Author: Ophelia Benson

Good, here’s another list. I think it falsifies the one-item-in-common hypothesis. This is Phil Mole’s.

1) Bertrand Russell – Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays. This book really stimulated my own thinking about religion, and probably gave me the decisive shove toward atheism.

2) William James – Varieties of Religious Experience. After reading this, I became very interested in the psychological components of religious experience.

3) Stephen Jay Gould- An Urchin in the Storm. This is a collection of Gould’s book reviews. Reading this collection taught me a great deal about the art of the book review, not to mention the art of critical thinking.

4) C. Vann Woodward – The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Opened my eyes to the complexities of race in the Old South, and the complexities of race relations in general.

5) Voltaire – Candide. A hilarious expose of life’s absurdities.

6) Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs and Steel. Drew together information from countless sources and disciplines to present a novel and surprising view of human history.

7) Feodor Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov.

8. William Shakespeare – Hamlet.

9) Isaiah Berlin – Crooked Timber of Humanity. A great collection of essays about political and intellectual history, and the havoc caused through the quest for certainty.

10) Charles Darwin – Origin of the Species. Reading the book teaches you how to think about science.

Yup. Russell (Skeptical Essays), James, Gould, Diamond, all on my mega-list. I haven’t read the Woodward, but several books have had the same effect on my thinking. There’s David Olshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery, for instance – now there’s an eye-opener. Oy. ‘Hamlet’ is perhaps my single favorite piece of literature of all time. There’s something almost eerie about the way you can’t ever get to the bottom of it. Berlin is interesting, though I don’t always believe what he’s telling me. Darwin of course – which reminds me that I don’t think I have a Dawkins on my list – and yet he has certainly influenced my thinking. Ten just isn’t enough, that’s all there is to it. The only one I wouldn’t have is the Dostoevsky. I share Nabokov’s opinion of him.

Now. More readers will be inspired to send their lists.

My colleague is, I believe, writing a list of books that have not changed his life, so while he is doing that I will go ahead and do the dull boring plodding literal humourless N&C I had in mind, which is partly an adaptation of my own list and partly a reaction to a new one as well as partly a reaction to Norm’s reaction. See how dull I am? Sigh. My colleague is the one who gets to make all the jokes around here, while I just trudge along, saying tedious flat-footed obvious things all the time. It’s so unfair.

Yes sure enough, there’s his list now, and it made me shriek with laughter. You see how unfair that is? I mean, what, was I behind the door when they were passing out the twisted senses of humour? Was I home with a cold that day? Huh? Oh never mind. Fine. I’m used to being dull and boring. Well I would be, wouldn’t I.

Okay that’s enough of that. I had someting terribly important and earnest to say. No I didn’t – I had an urge to go on messing around with the subject, that’s what I had. I felt like revising my list slightly, or making it a list of eleven. I also felt like explaining, and expanding, and urging other people to do a damn list so that Norm can have a shot at falsifying his hypothesis.

For one thing I wanted to note that I ran together the categories of books that changed my thinking, and favorites or best. Very sloppy. I meant, of course, something like: the ten books that did most to change my thinking. Anyway that list isn’t those ten books, at least not as far as I know. It’s just, as I said, some of the books that have changed my thinking quite a lot, but I don’t know how high on the meter they are.

Which raises the question of what we mean by changing our thinking. Jam Today said ‘Most books you read don’t change your mind. They confirm your opinions. That’s why you read them.’ But I see it a little differently. I don’t take ‘change our thinking’ to mean necessarily ‘turned our thinking upside down’. I think it can mean for instance augment our thinking – extend it, enrich it, add to it in some way, without necessarily causing us to have completely different opinions. A book can change our thinking simply by showing us what can be done with writing, for example. That’s a big part of the reason Hazlitt and Keats and Thoreau are on my list.

But the one I decided to add – I meant to have it in the original ten, then changed my mind for some reason, but on futher thought, changed it back again – because he in fact did do something to shape my thinking. I notice it when I read things like for instance this ridiculous article about how terrible science is and what a disaster it’s been – not just in some ways but overall. It may be partly due to number 11 that I think, when people talk that way, ‘Really? Are you sure you mean it? Do you really want to do without supermarkets and industrialized agriculture and transportation and appliances and factory-made clothes and hospitals and medicine? Really? Really? Have you ever tried living that way? Do you have any idea what it’s like? Do you really, honestly, want to grow and raise all your own food, make all your own clothes, have no recourse when you get sick? Are you sure? Or is that all just talk that you don’t actually mean a word of.’

Right, Orwell, obviously. He was good at that. He was good at nailing bullshit, stuff that people were saying because it was the right-on thing at the moment but that they didn’t actually mean. I left him off partly because he’s not always a very good writer, I’ve noticed lately. I think he’s a bit overrated now. His style could be quite tired and flat and even hackneyed. But his way of calling people on their poses has stuck with me for decades. I was addicted to the four-volume Collected Essays Letters Journalism and Shopping Lists or whatever it was called, when I was at university; read it over and over. And it did change my thinking, or perhaps prevent it from being changed too much in a fatuous direction.

So for a treat I’ll give you a little of that absurd article.

It is difficult for those of us steeped in the propaganda barrage of Big Science to even question such social norms as the mass-vaccination of children in the U.S. Mass vaccination of infants — a product of the “advancement” of technology — is such an “obvious” improvement that one rarely questions it any longer…And yet, legitimate alternative researchers are now linking childhood vaccination with a number of serious auto-immune diseases…Even so, it has been known for many years that a huge number of illnesses and deaths are “iatrogenic” casualties; they are caused by modern medicine’s normal “scientific” intervention into the disease and healing processes; more than one hundred thousand people die unnecessarily each year in U.S. hospitals of malnutrition caused by hospital diets, unnecessary pharmacological and medical interventions, and diseases contracted during their stay there. Yet still the Left promotes what can best be described as industrial medicine.

Okay – the question irresistibly arises – how clueless can you get? Has this guy ever heard of tuberculosis? (Orwell certainly had.) Cholera, typhoid, typhus, tetanus, diphtheria, syphilis, gangrene? Is he aware that a mere infection in a superficial cut could kill you before antibiotics? Does he have any idea how many lethal diseases there were kicking around in the world before about 1920? Does he not know the mortality statistics? Does he not wonder why the normal life span got so much longer in much of the world in the past century? Does he have any idea what he’s saying? So. Someone needs to have a little chat with him. Tell him for instance that antibiotics that worked against TB were developed just too late for Orwell. They were available while he was still alive, but his case was so far advanced that they didn’t do him any good. Tell him what a pleasant death Orwell had, then tell him about all the people who didn’t die of TB after 1954. Then let’s hear some more of his nonsense about ‘industrial medicine.’

Okay, since people are very keen on listing books, I thought I’d offer up ten books which haven’t changed my life.

1. Thus Spake Zarathustra – haven’t read it (not sure I can spell it either).

2. A Critique of Pure Reason – nope, not read this either (pretty sure that’s all spelt correctly, though).

3. Capital, vol 1 – can’t really claim to have read this (have looked at it in a bookshop, though).

4. Capital, vol 2 – haven’t read it (but I have read Marx for Dummies).

5. On Liberty – I make a point of reading nothing written before 1893.

6. The Fountainhead – like I’d read that!

7. Economy and Society (Max Weber) – meant to read this, but never got around to it.

8. The Republic – see 1893 rule, above.

9. Phenomenology of Spirit – nobody has read this.

10. Of Grammatology – didn’t understand a single word of it.

Update. Norm comments on this post which itself is a comment on a post of his which itself was a comment on the death of Paul Foot. So? Nothing. I just like to follow trains of thought. Anyway, he notes that there is only one book in common between our two lists. Yes. But it would have been a bit boring to repeat the same list, wouldn’t it. Although I didn’t actually look at his list again before doing mine, so I didn’t make a systematic effort not to repeat his. But I did remember that he had Mill, and I rejoice to concur with the Normblog reader. I said my list isn’t definitive, isn’t exactly a top ten list or list of favorites – more like a sampling from a much larger list of favorites. (For instance, I love literary biographies and biographies of philosophers; I could give a list of at least 20 or 30 in that genre, all of which are favorites. Maybe I will, sometime.) But Mill is the exception. (Well, and so are Montaigne and Hazlitt.) Mill really is a favorite. I couldn’t leave him off in order to have a non-duplicative list. So I didn’t. And I thought it would be tidy to have one overlap and the rest different.

Speaking of Keats and Wordsworth and Bronte – speaking, in short, of books – I was going to do that Ten Books that changed my thinking list. So now I will. It’s not a literary list – more of an argumentative list. And it’s also not really a top ten or ten best or ten favorites list. It’s not definitive. That list would have to be much longer, and more fluctuating. But this is a sample of that list.

1. Montaigne’s essays.

2. Hazlitt’s essays. That’s cheating in a way, because they’re not all in one book (whereas Montaigne’s are). But just think of them as one huge super-book.

3. Keats’ letters.

4. On Liberty. Same what Norm said. I’m really, really partial to Mill. It seems we all are. That contest or quiz or whatever it was that people were chatting about last week (I didn’t look at it myself), the one about ‘which philosopher are you?’ The people I saw who’d taken it – Anthony at Black Triangle and – was it Norm? – both had Mill at the top. Martha Nussbaum in a recent interview when asked who her favorite philosopher was, said Mill. I should just throw in his autobiography and On the Subjugation of Women for 5 and 6, but that would be a little dull. Take all three as one book then, and throw in his essay on Coleridge, and –

5. Walden. A more rhetorical On Liberty.

6. The Flaubert-Sand letters.

7. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

8. Eichmann in Jerusalem.

9. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition.

10. Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice.

Whew. That’s better. The weather has changed. It’s been blisteringly hot for three days, the kind of hot where it’s still blistering after sunset, and still hot at midnight, and still very warm at dawn – in other words, the kind of hot where it never gets a chance to cool off. That’s rare around here. (I know, I’m spoiled.) Most of the time even in summer it cools off sharply around 8 p.m., and a breeze kicks up, and you can go for a nice sunset walk and cool off. Except for a few days here and there every summer. The statistical average here is, I once heard, to get three days per summer when the temperature is over 90 degrees. We’ve just had two of them, and very nasty they were. So it was very pleasant to wake up to clouds and nice cool air. Yesterday the air smelled foul, dry and hot and exhaust-laden; today it smells damp and faintly of trees. Offshore flow, it’s called. It blows from the west and the ocean, rather than the east and the desert. Offshore flow is a beautiful thing.

So. Now that I’m not all hot and cranky, a few items. There is this profile of Numero Uno atheist Richard Dawkins, for instance. Not a very good piece, actually; it looks as if someone cobbled it together in a hurry because of the Prospect poll. Well that’s all right, I guess, they were just providing some background; that’s a service. But the sub-head is really silly: ‘Now the scientist who calls himself the ‘devil’s chaplain’ has been voted Britain’s top intellectual …’ But he doesn’t call himself that, and if you know where the phrase comes from, that’s an absurd thing to say. It’s a quotation from Darwin, in a letter to a friend –

What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.

The point is that natural selection is hideously cruel. That’s not Dawkins’ self-description as a sort of anti-priest, it’s Darwin’s sardonic view of the idea that nature or its putative designer is kind and benevolent.

Jonathan Derbyshire has an interesting comment on the Observer piece, and a comment in it about Dawkins’ hatred of Bush.

The formulation is apposite: like many soi-disant “public intellectuals”, Dawkins doesn’t so much have a politics as a pathology – “hatred” of Bush and Blair. Those “streams of anti-war letters” are mostly lacking in the reasoned argument for which his scientific work is justly celebrated.

Hmmyes, I suppose. I’ve only seen one or two of those letters, but those were thin on argument. But I detest Bush so much myself, I may have a touch of the same pathology. Be that as it may, I was interested that Jonathan quoted from Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs. I’ve thought of that book and phrase several times lately.

Les hommes dont la fonction est de défendre les valeurs éternelles et désintéressés, comme la justice et la raison, et que j’appelle les clercs, ont trahi cette fonction.

To bluntify it a bit: people whose job it is to defend eternal disinterested values like justice and reason, ‘intellectuals,’ have betrayed that job. He’s right you know. We keep running into it. People whose job it is to defend reason and critical thinking, arguing that we shouldn’t use them on other people’s cultures, for instance. I do keep finding myself thinking that intellectuals just aren’t doing their job. They’re doing some other job, instead. And it is a betrayal. It’s like all those Democrats who changed party after they’d been elected as Democrats after the Republicans took Congress in 1994. I simply couldn’t believe that when it happened – it’s an outrage! People vote for a Democrat who wins and they find themselves lumbered with a Republican anyway? It ought to be illegal. And it’s the same thing with intellectuals. Being woolly and sweet and understanding and nonjudgmental just is not their job.

And finally, for dessert, I liked this brief comment by Eve Garrard at Normblog. I’m a landscape junky myself. Always have been – I mean literally always, from the age of three if not earlier. I know that because when I was three we moved from a house in the country to one in town, and I spent the next five years driving my mother and brother and sister crazy, asking ‘when are we moving back to the country?’ I pined, I longed, I yearned. I still remember the day we moved back when I was eight – the bliss of it. One result is that I’ve always known exactly what Wordsworth and Emily Bronte and Thoreau, for example, were talking about – known it on my pulses, as Keats would say.

For this group, landscape is much more than a source of pleasing aesthetic or nostalgic experiences; it’s a haunting passion (as one of its most famous, and longwinded, representatives noted); it’s something which shapes a whole life. For these people, every natural scene, every fall of land or changing colour of the sea, speaks its own unique, intense, significant word – as they keep telling us, at frankly tedious length.

I suppose ‘haunting passion’ is Wordsworth? Tintern Abbey or the Immortality Ode perhaps? I ought to know but don’t. But I do like Wordsworth a hell of a lot more than I would if I didn’t know what he meant. I love the Prelude, and I wouldn’t if it weren’t for that. Twelve long books of what Keats called ‘egotistical sublime’ (though he didn’t mean the Prelude, since he hadn’t read that, since it wasn’t published until 1850) – yes, but if you’re a landsape junky – well, you get the idea.