Category: Books
My excellent Conversation with David Bentley Hart
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious scholar, critic, and theologian who has authored over 1,000 essays and 19 books, including a very well-known translation of the New Testament and several volumes of fiction.
In this conversation, Tyler and David discuss ways in which Orthodox Christianity is not so millenarian, how theological patience shapes the polities of Orthodox Christian nations, how Heidegger deepened his understanding of Christian Orthodoxy, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970, the simplest way to explain how Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, the future of the American Orthodox Church, what he thinks of the Book of Mormon, whether theological arguments are ultimately based on reason or faith, what he makes of reincarnation and near-death experiences, gnosticism in movies and TV, why he dislikes Sarah Ruden’s translation of the New Testament, the most difficult word to translate, a tally of the 15+ languages he knows, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Hart is probably the best-read CWT guest of all time, with possible competition from Dana Gioia? Excerpt:
COWEN: If you could explain to me, as simply as possible, in which ways is Orthodox Christianity not so very millenarian?
HART: Well, it depends on what you mean by millenarian. I’d have to ask you to be a bit more —
COWEN: Say the Protestant 17th-century sense that the world is on the verge of a very radical transformation that will herald in some completely new age, and we all should be prepared for it.
HART: Well, in one sense, it’s been the case of Christianity from the first century that it’s always existed in a time between times. There’s always this sense of being in history but always expecting an imminent interruption of history.
But Orthodoxy has been around for a while. It’s part of an underrated culture, grounded originally in the Eastern Greco-Roman world, and has a huge apparatus of philosophy and theology and, I think, over the centuries has learned to be patient.
The Protestant millenarianism you speak of always seems to have been born out of historical crisis in a sense. The rise of the nation-state, the fragmentation of the Western Church — it’s always as much an effective history as a flight from history.
Whereas, I think it’s fair to say that Orthodoxy has created for itself a parallel world just outside the flow of history. It puts much more of an emphasis on the spiritual life, mysticism, that sort of thing. And as such, whereas it still uses the recognizable language of the imminent return of Christ, it’s not at the center of the spiritual life.
COWEN: How does that theological patience shape the polities of Orthodox Christian nations and regions? How does that matter?
HART: Well, it’s been both good and bad, to be honest. At its best, Orthodoxy has cultivated a spiritual life that nourished millions and that puts an emphasis upon moral obligation to others and the life of charity and the ascetical virtues of Christianity, the self-denial. At its worst, however, it’s often been an accommodation with historical forces that are antithetical to the gospel, too.
It’s often been the case that Orthodoxy has been so, let’s say, disenchanted with the millenarian expectation that it’s become a prop of the state, and you can see it today in Russia, in which you have a church institution. Now, this isn’t to speak of the faithful themselves, but the institutional authority of the state — of the institution, rather, of the church more or less being nothing but a propaganda wing of an authoritarian and terrorist government.
So, it’s had both its good and its bad consequences over the centuries. At its best, as I say, it encourages a true spiritual life that can teach one to be detached from ambitions and expectations and the violent projects of the ego. But at its worst, it can become a passive participant in precisely those sorts of projects and those sorts of evils.
Recommended, interesting throughout, and yes I do ask him about the Baltimore Orioles.
Central Notions of Smithian Liberalism
Just out, by my colleague Daniel B. Klein, I have not yet read it. It is described as follows:
Central Notions of Smithian Liberalism explores notions jural, political, and economic. The author does intellectual history as a way of theorizing—that is, to advance political theory, jural theory, moral theory, social theory, economic theory. The author treats Adam Smith and the liberalism he shared with David Hume and Edmund Burke. They represent classical liberalism at its best. Their classical liberalism is today aptly called conservative liberalism. The chapters derive mostly from substantial articles previously published in scholarly journals. Chapters expound Smith’s tri-layered justice, liberty, jural dualism, Humean conventionalist political theory, and Smithian liberalism. A chapter written with Erik Matson, “Convention without Convening,” explains natural convention, transcending “nature” and “convention” and attesting the place of Hume and Smith in natural law traditions and enlarging our understanding of those traditions. A chapter asks and answers, “Is It Just to Pursue Honest Income?”. Another chapter identifies four sets of nonconflicting rules, namely (1) government law, (2) commutative justice, (3) ethics writ large, and (4) just government law. Other chapters relate Smithian liberalism to various topics, including Iain McGilchrist’s divided brain, being grateful for without being grateful to, and the Export-Import Bank. The final chapter considers the fortunes of liberalism in relation to prevailing attitudes toward allegory and God.
Free download at the link, I am pleased to see more books presented in this fashion. Much better than the $100 price tags (and up) you get from some publishers…
*Germany in the World*
The author is David Blackbourn, and the subtitle is A Global History 1500-2000. The focus is on Germany’s global influence abroad and no I don’t mean the Battle of Stalingrad, though that era is covered. Here is one excerpt:
There was global demand for German scientists of every kind. The Southern Hemisphere offers two striking examples. One is Latin america, thanks partly to Humboldt’s legacy. There were hundreds of Germans scientists in Argentina alone by the early twentieth century, and many others in Chile, Peru, and elsewhere. German scientists also played an equally outsized role in Australia. We have already seen the impact made by the botanist Richard Schomburgk and his circle of ’49ers in South Australia. Among the many German scientists who arrived after midcentury and shaped Australia’s scientific landscape were several who were well connected internationally. The geophysicist Georg von Neumayer is a perfect specimen of the type. Neumayer enjoyed support in British scientific circles and was a disciple of the American astronomer and oceanographer Matthew Maury, who had himself been inspired by Humboldt. In Australia Neumayer established an observatory in Melbourne, before returning to Germany, where he chaired the International Polar Commission in 1879.
Neumayer is a reminder that German remained, as they had been in the era of Forster and Pallas, inveterate scientific travelers.
Recommended, this is quite a good book.
What could be more self-recommending than this?
Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food.
Due out in November. Here is my first CWT with Fuchsia, here is my second, there will be a third.
Who first declared that God is dead?
According to Michael Sonenscher it was German romantic Jean Paul Richter:
I had gone through the midst of the worlds. I mounted unto the suns, and flew with the milky way across the wilderness of heaven; but there is no God. I plunged down as far as Being flings its shadow and pried into the abyss and cried, ‘Father, where art thou?’ But I heard only the everlasting tempest, which no-one sways. And the glittering rainbow of beings was hanging, without a sun that had formed it, over the abyss, and trickling down into it. And, when I looked up towards the limitless world for the eye of God, the world stared back at me with an empty bottomless eye socket; and Eternity was lying upon chaos, and gnawing it to pieces, and chewing the cud of what it had devoured. Scream on, ye discords! Scatter these shades with your screaming. For He is not!
That Richter is excerpt is from Sonenscher’s new and interesting book After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought. One unique feature of Richter’s account is that Christ is the one bearing the news that God is dead. There are so many complainers about the Enlightenment these days, but how many go to the now-grossly underrated source of Richter?
*The Monetarists*, by George S. Tavlas
The key here is the subtitle The Making of the Chicago Monetary Tradition, 1927-1960. Have you wondered about the oft-underrated macroeconomics of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, Lloyd Mints, Paul Douglas, Clark Warburton, and many more? By no means did monetarism start with Milton Friedman, and this is the new go-to book on the topic.
*The Ruble: A Political History*
That is the new, highly useful, and thorough book by Ekaterina Pravilova, here is one excerpt:
Reutern was adamant about exterminating private currencies, but not everyone in the government shared his view. The minister of justice, Konstantin Pahlen, argued, for instance, that the right to issue private notes should be granted “to all Russian subjects.” Anyone willing to issue private monetary units should simply inform that local governor about the amount of issue, denominations, and the place these notes could be exchanged for state credit bills. The issue should also place an “exchange fund” consisting of state money or securities at the disposal of the local administration and order the printing of notes at the Expedition for the Production of State Papers, which would guarantee them against counterfeiting. In other words, private money should mirror the system of state credit bills and compensate for their deficit…
The debate between the opponents and the proponents of private money revealed an interesting ideological paradox. Private money in Russia stood for the ideological legacy of serfdom: a system that substituted an entire structure of local administration, p olice and judicial authority, and financial management, all concentrated in the figure of one landowner.
Of course most of the rest of the book covers the rather different directions that we taken. You can buy it here.
*All Desire is a Desire for Being*
A new collection of essays by Rene Girard:
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven, self-recommending, buy it here.
Rereading *Jane Eyre* (the experiment kiss)
Jane narrates:
She pushed me towards him. I thought Diana very provoking, and felt uncomfortably confused; and while I was thus thinking and feeling, St. John bent his head; his Greek face was brought to a level with mine, his eyes questioned my eyes piercingly–he kissed me. There are no such things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical cousin’s salute belonged to one of these classes; but there may be experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss. When given, he viewed me to learn the result; it was not striking: I am sure I did not blush; perhaps I might have turned a little pale, for I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters. He never omitted the ceremony afterwards, and the gravity and quiescence with which I underwent it, seemed to invest it for him with a certain charm.
Recommended, in case you have never read or reread it. And here is a recent Henry Oliver Substack on Jane Eyre.
The Road to Socialism and Back: An Economic History of Poland, 1939–2019
For four decades during the latter half of the 20th century, Poland and its people were the subjects of a grand socio-economic experiment. Under the watchful eye of its Soviet masters, the Polish United Workers’ Party transformed the mixed economy of this nation of 35 million into a centrally planned, socialist state (albeit one with an irrepressible black market). Then, in the closing decade of the 20th century, under the leadership of Polish minister of finance Leszek Balcerowicz, the nation was transformed back into a mixed economy.
In this book, we document the results of this experiment. We show that there was a wide chasm between the lofty goals of socialist ideology and the realities of socialism as the Polish people experienced them. We also show that while the transition back from a socialist to a mixed economy was not without its own pain, it did unleash the extraordinary productive power of the Polish people, allowing their standard of living to rise at more than twice the rate of growth that prevailed during the socialist era. The experiences of the Poles, like those of so many behind the Iron Curtain, demonstrate the value of economic freedom, the immiserating consequences of its denial, and the often painful process of regaining lost freedoms.
That’s the opening to an excellent new book (pdf) from the Fraser Institute written by Boettke, Zhukov, and Mitchell. More than an economic history of Poland, this book is also a very good introduction to the economics of socialism.
My Conversation with Noam Chomsky
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about LLMs, whether he’s optimistic about the future, what he thinks of Thomas Schelling, the legacy of the 1960s-era left libertarians, the development trajectories of Nicaragua and Cuba, why he still answers every email, what he’s been most wrong about, and more.
I would stress there is no representative sample from this discussion, so any excerpt will not give you a decent sense of the dialogue as a whole. Read the whole thing, if you dare! Here is one squib, in fact it is the opener, after which we ranged far and wide:
COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?
CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.
His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.
COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?
CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.
It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era. The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.
Humboldt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought, which were always pretty much identified. Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unbounded use of it. Those conceptions weren’t very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the theory of computation by Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and other great mathematicians, 1930s and ’40s. But now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood. In fact, everyone has it in their laptop by now.
COWEN: Was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau astray on politics?
I will say that I am very glad I undertook this endeavor.
Game theory and the First World War
By Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson:
Books by Scott Wolford and Roger Ransom show how economic theories of games and decisions can be fruitfully applied to problems in World War I. This vital application offers fundamental insights into the analytical methods of game theory. Public random variables may be essential factors in war-of-attrition games. An assumption that nations can coordinate on Pareto-superior equilibria may become less tenable when nations are at war. Interpreting a surprising mistake as evidence of an unlikely type can have serious consequences. The ability of leaders to foster consistent beliefs within a cohesive society can create inconsistency of beliefs between nations at war.
Just published in the (ungated) Journal of Economic Literature.
The new public library?
This article is set in Canada, but some of these developments are more general:
Vicky Varga, a twenty-four-year veteran of Edmonton Public Library, described how the city had moved toward fully integrating social work into the activities of its main library branch. “People really do seek this out, because it’s the last truly public space, as I’m sure everybody in this room knows,” she said…
Every library branch in every city has its own specific issues, but in conversations with workers across the country, the broad strokes of the crisis are the same. Librarians say they’re seeing more people with more complex needs than ever before. In Toronto, the number of recorded “incidents,” a term which includes violent, disruptive, or threatening events, spiked from 7.16 per 100,000 visits in 2012 to 35.74 in 2021. In Edmonton, where librarians are offered training to administer naloxone, 2022 saw ninety-nine opioid poisonings across the system. On Vancouver Island, some workers went on strike for nearly two months over workplace concerns and a lack of wage growth. In a letter to library trustees, they argued that “management has refused to agree to many important proposals—including solutions to workplace violence and mental health impacts.” Library workers across the country report being attacked, spat on, threatened, sexually assaulted. They describe the emotional toll that results from not having the necessary resources to help the people who come to them, day after day. They talk about picking up the phone to call for help and realizing that nobody’s coming.
Here is the full piece by Nicholas Lune-Brown and Dorothy Leung, in The Walrus, and interesting throughout. Via (the excellent) The Browser.
*The Economic Government of the World, 1933-2023*
By Martin Daunton, retired economic historian from Cambridge. 1024 pp., and full of information, so yes many people should read this book. It is a major achievement, but somehow I wanted something with more economics and a sharper framework? Here is a very positive Adam Tooze FT review, who describes the narrative as “postheroic and disillusioned.” Multilateralism is covered in great detail.
You can pre-order it here, I picked up my copy in London at Daunt.
*Goodbye Eastern Europe*
The author is Jacob Mikanowski and the subtitle is An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Might this be the best overall book on how Eastern Europe ended up so different (but not entirely different) from Western Europe? I’ll be doing a CWT with him later this fall (hold your suggestions for now, and I’ll hold further commentary as well), but though I would flag this book for you in the meantime. I hope it gets some good publicity as the release date is approaching.