Well, the reference to Kant at the end of my last message was not flippant. The free-will/determinism antinomy is interesting but I think lies in the same category as our intuitions that the universe is infinite and that it has an intelligent designer. Which is to say, from the standpoint of ‘pure reason’ one might make the argument that there is a contradiction between free will and determinism but in light of the nature of the universe we live in, it’s not much of a paradox.

Have you ever read Alan Lightman’s book, Einstein’s Dreams? It’s a delightful little book. He tells 30 stories describing the experience of time in different possible, or at least imaginable, universes. One of those happens to coincide with the way our universe actually is, i.e. objects moving quickly experience time dilation. What you are proposing as “that annoying apparent contradiction between determinism and free will” pertains to some universe other than the one we inhabit.

Just in case you are thinking I am getting back to quantum mechanics being the camel’s nose that enables free will to sneak back into the ontological tent, let me point out that, as I see it, relativity provides just as much of a challenge to determinism as does quantum mechanics. The reason is thus: I propose that the principle of determinism states that if the initial states of all the particles and fields composing a system can be measured precisely, the future state of the system will be determined. Set aside quantum mechanical uncertainty for the moment. This determinism principle is not consistent with relativity. As you know, special relativity dictates that there are three topologically distinct regions of spacetime associated with any point in 4-space: the absolute future, the absolute past, and the absolute elsewhere. These regions are separated by the light cones forward and back attached to the point. Now, any state that is to be “predicted” must lie in our absolute future, that is, it must be contained in the forward part of our light cone. The crucial point is this: that future state will be influenced by particles and fields that lie in our absolute elsewhere, that is, outside our current light cone.There is no way — not even in principle — to ascertain the states of those particles and fields because we have never been in contact with them before. When you look up at night and see starlight (well, you might have to leave the City), those photons were traveling on a light cone that merged with your worldline only in the instant they entered your eye, not before — until that instant you could not have accounted for their existence in calculating a deterministic future. Of course, the photons are on the light cone, but the reasoning also applies to any massive particle traveling towards you at nearly the speed of light (say, the solar neutrinos that left the sun eight minutes ago and are only now weakly interacting with your electrons). And a curious footnote to this observation is that all those massive ‘elsewhere’ particles, because of the relativity of simultaneity, could be in the future or in the past, depending on the frame of reference you choose.

So I believe relativity is at least as insurmountable an obstacle as quantum mechanics to a principle of determinism.

I challenge you to come up with a reasonable formulation of the principle of determinism that is consistent with the universe we live in. Until then, I don’t see what the problem is. We don’t live in a deterministic universe.

About a month ago (which is like fifty years in Internet time) a number of my favorite bloggers were listing their top ten “most influential books”. I started putting a list together but I realized some of them don’t pass the serious-blogger giggle test.Would you like to take a shot at it? What ten books have most seriously shaped your world-view?

CVM wrote:

Geez, passing the giggle test, that’s a high bar! Though perhaps you and I know each other well enough to be beyond giggling.

It’s a tough assignment, and age-dependent. There was a time that Atlas Shrugged would have made the list, but not anymore, though it is no doubt incorporated into the sensibility that makes me more appreciative of libertarianism than I would have otherwise been, and I’m the better for that. On the other hand Heinlein has remained a far more important influence on my world view, though I’m not sure which of his masterpieces I would list on my top ten (Starship Troopers maybe, or Citizen of the Galaxy, or maybe even Double Star?). Then there are a whole spate of science fiction novels: The Stars My Destination, Wrinkle in Time, the Foundation trilogy, etc. Those however would definitely not pass the giggle test. Of my favorite other novels, Pride and Prejudice is pretty near the top, as are Great Expectations, Germinal, Madame Bovary, and Swann’s Way- I’m also terribly fond of Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Inferno, and, supremely, Don Quixote.

However, I can’t exactly say they were “influential”- I just thought they were terrifically entertaining. Don’t even get me started with theater- if I could only take one book to a desert island it would be the complete works of Shakespeare, though I would miss the Greek tragedians. There are so many other works of fiction in the category of great reads however that I tremble to winnow them down to a mere ten. (I suppose I could include the Bible among these works of fiction, in that I have spent far too much time in my adulthood analyzing the true intent of the authors of these fantastic tales, in preparation for my deconstruction of the tome, but that doesn’t really seem in the spirit of the question).

Many other works have excited me in my mature phase, including Epic of Gilgamesh and Plato’s dialogs of the last days of Socrates, but mainly because I found in them support for arguments I have already formulated about historical views of immortality. Not so much influential as adding fuel to the fire.

There are countless (well I should be careful about that) popular books that I also enjoyed tremendously, from Grammatical Man to Everything and More (David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece on transfinite analysis, though again preaching to the choir), of course Gödel Escher Bach and A Brief History of Time, to who knows how much of Asimov? And you’ve heard about some of my more recent reads. I would hesitate for any of these to make the top ten though, since they’ve all mainly just added small pieces to an over-arching world view, though probably the closest would be A Brief History of Time (hence, perhaps, my affectionate rip-off of the title for my own book-in-planning).

You’ll perhaps be flattered that I would consider Decline of the West on my personal top ten, though as with so many of my youthful infatuations I now appreciate it more for the vividness of its vision (not unlike Atlas Shrugged) than for the degree to which it accurately captures reality (with due respect of course).

In the end there is only one book that I can say significantly impacted my world view at the time (though it was preaching to the choir even then), and whose power I would say has not lessened with my increasing sophistication, but if anything I have come to appreciate even more. That would be the remarkably short and accessible The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I read in high school (I ran across it in an old used book store on a rainy Saturday as a senior, never having heard of it but something about the title attracted my attention) and from which I perhaps have never recovered.

Your turn.

BBB wrote:

A wonderful and insightful post. I think the challenge, though, is to list the top ten books that influenced you, i.e. altered your worldview, not just to list the smashing good reads that are typically too numerous to mention. The difference, I think, is important… for example, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but other than increasing my stock of one-liners, I can’t say it changed my view of anything at all. On the other hand, The Golden Bough is tough sledding, and in the abridgement demands a significant amount of interpolation, but is fundamental.

So, in that spirit, in no particular order, I would say my short list includes

o Decline of the West — well, unlike you, I have not outgrown my youthful flirtation with cultural morphology. I still find it a useful way to organize my understanding of the flow of history and culture and our place in it.

o History of Art by A.F. Janson. I read this right after I read Spengler. More than anything else I could name, it confirmed and solidified my understanding of cultural morphology and the fundamental way that our conception of space dictates the manifestations of art and architecture in our culture. If you have drifted into Spenglerian apostasy, perhaps this is the tonic you need.

o The Golden Bough — a century ago this was required reading. In the manner of the fin-de-siècle academy, however, I’ve only read the abridged version. Still, I have not read any book that comparably puts Christianity in the larger context of (mostly pagan) religions. “Killing the god”, indeed. You can’t really understand “The Hollow Men”, or Heart of Darkness, or “Apocalypse Now”, or, for that matter, American electoral politics, without the insight that Sir Frazer offers.

o Starship Troopers — whilst my compadres were absorbing Randite libertarianism, I found Heinleinian libertarianism elementally appealing. Now this I have (sort of) outgrown, inasmuch as I endorse the idea of a mixed economy, yet I still find Heinlein’s truths hard to deflect.

o History of the Second World War by B.H. Liddell Hart. Awesome, detailed history. Prior to reading this work, WWII was a fog of unrelated proper nouns for me: Corregidor, Anzio, Vichy, Rommel, Stalingrad, Tinian…. But Hart cleared up (almost) everything and gave me a framework to understand the significance of Bastogne and Bataan. And it led to a commitment to read histories of major conflicts from the Peloponnesus to Vietnam.

o Slaughterhouse Five — well, every other Vonnegut book falls into a certain template of 60-ish alienation in one form or another, but this one was different for me. If ever asked what character out of fiction I most identify with, I always respond: “Billy Pilgrim”. Like Billy, I suffer from chronosynclastic infundibulitis. I think it must be something out of DSM IV.

o Calculus: One and Several Variables by Salas and Hille. I read many mathematics texts in my youth (and even more in my dotage). This one stands out. Even today I have a mild Pavlovian response to the sheer tactile pleasure of handing this book, with its red cloth cover and its beautiful, hand-drawn graphs.

o There is a slate of books about the “Red Scare” or “McCarthyism” — or, as I call it, “The Era of Concern About Communism” — that I read mostly in succession. The authors are a who’s who of bêtes noire for the left, largely because they document a complex and dark phase of our history the facts of which the left would prefer everyone forget. Perhaps I should list Treason by Ann Coulter as influential, inasmuch as she motivated me to find out more about this period, but the truth is I simply didn’t believe a lot of what she wrote. However, my reading since then has largely confirmed her accusations, so I forgive a lot of the outrageousness that is her hallmark. One of the most important books in this slate was The Secret World of American Communism by Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, which — despite the crankish vibe of its title — is a thoroughly researched, well-written academic work that took full advantage of the opening of the Soviet archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This reading led to other books by Klehr and Haynes, by Horowitz, by Radosh, by Whittaker Chambers….

o Quantum Field Theory by Lewis Ryder. A beautiful but uneven book, it contains a remarkable, lucid chapter that ties together non-Abelian gauge theories with general relativity — the connection between the “connections”, as it were…. überkühl.

o The Second Creation by R.P. Crease and C.C. Mann. A history of particle physics. It convinced me to pursue a doctorate in theoretical physics. And the rest is history.

And, turning it up to 11:

o Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the autobiography (thru 1977) of the current governor of California . Inspired me to believe that — even though I would never master the dip-between-chairs — I could reach any goal that I determined to set my mind to. So this also played a part in my pursuing physics.

If the Obama administration wants to  get people feeling better, they should write more knee-slapping one-liners like that.

Still ROFLMAO….

This is yet another movie that expands on the theme that “we’re all connected”. The homages to Star Wars and Dances With Wolves were blunt.  This shop-worn theme is not a bad starting point, and it took me awhile to figure out why exactly I found Cameron’s interpretation distasteful. It wasn’t just the perversion of the American Marine into heartless genocidal exterminator — that’s been done to death by Hollywood and anyone offended by that should really avoid nearly every movie touching on the military in the last forty years.

As a Buddhist, I can usually relate to the notion of interconnectedness, and when movies push this, I’m generally okay with that. But what was it about the Na’vi that was so jarring? Clearly these were no Buddhists. In fact they were hysterically hostile, unbalanced, irrational hunters and warriors. And after all the jib-jab about Eywa, it was something of a letdown to be handed a flatly mechanistic explanation for the interconnectedness of the Pandoran biome. It turns out that the explanation provided for a not-so-universal interconnectedness after all — because the “we” in “we’re all connected” pretty much excludes everything off-world. This made for a handy “us vs them” to justify the slaughter by the Na’vi of human soldiers (and of Na’vi by the humans) at the end of the movie. So for me this came across as, “yeah, sure, we’re all interconnected, but we’ve got to have a big massacre at the end because it’s Hollywood and we’re all about the box office”….

Now, there have been times when Buddhism has been perverted into supporting militarism. But by and large the record of Buddhism is pretty good. [BTW the link goes to a paper about Lewis Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, which studied the correlates of war. Richardson’s studies showed, among many other things, that Buddhist countries by and large generated fewer conflicts than did other religions.] But whatever you might think of the Na’vi, “pacifist” doesn’t come to mind.

And the strange organismic interconnection of the Pandorans seemed to me to yearn for a Spock moment: “It would appear, Captain, that the entire planet is a single organism!” at which point Kirk would conclude that a few well-placed phaser blasts would convice Eywa that it was unwise to hold a Federation shuttlecraft hostage… but I digress. There were no heroes in this movie. Sure, Jake Sully was put forth as a hero for siding with the Na’vi, but the whole assimilation thing seemed a bit too Borgish for my comfort.

And a word about the 3D technology: I hope this is not the wave of the future. As a user of monovision contact lenses, the 3D effect seemed uneven and distorted. Much of the left side of the picture was fuzzy. But now I’m resorting to pleonasm….

The significance of this is two-fold: first, populism per se is neither Democrat nor Republican, and indeed many Democrat proposals for expanding government fit the definition of “populist”. This is why you still hear Democrats arguing that the election results mean that they have a mandate to push through health insurance reform as quickly as possible. So the use of “populist” [in the sense of “policies intended to help common people”] instead of “conservative” [”policies intended to promote individual liberty and initiative”] allows the Democrat conscience to pursue essentially the same anti-liberty, anti-business, anti-individual policies that they did before. This is the core calculation that is driving Obama to demonize the banks – he thinks that by repackaging his Marxism as “populist” all will be well.

Second, it helps to convince Democrats that the connection of Scott Brown to conservatism is accidental at best. Thus, they see no mandate to work with Republicans, who, after all, represent a kind of secular Satanism to them.

We shall see what this particular delusion earns them next November.

Politically: a very bad result for Mr. Obama. Despite job losses, the unemployment rate had actually fallen slightly in July (because enough people had been discouraged from looking for work that the labor force shrank). But the August rate is even higher. The numbers are bad enough to support headlines like “Unemployment rate rises to 26-year high“.

But the “other shoe” that is waiting to drop is the crossing of the 10% threshold. It’s a psychological threshold, to be sure. But you can also be sure that financial journalists have already written their columns, obituary-style, for the sad day when we cross that line. Once we cross the threshold, a jump from 10.1% to 10.3% won’t be nearly as dramatic.

But in the meantime, “highest in 26 years” instead of “gradually falling” means that it will be hard for Mr. Obama to win the battles he will be fighting over health insurance and energy this fall. Convincing the American people we are on the right path will be difficult, and as many in Congress learned this August, those people are getting angry with their representatives’ incompetence. If he loses those battles, it would forestall the economic damage his takeovers would inflict — so in a way, this slight uptick in an ambiguous parameter may actually be good news.

Still, unemployment is a lagging indicator of economic growth. We are past the six-month point after the grand inauguration, so in some sense Obama now, or shortly, will “own” the unemployment situation. (”How’s that stimulus working out for you?”) When we look back to the Reagan administration, the last time unemployment was this high, it was several years into his Presidency before his economic policies finally reversed the malaise of the Carter years. Of course, Reagan’s policy was to cut taxes, to slow the growth of spending, and to deregulate. Obama’s policy is to raise taxes, accumulate massive debt obligations, and to nationalize major industries. We shall see whether these Bizarro-Reagan policies reverse the trend in unemployment — or magnify it.

By the way, here is Innocent Bystander’s update.

UPDATE: September numbers are out. 9.8%. Labor force shrinking. Still waiting.

UPDATE: October: 10.2%. Still rising, even with shrinking labor force.

Just keep saying that to yourself.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.

I first learned about the notion that Socrates was black several years ago, from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato’s Apology, his account of Socrates’ trial and conviction. Throughout the entire semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had been concealing the truth about Socrates’ origins. In a course in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black, and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had warned her about. After she had taken my course, the student pursued the question on her own, and was satisfied that I had been telling her the truth: so far as we know, Socrates was ethnically no different from other Athenians.

The professor is Mary Lefkowitz, of Wellesley College. The student is fortunate to remain nameless. But I recall this story from time to time, because it is a reminder that even very intelligent people can be enticed, perhaps by cultish isolation, into a worldview that is not only counterfactual, but antisocial in its effect.

Now, the truth is that for a long time I have been privy to a set of facts regarding the period known as “the Red Scare”. I use the word “privy” advisedly, because these facts are readily available to anyone willing to look into the matter — but these facts are nonetheless not only widely disbelieved, but sharply discouraged by the larger culture. For instance, I am painfully aware that people are profoundly uncomfortable with any voicing of the fact that, in the 1930’s and ’40’s, Joseph Stalin had hundreds of agents operating in many areas of American culture and government, ranging from Hollywood to the Executive Office of the President. I have friends who continue to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Alger Hiss was framed. I know there are many people who continue to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, unpersuaded even by the recent confession of Morton Sobell. And of course, to the extent that they think of it at all, most people are content to fall back on the conventional wisdom that the Hollywood Blacklist was our equivalent of Stalin’s Gulag, and that the Red Scare was based on a false premise.

And so I am left with the same feeling that Professor Lefkowitz’s student must have had: why does no one mention this? Are they all deluded? Or am I? But all my investigations lead to the same conclusion. The more I learn about the extent of Soviet infiltration, the more it is apparent that the indictment is true. Alger Hiss was a spy. Rosenberg and Sobell were traitors. Whittaker Chambers told the truth. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist. Elia Kazan told the truth. I.F. Stone was a paid agent of Stalin. And the more I learn, the less the official reaction makes sense. Why did half of Hollywood’s elite sit on their hands when Kazan was given a lifetime achievement award? How can Ivy Meeropol make a film about her grandparents (the Rosenbergs) that remains resolutely ambiguous about their guilt? And why do people treat these facts about Communism — and the Left’s defense of it — as disconnected from the flow of American history?

So I am led to ask the question that Orwell left implicit in the climax of 1984: can facts be defeated by simple fiat of the guardians of the culture?  Winston Smith is finally stripped of all his humanity and forced to accept O’Brien’s demand that 2+2=5 (as the Wikipedia author remarks, “a phrase that has entered the lexicon to represent obedience to ideology over rational truth or fact”). As the previous blog post remarks, we live in an age in which — in accordance with the ascendant ideology — the facts of the past are dismissed out of hand as irrelevant to the problems of the present. Is this the fate of those who oppose the cult of personality, to suffer the ‘jackboot stamping on a human face, forever’?

Or is this just another Black Socrates moment?