Exuberance! Exitement! Reading Log!!!

sponsoredwalk

First off the Manifesto was written in 1848 by refugees trying to write a
pamphlet containing a moral & political philosophy whereby a study of
the history of class struggle from feudalism to capitalism would illustrate
the need for a different society in which man was no more pitted against
man in a struggle for power & resources.

Second there is no outline of the specific details of a new society because
that is not what the purpose for which the manifesto was written.

Third, the exclusion of any specific details is precisely the reason for which
the manifesto was written, namely becau se this philosophy was meant
to put to an end the idea that one man or a few men would be the ones
who would allocate wealth, resources, societal norms etc... I'm not
trying to be rude but excluding the rest of your opinions the fact that
you would point to these factors shows you thoroughally misunderstood
the pamphlet & brought to it the inevitable anachronistically flavoured
western bias that pervades modern political discourse.

Fourth, I don't think there are many people in history before Marx who
brought such a radical perception of history & class struggle. Yes it's
influenced by Hegel but Hegel wouldn't have written that as far as I
know, but that's based off second hand knowledge. The point being
that this was a radical pamphlet at the time & certainly had a huge
impact historically. Notice that there is nothing in this pamphlet that
calls for North Korea or Soviet Russia, quite the opposite.
" The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win."
Are you going to argue that phrases like these are the intellectual
roots of the gulag, the Stazi & show trials in Russia?

Fifth, the mention of religion is perfectly in line with the moral & intellectual
goals of this pamphlet if you understood what the goal of the pamphlet
are We are talking about a moral & political philosophy that is
supposed to revoke all forms of oppression & religion most certainly was
an oppressive force back in 1848. To Marx religion is the most fundamental
form of patriarchal subservience & ultimate arbiter of baseless authority.

Sixth, I would bet the introduction is thoroughally skewed. This is just
second hand but introductions are known for this. I read Noam Chomsky
talking about an introduction to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, well
read it yourself:
http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2008/01/chomsky-fuming-about-distortions-of.html
Notice the parallels to Marx

Seventh, I really think your letting the bastardized historical record of
abuses done in the name of Marx taint your reading.
"All I know is that I am not a Marxist." - Karl Marx.
Russian "communism" (centralized state capitalist denigrated workers state)
has very little to do with Marxism in practice, they may have trumped
on about thie theoretical alignment but the practice was nothing like
anything most Marxist theory would support. Similarly we could go into
detail about all flavours of this. If these are such dangerous ideas then
why didn't the Kibbutz movement overflow with bodies, or the many
matriarchal tribes based on communism end up in ruins? The ideals are
very similar, I think it means there are other vastly more detailed
reasons.

So, I don't think you were fair to the manifesto, but that's just my opinion


A book you might like to include in the, I'm sure, huge list you've got
planned is The Black Jacobin's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Jacobins-Toussaint-LOuverture-Revolution/dp/0679724672
This one is related to the French Revolution in many ways & it's a
fascinating story from what I know. I'm getting it on Tuesday
Danny Glover stole a script off some famous African filmmaker about
Toussaint L'ouverture & is supposedly making it while ignoring the
writers calls, but it will make a great movie even if the origins of the
movie are in stark contrast to the ideals of the person they are making
it about :pac:

Eliot Rosewater

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

whereby a study of the history of class struggle from feudalism to capitalism would illustrate the need for a different society in which man was no more pitted against man in a struggle for power & resources.

It doesn't give a description of what that alternative society is. It criticises capitalism, but what's to say the alternative is any better? History has shown that every alternative implemented by communists and socialists has been worse.

So this is the problem. One cannot merely use a system being bad to justify an alternative. The alternative must be shown to be better.

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

Seventh, I really think your letting the bastardized historical record of abuses done in the name of Marx taint your reading.

No, I'm not. Now that I've read the book I'm trying to understand why such abuses occured. In the absense of any concrete solution to the woes of capitalism, those socialists and communists who came to power in their various revolutions had a free hand. Without any actual recipe for the free society Marx called for, tyranny naturally ensued as leaders did whatever the heck they wanted.

This failure reflects on Marx (albeit in a small way). If you're calling for the overthrow of a system you have a moral responsbility to describe the alternative.

Eliot Rosewater

Other books I have read since:

John Locke - Second Treatise on Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration
A very interesting discussion on the nature of government. Far more theoretical than I thought it'd be. Locke considers pre-government society, and then builds a theory of how government gains legitimacy through voluntary co-operation between individuals, finally leading to states.

David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Meh. Reading this for a book club thingy, so will probably have to read it again. I got very little out of it, to be honest. Time Magazine ranked it the fourth best book of this year, and my friends seem to like it. I'm tempted to consider it a fault of myself (I couldn't understand it, etc) but I'm not so sure. Try as I may, I cannot see much merit in this book.

D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterly's Lover
Very good! Not at all as controversial as I though it'd be - but that's a reflection of more liberal attitudes these days I suppose. It's written very well, and has some genuinely interesting themes. Lawrence was proposing that people discover their sexuality. Even considering our liberal contemporary society, sex in a meaningful way is still a bit hush hush; that thing that's done in the bedroom and can't be mentioned but for jokes like "I rode her boi!" The class conflict element of the book was also enlightening.


Pretty slow reading, I'll admit. Indicative of my lack of enthusiasm for my current "to read" pile: this will hopefully change Saturday morning.

Eliot Rosewater

A Mathematician's Apology is an "apology" in that it seeks to justify the study of pure mathematics. GH Hardy was a mathematician at Cambridge, then Oxford, and then Cambridge again. He was highly interested in academic subjects other than maths (he loved cricket), and was good friends with other academics in Cambridge, like the classicist and poet AE Housman. This shows: the book is very well written, making Hardy yet another example of why the belief that "you're either good at science or humanities" is, frankly, such utter bollox.

The style of writing is almost conversational - the book is intended for the non-mathematical layman. Hardy makes a good case for studying mathematics for one's self. As he correctly points out, a lot of pure mathematics is useless in the short term, but it is as valuable as a great poem is. In the middle of the book he gives examples of two theorems - that the square root of 2 is irrational and that there are infinitely many prime numbers - and provides short proofs. He then analyses them and describes what makes these theorems and their proofs so aesthetically pleasing: the seriousness of the claims (ie: their generality), the clarity of argument etc.

If I were to describe this book in one word I would say "lovely". It's nice and easy, and gives a great insight into the works of mathematicians. You will generally understand the book regardless of your mathematical ability.


A coincidence: I got this book for Christmas, as well as the collected poems of AE Housman. In the first page of A Mathematician's Apology Hardy refers to a lecture given by Housman on the nature of poetry, and that lecture was actually included in the collected poems I got. As a mathematician I try to avoid calling things "coincidences", but that was really strange!

Eliot Rosewater

The great thing about the Penguin Great Ideas books is that they concisely introduce you to topics that, in the course of your normal reading, you would otherwise not encounter. Why Look At Animals? brings together eight essays and short stories by John Berger that generally deal with animals.

They're diverse enough. The collection opens with a very short story about a man who takes joy in capturing mice in his house and then watching them run free when he releases him in the garden. Another analyses the different relationship a working-class person and a middle-class person have with their food. (He makes an excellent observation about the timing of dinner: workers used take their dinner at midday, because they needed the energy from it for work, whereas the middle-class person took his dinner in the evening.) My favourite essay in the collection, Ape Theatre, considers the relationship between humans and their primate cousins.

Berger laments the contemporary human attitude toward animals, which he thinks won't change in the current "capitalist culture". Of old, he argues, humans met animals equally, and there was a striking relationship between them. But now we have lost the true contact with animals, in the age of zoos and industry.

Like all good Marxists Berger is an issue-mixer: he can't give his opinion on one topic without trying to give it on all topics, hence why in one of the animal essays he sticks in a strange dig at Thatcher! But his views are very interesting and such that I'd never considered before. Which is what made the book so good for me. Finding previously unheard of opinions forces you to consider your own attitudes and explore new ones.

Eliot Rosewater

It Must Be Beautiful is a collection of essays, each of which deals with an equation (of sorts) in a different area. The focus is not on the equations at all, but rather on the general area and how the equation relates to it. The book includes many famous equations, such as [LATEX]E=mc^2[/LATEX].

Though the majority of the essays are about physics, the other topic areas are quite broad. There is an essay about CFCs, and the relevant equations that uncovered their destructive effect on the ozone layer. Other topics include population dynamics, information/computer theory, extra-terrestrial life and game theory.

As I have never studied physics, I found a lot of essays difficult to understand (though I did get something from them). The non-physics essays were generally top class. Like the Penguin Great Ideas books, one of the principal strengths of this book is that it introduces you to diverse and interesting realms of science that you might otherwise not discover. It does it in a very applied manner - there's no throwing out equations and uncovering mathematical properties: this book is about how those equations shape the real world. That was my favourite aspect of this book.

Eliot Rosewater

The Oxford World's Classics edition of Lewis Carroll's two "Alice" books are keen to portray them not just as "nonsense" (in literary terms, they certainly are) but also as quite "complex textures of mathematical, linguistic and philosophical jokes". So I gave the books quite a bit of attention, which, in retrospect, I think they undoubtedly deserved.

On a literal level Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sees Alice, a little girl based on a child Carroll was close to, wander about Wonderland meeting all sorts of interesting folks - The White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, March Hare, The Cheshire Cat and the assortment of living playing cards (whose various social positions (Queen of Hearts, Guard, Gardener etc) become meaningless when their backs are turned).

Through The Looking Glass transports Alice to the Looking Glass world. This book has a quirky narrative structure: the plot is on an abstract level a game of chess (Alice moving to another place signals her moving across the chess board; her meeting the White Queen means she is adjacent to the Queen on the chess board; and so on).

As well as thoroughly enjoying the books on their nonsensical literal level, I found pleasure in the many intricacies, too. Looking Glass has references to Descartes ("I think therefore I am" becomes "the Red King thinks therefore Alice is" in Tweedledum and Tweedledee chapter). And the subtle maths!

"And how many hours a day did you do lessons?" said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
"Ten hours the first day," said the Mock Turtle: "nine the next day, and so on."
"What a curious plan!" exclaimed Alice.
"That's the reason they're called lessons," the Gryphon remarked: "because they lessen from day to day."
This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. "Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?"
"Of course it was," said the Mock Turtle.
"And how did you manage on the twelfth?" Alice went on eagerly.
"That's enough about lessons," the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone.

Which is exactly a lazy ("mock") maths lecturer's attitude towards dealing with uncomfortable consequences of some half-baked thing they're teaching!

Overall, I found the Alice books fantastic. The combination of literal nonsense with some meaningful undercurrents made for double the ordinary pleasure. They're easy going, but intellectual. And Tenniel's accompanying illustrations really add to the experience. So read them, and read the Oxford World's Classics edition while you're at it!

Eliot Rosewater

I'm going to start a new log for the new year, so this is, erm, the end. I read 48 books in 2010, which was 2 below target, but I think I made up for it in quality.

My favourite books of 2010 were:

• For Esme With Love and Squalor - JD Salinger
• Essays - George Orwell
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
• At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Though the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
• History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell
• Reflections the the Revolution in France - Edmund Burke

...and on that last note, have some coffee for the new year:





I hope you derived some kind of something from my ramblings. A song to finish!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgcoBKWTW14