Category Archives: Non-Fiction

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell

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Paul Fussell’s best-known book is The Great War and Modern Memory. In that book, he wrote about the effect of World War I, especially trench warfare, on British writers. Wartime is Fussell’s similar book about World War II. This one isn’t mainly concerned with the war’s effect on writers, however. It has a much broader scope. There are discussions, for example, of the myth of “precision” bombing; the frequency of military foul-ups; rumors; rationing; stereotypes; accentuating the positive; casualty rates; popular songs; swearing; hunger; and sexual frustration. There is even a whole chapter devoted to “chickenshit” – the petty crap that superiors inflict on subordinates.

Fussell wrote from experience. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart as an infantry officer in France. His goal in Wartime was to capture the reality of World War II as it was endured by American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen, especially those who actually saw combat (a small minority of those who served). He often does this by contrasting military reality with the sanitized version presented to the people back home. If you were in the service but not in combat, your main emotions were boredom and anger. If you were in combat, it was fear and horror.

According to Fussell, the authorities eventually realized that engaging in more than 240 days of combat (not consecutive days, but total days) would drive anyone insane. That sums up World War II for the men who did the actual fighting.

The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions by Alex Rosenberg

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The author is a professor of philosophy at Duke University who usually writes books for other philosophers and people who aspire to be philosophers. This one was written for a general audience. Maybe that’s why the book comes on so strong. Borrowing Nietzsche’s phrase, it’s philosophy with a hammer.

I assume Professor Rosenberg chose the title, but it’s a little misleading. Rosenberg derives his atheism from a more fundamental view called “scientism”. He defines that as the worldview according to which “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything”. Unfortunately, there is no word that refers to someone who accepts scientism except “scientist” and you can definitely be a scientist without believing in scientism. Plus, a title like The Guide to Reality for People Who Accept Scientism isn’t exactly catchy. So “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality” it is.

One way Rosenberg explains scientism is to say that physics fixes all the facts (except, presumably, for the facts of logic or mathematics). Physics says that all events in the history of the universe, except some at the quantum level, are determined by previous events and the laws of nature. Furthermore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy ultimately increases in an isolated system) is the “driving force” behind evolution, which is the result of haphazard genetic mutation. Evolution gave us minds, but our minds are nothing more than the activity of our brains.

Rosenberg concludes that we don’t have free will, introspection is generally misleading and thoughts (whether conscious or unconscious) aren’t “about” anything (since what happens in a neuron can’t be “about” anything — it’s just a tiny input/output device). Furthermore, there are no purposes in nature, even in our minds, and there are no ethical facts. Morality is just another evolutionary adaptation. In addition, we can learn nothing from history or economics, since human culture is constantly evolving.

Rosenberg expresses his conclusions with an air of almost absolute certainty, which is odd for someone who believes in science (maybe it’s not so odd for someone who believes in scientism). For example, he says that “what we know about physical and biological science makes the existence of God less probable than the existence of Santa Claus”. Perhaps he’s being facetious in that passage, but many atheist or agnostic philosophers would agree that God’s existence is a metaphysical question beyond the reach of science. Natural processes don’t count for or against the supernatural. Besides which, there is no evidence at all for the existence of Santa Claus.

Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin

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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

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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.

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin

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The theoretical physicist Lee Smolin has written 4 books. I’ve read 3 1/2 of them.

His first book, The Life of the Cosmos, applied the theory of evolution to cosmology. Smolin suggested that our universe might be a good home for life because universes breed new universes, which differ somewhat from their parents. Over time, a universe with lots of black holes will generate a number of new universes with lots of black holes, and universes with lots of black holes tend to be hospitable for life, since their fundamental constants (like the strength of their subatomic forces) have values that permit life to evolve.

His next book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, was too technical for me, but I did finish his 3rd book, The Trouble With Physics. In that one, he argued that string theory is much too popular among physicists, since it isn’t a proper scientific theory. It’s too speculative and might never generate testable predictions.

Now there is Time Reborn. This is a kind of sequel to Smolin’s earlier books. He still subscribes to the evolutionary views presented in The Life of the Cosmos, but his principal thesis now is that time is real. In fact, time is more real than space. This contradicts the common view among physicists and philosophers that space and time are the four dimensions that make up “spacetime”. The standard view among physicists is that all events, whether past, present or future, are equally real. There is nothing special about the present moment. In fact, our perception that time passes is an illusion.

Smolin argues that this consensus view of the universe as a “block universe”, in which all moments are the same, is a mistake. He agrees that the laws of physics and the equations that express them can run forwards or backwards, but only on scales smaller than the universe as a whole. The planets could revolve the other way around the sun, just like clocks can run in reverse. But the universe as a whole has a history that is real and a future that isn’t determined. Smolin thinks that treating time as real might help resolve certain issues in physics, such as the “arrow of time”, i.e., the fact that certain processes always go in one direction (entropy tends to increase in isolated systems).

Professor Smolin tries to explain how his view of time fits with Einstein’s special theory of relativity (in which temporal properties are relative to an observer) and how something can act like a particle and a wave at the same time (as shown by the famous “double-slit” experiment). I don’t know if those explanations or some of his other technical explanations make sense. But it was reassuring to read a book by a reputable physicist who believes that time is real, physicists have overemphasized the importance of mathematics in understanding the universe, and there is a reality beyond what we can observe. Smolin also believes that there are probably more fundamental, deterministic laws that underlie quantum mechanics. I believe that’s what Einstein thought too.

Time Reborn veers into philosophy at times. There is much discussion of the Principles of Sufficient Reason and the Identity of Indiscernibles. The book concludes with some comments on subjects that aren’t physics, like the nature of consciousness. Smolin’s philosophical remarks are relatively unsophisticated. I assume his physics is better.

Even if he’s wrong about the reality of time, however, I enjoyed the book. For one thing, I can now see how two particles at opposite ends of the universe could be “entangled”, such that a change to one would automatically result in an immediate change to the other. Space might have more dimensions than we recognize. In another spatial dimension, the two entangled particles might be very close neighbors, making what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” (“spukhafte Fernwirkung“) less mysterious. That makes me feel a lot better.