Category Archives: Non-Fiction

Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media by Elaine Showalter

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Published in 1997, this interesting account of hysterical epidemics feels a little out of date, since it describes the most popular versions of hysteria as of 15 years ago: chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple personality disorder, recovered memories, Gulf War syndrome, satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction. Maybe 9/11, war and economic distress have given people other things to focus on since the relative calm of the mid-nineties.

The book begins with a scholarly discussion of the origins of hysteria as a medical diagnosis in the 19th century. Patients, mostly women, exhibited strange behavior or physical symptoms for no apparent reason. Showalter convincingly argues that early forms of hysteria have been replaced by “hystories” or epidemics of hysteria. In remarkably similar patterns, people who have been subjected to stress or have unmet psychological needs develop symptoms. They seek treatment from particular doctors and therapists who, for their own reasons, collaborate in assigning mysterious or bizarre causes to these symptoms. Journalists and scriptwriters help spread the news. Evidence is lacking, but paranoia feeds mass hysteria. 

Showalter doesn’t discount the real suffering involved. She just thinks that we should pay more attention to scientific evidence and accept the fact that psychological causes can have very real, sometimes incredible, physical effects.  (8/9/11)

The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War by Fred Anderson

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Professor Anderson is the author of Crucible of War, a 900-page history of the Seven Years War and its effect on North America. This is a shorter version of the same history. It’s not a great book, but it tells an interesting story.

Like most Americans, I know very little about the Seven Years War. For example, I didn’t realize that: the French and Indian War that occurred in North America between 1755 and 1763 was one part of the Seven Years War, which is considered to be the first “world war”; an inexperienced George Washington, leading a troop of soldiers as a representative of England, tried to remove the French from the area now known as Pittsburgh, and this failed attempt was the spark that set off the global Seven Years War; various Indian nations engaged in complex diplomatic relations with both the English and the French, and Indian warriors were crucial  participants on both sides of the war; The Last of the Mohicans was based on a battle and subsequent massacre that occurred near Lake George in upstate New York; the battles fought in America and Canada often involved thousands of troops and sometimes fleets of warships; in 1763 the victorious English formally declared all of the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi to be, in the words of one cartographer, “Lands Reserved For The Indians” (we know how that worked out).

According to Anderson, the French and Indian War had two major effects: revolution and westward expansion. The victorious English concluded that they could “exercise power over the colonists without restraint”, while the colonists, having participated in the victory as loyal Englishmen, concluded that they were “equal partners in the empire”. These conflicting views helped set the stage for the American revolution a decade later. And, with the disappearance of the French, the Indians lost an important counterbalance to the English, in particular, access to French-supplied guns and ammunition. The colonists wanted more land and the Indians lacked the power to resist.

Hence, Anderson’s subtitle: “the war that made America”.  (8/2/11)

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers

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The Conscious Mind is one of those philosophical works that becomes famous because it features interesting arguments in support of implausible conclusions. Chalmers argues for property dualism, the thesis that mental properties are fundamentally different from physical properties. In other words, mental states are not equivalent to, cannot be reduced to, and do not logically supervene on brain states. This is a more plausible view than the traditional dualist claim that there are mental substances (minds or souls) in addition to physical substances, and that the mental and physical substances somehow interact.  

Chalmers agrees that there are psycho-physical laws that relate brain states and mental states, but argues that physical properties and mental properties are ontologically distinct. Maybe this is the correct view, but Chalmers goes further when he begins to discuss a possible fundamental theory of consciousness. He thinks that we should ascribe consciousness to any system that exhibits the same causal relationships as a brain, e.g. automated systems, John Searle’s Chinese Room translation scheme, and Ned Block’s billion minds linked together by radio. Since he views consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe, he thinks that rocks and even sub-atomic particles might possess some simple form of proto-consciousness. He suggests that panpsychism is a real possibility. He also argues that the simplest interpretation of quantum mechanics involves minds branching into other minds, so that each of us is one of a vast set of similar minds, all having split off from our infant selves.

The naturalistic or property dualism that Chalmers advocates, featuring “physical properties, separate phenomenal properties, and a lawful connection between the two”, is certainly worth considering as a philosophical theory of mind. If a property is merely a way of being, maybe mental properties (what it is like to have experiences or to be an X) are fundamentally different from physical properties. However, his views on what systems or objects might be conscious are much less plausible, despite the many ingenious arguments that he offers.  (7/25/11)

The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore

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The Name of War is a study of King Philip’s War, a bloody conflict in New England that began in 1675. “King Philip” was a name given to Metacom, an Indian who lead the fight against the English colonists. Lepore doesn’t focus on the war’s chronology. She is concerned with the war’s meaning, which she discusses in relatively academic terms (“the consequences of literacy, the power of print, the negotiation of identity, the suppleness of memory”). Her principal conclusion is that the Indians never got a chance to tell their side of the story — they didn’t win and didn’t write books. Many of those who survived the war didn’t even get to stay in America — they were loaded onto ships and sold into slavery in the West Indies. 

King Philip’s War was the subject of popular memoirs, histories and theatrical performances (none written by Indians) for almost 200 years. But it’s not clear how much the war affected American perceptions of the Indians as the years went by. Many residents of New England opposed Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing Indians from their homes in the South during the 1830’s, even though their English ancestors had accomplished pretty much the same thing years before.  (7/11/11)

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer

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This is a disappointing book with a misleading title. There is too much globalization and not enough soccer. Certainly, none of it amounts to a theory of globalization. Every chapter but the last is a typical magazine article, in which the author visits a new city (Glasgow, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, etc.), provides a history lesson and interviews some locals. There are exaggerations and questionable observations.

In the last chapter, Foer expounds on America’s attitudes toward soccer. The book feels dated, despite having been published in 2004. Anyway, soccer doesn’t explain the world. The world — its history, economics and politics, as well as human psychology — explains soccer.  (6/28/11)