In thinking about what I read and why, I suppose a theme arises. I just want to know why the world is the way it is. What I am coming to understand is that it’s a slow, complicated process way beyond the ability of any one person to understand. But one thing is for sure: Ideas matter.
Here are some of my favorites.
The Weirdest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich
This whole book is like a list of uncomfortable facts based on this: The Western Church's Marriage and Family Program (MFP) is what helped to shape the Western mind.
Before the MFP, which promoted monogamy and marrying outside of your family/kinship circles, clan and kinship based relationships strongly influenced the psychology of humanity. Once the MFP started forcing people to find mates outside of that familial social network, they had to create new families and social networks that relied on a trust not based on family connections. This is how the Western mind became so individualistic. That mindset sparked a complete transformation of psychology for people in what we now call Western nations.
One fascinating tidbit of knowledge that is an example of how impactful this change was is this: People in kin-based social networks referred to as segmentary lineages respond more aggressively to threats of their "honor, family, or property" as compared to people in cultures without kin-based familial and social institutions. Modern examples include Boko Haram, Al Shabab, and Al Qaeda who "all recruit heavily from populations with segmentary lineages."
The amount of evidence and research professor Henrich presents can be tedious, but it drives home the point and makes it difficult to say anything other than, at the very least, it's an idea we have to integrate into our understanding of the world.
This Book Changed Everything, by Vishal Mangalwadi
Vishal goes through the historical influence of the Bible on Western societies. I was shocked at the depth to which he was able to point to foundational principles and practical examples, and here are just a couple.
Often the religiosity of the Founding Fathers comes into question. Whatever motivates people to question it is out course varied. But some undeniable, practical examples shed some light on their mindset.
The original draft of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson claimed that the rights of men are "sacred" as opposed to self evident, which is not a secular source. He also worked with Benjamin Franklin in designing the original seal of the United States which was Moses parting the Red Sea, escaping the tyranny of Egypt much like the United States escaped the tyranny of Great Britain.
A famous phrase and concept that Lincoln used in the Gettysburg Address described the United States as a nation "of the people, by the people, and for the people", also has religious roots. Its first appearance is in the old Wickliffe Bible, which was translated no later than 1384. In its preface, it declares that "this Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people."
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
Broken up into three sections - Antisemitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism - the third was my favorite. There were so many parallels in the ideas behind totalitarianism and today's popular culture.
The deepest was what Arendt refers to as "scientism" as a type of religious dedication to science as the savior of mankind. During the COVID pandemic it was hard to go more than five minutes without hearing "follow the science" or "trust the science" as if it was the source of all truth while ignoring the fact that it's a process created and performed by fallible human beings. At one time Dr. Fauci referred to himself as "the Science."
"...thus totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which 'science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.'"
The Book That Made Your World by Vishal Mangalwadi
Another book by Vishal that provides some details on the evolution of civilization from a Biblical perspective had one fact about India that blew my mind. All modern, literary languages in India, seventy-three of them to be exact, are the result of Biblical translations.
There is a Biblical idea that in order to form a nation, a people need a common language. (Think Tower of Babel) And the Lutheran concept of solo scriptura which dictates each individual to be responsible for their own spiritual journey through reading the Bible, requires people to be able to read. A people must have a written language in order to read and Biblical translators created written languages in India for the sole purpose of translating the Bible into the mother tongue of their converts. The literacy promoted by Martin Luther didn't stop on the shores of English speaking lands, but transformed the East as well.
The Rifle by Andrew Biggio
Andrew Biggio does a great service to his nation and to the veterans of World War II by interviewing several surviving veterans and telling their stories.
I had a narrative about the military that was shattered by my own and this book's stories. Movies and television shows make it seem like the military will take young men, dump them into war, and then dump them back on the porch of their house like used up trash. It's not like that at all.
It can take almost a year of training before you even get to a battlefield, and that's only if you're trained for combat. Additionally, there were at least two stories of veterans Andrew interviewed who on their way home were sent to a facility in Lake Placid, New York, to help them deal with what they called "battle fatigue." Even during the time of WWII we knew about PTSD and made attempts to help our veterans deal with it.
Something else changed my perspective on the Iwo Jima flag raising that has become an icon of victory. Important to know is that the flag was raised during battle, and many troops were killed and injured beyond that event for days after the raising, as the island was not yet secure.
The Origins of American Constitutionalism by Donald S. Lutz
A great empirically based review of the ideas behind the founding of the United States. The amount of research that must have gone into this book is astounding. Kudos to Professor Lutz.
A couple things stood out and stuck with me.
First, the structure of our Constitution is based on Biblical covenants. Being so far from Great Britain, these religiously oriented settlers, mostly Calvinists, needed to self-govern even as they still remained loyal to their British rulers.
The first thing most communities did was to covenant a church. Those covenants relied on a consistent structure with five foundational elements: God as a witness, why the agreement is necessary, identifies a people, creates a church, and defines the kind of people they want to become.
This structure is reflected in following political documents to include the Mayflower Compact, The Pilgrim Code of Law, the state constitutions, and finally, the U.S. Constitution.
Second, when reviewing the political writings leading up to the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, the sources vary depending on the decade, but the majority of references are Biblical, mostly from Deuteronomy. Also, of the political pamphlets distributed that helped to spread the word and inspire the Revolution, eighty-percent of those were reprinted sermons.
One can argue that the United States is not a "Christian nation," but there is no doubt that it is heavily influenced by religious ideas. Which makes sense for religious refugees.
Even our first secular political document was a covenant created by the most religious of our American ancestors who excluded using God in a political document as they saw it as tantamount to taking God's name in vain.
The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet
So nice, I accidentally read it twice. Desmet does a great job at taking the reader through a journey into the process that created the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism. Like Hannah Arendt, he makes a point of emphasizing its modern characteristics. Or to say it another way, totalitarianism only arises in the twentieth century because twentieth century man is particularly different in a few key ways.
What he expands upon and makes current is the modern obsession with science as the only and supreme guiding factor for humanity. I think it's best described as the effects of humanity's over confidence in its own ability to use scientific tools to understand and then calculate or predict the human experience.
As great mathematician René Thom said, "That portion of reality, which can be well described by laws which permit calculations, is extremely limited."
Desmet does a nice job of providing current examples that more people should really know about, specifically the replication crisis of 2005. Numerous scientific studies had to be retracted because of an inability to replicate their findings, and some were even found to be fraudulent.
This type of problem was reflected in much of our COVID response which fed into what can only be described as totalitarian light.
The Language of Creation by Matthieu Pageau
Imagine an engineer uses his engineer mind to dissect and re-present the cosmology of the Bible in terms common people can understand. That's exactly what Pageau does in this book.
All too often, both proud atheists and fundamentalists alike, critique the Bible without accounting for the fact it was written by/for people thousands of years ago with a spiritual perspective and not a material/scientific perspective. (They didn't even have science!)
They cared about spiritual development and weren't looking to understand material reality. They weren't asking the questions scientists ask about the world so they provide answers that are not scientific.
When looking at a plant, a scientists asks, "What is it made of and how does it work?" A spiritual perspective asks, "What is its meaning and what truth does it embody?"
So to take a materialist mindset and throw it back onto text written so long ago by people you don’t understand is unfair and unproductive. You can’t even do that with people today who live in different cultures so doing it for ancient people is even more ridiculous.
For example, when the Bible talks about heaven and earth, it isn't talking about a planet that orbits the sun, third after Venus. Heaven and earth for the Bible refer to material reality below (earth) and spiritual reality above (sun/light/consicousness). Once you understand how to read the Bible using its own cosmology, it makes a lot more sense. Just understanding that one aspect of Biblical cosmology shapes so many of the stories and links them all together.
I've found that after reading this book, I see the echoes of these spiritual realities everywhere. I now understand why churches have gold colored spires and why most atheists and fundamentalists keep getting everything so wrong.
Woke Racism by John McWhorter
This is the second book I've read by Professor McWhorter and again, he nails it. If you're looking for a not-so-mean understanding of why modern anti-racism is not only a barrier to progress, but laughable, this is your book.
It took me maybe forty-eight hours to read it. That's likely because McWhorter is a linguist by education and writes like butter. It couldn't be clearer or easier to read.
One of my favorite sections comes early on when he lays out several obvious contradictions we hear from the progressive woke today.
Here are a couple of my favorites:
"When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt". But... "Don't put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have health with too much to be expected to."
"If you're white and date only white people, you're a racist." But..."If you're white and date a black person you are, if only deep down, exotifying an 'other'"
With smooth precision Professor McWhorter points out how the best way forward is what we already know and have been struggling to expand since the nation's founding, and during the Civil Rights movement. Modern anti-racism does nothing but purposefully move us away from what we already know works.
The Immortality Key by Brian C. Muraresku
Muraresku treats his journey to understand the Ancient Greek mysteries like an investigative journalist, and takes us along on his trip.
If you are not aware of the Ancient Greek mysteries, just learning about what they are is rewarding enough. Most of the ancient philosophers we are familiar with participated in this tradition which looks to be a journey to Eleusis, some initiation by priestesses, a drinking of a secret formula, and a hallucinogen inspired mental journey to the ends of the universe.
What Muraresku does is investigate what exactly it was they were drinking, what other cultures did similar, and how it evolved into modern sacraments. Or to say it differently, is taking communion in Christian churches derived from Ancient Greek traditions linked to hallucinations that in themselves were their own religions?
It was a lot of fun to read and had a ton of insights into how religions are created and affect our daily lives.
The secrecy with which the original tradition was kept in itself was incredible. One of Socrates' disciples, Alcibiades, was exiled under the threat of death for merely discussing his experience at Eleusis.
The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams
This is a bit of an obscure book that I found through reading The Immortality Key. Professor Lewis-Williams is a world renowned expert in rock art and takes us on a journey into the mind of ancient humans and beyond. It's like an archeological journey through the origins of human consciousness as evidenced by ancient art.
A couple things stuck with me.
One was that a lot of ancient cave art is of animals without feet. We tend to think that ancient people are simply painting pictures of animals they saw in real life, but it is much more likely that these paintings were from dreams and/or visions. The animals often don't have feet because they are not being represented as animals standing on the ground, but as animals seen in visions. Objects in visions seem to float, and floating creatures need not feet to stand, not being connected to the ground.
Another little gem was a discussion about social hierarchies and how they form. When archeologists look to determine if there is any gender stratification, they infer based on how different the two genders are, morphologically. That goes for ancient humans and their ancestors of different species. So to think of gender as purely socially constructed would be to ignore hundreds and thousands of years of evolution. Our differences are much deeper and older than consciousness itself.
Political Pilgrims by Paul Hollander
There's an incredibly weird tendency for Western intellectuals to romanticize incredibly brutal, foreign regimes. Hollander details those instances and discussed some of the why behind this phenomenon.
I was already aware of this to some extent, as young people wear Che Guevarra shirts, ignoring his history of rape and murder. But the extent with which it happened over and over with regimes of such murderous tendencies is something I did not realize. And it isn't just misguided teenagers. Many of the stories and documents are from top journalists, our own politicians to include presidents like Kennedy, and several college educated intellectuals.
One story that stuck with me was of a young couple enamored with the idea of "equality" and free health care in the Soviet Union. They cut their social experiment short when they actually needed healthcare and ended up not only without timely help, but sicker than when they started.
Why does this keep happening? Likely because progressivism is akin to Gnosticism in that their adherents seem to think that they are privy to special knowledge (woke) about the future of mankind which can be socially constructed and deters them from simply reading the lessons of history.
As I started looking through the books I’ve read this year and thinking about the ideas I gathered, I realized that I had trouble remembering which books I read this year. It seems like it was just a few weeks ago that my reading friends were putting their lists and goals on Goodreads.com. I now realize why they did it. The year flashed by and reviewing my progress is futile.
So here’s to doing it right this time! Let’s join up. Here’s my profile and share what you’re reading. Let’s do it right for 2023.