Category: books

beggs on books.

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books

The Life You Can Save

Title
The Life You Can Save
Author
Peter Singer

I have been a utilitarian for as long as I’ve had a label for my worldview. I was greatly influenced early on by the works of Peter Singer [petersinger.info]. Most notably Practical Ethics [confusion.cc] and Animal Liberation [confusion.cc], both of which I’ve written of here on Confusion.

The first thing I read by Singer, in an introduction to ethics class long ago, was Famine, Affluence and Morality an article Singer published in 1972. The idea in Famine can be summed up as “you, and those you know, don’t give enough money to help poor, suffering people around the world, and that makes you a morally bad person”. It’s a short essay, a quick read, but its conclusion was, and in many ways still is, shocking. It’s easy to see why many people have a gut reaction to it, rejecting its conclusion. “How can I be a bad person, just because I don’t give all of my money to others, to others half a world away?” It’s an uncomfortable feeling that you might be morally bad. There are lots of objections to Famine including many academic or more thorough attempts to rebut it.

Singer expanded on the concepts of Famine and published The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty [thelifeyoucansave.org] in 2009 and an updated second edition in 2019. I missed it, not having read much philosophy or ethics in the past decade plus. But last year I stumbled across a series of philosophy lectures on YouTube by Jeffrey Kaplan [youtube.com] which included this episode on The Most Controversial Ethics Paper Ever Written [youtube.com], that covers the original Famine paper. After watching it I went looking for a copy of Famine and I stumbled upon The Life You Can Save. I ordered a physical copy of the book but you can get the ebook and even an audio copy read by some famous people from the link above, for free.

The book covers the original idea of the paper fairly quickly, with the a typical Singer approach of using leading you through a situation where few would disagree with his conclusions, then drawing a large moral equivalence between that situation and something much larger, and challenging the reader to find fault. He then spends the rest of its length addressing various objections or refutations of the moral conclusion that he draws from the parable and analogy.

The larger issue is global poverty and the apparent apathy that the world’s affluent have towards it and its effects. Affluent here means anyone who can cover their basic needs, meaning nearly everyone living in ‘western’, ‘developed’, ‘rich’ or ‘affluent’ countries. Meaning you and me and nearly everyone you know. To back up this accusation of apathy Singer includes significant time on data about giving, people’s perceptions of how much is given, how much should be given, and, the effects and efficiency of what is given or the lack thereof.

The updated second edition also includes a lot of stories about people who give, their money or time. Some were inspired by the first edition, some are an inspiration; rising from their own struggles to devote their lives to helping others.

Crucially there is also a discussion of what the Singer thinks is actually a reasonable, workable, contribution level that everyone can strive for. Even if you don’t live up to the ideal of giving until you are on the edge of needing yourself you can give, more than you think and it will help if you give well and you give intentionally. One of those people inspired by the first edition setup the charity that bears the name of the book; The Life You Can Save [thelifeyoucansave.org]`, dedicated to making giving easy and effective for everyone.

The Life You Can Save is a hard book. Like everything by Singer I have ever read I think most people will have a visceral reaction to it. I can’t imagine anyone having a neutral reaction to it. I think that if you read it and think about it, examine your life and the reality that the book discusses you can only have one of two reactions; you can give and give generously, or, you can work yourself into knots to avoid giving. Once you’ve read The Life You Can Save you can’t plead ignorance of this issue.

Reading Singer’s Practical Ethics [confusion.cc] and, later, Animal Liberation [confusion.cc] were foundational to my own self examination. Practical Ethics is still the single most influential book on my understanding of what I think, the fundamental morals and ethics I use to understand my worldview. It’s hard to live up to a code of ethics, it takes time and effort. It’s important to understand your own code, so that when you need to make a decision in the moment you have something to draw on. The Life You Can Save is more of the same, challenging and important. For myself, I have increased the amount I give, as a regular monthly donation after reading it. I have been giving for years, but I never increased it as my own income and ability to give increased.

You should read The Life You Can Save, get the ebook or audio book for free here [thelifeyoucansave.org] or listen to the full book as a podcast via Apple:

or Spotify:

There is no excuse.

Categories
books quotes

The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents

Title
The Parable of the Sower
Author
Octavia E. Butler
Title
The Parable of the Talents
Author
Octavia E. Butler

The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler should be the book of the moment. You should read it now, in 2024, during the presidential election.

The core of the Parable books is a post-apocalyptic America. Staring in 2024 in a time when America’s worst impulses as a society and climate change have together wrecked America. Poverty, drugs and violence are rampant. Wealth buys what there is of security, the police are pay to pay at best and all too often just robbers themselves welding power for themselves in a dog eat dog world. Public education is a thing of the past. And actually slavery and de-facto slavery —debt slavery— in factory towns has returned. Drug addled gangs roam the streets killing and burning at will. Good people are ground up and spit out. The rich and even the middle class build literal walls around their houses and cul-de-sacs to keep out the poor and the violent. People live 19th century lives in the 21st century, bartering, eating what they can grow or scavenge.

Sower follows the teenage years of Lauren Oya Olamina, who starts life in a walled middle class community, if violently thrust out into the wild and eventually come to found a new community —and religion— that aims to help all of humanity with an achievable purpose, not a spiritual salvation but a path to fixing the real world.

Talents continues the story, showing how bad the world can be to those trying to do good and how people can be misguided into doing horrible things… and how power, even and especially power seeped in righteous faith corrupts people or makes them blind to evil done in the name of their righteousness.

I don’t want to give any more of the story of Lauren and the others away. Read the books. But what I wanted to point out is how close the US feels to this post apocalyptic world. It’s 2024 and of course things are not as bad as they are when the book opens in 2024. But the trends are all there. We are too close to this to be comfortable. I’ll let the story stand on it’s own, here are some choice quotes:

The most scary quotes, have to do with the political movement, a right wing Christian group, Christian America, and their leader who’s slogan is:

“Help us to make America great again.”

MAGA, written in 1993, at the dawn of the 1990’s when we looked to a future we thought was bright. The end of communism, the triumph of capitalism and democracy. Somehow Butler knew. She pulled the threads together and predicted it. Like the Simpsons.

“The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven.”

That, more or less is the summary of the Christian nationalism [wikipedia.org] of Project 2025 [wikipedia.org] and many of the people behind it. Excluding everyone who doesn’t meet their definition of a good Christian according to their particular flavor and interpretation of Christianity.

Jarret’s fanatical followers were the greater danger. During Jarret’s first year in office, the worst of his followers ran amok. Filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened, ordinary citizens who only wanted order and stability,

Before Trump, before the rise of the Gospel of Wealth, before Nazi’s in Charlottesville. Jarret is an interesting stand-in for Trump. Jarret started as a preacher, not a property investor and reality TV star. But in the end he has political supporters and his out-of-control paramilitary hate groups. The Crusaders, like the Proud Boys and their ilk are extremists and domestic terrorists. And it’s all to realistic that the real-world crazies are only one steep away from the fictional crazies reign of terrors and atrocities.

Even some of the less religious ones support him. They say the country needs a strong hand to bring back order, good jobs, honest cops, and free schools. They say he has to be given plenty of time and a free hand so he can put things right again.

I hear some version of this from people I would not expect, rationalizing Trump, or ignoring his authoritarian and fascist tendencies for a variety of reasons. Often they are considering only one issue but when I ask, “why would you ever vote for someone who sounds like Hitler” they don’t seem to understand.

They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

This ones strikes a fundamental issue in America politics over the last 30 plus years. The fact that politicians have failed many Americans. Focusing on globalization and a view of the economy based on national level KPIs like GDP and unemployment, politicians on both sides have failed so many Americans. Both rural and inner-city have been left behind and neither party has made any real plan to help them. Their anger boiled over, hatred of the “elites” and the “deep state” are rational given how they failed. Trump road the rural anger into the White House in 2016.

I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Most people have given up on politicians. After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century ever since I can remember.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched

Climate change denial, the pandemic and its economic consequences, and the culture wars seem to fit the bill…

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they’ve been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don’t much matter.

This one hits close to home. The Supreme Court didn’t gut these ones, but they have been on a rampage recently overturning “settled law” and bending over backwards and contorting themselves into knots to justify their immunity ruling.

Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.

The desire for some mythical time when America was “great” and the lack of how limited that greatness was (great for who?) or what it took (high taxes, high government spending). Education hasn’t fallen so far that only 50% are literate but the susceptibility to online misinformation and disinformation seems to affect at least 50%.

Ok. Enough. We’re fucked and somehow she predicted it.

You should read The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents.

You should read them now, this year. You should read them before the US presidential election. You should read them after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and after the Supreme Court gutted checks and balances and all but declared the president a king by granting unbelievably broad absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.

Their good books but also scary prophetic. I don’t think I can explain it without spoiling it. It made me think, it made me concerned, in a few places it made me hopeful, but mostly it made me concerned about many things I’m already worried about.

Categories
books ranting

Of Literature and Genre Fiction

Some of my books, post featured image

The other day Richard Geib, who’s website musings I have followed for the past two decades [confusion.cc], posted a new blog entry: My Jane Austen Problem [rjgeib.com]. Before diving into Jane Austen specifically Mr. Geib recounts a period of time in college when he had a voracious appetite for all the famous literature I had heard about but never read. I would read anything and everything I could get my hands on.

The insatiable desire to read, during college, is something I can relate to, along with the fact the Mr. Geib was not a literature student, he was reading out of love for reading.

I never had a late night boring desk attendant job like Mr. Geib but I was nevertheless a voracious reader during college, with the mindset of “so many books, so little time”. I was never a fast reader but I read whenever I could. In and around my college days I devoured a lot of time to literature. I read Dostoevsky [wikipedia.org], Sartre [wikipedia.org], Nabokov [wikipedia.org], Mann [wikipedia.org], Camus [wikipedia.org], Eco [wikipedia.org], Rushdie [wikipedia.org], Marques [wikipedia.org] and more. Reading was my escape from classes, homework and work. I even forced myself to finish James Joyce Ulysses, a book I disliked almost from beginning to end, every critic sings it praises It must be great, right?

As with Mr. Geib my reading slowed considerably in the years after college. Work and, later, family inevitably reduced my reading time. I also struggled for a while in Singapore because there were only a few bookstores and books were much more expensive, to say nothing about having little room to store books. Eventually I move to reading mostly ebooks. I agonized over culling my physical book collections several times, it’s down to only the favorites or those that I have some sentimental attachment to.

Despite all that I have managed to work my way through many of the novels of Hemingway [wikipedia.org], Faulkner [wikipedia.org], Murakami [wikipedia.org], Cormac McCarthy [wikipedia.org], Truman Capote [wikipedia.org] and I even read Cervantes [wikipedia.org]’ Don Quixote [goodreads.com] for it’s 500th birthday. Over the past few years I’ve been reading short stories: the complete shores stores of, the complete collections of Chekov [wikipedia.org], Turgenev [wikipedia.org], Flannary O’Conner [wikipedia.org], and the short story side of Nabokov and Hemingway. As well as select works of more authors.

That’s a lot of big, famous names, and the list of yet-to-be-read is infinitely longer. I’m listing these names not as a brag but to provide a counterpoint to other books… Because, one thing those names all have in common is they are all Literature in the sense that excludes most genre fiction [wikipedia.org] (a term I just learned from looking for the opposite of big-L Literature); sci-fi and fantasy and horror as well as comics and manga. Things that stuffy old Columbia Literature Professors would look down on.

Why do I read so much Literature?

First, a bit of history, I was not always so, I started my reading journey firmly in genre fiction. Specifically in fantasy. Way back in the fifth grade, in Ms. Venning’s class, where I read The Hobbit [goodreads.com]. I liked The Hobbit and I got a copy of The Lord of the Rings [goodreads.com] shortly after we finished it. After a couple of false starts on LOTR I revisited it in sixth grade because I had an hour long bus ride in the morning and afternoon and reading became my escape. Since first finishing LOTR when I was 12 it has never not been my favorite book and I have re-read it almost every year since.

Like the dwarves of Moria I dug deep into middle earth. A few years later I read The Silmarillion [goodreads.com] and the entire History of Middle Earth series released by Christopher Tolkien. Fantasy was my thing in middle school and high school. At the same time I read LOTR I discovered Dungeons & Dragons (thanks to the Boy Scouts and being snowed in on a trip to Fort Eustis) and I got sucked into the new TSR Forgotten Realms novels that came out around that time.

Sci-fi and fantasy ran in the family. My dad was a big sci-fi and fantasy reader (and comics reader), we had a library full of Isaac Azimov [wikipedia.org], Sir Arthur C. Clarke [wikipedia.org], Edgar Rice Burroughs [wikipedia.org], David Eddings [wikipedia.org], Robert Jordan [wikipedia.org], Mercedes Lackey [wikipedia.org] and many others. Shelves full of Star Trek novels, X-Men comics, Spider-Man, and so many more. So, sci-fi and fantasy were ‘normal’ for me I guess.

Like most American teenagers I had to read a lot of famous literature in school. And like most others I knew it was read-and-forget after the test. A few books stand out, I remember reading Where the Red Fern Grows [goodreads.com] and To Kill a Mockingbird [goodreads.com] as books I, grudgingly enjoyed. But for the most part I had not time for anything but my fantasy books.

That changed in the spring of my senior year of high school. I’m not sure why exactly, but I was home for an extended period recovering from Mono, I had almost a month laying around the house with little energy and for some reason I picked up and read the complete Shakespeare… A onion paper used copy I got from a shop in the basement of The Hardware Store on the downtown mall in Charlottesville (there I got a lot of used books, including the History of Middle Earth series). I don’t even remember why I had this book other than it was a massive leather bound red book that looked cool on the book shelf.

Maybe it was because Shakespeare was in the air that year. The senior class put on Macbeth as a school play that fall and many of my friends where in or involved in the production. We read Hamlet in my senior English class. Of course we had read Romeo and Juliet earlier in high school but more importantly Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet [imdb.com] came out that year too. And I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Othello [imdb.com] movie with a bunch of my drama-room and coffee shop friends that year too.

Whatever the reason I had an epiphany reading Shakespeare. At some point when you read a lot of Shakespeare you get into a groove and you can really read him, it flows and you don’t need to think about the verse, you don’t need to read and re-read the same passages over and over to understand, it just works.

Shakespeare was my first taste of literature for pleasure and it set the stage. But there was a second incident that triggered my pivot away from fantasy. This was more about the literature of “the western canon” being the basis of so much. And all these references and influences in popular culture going over my head. Someone pointed this out on a car ride back from a Rage Against the Machine concert where Rage played a song I’d never heard: The Ghost of Tom Joad. Long story short: I didn’t know who Tom Joad was, despite having, supposedly, read The Grapes of Wrath [goodreads.com] a few years before in school. But as with most books that were part the curriculum it went in one ear and out the other… At some point these incidents triggered a shift away from fantasy to “literature”, what else had I missed?

A lot, but set that aside there is too much to go into the myriad retellings of different forms, the quotes, the nods, the rebellions against. But beyond all that there is a reason that people are referencing these books all the time: They are good, many of them are great. Crime and Punishment [goodreads.com], The Age of Reason [goodreads.com] and Invisible Man [goodreads.com] are, just behind The Lord of the Rings my favorite books today.

So I spent more then 10 years reading almost exclusively big-L Literature. I never completely left fantasy and sci-fi, I continued my annual tradition of reading The Lord of the Rings and regular re-readings of Dune [goodreads.com]. But I was working my way through such a backlog of great books and authors.

And then at some point I came back around to a more balanced diet mixing in a healthy dose of genre fiction with my hoity-toity literature. Moderation in all things, right?

Over the past decade or so I have read (or re-read in a few case) things like Leviathan Wakes [goodreads.com], Wool [goodreads.com], Old Mans War [goodreads.com], The Dark Tower series [goodreads.com] by Stephen King, The Nexus trilogy [goodreads.com] by Ramez Naam, The Hangman’s Daughter series [goodreads.com] by Oliver Pötzsch. The Watchmen [goodreads.com] and V for Vendetta [goodreads.com] by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman [goodreads.com], Akira [goodreads.com], Fables [goodreads.com], Locke & Key [goodreads.com], and many more. For good measure I read the complete stories of H. P. Lovecraft [goodreads.com] (skip the essays, don’t sully yourself with his racist drivel any more than you have too in the stories themselves.)

OK, I need to stop listing books… there are so many, too many to list, but i recommend everything linked here (except Ulysses, of course 😉, read Moby-Dick [goodreads.com] instead). I have not posted reviews of most of these books here on Confusion. I started back in the day, reviews of books was one of the original reasons for the site, to share my thoughts on these books with my college friends when we were apart, over summers and during my long-strange-trip in Europe. There is a whole category for my book reviews [confusion.cc], but I’ve only written one review in the past decade – fittingly it was for Lovecraft Country [confusion.cc] a fantasy-horror book recommended by a friend who lives in a foreign country. Which, along with The Dream Quest of Vellit Boe [goodreads.com] helps to redeem a small corner of the H. P. Lovecraft mythos from his misogyny and racism. I highly recommend both books.

Categories
books

Lovecraft Country

Author
Matt Ruff

I first heard about Lovecraft Country from a friend, a friend who lives in Sweden. He recommended it wholeheartedly, saying he read it several times. I picked it up a week or so later, just as the COVID19 pandemic was taking off. It was not long after I finished Lovecraft Country that the George Floyd protests started. Given the nature of the book it was a very timely read.

On Goodreads [goodreads.com]

Before we get to Lovecraft Country itself, it’s worth noting that I have read all of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction [goodreads.com], and I enjoy most of it. I am aware that he was a massive bigot, racist and anti-semitic, and many other -ists. I didn’t read more than a few of his non-fiction writings, is “essays” or letters, there is not reason to read it beyond a reminder of how nasty a person can be with their words. Good fiction, if lacking a lot of representation, but a nasty author.

This is the second recent book I have read that attempts to deal with Lovecraft’s bigotry by authors, who would have been on the receiving end of his bigotry, co-opting him. The other book is The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson. Johnson [goodreads.com]. That book takes place inside one of Lovecraft’s fictional worlds, the dream world, and aims to address Lovecraft’s sexism. Specifically the lack of female characters by populating the dream world with female characters, including the strong female lead.

Lovecraft Country on the other hand takes place in the “real world” where Lovecraft’s books exist, and so does Lovecraftian cosmic horror. So Lovecraft Country addresses Lovecraft’s rabid racism by casting as it’s protagonists a group of Black Americans living during the height of Jim Crow America. Lovecraftian cosmic horrors alongside the everyday, real, horrors of American racism.

Lovecraft Country is a collection of linked stories, focused around a the protagonists and their repeated encounters with the members of a secret society. Magical rituals, cosmic portals, potions and spells abound. There is even a monster or two. But there are also racist cops, racist shop owners and racist random strangers. The racism is both active; vulgarities and violence perpetrated sadistically, and passive; condescending tones, stares and casual disrespect and disregard. I can’t imagine how true it is, what it was —what it is— like to experience this type of bigotry in real life. It was oppressive and ever present in the story.

The climax of the racism is a flashback to the events of Tulsa Race Massacre [wikipedia.org]. An event that I first remember hearing about a few years ago. I don’t remember being taught about it in high school, not in American History class or even in Ms. Reynolds African American Studies class. Maybe my memory fails me or maybe it says something about American racism that the trauma of an event like that is not a shared public memory, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or Kent State.

Another aside: this is the second work I’ve come across this year that includes reference to the Tulsa Race Massacre as a key background event for the characters. The other being HBO’s Watchmen series. So maybe in the future what happened in Tulsa will be part of the collective American psyche.

I won’t spoil the Lovecraftian aspects of the stories, only note that there is a lack of cyclopean masonry and eldritch horrors. Lovecraft Country is more the The Colour out of Space and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward than The Call of Cthulhu or The Shadow over Innsmouth. But the real horror remains the ever present racism.

I really enjoyed Lovecraft Country, I will read it again, and I hope the upcoming HBO series is as good. I would put Lovecraft Country up there with To Kill a Mockingbird and Invisible Man [confusion.cc] in giving me some vague understanding of how racism affects people through literature.

Categories
books

Unfinished Tales

Author
J.R.R.Tolkien
Editor
Christopher Tolkien
On Goodreads [goodreads.com]

Until the publication of The Children of Hurin a few years ago, Unfinished Tales was the third piece of the Middle-earth trilogy. Paired with The Lord of The Rings and The Silmarillion [confusion.cc] it was a bit of a third wheel; comprised of various stories in different states of completeness with some editorial comments by Christopher Tolkien needed to bridge the gaps and contradictions left by the myriad versions Tolkien authored of most of these stories.

Unfinished Tales actually includes my favorite of all of Tolkien’s writing. What I consider the be the best high fantasy ever: “Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin”. Versions of this story date back as far as 1911 and it is the birth of Middle Earth. It is an ultimate tragedy that Tolkien never finished the tale – “Of Tuor and The Fall of Gondolin” – to his satisfaction. I wish Christopher Tolkien could piece together a completed tale as he did with The Children of Hurin expanding the story in Unfinished Tales of “Narn i Hîn Húrin (The Tale of the Children of Húrin)” a related story to Tuor’s.

If you enjoy the window into Tolkien’s mind and the development of the Middle-earth “legendarium”. Then you can dive off the cliff into the massive 12 volume History of Middle Earth that Christopher Tolkien published in the late ’80s and early ’90s. An impressive read which I should attempt again as I’ve forgotten more of it than I remember.