[Serious] Book reports

[Acrobat]

Thanks for introducing me to Tom Holland, looks like the next book I want to read. Mind if I asked how you have access to it? Because I don’t show it available till the end of October?

I think you'll like this one. In a way, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age addresses the same thing in a more scholarly way. Holland has more historical anecdotes that make it easier to read. 

If you don't mind a little piracy, the British edition is available now. 

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Thanks a lot, now I having something to read on a long flight this weekend!

[EgoDeath]

@Belaqua

So, no book list for us?

[Belacqua]

Thanks a lot, now I having something to read on a long flight this weekend!

Now that you mention it, it is an ideal airplane book -- long and flowing (but not so hard that you have to stop and worry about it).

I have his earlier books around here somewhere. If I ever get to travel again I'll take one along!

[Belacqua]

Here you go what? That it took Christianity a thousand years to re-discover Heliocentrism? No thanks. I don't need that kind of organizations in charge of anything, let alone science.

You can change the subject now, but that doesn't hide the fact that you lied about the book earlier, when you said it is, "Yet another book whitewashing Christianity for gullible delusional religious zealots."

It's true that the book could elaborate more on the horrors caused by Christianity. That's because it zips so quickly through history that in the space of about six pages you've got British Christians looking down their noses at "Hindoos" in their Empire, Christian anti-Semitism in Prussia, and Muslim opposition to the abolition of the slave trade in Africa. But all of these are well foot-noted and interested people can go to more complete sources. 

Your opposition to the lies of Christianity doesn't give you the right to type lies of your own.

[Belacqua]

OK, I finished Dominion, by Tom Holland.

I guess I'm a little disappointed, just because I was expecting something different. But it's not fair for me to say he should have written a different book -- this one is what it is, and it does what it does quite well.

Overall it's more like a Daniel Boorstin book, if anybody remembers those. The Creators and The Discoverers by Boorstin are readable surveys through all of Western history, with a zillion anecdotes around a loose theme. There is just so much in them that you're bound to learn something. Dominion is the same. I learned a whole bunch of interesting things about history that I didn't know. For example, I had no Charlemagne was so genocidal. I had heard of the Horst Wessel song, but I didn't know who Horst Wessel was. Things like that.

I had anticipated something different based on the reviews: a demonstration with evidence that our modern thinking, although no longer explicitly Christian, is still largely shaped by values that Christianity was the first to spread. In a few places he does focus on such evidence, and makes a good case. But the examples of this are lost in the masses of detail.

So I see what you mean, @Grandizer, when you quoted the review earlier to the effect that such a general theme "explains everything and nothing." Because Western history was so completely dominated by Christians for so long, anything they did was justified along the way by their Christianity. To Holland's great credit, he has clearly done his best to tell both the good and the bad. For every Quaker he describes as arguing against slavery, there is a page devoted to a slave-owner using the Bible as justification for slaves.

The interesting thesis, the part the reviews led me to believe was more dominant, is summed up in the Conclusion. Here is the most concise part:

Today, as the flood-tide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions
of European and American liberals risk being left stranded. Much that they have
sought to cast as universal stands exposed as never having been anything of the
kind. Agnosticism – as Huxley, the man who coined the word, readily
acknowledged – ranks as ‘that conviction of the supremacy of private judgment
(indeed, of the impossibility of escaping it) which is the foundation of the
Protestant Reformation’.32 Secularism owes its existence to the medieval
papacy. Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that
humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that
there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Repeatedly, like
a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First
there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by Saint Paul. Then
there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that set Latin
Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the
Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the
aspiration to enfold within their embrace every other possible way of seeing the
world; the claim to a universalism that was culturally highly specific. That
human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed
sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these were never selfevident
truths.
The Nazis, certainly, knew as much – which is why, in today’s
demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been
no less murderous than fascist ones; but they – because communism was the
expression of a concern for the oppressed masses – rarely seem as diabolical to
people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass
murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than
mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise.

It is a conclusion that other (particularly British) thinkers have been expressing for a while now. John Gray, for example, is an atheist historian who says something similar. Terry Eagleton argues that since the failure of Christianity, we feel the lack of an all-unifying moral and aesthetic system. Alain de Botton has argued that an important baby has been thrown out with the Christian bathwater, and we should take active steps to shore up our Christian-like values of universality.

Probably there's a reason why it's the Brits who are writing this kind of thing. Unlike in the US, Christianity in Britain has shrunk to such a small percentage that educated people no longer feel it as a threat. With no danger of themselves getting evangelized, they are free to look back on the good parts of what has been lost.

(This reminds me of certain lifestyle trends here in Japan: after your whole city has been paved over and converted to a car-culture with parking lots instead of gardens, where the breezy old wooden houses have been torn down in favor of air-conditioned concrete boxes, then people get nostalgic for the old ways. And lifestyle magazines start to show young people in traditional clothes holding fans in their gardens, even though only a tiny percentage of young people have moved back to small towns and actually live that way.)

So I guess this is a very detail-packed contribution to this current trend, including John Gray and Eagleton, etc., of looking at Christianity in the rear-view mirror and thinking about what it gave us, and what may be lacking now that it's gone.

[Belacqua]

Started a book on Plotinus that looks really good so far.

Stephen R. L. Clark, Plotinus - Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice

The author suggests that Plotinus' Enneads aren't -- or aren't ONLY -- intended as philosophical argument in which facts and reasons are argued out in order to persuade us. This is the way we think of philosophy nowadays, as any book by Locke or Kant or Thomas Nagel will be like that.

Instead, he says that Plotinus' work is to be read as a kind of guided meditation. Almost Jungian, in the way that the process of reading and the different metaphors we come across will subtly but effectively improve our thinking -- if we're open to it.

I like this a lot, as it blends the boundaries we have between logical discourse and art.

Scientific truth, they say, is that which can be translated into a different language. A paper on chemistry published in English can be translated into Japanese and the meaning of it will be exactly the same. Science papers are meant to deliver truth-contents, which can be restated or taken away from the delivery vehicle.

Art, on the other hand, is an object and an experience. If you translate a work of art into another medium or language, you get some new version, but not the thing itself. Restating a summary of Proust is NOT Proust. The work of art or literature must be experienced -- lived through.

I like the idea that what is true of art is true of some philosophy as well.

[Fake Messiah]

You can change the subject now,

I'm not changing it, it was part of the original post, it's you who is ignoring it, again.

[Belacqua]

You can change the subject now,

I'm not changing it, it was part of the original post, it's you who is ignoring it, again.

What you said about Dominion was false, and it was easy to demonstrate that. 

Instead of saying "oops sorry" you talked about something else. 

You are an unrepentant liar.

[Fake Messiah]

I'm not changing it, it was part of the original post, it's you who is ignoring it, again.

What you said about Dominion was false, and it was easy to demonstrate that. 

Instead of saying "oops sorry" you talked about something else. 

You are an unrepentant liar.

Still ignoring the topic and blaming me for it.

[GrandizerII]

Just started reading Edward Feser's "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide".

Nothing to say much at this point as I haven't gotten to the meat of Aquinas' philosophy yet. I did get to read a brief account of Aquinas' life in the first chapter of this book, and I found some parts of the story to be quite amusing (e.g., the prostitute bit).

And the stuff said before that was insightful, on the value of challenges posed to us "moderns" by philosophies of the past.

Actually, the bit where Feser makes a brief statement or two about "revealed theology" was rather ludicrous, but he does thankfully make it clear the book isn't about that anyway.