Anyone who has read this weblog over the last few years has sensed my hopelessness and despair about the fallen world and in particular the American republic and Western civilization. I have told Rod Dreher many times privately that we irreligious also need our “Benedict option” in a “darkening world.” But while the Roman Empire fell due to the exogenous shocks of barbarian invasions, as well as internal decay, I feel the exogenous shock of coronavirus just exposed our societal ills, and we’re committing suicide all by ourselves.
My wife is reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. When I first heard the author, Nicholas Carr, talk about his book in 2010 on a podcast I was walking up Cedar street in Berkeley. I remember this moment so well because I laughed loudly. I scoffed. I almost dropped my iPod shuffle. Those were the days.
Unfortunately, though Carr’s book is dated, and some of the research seems tenuous, I am beginning to accept more and more of his conclusions. A few years ago I expressed some alarm at the rise of YouTube commentators. They are fine as far as it goes, but they are extremely popular and often informationally vapid.
Today, we have TikTok, where some of my younger friends admit to me that they spend hours and hours watching sequences of videos such as this.
But despair isn’t the point of this post. I’m almost done with The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century. The question then is, what do I read next? But then I thought, why just me? I haven’t done anything like a “book club” in many years. But why not? There isn’t a reason I have to march alone through the TikTok world.
So here’s the plan: I will pick a book, and read one chapter a week, and write a blog post about it. And those of you who also want to read the book can comment (if you have a blog or something you can post and I will link to that post; but who has blogs now?).
Here are some options, and I’ll let readers in the comments help choose:
The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society
Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution
Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia
Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders
The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity
I’m open to selections outside of this list…but I would prefer something on this list unless you have an awesome idea. These are books I already own and are in my “stack” of to-reads. Also, obviously remember that books written by academics are going to be much more dense than those written by journalists and commentators, which will be “quick reads.”
Not born yesterday. I really enjoyed it. Would be nice with some commentary
From the list ‘Not Born Yesterday’.
Outside of list, ‘Microeconomics: Behaviour, Institutions, and Evolution’ by Samuel Bowles. It’s a textbook but the title is a bit of a misnomer, its more political economy than microeconomics. I read this about 10 years ago but looking to reread again.
Bit of maths of the calculus/game theory kind but can be skipped without losing much.
Between this book and Henrich‘s new WEIRD people and Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor provides a good foundation of how political economy works from economists perspective.
i have the bowle’s book. haven’t read it
Long time lurker here. Book club sounds like a great idea. I’d be keen to do “Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution”. Start the book club of with something science-related then we can descend into politics-adjacent things with time.
Not Born Yesterday. The book argues against something I feel correct intuitively. Over the past 20 years I have seen fringe theories from internet go mainstream. But the book plays down the importance of online culture/influence. Would like to read your thoughts about it.
I would recommend any book from Richard A. Werner and like-minded economists, this book is highly important:
“Where Does Money Come From?”
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B00FFAKEQU/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&qid=1601374234&refinements=p_27%3ARichard+Werner&s=digital-text&sr=1-2&text=Richard+Werner
People should read it, because its urgent and the more people know how the current financial system works, the less they are likely to get tricked in the upcoming transition and reset of the currency. Like I have expanded on in comment No 10 here:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/09/28/white-men-invented-everything/
This is the best time to start thinking about economics and the financial, especially the monetary system, if not having started already. Because its urgent, the bomb is ticking.
I can’t think of anything more important right now, because history will be made, based on these mechanisms, one way or another, within the next months, latest years.
Another one would be from Axel T. Paul, but unfortunately I found no English translation, it tackles the object from a more and deeper historical perspective:
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B08295GHMG/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1601374870&refinements=p_27%3AAxel+T.+Paul&s=digital-text&sr=1-1&text=Axel+T.+Paul
Probably somebody else knows an English equivalent, but I doubt there is an exact one, because this book is, from my point of view, absolutely outstanding on its own right. Such content should be spread, people need to know more about how the “money world” was created, from the basics to the modernity. This is so important, yet so many people have no clue about it.
I like this idea. I want to read the one that is most likely to give us insight into how we can save ourselves. Also, logistically it might be best to choose one that is available in digital format.
I would suggest to read up on the financial and especially monetary system and its history, because that’s what’s really urgent in the face of what’s coming in the next months, latest years, like expanded on in comment No 10 here:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/09/28/white-men-invented-everything/#comments
First I would recommend anything from Richard A. Werner and there is a great English book about the money system:
“Where does Money come from”
About the Japanese case study:
“Princes of the Yen: Japan’s Central Bankers and the Transformation of the Economy”
For getting a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and deeper history, I can only recommend a German book from Axel T. Paul:
“Theorie des Geldes zur Einführung”
Probably someone else knows a good English equivalent, but it might be hard to find, because his book is really, really outstanding in painting a very big and complete picture from prehistory to modernity in a fairly small book.
Considering what’s coming up, this topic is really essential in helping people to understand what’s going on. There was, probably, never a better time and more urgent situation than now to read up on the monetary system and its alternatives.
I remember reading Wootton’s The Invention of Science back when it came out. It was relatively good as a general history and a good job of adding the culture of science front and center of that history, and not just some “great scientific works”.
I’ll follow Khan’s posts regardless, but would invest more of my own time on any of The Evolution of Everything, The Invention of Science, Improbable Destinies, The Economists’Hour.
I share your preoccupation with the ideological / religious fracturing of western society. I’ve been reading a lot recently about the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, which strike me as having significant parallels with modern times, and I am increasingly inclined to the notion that ideas play an important role, in combination with material factors. I’d be most interested in books that shed light on those issues.
So, I would vote for Mercier, Not Born Yesterday; O’Donnell Pagans, on ideological transition; Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, on civil war and religion. Also Losos, Improbable Destinies – not related to the above themes, but I love learning about evolutionary biology.
A couple of maybes: Douthat The Decadent Society – he’s a smart guy, but I am more interested in facts / science than opinion; Ridley The Evolution of Everything, but I wonder if it might not have a lot new to say since I’m already quite familiar with cultural evolution, eg Henrich.
If I can make a recommendation, Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World is a really great book that I think is a must read in current times.
Great idea. I have a blog still. It’s pretty low traffic, but I’d participate and post along there (and here).
My votes are for one of these two:
“Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity”
or
“The Evolution of Everything”
We have been experiencing major cultural change right now, and it appears we are headed for even bigger changes. Christianity and the old moral order seem to be collapsing, and it is not clear yet what form their replacement will end up taking. These two books seem most timely and relevant to what is going right now around us (and also, I’ve already read “The Final Pagan Generation,” and have been meaning to read “Pagans” to complement).
I’ve been wanting to do some Chinese history. I vote for Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom or Mao’s Great Famine.
I’m quite biased towards audiobooks, I will do any of those. I’ve made it through about 185 nonfiction books in the last 3 1/2 years so I’m down for whatever
Just read the New Yorker review of Michael Strevens’s The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science (which is not yet out). Makes me want to read it. One of the few books in the last several years that I both want to read and have not found first on this blog.
Interesting idea. I vote for either
Autumn in the heavenly kingdom or
Greek Buddha.
I think the intellectual contacts between West and East deserve
more attention.
“Pagans.” Some of the other books have interesting topics, but would be less thrilling in chapter by chapter detail. I feel like this one might offer more novel insights with particular chapters.
From your list: Improbable Destinies or The Invention of Science sound quite interesting.
A few others that possibly be interesting for any future lists:
“The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of the Future of Our Planet”
“A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution”
“Sea People: In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific”
“Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans”
“The Goodness Paradox: How Evolution Made Us Both More and Less Violent”
From the list:
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Also, I love this idea. I would be thrilled to be in a book club with one of the most well read people I have come across.
I’d be a big fan of you doing this for The Great Leveler.
I vote for the book about the Taiping rebellion, fascinating subject. 2nd choice would be “Greek Buddha”.
I agree that the internet on the whole probably has a negative impact, and I’ve indulged unhealthy time-wasting habits (like getting into feuds with other commenters in forums) myself in the past, but given the amount of books you can easily get online (legally for older books or on piracy sites like Library genesis for more recent ones) the problem might be more with users than with the medium imo.
Freddie de Boer’s The Cult of Smart, partly because it’s on the top of my to-read pile. But also because one of my biggest questions is, “what happens when (if?) we accept the reality that people differ a lot in smarts and at least half the high school population can’t successfully complete a rigorous college prep curriculum?” That most everybody actually can is the myth that much of our educational system is built on.
Greek Buddha would be my choice. I’m a sucker for the collisions of two very different ideospheres.
“The English Settlements” by J.N.L. Myres. It goes into some length about the Roman supervised settlement of Germanic peoples prior to the “coming” of the Anglo-Saxons (although the former group tended to be settled from the Rhine area as opposed to Northern Germany and Scandinavia.)
I vote for Wootton, Fischer, Scheidel, Douthat or Salam.
@German_reader
“the problem might be more with users than with the medium imo.”
There is a similar problem with food, in which both the highest and lowest quality have become increasingly cheaper and more readily available in my lifetime. The problem is that our inner cavemen are not well-adapted to modern life, and so we need heuristics to artificially constrain ourselves in order to live well.
I will pick a book, and read one chapter a week, and write a blog post about it.
Not on the list, but I’d like to see an American, Desi, ex-Muslim, conservative atheist’s take on one of the Gospels or Epistitles. So many different angles to analyze some of the most influential stories on Western Culture.
I will guess any input from me has negative utility, but I enjoyed Champlain’s Dream. I had fun discussions with a young French Canadian coworker about his family history after reading it, as one of the young men sent out by Champlain to live with the tribes shared his surname.
The Reihan Salam book sounds like great counterpoint to the MY 1B book.
Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing
by Vaclav Smil?
i’m thinking of paralleling two now. perhaps one science and one non-science?
I have enjoyed your reading lists as much as anyone and I have read many books upon your recommendation. However, I think it lacks a certain spice that has, for me anyway, added perspective. For example: every town I’ve ever lived in this country — and every town I have not lived — has an elaborate Masonic meeting hall. I have ancestors who were Masons, one of whom was senior executive with the Santa Fe Railroad in the 1880s. My family and others that I have known were mostly active with the railroads which were obviously quite powerful. The history of Masonry was tied in with political movements in Europe as well as the commercial history of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Their legacy architecture, purpose and history is obscure but there is no doubt that in the U.S. and other places the organization had vast resources and an outsized influence on events based on their physical footprint and membership (that includes, more or less, all of America’s “Founding Fathers”).
Now, this is going down the “rabbit hole” that extends far beyond the Masons and that is a difficult journey. One reason perhaps is that the established press, publishers and academic intellectual class simply wave their hands dismissively at institutions like the Masons having anything meaningful to do with anything whatsoever. And yet. So one must go to the fever swamps of authors, publishing houses and journalism that are not from credentialed polite society. There is much chaff to sort through. Some of the core intellectuals (such as Catherine Austin Fitts) often have troublesome hobby horses like secret space programs. Still, if you only accept “accepted” topics and books, you are missing a key piece of the puzzle. Institutions and events are clearly being guided by hands unseen.
But hey, I wear my stupid face diaper when I go out in public so as not to be “unpersoned” by HEB. I have my share of credentials and people take me seriously in a serious business. However, inevitably I think, everyone has experiences that simply do not make sense given what we might have expected if we believe in the traditional meritocratic path to success and the connection of that meritocratic path to the institutions that govern society. At some point, the governors act in ways different than we would expect and we often see people with, say, peculiar backgrounds **cough** Epstein **sneeze** Mozzad **burp** weilding tremendous influence over events.
The notion that peons using Facebook, and other social media, to communicate with other peons by the millions is somehow dangerous and harmful needs to be proven. The notion that “unapproved” persons are communicating with peons by the millions and they are all wallowing in ignorance has the potential to be troublesome, but has always been around, just not on this scale. The collapse of journalism, by reason of the loss of its economic model, only brings us back to a prior time when advocacy journalism was not only the norm; it was the raison d’etre, and we seemed to have survived just fine. I think that the fear that the elite have that they are losing control of “the message” is a good thing, and the sooner and more complete their loss of control the better. Walter Cronkite was an imperfect ideal, even though there was a profession that tried to be the best and objective filter possible, at the end of the day, it was just that, a filter.
the real ‘danger’ is probably sub-elites.
“The Once and Future Worker” by Oren Cass. It’s the only book I have seen that actually has reasonable ways to address our economic problems in the inner cities and rural America.
I will guess any input from me has negative utility
i have no idea who you are. why do you think i would care?
re: secret histories. you can learn a lot from what is not said. e.g., we’ve had dozens of stories that are deep dives into epstein’s sex abuse etc. but very little concrete about the financial aspects. why? because there is nothing there? or because powerful people would prefer that we focus on the sex rather than the money?
Well then it is good your memory of your ire is so short. Given your demonstrated recall of other information I would not have guessed it.
If you are interested in Epstein, look up Whitney Webb (not an endorsement, I do not know her but since you asked…). She’s done a lot of reporting on him and the network that produced him that is all around us yet remains unseen. I think she has a patreon for a book which I will likely buy after it comes out and I get a sense of whether it’s worth it.
multiple ppl use the name ‘bob’
now i know who you are (email/IP), and your smug self-regard makes more sense
I vote for Taiping Rebellion. Amazing story of where religious awakening can lead to. I also suspect that China never really recovered from it and modern Chinese history doesn’t make much sense without understanding the Taiping cataclysm.
I’ll be reading The Economists’ Hour regardless. Years ago I read a book called Memenomics which argued that in social evolution, economics is a couple of stages behind other societal areas, and the current “nothing but money matters” perspective is an evolution from the previous “fiefdoms of power” and “patriotic prosperity” phases. I wasn’t altogether persuaded at the time, but the argument in this book seems like it might be roughly congruent while coming from a more standard angle.
@ iffen – i agree that separation of powers (re: “The Message”) is good but i like separation of power *between qualified elites* a lot more. too many have been sucked down the youtube rabbit hole. it’s a real thing, trust me.
thinking about Patrick’s “sub-elites” post vs Piketty’s “Capital..”
Not sure what to think. Piketty’s evidence is massive and overwhelming but i’d like to hear more about sub-elites. Reminds me of Brink Lindsey’s “The Captured Economy.”
I have to throw in “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” “Operation Paperclip” “Bad Samaritans” “Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism” “American Amnesia” “Stalin’s Secret Agents” “The United States and the Middle East: 1914 to 9/11” “Fantasyland” “The Ends of the World” “A Thousand Small Sanities” “America in the Guilded Age and Progressive Era” as ones i’ve liked that might be good discussion books.
now that i’ve had time to think about this post quite honestly, i thought the O’Donnell, Reihan, Douthat, Applebaum, Ridley books were pretty average but maybe different perspectives will invigorate me:)
I have read “Champlain’s Dream”, and I thought it was terrific. I have enjoyed all of the David Hackett Fischer books that I have read including: “Washington’s Crossing” and “Paul Revere’s Ride”. I think you have cited “Albion’s Seed” many times. “The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History” was his foray into macroeconomic history. The Chicago school doctrine was that inflation was always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Great Wave posits that demographic bulges cause inflation. Such a theory might make sense out the persistent inability of the Fed to spark inflation over the last decade.
leaning toward
– not born yesterday
– greek buddha
The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology
by Hans Jonas.
This is a book of 12 essays that will blow the gnxp cohort’s shiz wide open, bruh. They’ll be fistfighting in the aisles…
Thinking on it a bit more, Greek Buddha and the Jonas book would make for potent parallels/bookends: the one exhuming Axial Age incipience and the other cheerfully digging the grave for our inherited senescent Cartesian certitudes [while not necessarily throwing the Enlightenment baby out with the misdirected-reductionist bathwater].
And thus a new synthesis may glimmer within the readers of gnxp. My fellow Razibists! Let us together bequeath humanity the beginnings of a new ontological framework! Toward a pleasant trans-galactic annum 3020!
1) The Great Leveler
2) Decadent Society
3) Improbable Destinies
From within the list, I recommend “The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success”.
From outside the list, I would recommend very strongly Kulikowski’s “Imperial Triumph” and, to a somewhat lesser degree, “Imperial Tragedy”. Both are great books on Roman history.
I’m biased because I’ve already read (and really liked) it, but, if you want to have lively discussions in the comments, I think that The Decadent Society would be the best choice. It’s a relatively short and clearly written book that deals with issues like politics, child-rearing, pop culture, etc. that many readers will have thoughts on. By contrast, while the other books on the list are no doubt excellent, they’re longer, denser and deal with more niche subjects that fewer readers will be interested in.
I’d also recommend The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman, for reasons I’ll discuss at greater length in a new comment.
I guess I haven’t been reading for that long (maybe a year or so), because I have not sensed that. If you have another post on this, I’d be curious to read it, because, respectfully, I think it’s a deeply mistaken perspective. From my point of view, the big story of the past couple centuries has been the massive global gains in metrics like life expectancy, literacy, wealth, democracy, peace, and so on, as documented by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now, which IIRC you’ve read. Consequently, I don’t understand how one can, from a secular perspective at least, view the contemporary world as “fallen.” Fallen from what? Going back to Hesiod in the 8th century BC, as Arthur Herman documents in The Idea of Decline in Western Civilization, you can easily find writers in every age of man lamenting how much better previous ages were compared to the terrible, awful, decadent, etc. one that they have the misfortune to inhabit. (Which will, of course, itself be bemoaned in turn as a lost golden age by later generations of reactionaries.)
And I can’t say that I find the analogy to the fall of the Roman Empire very convincing. It seems to me, based on books like War in Human Civilization and War! What is it Good For?, that the fall of the Roman Empire is best understood as a significant reduction and fragmentation of state capacity in Western Europe. That doesn’t seem very relevant to the contemporary world to me, since the military revolution has fundamentally altered the balance of military power between core and peripheral polities and, as Francis Fukuyama explicates in The Origins of Political Order, there’s been a general global trend towards state consolidation.
(As a Zoomer, I feel somewhat obliged to defend the honor of my generation here, so I may be biased.)
I think your previous criticisms of Carr were quite accurate. Of course many people use the Internet for vapid entertainment, but previous generations likewise used television, radio, print and personal conversation in equally shallow ways. The flipside is that the Internet has 1) Made it much easier for Tyler Cowen’s “infovores” to seek out intellectual stimulation, with everything from blogs to podcasts to Project Gutenberg’s ebooks and 2) Greatly enabled heterodox, dissenting voices to find audiences. I really appreciate the perspectives of Scott Alexander, Steve Sailer, the GMU econ department, Glenn Greenwald, Chapo Trap House, Gwern and Razib Khan himself, among many others, which I think would have been a lot harder to find without the Internet. With YouTube specifically, I think that e.g. the rise of Jordan Peterson, with his anti-woke/self-help/centrism combination, had a very positive impact on the general discourse.
The common denominator for me is that the Internet is a tool, which is as good or ill as the ends of the people using it are. I have a cautiously and modestly optimistic Scottish Enlightenment-style view of mankind, so I see it as a significant net positive.