Organizations are not highly centralized structures in which all the important decisions are made at the center. … As a single decision may be influenced by a large number of facts and criteria of choice, some fraction of these premises may be specified by superiors without implying complete centralization. Organizations can localize and minimize information demands just as markets do, by decentralizing decisions. Matters of fact can be determined wherever the most skill and information is located to determine them, and they can then be communicated to “collecting points” where all the facts relevant to an issue can be put together and a decision reached. We can think of a decision as produced by executing a large computer program, each subroutine having its special tasks and relying on local sources of information. No single person or group need be expert on all aspects of the decision. (41)

In a world of bounded rationality there are several ways to magnify the computing capabilities of individual human beings and enhance the possibilities of their collective survival and prosperity. With the combined use of markets and administrative hierarchies, the human species has enormously increased its capabilities for specialization and division of work. It would be too much to attribute the vast growth and spread of human populations to such mechanisms alone…but the (perhaps temporary) dominance of our species over the globe today is witness to the augmentation of human reason—applied to local, not global, concerns—that has been made possible by these social artifacts. (43)

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves. (53)

A thinking human being is an adaptive system; men’s goals define the interface between their inner and outer environments, including in the latter their memory stores. To the extent that they are effectively adaptive, their behavior will reflect characteristics largely of the outer environment (in the light of their goals) and will reveal only a few limiting properties of the inner environment—of the physiological machinery that enables a person to think. (53)

There is no contradiction, then, between the thesis that a human being possesses, at birth, a competence for acquiring and using language and the thesis that language is the most artificial, hence also the most human of all human constructions. The former thesis is an assertion that there is an inner environment and that it does place limits on the kinds of information processing of which the organism is capable. The structure of language reveals these limits; and these limits in turn account for such commonality as exists among the Babel of human tongues.

The latter thesis, of the artificiality of language, is an assertion that the limits on adaptation, on possible languages, imposed by the inner environment are very broad limits on organization, not very specific limits on syntax. Moreover, according to the thesis, they are limits imposed not only on language but also on every other mode of representing internally experience received through stimuli from outside.

Such a view of the relation of language and thinking puts a new cast on the “Whorfian” hypothesis that—stating it in overstrong form—only the expressible is thinkable. If the view is valid, it would be as correct to say, “Only the thinkable is expressible”—a view that, I suppose, Kant would have found quite congenial. (80)

One of the curious consequences of my approach—of my thesis—is that I have said almost nothing about physiology. But the mind is usually thought to be located in the brain. I have discussed the organization of the mind without saying anything about the structure of the brain.

The main reason for this disembodiment of mind is of course the thesis that I have just been discussing. The difference between the hardware of a computer and the “hardware” of the brain has not prevented computers from simulating a wide spectrum of kinds of human thinking—just because both computer and brain, when engaged in thought, are adaptive systems, seeking to mold themselves to the shape of the task environment. (83)

Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment. (100)

…we include in what we call the human environment the cocoon of information, stored in books and in long-term memory, that we spin about ourselves.

That information, stored both as data and as procedures and richly indexed for access in the presence of appropriate stimuli, enables the simple basic information processes to draw upon a very large repertory of information and strategies, and accounts for the appearance of complexity in their behavior. The inner environment, the hardware, is simple. Complexity emerges from the richness of the outer environment, both the world apprehended through the senses and the information about the world stored in long-term memory.

A scientific account of human cognition describes it in terms of several sets of invariants. First, there are the parameters of the inner environment. Then, there are the general control and search-guiding mechanisms that are used over and over again in all task domains. Finally, there are the learning and discovery mechanisms that permit the system to adapt with gradually increasing effectiveness to the particular environment in which it finds itself. The adaptiveness of the human organism, the facility with which it acquires new representations and strategies and becomes adept in dealing with highly specialized environments, makes it an elusive and fascinating target of our scientific inquiries—and the very prototype of the artificial. (110)

Historically and traditionally, it has been the task of the science disciplines to teach about natural things: how they are and how they work. It has been the task of engineering schools to teach about artificial things: how to make artifacts that have desired properties and how to design.

Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is at the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences. Schools of engineering, as well as schools of architecture, business, education, law, and medicine, are all centrally concerned with the process of design. (111)

When we come to the design of systems as complex as cities, or buildings, or economies, we must give up the aim of creating systems that will optimize some hypothesized utility function, and we must consider whether differences in style…do not represent highly desirable variants in the design process rather than alternatives to be evaluated as “better” or “worse.” Variety, within the limits of satisfactory constraints, may be a desirable end in itself, among other reasons, because it permits us to attach value to the search as well as its outcome—to regard the design process as itself a valued activity for those who participate in it.

We have usually thought of city planning as a means whereby the planner’s creative activity could build a system that would satisfy the needs of a populace. Perhaps we should think of city planning as a valuable creative activity in which many members of a community can have the opportunity of participating—if we have the wits to organize the process that way. (130)

The proper study of mankind has been said to be man. But I have argued that people—or at least their intellective component—may be relatively simple, that most of the complexity of their behavior may be drawn from their environment, from their search for good designs. If I have made my case, then we can conclude that, in large part, the proper study of mankind is the science of design, not only as the professional component of a technical education but as a core discipline for every liberally educated person. (138)

[In which Simon presages Google.] An “information superhighway” is proclaimed without any concern about the traffic jams it can produce or the parking spaces it will require. Nothing in the new technology increases the number of hours in the day or the capacities of human beings to absorb information. The real design problem is not to provide more information to people but to allocate the time they have available for receiving information so that they will get only the information that is most important and relevant to the decisions they will make. The task is not to design information-distributing systems but intelligent information-gathering systems. (144)

The heart of the data problem for design is not forecasting but constructing alternative scenarios for the future and analyzing their sensitivity to errors in the theory and data. … Predicting the exact course of global warming is a thankless task. Much more feasible and useful is generating alternative policies which can be introduced at the appropriate times for slowing the warming, mitigating its unfavorable effects and taking advantage of favorable effects. (148)

In introducing the subject of social design, I used the Constitution of the United States as an example. configuring organizations, whether business corporations, governmental organizations, voluntary societies or others, is one of society’s most important design tasks. If we human beings were isolated monads—small, hermetically sealed particles that had no mutual relations except occasional elastic collisions—we would not have to concern ourselves with the design of organizations. But, contrary to libertarian rhetoric, we are not monads. From birth until death, our ability to reach our goals, even to survive, is tightly linked to our social interactions with others in our society.

The rules imposed on us by organizations—the organizations that employ us and the organizations that govern us—restrict our liberties in a variety of ways. But these same organizations provide us with opportunities for reaching goals and attaining freedoms that we could not even imagine reaching by individual effort. For example, almost everyone who will read these lines has an income that is astronomical by comparison with the world average. If we were to assign a single cause to our good fortune, we would have to attribute it to being born in the right place at the right time: in a society that is able to maintain order (through public organizations), to produce efficiently (largely through business organizations), and to maintain the infrastructure required for high production (again largely through public organizations). We have even discovered, in our society and a modest number of others, how to design organizations, business and governmental, that do not interfere egregiously with our freedoms, including those of speech and thought. (154-155)

Each of us sits in a long dark hall within a circle of light cast by a small lamp. The lamplight penetrates a few feet up and down the hall, then rapidly attenuates, diluted by the vast darkness of future and past that surrounds it.

We are curious about that darkness. We consult soothsayers and forecasters of the economy and the weather, but we also search backward for our “roots.” …

History, archaeology, geology, and astronomy provide us with narrow beams that penetrate immense distances down the hallway of the past but illuminate it only fitfully—a statesman or philosopher here, a battle there, some hominoid bones buried with pieces of chipped stone, fossils embedded in ancient rock, rumors of a great explosion. We read about the past with immense interest. A few spots caught by the beams take on a vividness and immediacy that capture, for a moment, our attention and our hearts—some Greek warriors camped before Troy, a man on a cross, the painted figure of a deer glimpsed by flickering torchlight on the wall of a limestone cave. But mostly the figures are shadowy, and our attention shifts back to the present.

The light dims even more rapidly in the opposite direction, toward the future. Although we are titillated by Sunday Supplement descriptions of a cooling Sun, it is our own mortality, just a few years away, and not the Earth’s, with which we are preoccupied. We can empathize with parents and grandparents whom we have known, or of whom we have had firsthand accounts, and in the opposite direction with children and grandchildren. But beyond that circle our concern is more curious and intellectual and emotional. We even find it difficult to define which distant events are the triumphs and which the catastrophes, who the heroes and who the villains. (156-157)

Thus the events and prospective events that enter into our value systems are all dated, and the importance we attach to them generally drops off sharply with their distance in time. For the creatures of bounded rationality that we are, this is fortunate. If our decisions depended equally upon their remote and their proximate consequences, we could never act but would be forever lost in thought. By applying a heavy discount factor to events, attenuating them with their remoteness in time and space, we reduce our problems of choice to a size commensurate with our limited computing capabilities. We guarantee that, when we integrate outcomes over the future of the world, the integral will converge.

… Our myopia is not adaptive, but symptomatic of the limits of our adaptability. It is one of the constraints on adaptation belonging to the inner environment. (157)

Defining what is meant by progress in human societies is not easy. Increasing success in meeting basic human needs for food, shelter, and health is one kind of definition that most people would agree upon. Another would be an average increase in human happiness. With the advance of productive technology, we can claim that there has been major progress by the first criterion; but…changing aspiration levels would lead us to doubt whether progress is possible if we use the second criterion, human happiness, to measure it. There is no reason to suppose that a modern industrial society is more conducive to human happiness than the simpler, if more austere, societies that preceded it. On the other hand, there seems to be little empirical basis for the nostalgia that is sometimes expressed for an imagined (and imaginary) happier or more humane past. (160)

The idea of final goals is inconsistent with our limited ability to foretell or determine the future. The real result of our actions is to establish initial conditions for the next succeeding stage of action. What we call “final” goals are in fact criteria for choosing the initial conditions that we will leave to our successors.

How do we want to leave the world for the next generation? What are good initial conditions for them? One desideratum would be a world offering as many alternatives as possible to future decision makers, avoiding irreversible commitments that they cannot undo. It is the aura of irreversibility hanging about so many of the decisions of nuclear energy deployment that makes these decisions so difficult.

A second desideratum is to leave the next generation of decision makers with a better body of knowledge and a greater capacity for experience. The aim here is to enable them not just to evaluate alternatives better but especially to experience the world in more and richer ways. (163-164)

From a reading of evolutionary history—whether biological or social—one might conjecture that there has been a long-run trend toward variety and complexity. There are more than a hundred kinds of atoms, thousands of kinds of inorganic molecules, hundreds of thousands of organic molecules, and millions of species of living organisms. Mankind has elaborated several thousand distinct languages, and modern industrial societies count their specialized occupations in the tens of thousands.

I shall emphasize…that forms can proliferate in this way because the more complex arise out of a combinatoric play upon the simpler. The larger and richer the collection of building blocks that is available for construction, the more elaborate are the structures that can be generated.

If there is such a trend toward variety, then evolution is not to be understood as a series of tournaments for the occupation of a fixed set of environmental niches, each tournament won by the organism that is fittest for that niche. Instead evolution brings about a proliferation of niches. The environments to which most biological organisms adapt are formed mainly of other organisms, and the environments to which human beings adapt, mainly other human beings. Each new bird or mammal provides a niche for one or more new kind of flea. (165-166)

There is one important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other. Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms. We detect the organelles in a cell the way we detect raisins in a cake—they are “visibly” differentiated substructures localized spatially in the larger structure. On the other hand, we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom. These two points of view can be reconciled by defining hierarchy in terms of intensity of interaction, but observing that in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity. One of the interesting characteristics of nerve cells and telephone wires is that they permit very specific strong interactions at great distances. To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure. (187)

The distinction between the world as sensed and the world as acted upon defines the basic condition for the survival of adaptive organisms. The organism must develop correlations between goals in the sensed world and actions in the world of process. When they are made conscious and verbalized, these correlations correspond to what we usually call means-ends analysis. given a desired state of affairs and an existing state of affairs, the task of an adaptive organism is to find the difference between the two states and then to find the correlating process that will erase the difference. (210)

On theoretical grounds we could expect complex systems to be hierarchies in a world in which complexity had to evolve from simplicity. In their dynamics hierarchies have a property, near decomposability, that greatly simplifies their behavior. Near decomposability also simplifies the description of a complex system and makes it easier to understand how the information needed for the development or reproduction of the system can be stored in reasonable compass. (216)

A 1400-page saga of despair and culminating hope in the midst of humanity’s greatest conflict and tragedy. A greatly enjoyable work with the exception of the very end, which lamentably (and in a manner I will not reveal here) undermines the integrity of the entire two-volume tapestry that has come before. That said, in this book and in the Winds of War, its predecessor, I learned a great deal about WWII and had the opportunity to enjoy some wonderful novels as well. Recommended.

I already posted quotes from this book by C.S. Lewis. As to the content: Lewis is a keen observer of human life, and there are many gems of wisdom in this short volume (I excerpted what were in my opinion the choicest of them). I confess, however, that I am troubled by the book, in the following sense: It purports to be an account of Lewis’ conversion to Christianity and the features of his early life that led him to it. But on reasoned justification for that conversion, Lewis comes up here — to me, anyway — remarkably and troublingly short. It was a good read, though — thought-provoking in many respects, and an interesting portrait of life in the first half of the 20th century in Britain.

I expected something in the vein of Miracle on Ice — a feel-good movie with the usual plot twists and happy conclusion. Instead what I saw was a nuanced and realistic portrait of the trials and triumphs of two British runners as they made their way to victory at the 1924 Olympics. They come across as real human beings, flaws and all, rather than as airbrushed heroic figures, and their eventual victory by no means seems foreordained. The plot and its symbolisms, meanwhile, are tied into the British zeitgeist. The score, also, was interesting — not the usual orchestral accompaniment, but rather electronic music (and catchy compositions at that). All in all, it’s a film that takes what could’ve been a flimsy feel-good throwaway and turns it into something memorable, nuanced, and human. Good watching.

Saw it once when I was a kid. Saw it again a few days ago, and understood it much better this time around. A rousing movie, gut-wrenching and heart-wrenching both, with a feel-good ending that does actually make you think a bit. Recommended.

Two things from this book stuck with me:

1. Stephen Hawking is absurdly smart. His brain makes just about everyone else’s look like a pea.
2. If I want to actually learn anything about the state of contemporary physics, I should look elsewhere.

It’s an enjoyable book. But it consists mainly of a series of assertions: general relativity predicts x; the nature of the universe might be y; etc.. It doesn’t delve into any of the logic supporting the assertions. Which, I guess, is the nature of the beast — it’s supposed to be accessible to the layperson. And it’s not like I could follow the math behind the claims made, either, even if he included it. But still, I found it disconcerting. It was an enjoyable portrait of the state of theoretical physics/astrophyics/whatever it is, but it didn’t suffice to foster real intellectual engagement in me.

The exception to this rule was the last chapter, where Hawking waxes philosophical about the future of physics. Here’s an excerpt that spoke to me (spoiler alert! don’t read if you’re planning on reading the book, as this pretty much gives away the ending):

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason–for then we would know the mind of God.

Bridging the gap between the specialists and the philosophers is, I take it, part of Hawking’s goal in this book. It’s a pity that, for me at least, he didn’t succeed to the extent he may have wished.

Quotes now while I still have access to the book. A review coming soon.

I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead. (20)

[H]e would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would at least have been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one. (29-30)

We have learned not to take present things at their face value. (37)

It took me as long to acquire inhibitions as others (they say) have taken to get rid of them. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans. (69)

I do not much believe in the Renaissance as generally described by historians. The more I look into the evidence the less trace I find of that vernal rapture which is supposed to have swept Europe in the fifteenth century. I half suspect that the glow in the historians’ pages has a different source, that each is remembering, and projecting, his own personal Renaissance; that wonderful reawakening which comes to most of us when puberty is complete. It is properly called a rebirth not a birth, a reawakening not a wakening, because in many of us, besides being a new thing, it is also the recovery of things we had in childhood and lost when we became boys. For boyhood is very like the “dark ages” not as they were but as they are represented in bad, short histories. The dreams of childhood and those of adolescence may have much in common; between them, often, boyhood stretches like an alien territory in which everything (ourselves included) has been greedy, cruel, noisy, and prosaic, in which the imagination has slept and the most unideal senses and ambitions have been restlessly, even maniacally, awake. (71)

Where oppression does not completely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a natural tendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt? We reimburse ourselves for cuffs and toil by a double dose of self-esteem. No one is more likely to the arrogant than a lately freed slave. (107)

“Never let us live with amousia,” was one of his favorite maxims: amousia, the absence of the Muses. (112)

It is true that when a pessimist’s life is threatened he behaves like other men; his impulse to preserve life is stronger than his judgment that life is not worth preserving. But how does this prove that the judgment was insincere or even erroneous? A man’s judgment that whisky is bad for him is not invalidated by the fact that when the bottle is at hand he finds desire stronger than reason and succumbs. Having once tasted life, we are subjected to the impulse of self-preservation. Life, in other words, is as habit-forming as cocaine. (116)

These are situations where the very genius of Filial Piety would find it difficult not to let some sign of impatience escape him. (123)

Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself. (131)

I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand. (159)

As Johnson points out, where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident. (161)

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy. (170)

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it. (177)

Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure. The one breeds camaraderie and even (when intense) a kind of love between the fellow suffers; the other, mutual distrust, cynicism, concealed and fretting resentment. (188)

I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake. And it was, like that moment on top of the bus, ambiguous. Freedom, or necessity? Or do they differ at their maximum? At that maximum a man is what he does; there is nothing of him left over or outside the act. As for what we commonly call Will, and what we commonly call Emotion, I fancy these usually talk too loud, protest too much, to be quite believed, and we have a secret suspicion that the great passion or the iron resolution is partly a put-up job. (237)

This terse and eloquent little volume by C.S. Lewis constitutes one of the most elegant and deep defenses of the Natural Law position that I have yet read. In a mere 81 pages (and in large, wide-spaced type at that), Lewis articulates in brilliantly compressed form the value of the Natural Law/the Tao, its trans-cultural/civilizational significance, the trouble with ethical positions that attempt to step outside it, and the dangers that arise when such positions are taken to their logical conclusions. [1] Most impressive is the last of these items, which Lewis articulates from an angle that to me was wholly fresh — and quite frightening. I am inclined to be somewhat more skeptical than Lewis seems to be that these possibilities might be fully realized in the absence of the human capability for total self-modification (presumably via genetics); but then, Lewis builds his arguments on the assumption that such capability is attained, and given that I have worrisomely little to say in dissent.

The top Amazon reviewer is worth quoting at length:

Written like an open letter to Richard Rorty[, ]but written when Rorty was still in diapers. This is by far the most prophetic, and the most disturbing, of Lewis’ works. Starting with a deceptively simple observation - that modern (now postmodern) philosophy tends to reduce all statements of value to mere statements of subjective feeling - Lewis goes on to demonstrate the corrosive and ultimately fatal effect of this line of thinking on any civilized culture.

Lewis accurately predicts the parallel development of two trends: (1) the loss of any objective transcendent moral standards; and (2) the ability of a scientific or political elite, through social conditioning and/or genetic manipulation, to affect the thinking of successive generations of the rest of us - the great unwashed. The ascendancy, during the last decade, of moral relativism and the political correctness movement demonstrate how far down these parallel tracks we have come (i.e., Rorty: truth is what gets us what we want; truth is what my peers will let be get by with saying; Christians are “the natural constituency of Hitler”).

While he’s at it, Lewis refutes the postmodern, and generally unexamined, truism that the historic moral principles of Western Civilization are fundamentally different from other cultures’ norms, and thus are arbitrary and nonbinding. In a lengthy appendix, Lewis shows that the great moral principles are timeless and have been generally accepted by all civilized societies, at all times (until ours).

So where will it end? In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man’s ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature’s ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.

I must take issue with the reviewer who referred to the book as a “disguised apologetic” for Christianity. While Lewis openly acknowledges his Christian beliefs, he takes great pains to establish that the existence of objective moral standards is transcultural; that it is “trans-” any specific religious or ethical system other than relativism. Those who insist otherwise are simply out of touch; controlled by their own hermeneutic of suspicion, they see closet Christians lurking behind any and all moral absolutes.

I take issue with two items above: (1) the phrasing “any civilized culture” in the first paragraph; and (2) that Lewis in the appendix “shows” that said principles are trans-cultural. Lewis doesn’t “show” anything in this book. What he does is indicate or point the way, and that with startling perspicacity.

The full text of the work is available online thanks to Columbia’s Augustine Club (parts one, two, three, and appendix). My favorite portions are quoted below.

When a Roman father told his son that it was a sweet and seemly thing to die for his country, he believed what he said. He was communicating to the son an emotion which he himself shared and which he believed to be in accord with the value which his judgement discerned in noble death. He was giving the boy the best he had, giving of his spirit to humanize him as he had given of his body to beget him. But Gaius and Titius cannot believe that in calling such a death sweet and seemly they would be saying ’something important about something’. Their own method of debunking would cry out against them if they attempted to do so. For death is not something to eat and therefore cannot be dulce in the literal sense, and it is unlikely that the real sensations preceding it will be dulce even by analogy. And as for decorum—that is only a word describing how some other people will feel about your death when they happen to think of it, which won’t be often, and will certainly do you no good. There are only two courses open to Gaius and Titius. Either they must go the whole way and debunk this sentiment like any other, or must set themselves to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost him his life, because it is useful to us (the survivors) that our young men should feel it. If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds— making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. (21-23)

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ’spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. (24-25)

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in. (43-44)

In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes—the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct—the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.

The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car. (56-58)

We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all `rational’ or `spiritual’ motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently. I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us an illusion of meaning for our lives which compares favourably with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men. But I do not insist on this, for it is a mere conjecture. What is not conjecture is that our hope even of a `conditioned’ happiness rests on what is ordinarily called `chance’—the chance that benevolent impulses may on the whole predominate in our Conditioners. For without the judgement `Benevolence is good’—that is, without re-entering the Tao—they can have no ground for promoting or stabilizing these impulses rather than any others. By the logic of their position they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature. It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationalism, by `seeing through’ all `rational’ motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behaviour. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere `nature’) is the only course left open.

At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. (66-68)

Is it, then, possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the `natural object’ produced by analysis and abstraction is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am asking for. I hear rumours that Goethe’s approach to nature deserves fuller consideration—that even Dr Steiner may have seen something that orthodox researchers have missed. The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. The analogy between the Tao of Man and the instincts of an animal species would mean for it new light cast on the unknown thing, Instinct, by the only known reality of conscience and not a reduction of conscience to the category of Instinct. Its followers would not be free with the words only and merely. In a word, it would conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by her and buy knowledge at a lower cost than that of life.

Perhaps I am asking impossibilities. Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. But if the scientists themselves cannot arrest this process before it reaches the common Reason and kills that too, then someone else must arrest it. What I most fear is the reply that I am `only one more’ obscurantist, that this barrier, like all previous barriers set up against the advance of science, can be safely passed. Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of the modern imagination—the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Because we have to use numbers so much we tend to think of every process as if it must be like the numeral series, where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before. I implore you to remember the Irishman and his two stoves. There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis—incommensurable with the others—and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on `explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on `seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to `see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To `see through’ all things is the same as not to see. (78-81)

The last of these is where, for me, the whole of Lewis’ argument comes together and the startling implications he traces come into sharp relief. But the whole thing is quite worth reading.

[1] Lewis’ argument is so compressed, in fact, that I’m dubious that its full depth and import could be understood by one not already schooled in moral philosophy, especially Natural Law theory, Nietzschean ethics, Confucianism, and the naturalistic ethics of G.E. Moore and company, four schools with which Lewis deals either implicitly or explicitly here. I’ve studied them, and this plus Lewis’ accessible style made it easy reading for me, but I can understand why some Amazon reviewers complain of its being tough to get through.

The most impressive thing about Douglas Brinkley’s book on Katrina is the fact that he got it to press in 2006, only a year after the hurricane hit. The sheer volume of material incorporated — as attested to by the copious footnotes — is quite impressive. Brinkley deserves great credit for this gargantuan contribution to public memory of this horrific natural disaster. Assembled so soon after the events it recounts, it serves both to record the raw data of the time and as a piece of history itself, a window into the gnawing heartache that reigned in south Louisiana a year after the storm.

In that light, here’s a compendium of the worst of the government incompetence and malfeasance documented in the book:

• It took four days after Katrina hit for federal first responders to arrive in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. (Brinkley 163)
• Michael Brown, director of FEMA at the time, ordered all emergency responders from outside the Gulf South to stay home on Monday following the storm. (Brinkley 254)
• In response to an email from a subordinate in New Orleans saying that the “situation is past critical,” Brown responded: “Thanks for the update…Anything specific we need to do or tweak?” (Brinkley 254)
• A few hours later, Brown’s press secretary emailed saying, “it is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. Given that Baton Rouge is back to normal, restaurants are getting busy. He needs much more that 20 or 30 minutes. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choice, followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc.” This while tens of thousands of people were stranded in New Orleans with almost no food or water. (Brinkley 254)
• The Pentagon delayed the departure of 200 National Guard troops from New Mexico on the grounds that they had to get clearance before they could be transported across state lines. (Brinkley 421)
• Condolezza Rice was on vacation in New York shopping for shoes on Fifth Avenue when Katrina went down. A shopper spotted her and shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless?” That same evening, she saw Spamalot. Word got around that she was present, and when the lights came up she was booed. Served her right. (Brinkley 440)
• FEMA redirected a group of 100 first responders to Atlanta for sensitivity and anti-sexual harassment training. This was on Wednesday, three days after Katrina had hit. Because it’s not like, you know, people were dying or anything. (Brinkley 441)

These are just some of the juicier details. The broader failures are less shocking, but ultimately more egregious. For example, FEMA conducted an exercise in 2004 called “Hurricane Pam” that accurately predicted what might happen to New Orleans if a major hurricane struck, but no disaster preparedness plans were put into action. Ray Nagin failed to provide leadership during Katrina and quite possibly had a nervous breakdown during the storm. Partisan squabbling and power plays between Governor Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, and Bush, a Republican, held up federal relief efforts. Brinkley artfully depicts these shenanigans and really brings home the immense human toll they exacted.

The book does have its negatives, most of which also seem to stem from its being so hastily assembled. To wit: Brinkley’s voice isn’t consistent throughout; when he indicts certain actors for their mistakes he sometimes goes out on a limb, making accusations beyond what the information he provides seems to warrant; likewise, his tone sometimes gets a bit shrill and un-scholarly; there are sloppy copy errors and there seem to be a few factual errors as well.

That said, it’s a powerful book. Its greatest value lies in the little details Brinkley assembles. We know the death toll, and we know the cost of the storm. Social scientists of all stripes will examine the human effects. But it’s these little details that make his account shine. His book is at its weakest when it attempts to make political or sociological arguments. It is at its strongest by far when it attempts to tell the story of what happened during Katrina. Given that it purports to be a work of history, this is heartening. Its greatest value is in the sheer volume of detail it assembles for posterity.

I’m on the fence about this book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. On one hand, John Perkins, the author, appears far too self-satisfied and convinced of his own importance, intimating that he played a key role in multiple major events in recent world history and elisively comparing himself to Paul Revere in the closing pages of the book, even while cursory examination of his biography reveals that he was, in the grand scheme of things, a fairly minor player. His is a sensationalist and melodramatic account, low on reasoned argument and high on fear-inducing intimation. It’s a fluffy book — its key points could be summarized in a few pages — that seems to be emulating Dan Brown more than the early American revolutionaries like Tom Paine that he cites as his inspiration. This is a pity, because the people Perkins needs to convince if he really wants to change standard operating procedure in what he terms the global “corporatocracy” are unlikely to be swayed by Da Vinci Code-style smoke and mirrors.

On the other hand, there’s a great deal about what Perkins has to say that rings true in a very disquieting way. It is the case that Perkins worked for the companies he says he worked for and in the locations he says he did, and it is the case that the basic historical details which he recounts are corroborated by established sources. Moreover, Perkins is not the first to write on the growing linkages between government, big business, and international institutions — though some who do so are as or more sensationalistic as he, other more dispassionate scholars have attacked the same issues, often classing them under the heading “military-industrial complex” (a concept that, by my count, Perkins mentions but once, and only in passing). Mainstream media have revealed the deeply troubling connections between the Bush Administration and Halliburton, for example, and cursory examination of the resumes of some of the other prominent people Perkins touches on in his book seems at least not to contradict his assertions. Anyone who’s compiled their own resume should know that there’s a lot that gets left unstated or hides below the surface in any such document. It also by this point is fairly common knowledge that, for example, the CIA has had and likely continues to have a hand in assassinations and other maneuvers in countries where the “national interest” of the US is at stake, and Perkins’ account of these actions’ impact on locals in those countries illuminates in telling terms the problematic nature of the US’ habit of international interference.

In the end I think Perkins has something important to say, but it’s a pity he chose to say it in the terms he uses here. He employs his own relatively uncreative vocabulary for dealing with these issues (”corporatocracy”, “economic hit man”) when terminology already exists that would help plug him in to the broader discussion of the issues. His motivation for doing this seems to be to play up the impact of his tale, but sadly it seems to have the opposite effect: making him seem like more of a fringe character than he perhaps in truth is. Corruption in the World Bank and the military-industrial complex are of vital importance to current affairs — but they also, I think, don’t have the overwhelmingly determinate force over world events that Perkins seems to want them to have, at least for the sake of blockbuster-izing his tale.

The verdict: It’s good beach reading if you want to think a little bit too. But for real investigation and analysis of these issues, look elsewhere.