Comforting Lies: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume
It is my opinion, i own, replied Demea, that each man feels, in a manner, the truth of religion within his own breast, and from a consciousness of his imbecility and misery, rather than from any reasoning, is led to seek protection from that Being, on whom he and all nature is dependent. So anxious or so tedious are even the best scenes of life, that futurity is still the object of all our hopes and fears. We incessantly look forward, and endeavour, by prayers, adoration, and sacrifice, to appease those unknown powers, whom we find, by experience, so able to afflict and oppress us. Wretched creatures that we are! What resource for us amidst the innumerable ills of life, did not religion suggest some methods of atonement, and appease those terrors with which we are incessantly agitated and tormented?
So, if followers of other philosophers are called Lockeans, Rousseauians, Kanteans, etc., then what do you call people who love David Hume? Humeans? Humans? Humanists? It's hard to say, because nobody really likes him. Hume didn't much care for himself, even. so why am I reading him?
see January of this year for my thoughts on Berkely. At least his Dialogues were light and readable, written almost in the form of a play. Hume's so-called "discourses" are more of a book in which some narrator says, "X said ___, and then Y said ___", and so on. Why did he even bother calling it a dialogue? Also, why did he even bother trying to be skeptical about religion in a world where they killed people for that and he had to wink and say his characters were only pretending?
So he has to assume that the Christian religion is true because they kill you if you disagree (remember this if you're ever thinking about voting Republican; Christians plea for tolerance only when they do not yet have the temporal power to kill heretics. When the shoe's on the other foot, their craving to punish is like the craving of a Catholic bishop for underage boys), but then he has his poorly drawn "characters" look at all the well-known proofs for the existence of god and finds them wanting, at which point he has his characters (never him, oh no) point out that the tendency toward religion stems from fear and the need to comfort oneself with fables--but no, he doesn't really mean that, really.
Seems to me, the main point of the "Age Of Reason" has to do with finally, finally throwing off those ancient chains and telling reverend Firesnort to go jump in the lake without fear of reprisal. The nice thing about Hume is that, after his thick Treatise on Human Nature (see last month's bookpost), most of his philosophical writings are short enough to tolerate.
The 18th Century Murders: Dragonfly in Amber; Voyager, by Diana Gabaldon; The Dutchman's Dilemma, by Maan Meyers
Scottish Clansmen fought according to ancient traditions. Disdaining strategy, tactics and subtlety, their method of attack was simplicity itself. Spotting the enemy within range, they dropped their plaids, drew their swords, and charged the foe, shrieking at the top of their lungs. Gaelic shrieking being what it is, this method was more successful than not. A good many enemies, seeing a mass of hairy, bare-limbed banshees bearing down on them, simply lost all nerve and fled.
Well schooled as it might ordinarily be, nothing had prepared Jamie's horse for a grade-A, number one Gaelic shriek, uttered at top volume from a spot two feet behind its head. Losing all nerve, it laid back its ears and fled as though the devil itself were after it.
--from Dragonfly in Amber
The smell came strongest from the last door in the narrow corridor. Raqel covered her nose and mouth and held up the candle to the door. both women gasped. Across the door, scrawled in red, was the word BLASPHEMER. there was no notice of illness. Instead, nailed to the door with a bright tenpenny nail, dripping blood, was the very private organ of another stallion.
--from The Dutchman's Dilemma
"Ma'am, ruthven says as somebody's been drinking of the pure alcohol again." Elias Pound popped up at my elbow, his round pink face looking drawn and wan, substantially thinned by the pressures of the last few days.
I said something extremely bad, and his brown eyes widened. "Sorry", I said. "Didn't mean to offend your tender ears."
"Oh, I've heard it before, ma'am," Elias assured me. "Just not from a lady, like."
"I'm not a lady, Elias," I said tiredly. "I'm a doctor."
--from Voyager
I did not like Maan Meyers' addition to the set of mysteries set in colonial Manhattan. This is really number six, but chronologically the fourth, as it apparently spans a few centuries. The Dutchman's Dilemma takes place about eleven years after The Dutchman, and is triggery for gruesome scenes filled with blood, for animal cruelty, and for nasty stereotypes of Jews, Native Americans, and Africans transported to be slaves. The passages where a bunch of white guys from Holland and England malign all three groups while discussing which of them must be responsible for the apparent ritual killing of several animals, and eventually humans, was extremely offensive, and the mystery not worth it.
Gabaldon's second and third Outlander novels, on the other hand, while stereotypically Celtic, were not offensively so. 20th Century Claire and her 18th Century husband Jamie have more culture shock with each other as they attempt to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie's ruinous attempt to claim the Scottish and English crowns, separate in time and space for 20 years or so, and then reunite and have a sea adventure in the Caribbean in a world of improbable coincidences where Claire continually just happens to stumble across people and things that she had previously encountered as centuries-old relics in her own day.
Nonsense and Stuff: Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, by Denis Diderot
How did they meet? by chance like everyone else. What were their names? What's that got to do with you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going to? Does anyone ever really know where they are going to? What were they saying? The master wasn't saying anything and Jacques was saying that his Captain used to say that everything which happened to us on this earth, both good and bad, is written up above.
I can't even.
This is the precursor to the sort of 20th century novels I despise, that are full of one non sequitur after another and insist that they are profound, while I see nothing but nonsense. Or maybe I'm a Philistine who doesn't get the deep important literary joke. Take your pick.
There's a master whose name is never given, and a servant named Jacques who does a lot of talking without saying much, as they travel on foot in an unspecified place and nothing important happens. They talk a lot of philosophy without reaching conclusions, and indulge in paradoxes (that the reader might spot; the characters are oblivious) like a man in mourning for his widow. Depending on which came first, Diderot either influenced or was influenced by Tristram Shandy--oh, all right, he actually references the book, which is a clue that Sterne came first--, which did it better.
If that's your cup of unspecified beverage, go for it. Some kinds of French "wit" are lost on me.
Critics Rave! The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
Saladin Chamcha, following the line of Popeye's pointing finger, raised his hands to his forehead, and then he knew that he had woken into the most fearsome of nightmares, a nightmare that had only just begun, because there at his temples, growing longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were two new, goaty, unarguable horns.
Salman Rushdie is a living example of the need to separate church from state and keep religion OUT of the government. Rushdie received a sentence of death from the Muslim Book Critics Association for The Satanic Verses for some sort of "blasphemy" so mild that I didn't notice it. The book contains a couple of dream sequences involving the life of Mohammed (called "Mahmoud" here), that are about as blasphemous as Kazantzakis's Last Temptation of Christ, with the distinction that Mohammed was a fully human prophet by all accounts, not an alleged god or son thereof whose human aspect would have been in possibly dispute. The main plot involves a Bollywood actor and a VO professional who survive a plane explosion together, only to have one of them grow a halo and the other horns, in a magic realism angel/devil allegory, with the "angel" subsequently being more adored than ever, while the "devil"'s life is ruined. There are subplots involving a mountain climber, a hunt for a serial killer in which the police arrest the wrong man, and a group of pilgrims who take a death march into the sea.
It's weird, but not shocking, and might not have become so famous had some religious assholes not put a Fatwah on Rushdie's head.
Mr. Manners Approves! Letters to His son, by Lord Chesterfield
Dear Boy:
Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon; they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compass to direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel, for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage. Do not think that I mean to snarl at pleasure, like a Stoic, or to preach against it, like a parson. No, I mean to point it out, and to recommend it to you, like an Epicurean. I wish you a great deal, and my only view is to hinder you from mistaking it.
Wisdom and entertainment can be found in unusual places. Having been failed by Swift, Voltaire and Diderot, three of the biggest "wits" of the age, I found what I was looking for in an English collection of letters in which Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, educates his son in the art of being a gentleman.
It is AWESOME.
Unlike the preachy, churchy books on behaviour that have come before Chesterfield, his guide to manners is not designed to make all people miserable or to display snooty manners; it is designed to enable the reader to avoid making himself snubbed, unpopular, or threatened with the duels and ambushes that were apparently as common in 18th Century Britain as they had been in France and Italy the previous century. It is designed to put one at ease in both highbrow and lowbrow company, and the letters apparently made a scandal by pointing out the differences between the two.
There's a big difference between proper behavior in 1750 and in today's world, and the whole notion of society here excludes huge sections of the population, notably women (whom, for example, a man is to praise for their beauty only if they are average looking; the beautiful and the ugly know what they look like and won't be impressed by flattery,; they should be praised instead for their brains because the beautiful are never recognized for their brains and the ugly will be grateful to have some second-prize value....there is both wisdom and fail in that advice). Bottom line, there are many useful and delightful things to be learned from Chersterfield's advice, and the sincerely loving and affectionate tone he uses makes one willing to forgive the blunders. See that? Always be loving and affectionate, and people will be more inclined to forgive your blunders.
Very highest recommendations.
Mr. Roboto: Man a Machine, by Julien Offray de la Mettrie
What power there is in a meal! Joy revives in a sad heart, and infects the souls of comrades, who express their delight in the friendly songs in which the Frenchman excels. The melancholy man alone is dejected, and the studious man is equally out of place in such company. Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it would have the same effect on man. This is so true that the English, who eat meat red and bloody, and not as well done as ours, seem to share more or less in the savagery due to this kind of food, and to other causes which can be rendered ineffective by education only. This savagery creates in the soul pride, hatred, scorn of other nations, indocility and other sentiments which degrade the character, just as heavy food makes a dull and heavy mind whose usual traits are laziness and indolence.
Another winner of a book--really, a long essay, and its brevity as well as the contents are to be appreciated--that came along just as I was about to get ready to give up on the whole historical reading thing altogether. La Mettrie's philosophy sounds a lot like the short pithy "what if" philosophy your college friend came up with while stoned in the hall one night. La Mettrie, partly tongue in cheek, reduces human beings to mechanical, stimulus-response organisms that are designed to do this and that when given various foods, or put in various climates, or manipulated in various ways. The senses are all that differentiate us from actual machinery, and the brain capacity is all that differentiates ourselves from animals.
He also delightfully disposes of Locke, Descartes, and several other major philosophers in a paragraph or two, and does so in ways that show originality. So many of the "great books" simply repeat a lot of what was said in earlier "great books", to the point where reading several such books at once gets boring and repetitive.
He "proves" the existence of god by appealing to the unlikelihood of such a magnificent machine as the human organism appearing by chance, comparing humans with a finely made watch that of course must have been made by a watchmaker---and then he goes out of his way to assert that knowing god exists has very little practical value, as it is equally unlikely that something big enough to create the cosmos gives a ripe turd what is going on in the lives of any one among the millions (now billions0 of insignificant souls on the dust speck that is Earth.
Like Rushdie, above, La Mettrie predictably got a sentence of death from the clerical book critics' association, and spent much of his life nation-hopping to avoid the church police. Do not let the theologians get their feet in the door again.
Strangers on a Train: The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. It was my intention to board every train that chugged into view from Victoria Station in London to Tokyo Central; to take the branch line to Simla, the spur through the Khyber Pass, and the chord line that links Indian railways with those in ceylon; the Mandalay Express, the Malaysian Golden Arrow; the locals in Vietnam, and the trains with bewitching names, the Orient Express, the North Star, the Trans-Siberian.
I sought trains. I found passengers.
Probably Theroux's best known travel book, it recounts his journey by train across Eurasia and back, with particular emphasis on the Indian subcontinent, and also exploring the Middle East, Indochina and Japan, with a climactic return trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
As with a lot of travel writing I've read, this book pays too much attention to corrupt border-crossing officials and to the absence of amenities taken for granted by Americans. Yes, if you go on vacation, it sometimes seems like you spend the entire trip being delayed at the border by a sneering, humiliating, uniform-wearing twerp with a hand out. but that's neither the part you want to remember, nor what other people are interested in knowing about your trip. And yes, it can be hard to get ice, or private traveling space, or food exactly the way you like it, etc., etc., but the more outrage you put into describing that part of it, the more you look like the kind of American asshole that natives would enjoy killing.
And then, there's Theroux's appeal to ridicule by "humorously" imitating the accents of the people in whose country he's in, as when someone invites him to go to the "tzu" to see "wild enemas in cages". And the guides who always want to take him to visit the degraded prostitutes. And the dirt. And the garbage. And the crime, on and off the train. And the danger, in most of the stops, of having the train blithely leave you stranded at a time other than the one he was told. And not much about views, or history, or the things tourists generally enjoy more than going to the slums. This book did not awaken in me an interest to see any part of Asia. It convinced me that it would be simpler to just baste myself with mosquito attractant and go camping at the most pungent local dumpster where the most homeless hang out, throw my wallet away, get kicked and abused by the cops, inject myself with some tropical viruses, and sit around bitching about it to people for whom such conditions are just another day in the life.
There are, however, passengers with stories. Those are the book's redeeming feature. nothing like having a stranger you're never going to see again open up to you about weird family secrets. The best are the asians who have been to America and who are eager to tell Theroux all about it from their perspective, which may well be a put-on, or telling the American what he wants to hear.
Large Wit: Letters on the English, and Philosophical Dictionary, by Voltaire
To be driven out of a delightful garden where we might have lived forever if only an apple hadn't been eaten--to bring forth poor children into misery, only that they may bring forth more--to be sick with so many diseases, vested with so many disappointments, to die amidst grief and in recompense to burn throughout eternity--is this the best of all possible lots? It certainly isn't good, so far as we are concerned; then how can it be so to God?
---from Philosophical Dictionary
The English have so great a veneration for exalted talents, that a man of merit in their country is always sure of making his fortune. Mr. Addison in France would have been elected a member of one of the academies, and, by the credit of some women, might have obtained a yearly pension of twelve hundred livres, or else might have been imprisoned in the Bastile, upon pretence that certain strokes in his tragedy of Cato had been discovered which glanced at the porter of some man in power. Mr. Addison was raised to the post of Secretary of State in England. Sir Isaac Newton was made Warden of the Royal Mint. Mr. Congreve has a considerable employment. Mr. Prior was Plenipotentiary. Dr. Swift is Dean of St. Patrick in Dublin, and is more revered in Ireland than the Primate himself. The religion which Mr. Pope professes excludes him, indeed from preferments of every kind, but then it did not prevent his gaining two hundred thousand livres by his excellent translation of Homer
---from Letters on the English
Voltaire seems to be a literary giant more due to the volume and variety of his writings than for any one work of genius in particular, and it is difficult to find people today who have read more than his short philosophical fiction. The revised Great Books set includes Candide, and the Harvard Classics includes Letters on the English, 24 letters written during and after a stay in Britain and including a sympathetic treatment of the Quaker religion, ridicule of the parliamentary monarchy, short sketches of Newton, Locke, etc., comparisons of French and English drama, some science notes, and miscellaneous observations. The primary theme is that England is a silly little place compared to enlightened France, but that some of it may bear watching. (condescending head pat)
Voltaire also took part in the fad, which thankfully didn't last like the novel, of writing "dictionaries" and "encyclopedias" that were not so much reliable reference books as opinionated precursors to collections of op-ed writings, Andy Rooney rants, and blogs. As with Bayle's dictionary (see December 2015 Bookpost), i did not attempt to read the whole thing, as it would have kept me busy for months without providing much education or pleasure. I just grazed at the articles that caught my fancy. Some, maybe all, articles were also put in Diderot's Encyclopedia; several made fun of the Catholic church and resulted in voltaire having to go into exile among protestants (see also, Salman Rushdie, elsewhere this month. The religious will kill people whenever they have the temporal power to do so).
Feel the Burn: Analytical Theory of Heat, by Joseph Fourier
The problems of the theory of heat present so many examples of the simple and constant dispositions which spring from the general laws of nature, and if the order which is established in these phenomena could be grasped by our senses, it would produce in us an impression comparable to the sensation of musical sound.
The forms of bodies are infinitely varied: the distribution of the heat which penetrates them seems to be arbitrary and confused; but all the inequalities are rapidly cancelled and disappear as time passes on. The progress of the phenomenon becomes more regular and simpler, remains finally subject to a definite lawwhich is the same in all cases, and which bears no sensible impress of the initial arrangement.
Once again, the "science" volumes of the Great Books of the Western World series frustrates and fails to teach me, despite Mortimer Adler's promise that "anyone" can read these books. Last year, i was seriously beating myself up as a noo-noo brain until a kind scientist friend assured me that one does not learn physics by reading the original Newton...or, evidently, Fourier.
I can tell that Fourier is building on Newton's laws of motion, and on the laws of thermodynamics, in exploring the way heat flows between bodies of unequal heat. As with Newton, i was able to follow Fourier through the prefaces and introductory material; after that, the pages began to fill with equations lacking in explanation, and i had to give up in frustration.
Math is hard.
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