Monthly Archives: August 2013

A Murder of Quality by John le Carré

Posted on by

George Smiley appears again in John le Carré’s second novel. This time he does a favor for an old friend and travels to a private school that sounds like Eton. The wife of a faculty member has written a letter stating that her husband plans to kill her. By the time Smiley arrives, she’s already dead. It’s not an espionage story, just a typical English murder mystery.

A Murder of Quality is worth reading for le Carre’s excellent prose and for his depiction of the mostly upper-class inhabitants of the school. My favorite part, however, was being able to spend time with the wonderful character of George Smiley. Whenever he spoke, I could almost hear the voice of Alec Guinness. 

Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin

Posted on by

Karl Marx was a monumental figure. I knew that he spent years doing research in the library of the British Museum and wrote several dense volumes, as well as the Communist Manifesto. I didn’t realize that he was personally involved in left-wing politics. He was the leading revolutionary of his time, moving from country to country, attending meetings, writing letters, advising other communists and socialists throughout Europe, Russia and even the United States (he was even a regular contributor to a New York newspaper).

This is the 4th edition of Isaiah Berlin’s well-written biography of Marx, first published in 1939. Berlin, the famous British philosopher and historian of ideas, presents Marx as a brilliant thinker but a difficult person who devoted his life to bringing about the downfall of capitalism.

What is especially striking is that Marx strongly believed in gathering mountains of evidence in support of his political and economic theories. In that regard, he was a social scientist and an empiricist. Yet he labored in support of an idealistic vision of a future after capitalism that seems terribly unrealistic.

It was conceivable that the proletariat would rise up against the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, especially if a group of revolutionaries could seize power, as they surprisingly did in Russia (of all places). But it was a tremendous leap to think that the state would eventually wither away and the workers would create a functioning communist society. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need” is an ideal that sounds rational and even practical, but Marx doesn’t seem to have given enough thought to how such an ideal would be implemented. At least, Berlin never gives the impression that Marx spent much time thinking about the communist future. He was much too busy trying to overcome the capitalist present.

Spinoza and Spinozism by Stuart Hampshire

Posted on by

Baruch (aka Benedict, aka Benedictus) Spinoza was a truly great philosopher. Professor Hampshire’s introduction to Spinoza, first published in 1951, has been one of my favorite books since I first read it in the 1970s. So it was disappointing to read this collection of Hampshire’s writings on Spinoza and find it rather tedious, mainly due to the repetitive nature of the book’s three main sections.

Still, if you want to understand Spinoza, Hampshire’s Spinoza: An Introduction to His Philosophical Thought, the 1987 edition of which is included in this book, is an excellent place to start. 

Spinoza famously argued that there can only be one infinite substance. This is Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. There is nothing supernatural about God, since God and Nature are the same. This one substance has two attributes, so far as we know: thought and extension, or mind and matter. Everything that exists or occurs is represented in both of these attributes. When something happens in my body, it also happens in my mind, and vice versa (although sometimes unconsciously). The same rule applies to all other objects in the universe, e.g. both rocks and rabbits.

In addition, everything that happens is fully determined. If we had the mental capacity, we could infer everything about the universe from what happened before. Yet we human beings have moments of freedom, i.e. when we exercise our rationality, either in pursuits like mathematics or in understanding ourselves and the world around us.

Hampshire doesn’t accept everything Spinoza said, of course. But he does generally endorse Spinoza’s view of our “double aspect” and what it means to be free in a deterministic world. Unfortunately, it’s hard to understand what it means for a rock to have a mental aspect. Hampshire tries to explain this idea by suggesting that a rock’s thought-like aspect is its form: “they have a nature and form which can be described or represented. They are not a haphazard collection of atoms. They have their own distinctive unity.”

But I think Spinoza was closer to the truth regarding the “mental” aspect of people and other animals than he was about things like rocks or trees. We have both a form that can be represented and the ability to represent ourselves and other things. We have evolved and become aware (Hampshire doesn’t disagree, of course). Having a form and being able to represent something that has a form are quite different things, although perhaps that’s what Spinoza had in mind. A rock has something that can be represented by an idea. And we have ideas. So maybe we are just a bit higher on the evolutionary scale.

My Country, ‘Tis of Thee

Posted on by

Sweet land of liberty?

The older I get, the less patriotic I feel. It was easier to love America when I knew less about it.

Take, for instance, those brave Texans, joined by Davy Crockett of all people, standing up to the evil General Santa Anna at the Alamo. I didn’t know until recently that Mexico had invited the Americans to settle in Texas, with the understanding that the American immigrants would become Catholics, learn Spanish, obey Mexican law and presumably become Mexicans. For the most part, the American settlers ignored Mexican law, including the law against slavery. In little more than a decade, the Americans were fighting to take Texas from Mexico and, of course, make slavery legal. (Walt Disney and John Wayne didn’t tell that part of the story.)

Despite their defeat at the Alamo, the Texans prevailed and, after some controversy, joined the United States as a slave state. President James K. Polk immediately tried to expand Texas by purchasing land from Mexico. When Mexico refused to sell, Polk sent American troops into Mexico, igniting the Mexican-American War. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in the war, later referred to it as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation”. The Mexicans call it “the United States’ Invasion of Mexico”.

It’s clear that we haven’t lived up to our ideals as a nation. Obviously, nations never live up to their ideals completely, but our ideals are relatively high and our behavior is relatively low in too many cases.

So it isn’t surprising that there are lots of people with doubts about America these days. The person who wrote the article at the link below brings up Vietnam and Cambodia, Bush and Cheney, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Manning and Snowden, the NSA and our frequent outbreaks of paranoia.

He might have mentioned a whole bunch of other things. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. We are the largest arms exporter in the world. Our leading politicians are for sale. People sometimes wait for hours to vote in poor neighborhoods, but not in rich ones. We’re the only developed country that doesn’t require paid vacations or maternity leave. And one of my favorites: our drug companies send drugs banned in America to other countries:

Dr. Maria Guadalupe Rodriguez tries vainly to convince parents that the costly American drugs they buy to fight their babies’ diarrhea are useless and often deadly.

Some of the drugs can paralyze a child’s intestines. Others can destroy a child’s ability to fight other infections. All fail to treat the worst enemy of a child with diarrhea: the dehydration that kills about 4 million children under 5 in underdeveloped countries every year, the World Health Organization says. All these infants need, WHO says, is an inexpensive mixture of sugar, salt and water.

Of thee I sing.

——————————————————————————————————————–

One citizen’s angry appraisal of America: 

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/08/bin-laden-won-no-man-has-changed-america-more-for-the-worse.html#more

How drug companies profit by selling dangerous drugs overseas:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19910611&slug=1288354

Call For the Dead by John le Carré

Posted on by

Call For the Dead was John le Carré’s first novel. He wrote it while still an employee of MI6, the British version of the CIA. It’s an entertaining mystery story about spies and murder that introduces the character of George Smiley, the “little fat man, rather gloomy,” who is the hero of Le Carre’s later novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

We also meet other characters who will return in later novels: the younger, suave Peter Guillam; the police officer Mendel; and the high-level civil servant Maston, later known as Lacon. Unfortunately, we don’t meet Smiley’s ex-wife Ann, although her words do appear a few times.

It’s a short novel, but quite good. My only problem was wondering how Smiley survived several blows to the head with a lead pipe, and why the police weren’t immediately summoned at a climactic moment. But if Smiley had died, or the police had been called, Call For the Dead would have been even shorter.