Does this thing still work?

 Is this thing on?

A few years ago I was at least updating this at least with the reading I was doing, if nothing else.

Books of 2018: Race and Leftist studies

In my last reading update, I said of my tour of black studies that I was "kinda finished." Except then I kept reading. Since that post, I read the following:

• Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Women, Race, and Class - Angela Y Davis
• The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
• The Racial Contract - Charles W Mills
• Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition - Cedric Robinson
• Racism: A Short History - George Fredrickson

In addition to these, I have one last book I plan to read as a part of this project (which is not to say that I won't read more black and race literature — I certainly will): Rethinking Racial Justice, by Andrew Valls. And yes, the caucasity of letting two white dudes have the last words on race theory is not lost on me. See my previous reading update for my assessment of black/race studies.

To break that project up a little, I also started my long overdue course on socialism and leftism, including finally reading Marx (the hate-read of the Communist Manifesto I did during the Randian haze of my freshman year of university doesn't really count, I think). Not a big total, but the Marx book was huge, and I consider Davis, Fanon, and Robinson from above to be part of this project as well.

• Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan (ed.)
• Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya

And I'm about 10% into the massive Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski. My thoughts on Marxism so far are mostly that Marx got a lot wrong, and he really didn't deserve the world-historical level of influence he attained. That said, the humanistic elements of Marxian thought — as discussed in the Dunayevskaya — are interesting and valuable. I tend to think that liberalism needs to be socialized (in that the social context is insufficiently attended to in a lot of liberal theory), socialism could do itself massive favors by adopting suitably altered liberal institutions, and that there is an attractive no man's land between the blurry frontiers of liberalism and (democratic) socialism.

The rest of my nonfiction reading for the year didn't conform to a theme. I finally read the Captured Economy, by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, an excellent, timely book about the reforms we should be making to our political economy. And I read A Turn to Empire, by Jennifer Pitts. Pitts reviews the patterns of liberal thought on imperialism from the late 18th century through the 19th century, showing how the later thinkers in this period rejected an earlier liberal anti-imperialism. My yearly fix of Nussbaum was her Therapy of Desire. I had expected to like it more than the Fragility of Goodness, as the books have similar themes, but the former involves an explicit comparison of her Aristotelian ethics with other Hellenistic approaches, but Fragility managed to be less tedious, more engaging. That said, Therapy had some very interesting discussions on diverse topics. Finally, Dear Ijeawelle, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was a delightful little feminist manifesto, highly recommended especially as a jargon-free introduction to feminism.

I read more fiction than I reckoned I would. Two Star Wars books, one pretty good and one horrendous. Revan was an utter violation of the promise and philosophical sophistication of the Knights of the Old Republic games. I read one Black Panther graphic novel when I was hyped up about the film. I read the Wheel of Time prequel, which I'm certain I'd read many years ago, but I'd forgotten all the details. And the greatest new find was the Expanse series, the first book of which was wildly entertaining.

• Revan - Drew Karpyshyn
• Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves
• Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
• New Spring - Robert Jordan
• Black Panther, Book 1 - Ta-Nehisi Coates

A feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time

And now for something completely different: a feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time!

If Jordan Peterson is right that the symbolism of chaos as feminine and order as masculine is deeply rooted in the human psyche or collective consciousness or whatever, then the feminism of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is even more subversive than I'd previously thought. [Editor's note: Of course Jordan Peterson is a clown show, but when this was originally written, Peterson was all over the place. No respect for Peterson is intended.]

SPOILERS to follow.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The protagonist is, of course, the Lord of Chaos. He is the breaker of bonds, meaning social relations would be torn asunder in his wake. He brought conquest and war. The White Tower, the most powerful institution, broke into civil war over how to deal with him. And of course the chaos of his actions corroded the seals on the Dark One's prison.

Rand is thus easily seen as a male representation of chaos. Importantly, it's not just that the protagonist happened to be a man. An obvious feminist interpretation of the Wheel of Time is that toxic masculinity is literally a kind of madness, and it's a madness that threatens to destroy the world.

There are different ideas about what toxic masculinity means, but a common one is that masculinity becomes toxic when vulnerability becomes anathema. When vulnerability must be avoided at all costs, then men cannot share emotions like fear or grief, and these emotions are suppressed and left unexamined. Even love and affection are avoided because love opens one to the threat of loss. Basic human connection is strained and mental (and spiritual) health suffers. Anger, however, is conceived as an emotion coming from strength.

Rand fits this description quite well. He still feels love, but he struggles against this. He feels as if he must suppress all weakness in order to defeat the Dark One, be impervious to the threat of losing loved ones lest they be used against him. As the series (and his madness) progresses he lashes out in anger more and more. Cadsuane's project to make Rand once again cry and laugh is pivotal. We come to understand that Rand's toxic masculinity was the form the saidin madness took with him. When he finally learns at the peak of Dragonmount how to keep the madness at bay, he does so by once again learning how to laugh, cry, love, and fear. Post-Dragonmount Rand not only can talk about his feelings, but he can trust again, and his presence begins to heal the blighted world around him.

Chaos in the Wheel of Time is not just masculine, it is toxic masculinity.

Rand's foil is neither the Dark One nor any of the Forsaken or other darkfriends, but Egwene al'Vere, who symbolizes order.

As Rand is the breaker of bonds, Egwene is just as much a forger of bonds, and a healer of broken institutions. She forges connections between the Tower and other groups of female channelers, thus shining a light on a history of cover-ups and deceit while creating new relationships, alliances, and opportunities for fruitful exchange.

One of her primary arcs in the story is the campaign to reunite the White Tower and to heal the political rot within. She resists the temptation to accomplish this with open warfare, though she likely could have succeeded. It's hard to see such a strategy coming from Rand, who, for example, broke the Aiel in twain and hurled them against the wetlanders.

Instead, she nurtures back to health trust between the Aes Sedai factions and faith in the White Tower itself, the lack of which were the ultimate causes of the rot. She does this from within the Tower during her captivity by nonviolent protest in the vein of Gandhi and MLK. Her conspicuous vulnerability was her greatest strength. This contrasts vividly with Rand, whose own time of captivity only accelerated his paranoid madness.

Even her Talents with the One Power symbolize order. She has a knack for Earth (rare for saidar), suggesting solidity. She independently rediscovers how to create cuendillar, a material that becomes stronger with every attempt to destroy it (antifragility is a kind of order). And in an unfortunate bit of goofy writing, she's even depicted as inventing an anti-balefire. Balefire is a weapon of pure chaos that burns threads directly from the Pattern. It's fitting that Rand goes a little nuts with balefire, and it's equally fitting that it is Egwene who finds a way to directly patch the Pattern back together.

Egwene's representation of order is feminine in a traditional sense, featuring vulnerability, nurture, and an orientation toward relationships. But it's important to acknowledge that Egwene isn't a sexist caricature of femininity. She is also presented as brave (she has the heart of an Aiel, with whose Wise Ones she trained), adventurous, sharp (she's not only inventive with the Power, but a ferociously savvy politician), and possessing a strength of will rivaling any other character in the series (in one contest of wills she straight up breaks the mind of one of the Forsaken).

Summing up, the Wheel of Time inverts Jordan Peterson's symbolism of feminine chaos and masculine order. Rand consistently represents not just chaos but a particularly toxic-masculine form of chaos. And the most pivotal moment of the series is when Rand reengages his "feminine" aspects and becomes thereby a truly human, whole being. Meanwhile Rand's foil doesn't just happen to be a woman, but a woman who represents a particularly "feminine" order of nurture, vulnerability, and human connection.

Reading update: libertarianism, democracy, black studies, and Marxism

So long libertarianism

It's been over a year since my last reading update! In my last post I summarized both my feminism and libertarianism reading projects. One interesting development of the libertarianism reading project plus marinating in the Trump era is that I've determined I can no longer call myself a libertarian. One thing I gleaned from my reading is that there's a useful distinction to be drawn between libertarianism and classical liberalism, based roughly on the property rights absolutism/monism and anti-institutional tendencies of libertarianism versus the more comprehensive value pluralism and sensitivity to institutional context of classical liberalism. That's the theory. In recent practice, most libertarians have also just proven to be exceptionally useless in understanding Trump. Trump, to most libertarians, is just another politician, and not any kind of special threat. I wrote a rather long critique of libertarian anarchism, and most of the arguments therein apply to minarchist libertarianism as well.

Democracy

In my last post I also hinted at a miniature reading project inspired by Jerry Gaus's Tyranny of the Ideal, and I did read a few such books:

• The Difference - Scott Page
• Democratic Reason - Hélène Landemore
• Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance - Ryan Muldoon
• Against Democracy - Jason Brennan

I recommend Page and Muldoon, even though I somehow failed to review Muldoon's book. The common theme within all the books except Brennan's is that a pluralistic society leverages epistemic advantages by the very fact of pluralism. People from different walks of life, regardless of their raw intelligence, bring different perspectives, or different ways of organizing information about the world. These different perspectives each can make certain problems more readily soluble. I read Against Democracy as a sanity check on my enthusiasm for this idea. As I make clear in the link, I was unimpressed.

And all that other stuff

I took a break from major reading projects after this mini-project just to read a few things I'd been meaning to get to. I read Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments and Wolff & de-Shalit's Disadvantage, from the capabilities literature, back to back. I have a long simmering idea of writing an essay connecting these two works. Namely, I want to argue that access to effective, growth oriented institutions (Cowen) is a powerful example of a fertile functioning (Wolff & de-Shalit), or a capability/functioning that naturally tends to enable the development of further valuable capabilities/functionings.

In my hodgepodge between-projects reading, I also read Liz Anderson's wonderful book, Private Government. Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order and Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan both helped me write my critique of anarchism. And I finally got around to reading a couple classics: Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and Seneca's On Anger. After finally serendipitously spotting it at Powell's after years of looking, I read Martha Nussbaum's Fragility of Goodness. All of Nussbaum is really an ongoing project of mine. I've loosely set a goal to read one Nussbaum book per year, which should keep me busy for the rest of my life at her rate of publication. Next up in this effort will be the Therapy of Desire. I read Capitalism: For and Against, by Ann Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom after seeing it referenced by Charles Mills (see below) in his Occupy Liberalism essay (incidentally one of my favorite essays since my last update here). Ann Cudd is amazing and I'm looking forward to reading more by her. Finally, Jacob T Levy did not disappoint with Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (which, inexcusably, I neglected to review).

Black studies

That brings me to my tour of black studies, which I have kinda finished, though I'm still reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and I'm planning to read more Angela Davis for my next project (see below).

• The Making of Black Lives Matter - Christopher Lebron
• Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Davis
• The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois
• The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
• The Imperative of Integration - Elizabeth Anderson
• Black Rights / White Wrongs - Charles Mills
• Stamped from the Beginning - Ibram Kendi
• The Killing Rage - bell hooks
• The Future of Whiteness - Linda Martín Alcoff

And I watched Black Panther. Only half kidding about this, given the amount of commentary I read both before and after the film's release and the discussion groups I participated in.

This was an incredibly productive reading project, significantly nudging my perspective, albeit in a direction I was already trending. Concretely, I was skeptical of affirmative action before embarking on this tour, and I thought reparations were a clearly bad idea, both for political reasons and problems with targeting. Anderson convinced me of the merits of affirmative action as an instrument for integration even while she criticized other more common defenses of affirmative action that I was familiar with (as compensation, for example). By the time I got through Kendi, even though he doesn't focus on this, I came around to the idea of reparations (details matter, obviously) and the principle of black power generally. Blacks and other marginalized or oppressed peoples have to seize what power (economic, social, political) they can when they can (though not by "any means necessary"). Waiting for those things to come from the grace of the powerful is getting the cart before the horse. Power and privilege is jealously guarded, and this seems to be just a feature of humanity. Interestingly, my thoughts on black power resonate with some of the things I've learned from, e.g., Fukuyama and Acemoglu/Robinson on how equality and inclusive institutions typically depend on historical contingencies that happen to empower some groups relative to the existing elites. This is also in line with Jacob Levy's sort of agonistic view of politics and pluralism, from which I've learned a lot.

I'm also enchanted with the idea of "black radical liberalism" as is being developed by Charles Mills. Mills accepts what I view as the most challenging critiques of liberalism in both theory and practice without trying to claim these aren't "real liberalism." He argues that liberalism can survive these critiques but only if it turns away from ideal theory and embraces instead a non-ideal and rectificatory approach. Specifically, racialization and sex/gender oppression seen in actual non-ideal societies should be the focus of corrective justice, rather than being seen as deviations from liberalism (see paragraph above). I'm itching to write about this, especially since I think there are potentially very fruitful alternative directions to the one Mills has chosen. He's working from a theoretical tripod of liberalism (Kant and Rawls), radical theory (Marx), and black critical theory. A black radical capabilities liberalism could, at least in some ways, replace both the Kant/Rawls and the Marx legs, with the additional advantage that the capabilities approach is already well-suited to non-ideal theory and liberal practices.

Marxism/socialism

I've just started the Selected Writings of Karl Marx, edited by David McLellan. I've only read one book on socialism thus far (Socialism after Hayek), and this seems like a clear gap in my knowledge, especially since some kind of Marxian analysis is often implicit in some of the other topics I've become at least peripherally interested in, like radical feminism and black radicalism (see above). I'm ... not exactly in danger of becoming a Marxist. Or a socialist, except insofar as democratic socialists blend into social democrats blend into social justice-oriented (neo!)liberals. But I do have the impression that Marx has a far more humanistic perspective than some of the more economistic classical liberals. Marx was also inspired to some degree by Aristotle. Whatever the failures are of the labor theory of value and like, actual communism in the world (understatement), I'm pretty open-minded that Marxian class analysis might have useful resources. Anyway, at this point I don't even know enough to know what to read, but here are a few I'm intending to read so far:

• Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan
• Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya
• Women, Race, and Class - Angela Davis
• I dunno some other stuff open to suggestions
• Main Currents of Marxism - Leszek Kolakowski

Books of 2016, feminism and libertarianism

In my previous post back in April I gave the first impressions of my tour of feminism, which I concluded with this facebook post. I also previewed the tour of libertarianism I had planned to embark on, a syllabus to fill some gaps from my youthful libertarian indoctrination. It's amazing how these proposed lists differ so much from what I actually read. And then there was my New Years resolution to read more scifi and fantasy. I pretty much failed that as soon as I got inspired to read Les Misérables (just over 25% through that one ...).

Anyway, here's the list, with links provided to my reviews or relevant blog posts. Turns out I wrote a lot of book reviews this year.

• Justice at a Distance - Loren Lomasky & Fernando Tesón
• Women and Western Political Thought - Susan Moller Okin
• Feminine and Feminist Ethics - Rosemarie Tong
• Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men - Anne Fausto-Sterling
• Justice, Gender, and the Family - Susan Moller Okin
• Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics - Seyla Benhabib
• Sex and Social Justice - Martha Nussbaum
• See also this blog post on objectification.
• And this one on social justice versus social mercy.
• Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities - Martha Nussbaum & Jonathan Glover (eds.)
• Toward a Feminist Theory of the State - Catharine MacKinnon
• See also this blog post on how radical feminism is, like all fundamentalisms, epistemically closed.
• Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing - Miranda Fricker
• See this blog post on distinguishing between wrongness and culpability. 
• And this one trying to apply the concepts of testimonial injustice and (less successfully) hermeneutical injustice to rape culture.
• Justice and the Politics of Difference - Iris Marion Young
• Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? - Susan Moller Okin (lead essay)
• Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand - Mimi Reisel Gladstein & Chris Matthew Sciabarra (eds.)
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
• The Warrior's Apprentice - Lois McMaster Bujold
• I, Jedi - Michael Stackpole
• Liberalism: The Classical Tradition - Ludwig von Mises
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia - Robert Nozick
• Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order - Doug Rasmussen & Doug Den Uyl
• Free Market Fairness - John Tomasi
• See also this blog post on my own version of market democracy: free market capabilities.
• The Future and Its Enemies:  - Virginia Postrel
• Elements of Justice - David Schmidtz
• The Tyranny of the Ideal - Gerald Gaus

Somehow I never got around to reviewing Elements of Justice, even though it was excellent. It argues for value pluralism. Our understanding of justice is a hodgepodge of multiple considerations, such as equality, need, desert, and reciprocation. Good judgment comes in understanding where and how these different kinds of reasons apply and why.

I'm finishing my tour of libertarianism (really classical liberalism) with Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality. Though I do plan to read Jacob Levy's Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom when it appears in paperback.

I don't have anything too coherent planned for a new reading project. Gaus turned me onto some new thinkers I want to check out: Helene Landemore and Scott Page. With current events firmly in mind, I want to read more history and history-based accounts of civilization and political stability. And I also want to devote some energy to reading books that have been sitting on my shelf for a long time collecting dust.

Feminism update, libertarianism preview

I've started off 2016, according to plan, with a lot of feminism. I've been trying to be faithful with writing some kind of review of each book, whether it's a full-on blog post, a Goodreads review, or even a facebook status. The links are to those items, not to like, amazon pages.

1. Women in Western Political Thought - Susan Moller Okin
2. Feminine and Feminist Ethics - Rosemarie Tong
3. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men - Anne Fausto-Sterling
4. Justice, Gender, and the Family - Susan Moller Okin (see also this facebook post)
5. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics - Seyla Benhabib
6. Sex and Social Justice - Martha Nussbaum (See also this blog post on objectification).

This is in addition to the feminist works I read last year (Mill's Subjection of Women and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, by bell hooks).

Benhabib's book ended up being a lot more about discourse ethics than feminism specifically, but I'm glad I read it. Feminism plays into discourse ethics by way of the necessity of including diverse perspectives in dialogue. Myths of Gender seemed very good, but I couldn't think of much to say about it. It's the kind of thing that unfortunately probably needs to be updated once every decade or so. And this has been done, both by Fausto-Sterling in newer books and by other feminist scientists. Okin's schtick of analyzing Western canonical philosophers through the feminist lens is pretty rewarding. I highly recommend Tong's book as an introduction to feminist ethics. My favorite book by far has been Nussbaum's book, which is a kind of harmonization of liberalism and feminism through a neo-Aristotelian approach. It also just includes great treatments of important figures in feminism, both good and bad (Andrea Dworkin and Christina Hoff Sommers, for example) and tricky topics (objectification, sex work, colonialism). I reckon I'm about 60% finished with this project. Here are the next books on deck:

1. Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities - Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (eds.)
2. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing - Miranda Fricker
3. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women - Susan Moller Okin (ed.)
4. A Vindication of the Rights of Whores - Gail Pheterson (ed.)
5. Economics for Humans - Julie A Nelson

And this list may expand with new ideas or contract with fatigue. I'll almost certainly take a break after Women, Culture and Development in order to gobble up Deirdre McCloskey's thrilling conclusion to the Bourgeois Trilogy which came in the mail this week.

But I'm already looking forward to my next reading project, which is a deep dive into academic libertarianism. I've come a long way from my youthful Rand-influenced anarchism. Usually I feel more post-libertarian than libertarian, and have lately been calling myself just plain ol' "liberal" more and more. In part because of this, I want to read some classics I missed and read what some of libertarianism's best exponents have to offer. I'm thinking these:

1. Anarchy, State, and Utopia - Robert Nozick
2. Liberty and Nature: an Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order - Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl
3. Elements of Justice - David Schmidtz
4. Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society, and the Boundaries of Political Theory - John Tomasi
5. Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom - Jacob Levy
6. Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community - Loren Lomasky
7. Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms - Vernon Smith
8. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism - Chris Matthew Sciabarra
9. The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society - Jerry Gaus
10. Jason Brennan's and Bas van der Vossen's book on cosmopolitan justice.

Any suggestions welcome, for either good feminism or good libertarianism.

Books of 2015

I'm pretty proud of the reading I managed in 2015. I started the year finishing up my self-led course on virtue ethics (more on that in this post). I also honored my new year's resolution to read more substantive fiction this year (a resolution inspired in part by my interest in virtue ethics, incidentally). In addition to those below, I've got less than 100 pages to go in War and Peace, and I'll finish it by year's end barring hell, high water, and such.

Biggest surprise of the year: Structure of Scientific Revolutions was awesome, and made me realize I am apparently quite partial to postmodernism, at least as I currently understand it, and in what is probably one of its milder forms.

Socialism after Hayek was another delightful discovery. "Hayekian socialism" as a topic was just bound to be interesting, but I had no idea Burczak also appealed to the capabilities approach. This was fortuitous to find right after that little thing I wrote earlier this year.

Biggest disappointment was probably Burdened Virtues, which I expected to love based on my commitment to both feminism and virtue ethics. That said it was still interesting, and I don't regret reading it. Okay I take that back. The biggest disappointment of the year was Michel Foucault, which was so disappointing that I actually blocked it from my mind. I think I gave it one star on Goodreads.

Peace, Love, & Liberty, (Tom Palmer (ed.))
The Morality of Happiness (Julia Annas)
The State of the Art (Iain M Banks)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin)
Bourgeois Dignity (Deirdre McCloskey)
Burdened Virtues (Lisa Tessman)
Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Daniel C Russell)
Socialism After Hayek (Theodore Burczak)
Cordelia's Honor (Lois McMaster Bujold)
feminist theory: from margin to center (bell hooks)
On Liberty (John Stuart Mill)
The Subjection of Women (John Stuart Mill)
The History of Sexuality, Part 1 (Michel Foucault)
The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Daniel C Russell (ed.))
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, tentative)

Great list, right? Well, one thing that bites is I basically sacrificed all my reading of the Economist. I regret this and I'm resolving not to let that happen again next year. I'll probably read many fewer books next year because I want to get back in the Economist's good graces. Consider that a resolution.

Another resolution: read more sci-fi/fantasy! A few months ago I took one of those online quizzes that ask you what sci-fi/fantasy books you've read. Almost all my friends blew me out of the water. I consider speculative fiction to be part of my identity, so this made me feel like a bit of an impostor. I want to read at least five books next year. Probably going to start with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, then read some more Bujold.

Otherwise, I plan to read a bit of feminism and a bit of libertarianism. Susan Moller Okin, Elizabeth Anderson, and Seyla Benhabib are all on the list. And it seems like a few of the libertarian public intellectuals I stalk have books coming out in 2016 (although maybe I'm being optimistic here). And there are some classics like Nozick I feel I should get to at some point.