in London so that he can gain credibility in that society that he finds hard to come by; when John the savage rejects further gawking visitors (which reflects poorly on Bernard Marx, being the custodian of John the savage), rather than joining John the savage in solitude, Bernard Marx becomes despondent about his renewed feelings of alienation and ostracism from society at large. This deepens near the end of the book, when he is exiled to Iceland; his thoroughly conditioned worry about social alienation overcomes any excitement he may have felt at realizing that he would be among high-caste misfits like himself instead of in the superficial society for which he ostensibly does not care so much. Likewise, John the savage is initially delighted by what he sees after traveling from his tribe to London, but having been raised and conditioned outside of that society, he is disgusted by the superficiality, free love (though that may have more to do with his early childhood trauma of seeing his mother, who was brought up in the society, attempt to practice free love with the men of the tribe, consequently leading to his and his mother's ostracism from the tribe by the women and children of the tribe, respectively), and inability to find solitude in the main society. Yet at the end of the book, when he attempts to escape and live an ascetic penitent life outside of the city, the other members of society relentlessly hound him as an exhibition for their amusement; even at the very end, when he takes his own life, his limp hanging body is seen as another cheap spectacle, so even in death, his earthly remains cannot escape the superficiality of that society. Overall, I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in this sort of thing. Follow the jump to see more discussion of my thoughts about how this relates to today's society in the US (disclaimer: this is coming from a lay observer of American politics and society, so don't take anything too seriously; moreover, I'm sure that many of these observations have been made in the past by various people at different times).

On Political Correctness and Retard[suffix]

I've wanted to talk about this for a while, but this (Brent Dykes, Yahoo! News) provides a good starting point. It's about how Obama Administration Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called liberal lobbies planning to air attack advertisements on conservative Democrats opposing the health care plan "[expletive] retarded".
I do not at all condone this. He should have attacked the plan on its merits rather than mindlessly foulmouthing it. I also think it would be best if he sincerely apologized for this, though knowing him, it probably won't happen.
Sarah Palin, who has a son with Down Syndrome, has responded by calling for his resignation/firing, saying that this will affect her son and other similarly affected people the same way African Americans would be affected by someone using the 'n'-word to insult them. While I don't agree with this extreme reaction, I think it is entirely reasonable to condemn him as she did.
That said, I wanted to use this opportunity to bring up something bigger about the word "retard"/"retarded" and political correctness.
I don't think it is at all right to use "retard"/"retarded" as an insult against mentally handicapped people. In our schools, we are taught to use words like "mentally handicapped", "mentally disabled", or "mentally challenged", among other words; "retard"/"retarded" aren't even part of this vocabulary (i.e. they are completely ignored altogether). Hence, I have never once met someone who used the word "retard"/"retarded" to [insultingly] refer to a mentally disabled person. This probably isn't true in other parts of the country, but from my own experiences, the word "retard"/"retarded" has solely taken on the meaning of a synonym for "idiot"/"imbecile".
That is probably what Emanuel meant; I still don't support him on this, because as it is, it is a pretty vicious insult to use against someone else.