Burrowing Into Book - Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selected Readings

                                                                                                                                          May 8, 2018

“Enlightenment Now”

Steven Pinker

“For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death,

 health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want,

 freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering,

and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.”

                                                                                                            Steven Pinker

                                                                                                            Last sentence

                                                                                                            Enlightenment Now

The Age of Enlightenment extended from the late 17^thCentury to the early 19^th. It built on the studies and writings of Galileo, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, RenéDescartes and Baruch Spinoza. It encompassed writers, thinkers, scientists and essayists, from Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Denis Diderot and Thomas Jefferson. It inspired revolutions in America and France, and ultimately gave way to the Romantic period of the 19^thCentury.

Early in his book, into which he squeezes 75 charts in 23 chapters, Professor Pinker quotes the American columnist Franklin P. Adams: “Nothing is more responsible for the ‘good old days’ than a bad memory.” That is his thesis. Despite the horrors of the 20^thCentury and the Islamic terrorism we are now experiencing, the world has evolved for the better. And credit is owed to the Enlightenment, which, after thousands of years with little progress, unleashed a cascade of science, reason and humanism. The consequence was a healthier, wealthier and more humane world. Its positive effects Professor Pinker shows through charts that depict the remarkable increase in life expectancy, the decline in undernourishment, the dramatic increase in global GDP per capita and the subsequent reduction in extreme poverty. As well, the Enlightenment brought democracy, greater equality, and improvements in the environment, safety and quality of life. These changes are quantified in a series of easily-readable charts and descriptions.

In Part I of the book, Pinker outlines the ideas of the Enlightenment; in Part II, he shows that they worked. Part III is a defense of those ideas and ideals – that they are as important today as they were when conceived. We should not let them dissipate in political emotionalism. The message is that progress and humanism are based on science and reason, which in turn are products of democracy, freedom, capitalism and affluence.

As in any book of this nature, questions arose: At what point does governmental social welfare spending and the debt it requires impede economic growth? Does government assistance interfere with individual creativity? Is it better to teach people to fish than give them a fish? To that, Pinker would answer, yes. Can an all-encompassing, all-powerful administrative state morph into autocracy? If the world is growing more liberal and more secular, what explains the rise of illiberal Islamic caliphates? Professor Pinker writes of totalitarianism shrinking, but one wonders, is that correct with governments in Russia and China becoming more despotic. What is the future for the people of Venezuela and Nicaragua where Socialism is dying an ugly death? He dismisses religion in a way I found uncomfortable, for, while science has explained many mysteries, it has not explained all. For example, from whence did the energy and matter, which comprised the microscopic particle that produced the “Big Bang,” emerge? Religion, from my understanding, does not require scientific proof and can co-exist with science. Besides, religion, when it is not imposed by the state, serves to comfort those who are fearful, sick, dying or simply feeling hopeless and in need of love’s salvation. 

But my disagreements with the author and his politics that percolate beneath the surface were minor. Professor Pinker’s story is a herculean effort to explain why the present is so much better than the past – that progress has indeed changed our lives for the better, that fond memories of the past belie hardships endured, that a failure to see how far we have come deprives youth cognizance of their fortunate inheritance. And he does so in a readable and enjoyable way. Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist (and best-selling author) at Harvard. Another of his books, Sense and Style, which was published in 2014, is, in my opinion, a book all aspiring writers should keep within arm’s reach. 

Enlightenment Nowcovers a lot of ground. It takes time to digest, but the effort is worthwhile. 

Burrowing into Books, Anthony Trollope "The Small House at Allington"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                    January 29, 2017

“The Small House at Allington”

Anthony Trollope

“The squires of Allington had been squires of Allington since squires,

such as squires are now, were first known in England.”

                                                                                                Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

                                                                                                The Small House at Allington, 1864

If one wants facts, read non-fiction. If one wants to understand character, read fiction. Novels allow authors to explore emotions and responses, unencumbered by historical events or bothersome statistics. This was especially true before the advent of movies or television. Mythology, stories from the Bible and Shakespeare provide examples of fictional character traits we recognize in everyday relationships, as do 19^th Century novelists like Trollope, Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Hardy and the Bronte sisters.

Male-female relations have been fodder for novels since books were first written. “None but the most heartless of women know the extent of their power over men,” wrote Trollope in The Small House at Allington,” – as none but the most heartless of men know the extent of their power over women.” This story is one of triangulated and unrequited love – that of Lily Dale, one of Trollope’s most enduring (and endearing) creations, for Adolphus Crosbie, and of Johnny Eames for Lily Dale. Lily, who is the heroine of the story, lives with her widowed mother and elder sister Bell in the “Small House” as guests of her brother-in-law, the Squire of Allington, who owns the Big House. The late critic Stephen Wall said of Lily, that while she is “instantly recognizable, she remains a mystery.” Trollope thrived on the complexities of people and relationships. Among the best-known episodes in the book is the walk in the moonlight, where Lily first realizes her love for Crosbie. The reader, however, gets a harbinger of things to come: To Lily, moonlight and poetry represented romance; to Crosbie, they were nonsense.

Having been jilted, Lily Dale might today be considered a victim of false promises, thus a candidate for #MeToo. Maybe she would have marched, but I suspect she was too independent. Romances do not always have story-book endings, which Trollope understood. Crosbie, though older, is weak and immature – “a swell,” as Lily described him. She is young, pretty, smart, and headstrong. She knows her mind, but loses her heart. The reader understands, even though Lily does not, that she is better off without him.

At 600-plus pages, with multiple characters and plots, the story is too complex to summarize. In part, the reader is left unsettled: why, for example, did Lily not reciprocate Johnny Eames’ love? After all, in the story he stops being a “hobbledehoy and enters manhood.”  Regardless, the mark of a good book is when the reader is sorry to turn the last page, and when we miss those we cheered and jeered. However, Trollope’s characters often return in future books. This is the penultimate in the Barsetshire series. So, I look forward to The Last Chronicle of Barset, in which Lily, Johnny and Ambrose reappear. After all, to paraphrase Robert Frost on birches, one could do worse than be a reader of Trollope.

"Burrowing into Books - The Second World Wars"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                December 29, 2017

“The Second World Wars”

Victor Davis Hanson

“Unlike World War I, there has never been any doubt

as to who caused, won and lost World War II.”

                                                                                                Victor Davis Hanson

                                                                                                The Second World Wars

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His background is ideal for an analysis of the Second World War. “Wars” are plural in the title because, as Hanson notes, it was fought in many different places, from Singapore to Finland, and in many different ways, on air, sea and land, with weapons ranging from side arms to atomic bombs. It was the first war which saw more civilians die than soldiers.

The book is divided topically, with chapters titled “Ideas,” “Air,” “Water,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “People.” A complaint may be that the book is repetitive, but different aspects are looked at from different angles. The War was fought on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, with combatants from every continent except Antarctica. It was fought on the land, the sea and in the air, and Hanson reviews all facets. The facts he assembles are sobering: From a world population of about two billion, five hundred million people were displaced, perhaps a hundred million mobilized, and sixty million died, two thirds of whom were civilians. Seven million Jews were killed. “No other deliberate mass killings in history, before or since, whether systematic, loosely organized or spontaneous, have approached the magnitude of the Holocaust – not the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian ‘killing fields,’ or the Rwandan tribal bloodletting.”

His details are encyclopedic. In 1939, the U.S. spent one percent of GDP on defense. By 1944, forty percent of GDP was going to defense. During the war years, the U.S. produced forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and one billion rounds of artillery shells. In 1939, 9.5 million square feet of industrial plant space was devoted to aircraft production. By 1944, that had grown to 165 million square feet. Britain, despite being bombed, having been defeated in most every major battle during the first two years of the War and having mobilized 3.5 million men, added more ships to its fleet during the war than the entire naval production of the three major Axis powers. The Allies were more efficient manufacturers; The thousandth B-29 to roll off the production line required half the man hours as the four hundredth. With his eye for detail, we learn that in 1942, the Eastern Front was costing the Third Reich a hundred thousand dead each month. “In that year alone, the Germans lost 5,500 tanks, eight thousand guns, and a quarter million vehicles.” About three hundred thousand planes were destroyed or badly damaged during the War.

As a classicist, Victor Davis Hanson puts the War into historical perspective: The Normandy invasion, for example, was the largest amphibious assault since Xerxes’ Persians landed in Greece in 480BC. He writes about the epic tank battle at Kursk (just northeast of Ukraine) in July 1943. While the Soviets suffered three times the number of casualties and seven to ten times the number of tank losses, Germany’s victory cost them 200,000 casualties and the loss of 500 tanks. He suggests a comparison to Pyrrhus’s lament at Asculum in 279BC, when his invasion forces took heavy losses in defeating Roman defenders, writing that Generals Walter Model and Erich von Manstein “might have sighed, ‘if we prove victorious in one more such battle with the Russians, we shall be utterly ruined.’”

Hanson tells of the lengths democracies had to go in dealing with their totalitarian partner, the Soviet Union: “Roosevelt, for example, unlike Churchill, was determined to suppress the truth of the spring 1940 massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.” It took the Russians seventy years – until 2010 – to admit to their culpability in that slaughter.

The lesson of the book is that Mr. Hanson believes the War was preventable. It should have been self-evident, he notes, that the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were bigger, richer and stronger, and with soldiers and sailors better fed and equipped than the Fascist powers of Germany, Japan and Italy – that Germany and Japan embarked on an impossible-to-win quest, in invading Eastern Europe and in attacking the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. There should have been “no need for such a bloody laboratory, if not for prior British appeasement, American isolationism and Russian collaboration.”

This is a book to savor, to read slowly, to keep as a reference – as reminder that the strength of democracies is paramount to keeping the peace in a world where bad men seek power and dominance. FDR once, allegedly, said to his wife, when it was suggested in the early ‘30s he become a benevolent dictator, “There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator.”

The lesson for us today is that, like it or not, responsibility for global accord falls on the United States. There is no other country or entity – not Europe, Russia, China or the UN – that can ensure world peace.