Book Reviews

The Lucifer Effect and On Hitler’s Mountain

Philip Zimbardo and Irmgard A. Hunt

The two-line tattoo discovered across the back of Pfc. Stoner says it all. In Gothic type, beneath a grinning red skull flanked by two grim reapers, it read: “What if I’m not the hero/What if if I’m the bad guy”. Stoner was undergoing a physical examination after his beating by fellow soldiers for ratting them out in the still-unfolding American Kill Team civilian murders in Afghanistan.

Steve Smith
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The Lucifer Effect and On Hitler’s Mountain

The two-line tattoo discovered across the back of Pfc. Stoner says it all. In Gothic type, beneath a grinning red skull flanked by two grim reapers, it read: “What if I’m not the hero/What if if I’m the bad guy”. Stoner was undergoing a physical examination after his beating by fellow soldiers for ratting them out in the still-unfolding American Kill Team civilian murders in Afghanistan.

The murders could have been an example right out of The Lucifer Effect: the anonymity that comes with the uniform; the dehumanization of the object; the passive tolerance afforded by the fellow soldiers and the higher-ups. Morality then disengages. There had been talk about throwing candy from the back of a Stryker vehicle and shooting the children as they tried to gather it up.

Lucifer Effect: (every) man has infinite capacity for good/evil; the barrier between the two states is permeable; character transformation is situational. Episodes like this usually evoke the same response: it’s the work of a few bad apples in the barrel. Maybe the issue is neither the apples nor the barrel but rather the barrel-maker. That is author Zimbardo’s hypothesis. Look to the system itself, with its unchecked power, to understand the transformation.

Chapters two through nine detail the so-called Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). Ordinary college students, randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard, are transformed into – become – the real thing. It’s an extraordinary phenomenon to behold. “Guards” drunk with power quickly morph into over-reaching, sadistic, abusive personalities. Squint and you can see Abu Graib.

There is some sweet, sweet irony in this. Zimbardo was called to account. A woman (later his wife) took all this in and pointed out the obvious: hey, Zimbardo, these aren’t guards and prisoners you’re dealing with, they’re college kids, and what you are doing through this experiment is itself nothing less than abuse in the exercise of power. Whoa. Zimbardo halted the experiment prematurely the next day.

Those who feel no need to pour over the details of the experiment in order to be convinced of its authenticity (trust me, it’s compelling) can skip directly to Chapters 12-13. There described is the social dynamic underlying this transformation into our lesser angels.

A child’s vulnerability, particularly heart-wrenching, was also on dramatic display in the documentary study “A Class Divided.” How quickly these American grade-school children, separated into the blue- and brown-eyed specimen groups, hardened their view of themselves versus the “others” through arbitrary teacher input (google: Frontline/A Class Divided). They could have been budding Hutus and Tutsis in another time and place.

Those inclined to short-cut the entire book are invited to capture the essence of Zimbardo’s message by watching his excellent half- hour TED presentation (google: TED/The Lucifer Effect).

There is, however, no short-cutting the companion discussion book, On Hitler’s Mountain. This book is not about guards, prisoners, or even the Holocaust per se. This is the memoir of a woman who, through accident of history and geography, was raised in the literal shadows of what may be regarded as the biggest national transformation in modern Western history.

Irmgard Hunt was raised in Berchtesgaden, site of Hitler’s alpine retreat, during the time of his rise and fall. What comes through in Ms. Hunt’s extraordinary account is her open, honest, unflinching dedication to truth as she recalls her upbringing. The details are there: what she saw; what she knew; how she felt; what she and others did or didn’t do.

Detail matters. It transports the reader to a different time and place. We’ve all read in the history books about the post-Versailles humiliation, the crushing Weimar hyper-inflation, the desperate search for order that lead to a regime which ultimately ended with the parade of horribles. Ms. Hunt’s up-close-and-personal memoir invites the reader to the uncomfortable question: what would you have done in the same circumstances? Honestly.

Zimbardo dedicates a chapter (12) to the power of conformity, invoking the words of C.S. Lewis, “the terror of being left outside.” I’m not certain I would have had the courage displayed by nine-year-old Irmgard when she was faced with the prospect of turning in her anti-Hitler grandfather.

So the question is not whether we are good or bad. We’re both. It’s situational. Again, Pfc. Stoner: “What if I’m not the hero. What if I’m the bad guy.”

Steve Smith
The Fourth Turning

William Strauss and Neil Howe

Sometimes it takes a grand unifying theory – say, for example, quantum mechanics to explain the laws of physics beyond that which Newton could teach – to really make sense of the world. The ambition of The Fourth Turning is no less profound: to discern and explain the evolutionary patterns of America’s culture to describe her past, understand her present, and anticipate her future.

Steve Smith
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The Fourth Turning

Sometimes it takes a grand unifying theory – say, for example, quantum mechanics to explain the laws of physics beyond that which Newton could teach – to really make sense of the world. The ambition of The Fourth Turning is no less profound: to discern and explain the evolutionary patterns of America’s culture to describe her past, understand her present, and anticipate her future.

There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that we can apply the past five centuries of Anglo-American history to definitively conclude that our country will shortly pass through this current rights-mongering, entitlement-oriented, politically- dysfunctional, militarily-overextended, environmental-despoiling, anxiety-ridden, bankrupt era of Unraveling and emerge into a new High. To paraphrase the proverb, this too shall cycle. The bad news is that we will go through Crisis to get there.

Just as it has always been it shall always be. History, far from being a collection of random events, moves in predictable cycles. Each grand cycle, a so-called saeculum spanning the length of a long human life of approximately eighty years, begins after a convulsion e.g the Revolutionary War; the Civil War; the Great Depression/WWII. Contained therein are four generational “turnings” – High; Awakening; Unraveling; Crisis -- of approximately twenty years each.

This proposition is huge. Why? Because it flies in the face of the the more traditional Western view of history proceeding along a linear time-line, that our social destiny is entirely self-directed and that we can extrapolate the present to anticipate the future. Yet, then we’re surprised by the inevitable discontinuities. The Boomer Sixties weren’t an extension of the Silent Fifties. Who knew? No linear-thinking social scientist of that earlier era predicted the youth explosion and its consequences.

Biography, not some astrological hocus-pocus, accounts for the seasonality. It turns out that the real lesson of history is that four generational archetypes – Hero; Artist; Prophet; and Nomad -- arrive in a fixed pattern as life phases intersect with events and react to the generation which spawned it. A turning occurs upon that inevitable change in the social mood. Generations, even neighboring generations, thus have markedly different attitudes, behaviors, and self-identity. History creates generations, just as generations create history.

There have been seven Anglo-American saecula dating back to the Late Midieval cycle beginning in 1435 with America now in the third turning of the so-called Millennial saeculum commencing after the last Crisis period (end of WWII). The book’s overview of those twenty-four generations strikes a pleasing balance: the description of each such generational turning is complete enough to demonstrate in a compelling way the validity of the zeitgeist cycling yet not so tedious that it makes the eyes glaze over.

The City Club, its membership representing every generational archetype, is an ideal forum in which to observe, discuss, and debate the thesis. Of particular interest, of course, is the honoring of five centuries of history to anticipate what we are facing as we stare into “the fourth turning.”

Steve Smith
Deep Survival

Laurence Gonzales

We all know, even in relatively calm times, that many big life decisions – an investment choice, a major purchase, a love interest – are often emotionally made and later (maybe) intellectually justified.

Steve Smith
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Deep Survival

We all know, even in relatively calm times, that many big life decisions – an investment choice, a major purchase, a love interest – are often emotionally made and later (maybe) intellectually justified.

But it’s when life is on the line that emotions can truly trump intellect: the amygdala detects danger; the adrenal glands kick in; catecholamines constrict blood vessels and affect the firing of nerve cells; the adrenal cortex releases cortisol, invading the hippocampus, amping up fear and affecting the memory system; heart rate rises; breathing speeds up; sugar is dumped into the metabolic system; the oxygen and nutrients distribution shifts for immediate strength. You’re on afterburner and all this occurs before you can even “think.” In fact, the hormonal stress release interferes with the functioning of the neocortex itself.

So a threshold question is why it is that evolution developed a system that seems to work against us at the time of our greatest need. The answer is that evolution e.g. freeze-fight--flight, is all about the propagation of the species over the many millennia. In comparison, we’ve been landing jet fighters on aircraft decks for a relative blink of the eye. We must accommodate to evolution, not the other way around.

Otherwise, you die. It’s not personal. The given analogy is that of the relationship between the jockey – the rational, logical, controlling part that is the brain – and the thoroughbred horse – the powerful, wild, and barely containable emotional energy that resides within us all. The two are precisely aligned in the case of the blissful horse run. Deep Survival is all about what can happen to us when they are not.

It can start even with the decision to undertake the risk in the first place. A snowmobiler takes a run up a slope that any rational analysis would conclude is an invitation to an avalanche. The risk is overshadowed by an emotional “bookmarking” that recalls some previous wonderful experience. The results of such somatic markers can range from the mildly embarrassing (oh, so that’s what drives the middle-aged man with a bad comb-over to hit on the Hotties) to the fatal, as in this case.

So many accidents, so little time: rafting; flying; climbing; adrift at sea; even a walk in the woods. The very term adventure, almost by definition, suggests danger, voluntarily faced. The activities cited in the book range in risk from the barely forseeable to the patently suicidal.

We undoubtedly have our own stories. My own story involved an advertised CMC-sponsored intermediate, non-technical climb up Pyramid Peak (Maroon Bells, Aspen) many years ago. A dense fog, a lost leader, and a forced climb to the summit turned the expedition – then becoming one of unassisted rock chimney assaults; facial injuries from falling stones – into what seemed to be the Bataan Death March. Almost everything described in Deep Survival was on display that day.

Supplementing our own experiences and those depicted in the book is an optional non-fiction River of Doubt, describing Teddy Roosevelt’s 1914 post-Presidency exploration of an undiscovered tributary of the Amazon. The number and the magnitude of the perils faced by that party defies description here but try this on for a “taste”: provisions were gone; the starving men were reduced to dynamiting the river to stun piranha; one man collecting fish held another in his mouth; stunned fish comes to and bites off man’s tongue.

When, then, if ever, is the beam-me-up moment? Deep Survival invokes the words of Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim, “these elementary furies . . coming at him with a purpose of malice . . . which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling fact of taking his life.” We know, of course, that on a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. And, the case is made, one can evaluate a well-lived life only in the context of the death. You will bear witness in both Deep Survival and River of Doubt to an astounding resolve to keep zero-hour at bay. Of course, we have the accounts only of the survivors.

Another fascinating discussion angle might address the extrapolation of the deep survival phenomenon from that of the individual to something greater, to a nation even. The entire puzzle of how Germany – the land of deep thinkers and poets – could have been seduced into the madness that was to become The Third Reich might be answered by viewing the aggregate population from a fear-based perspective. Even the armchair historian knows of the rampant inflation, crime, and post-Versailles shame that preceded this parade of horribles. Maybe the whole story is simply one of collectively-fired amygdalae.

If so, may we become ever-vigilant ourselves. We discussed this point years ago in our session on transcendentalism, reflecting on the calming Walden Pond sentiments of simplicity, rootedness, and solitude. The challenge back then was to imagine the extent to which we could retain some residuum of those core elements in the face of a radically altered circumstance, in this case a post-EMP environment. It turns out that, subsequent to our discussion, the novel One Second After addressed this very theme. We could choose this as its own topic should there be interest.

Steve Smith
Night Train to Lisbon

Pascal Mercier

This is not the right book should you be in a hurry. Night Train to Lisbon takes its time to address a central question: given that we can only live a small part of what there is in us – what happens to the rest?

Steve Smith
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Night Train to Lisbon

This is not the right book should you be in a hurry. Night Train to Lisbon takes its time to address a central question: given that we can only live a small part of what there is in us – what happens to the rest?

Raimond Gregorius, a 57-year-old philologist of ancient languages, leads a comfortable, predictable life as a highly- regarded teacher at a Gymnasium (academic high school) in Bern, Switzerland. Then comes chaos theory applied to the soul. The flap of the butterfly wing – a chance and momentary encounter with a distraught Portuguese woman tearfully reading a letter on a bridge on his way to class (was she really going to jump?) – results in an existential hurricane.

This enigmatic woman, invited then to his class, departs from the back of the room with a finger to her lips (what does it mean: good-bye?; our secret?). He wanders in search. He enters a second- hand book store. He encounters an old book, written in Portuguese (not one of his languages). The store owner translates portions. Gregorius is overwhelmed. He quits his job, drops out of Bern, and catches the night train to a new world.

Behold the fantasy: leap and the net will appear.

The net is that old book, authored by Amadeu Inacio de Almeida Prado, doctor, resistance fighter, and goldsmith of words. Gregorius embarks on a journey to reconstruct the life of this now- deceased man, the author who had posed the question whether the soul is a place of facts or whether the alleged facts are only deceptive shadows of stories we tell ourselves.

Gregorius had no road map in the search for Prado’s surviving teachers, students, family, lovers, and friends. On one level the journey appeared to be a random walk. On another level some core belief in Prado’s wisdom and an underlying trust in contingent outcomes guided Gregorius through Lisbon, the city he had come to because he had suddenly seen his life from the end. Prado note: life is not what we live, it is what we imagine we are living.

The novel’s employment of Gregorius as a meditative filter for Prado’s writings is two-edged. Gregorius’s own life story, his travels, and personal ruminations provide added dimension to the Prado sentiments. Yet, filter works both ways and the Gregorius account can become downright t..e..d..i..o..u..s, e.g. almost an entire chapter dedicated to this philologist’s horror as he contemplates as a sign of his possible incipient memory loss his forgetting a single word in all of Homer’s works (in case you were wondering, the lost Homeric word appeared in the Odyssey and means an iron shovel for cleaning the floor of the hall). You were warned.

Yet the precious nuggets contained in this 438 page novel make this an ideal discussion book. It breathes life into virtually all aspects of the examined life: love; God; soul; friendship; intellect; betrayal; honor; trust; loneliness; death.

Among the most (to me) poignant sections spoke to father and son dynamics, as reflected in mutual written but unsent letters: Prado’s letter speaking of his father’s muteness, his withholding of affection; the father’s letter speaking of the intimidation he felt of Prado’s radiant intelligence and the difficulty in accepting that his children’s souls would ultimately register the father’s weaknesses.

Please do not be intimidated. You will need the time and staying power to conquer this novel. You will be rewarded in the end, however, as we discuss the many rich topics raised.

Steve Smith
The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe

I intend to celebrate my birthday on September 28 by discussing with you one of my favorite books, The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. This is one of the few late twentieth century so-called realistic novels, a form sometimes sneered at by the intelligentsia. So be it. It’s my birthday.

Steve Smith
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The Bonfire of the Vanities

I intend to celebrate my birthday on September 28 by discussing with you one of my favorite books, The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. This is one of the few late twentieth century so-called realistic novels, a form sometimes sneered at by the intelligentsia. So be it. It’s my birthday.

You will be absorbed by this novel. You will inhabit the world of 1980s New York City. Actually, multiple worlds, as the city is populated by such starkly differing realities – affluence on a level that would make the Sun King blink; the nothing-left-to-lose hopelessness that gives rise to the dead-eye stare and the Pimp Roll -- that it’s hard to believe these different realities could co-exist on the same planet, let alone the same city. But they do. And it’s when these parallel universes, against all the rules of nature, happen to intersect that we truly catch a glimpse of the human condition.

The magic of Tom Wolfe is in his characters. The words on the page somehow transcend the normal intellectual process and mainline directly into the visceral. The reader absorbs the accents, the affectations, the environment and is pulled into the minds and the central nervous systems of all these supporting actors in the unfolding drama.

It is that very slice-of-life precision that distinguishes the realistic novel (The Grapes of Wrath, another example) from the avant- garde, high-brow fiction with strange names like Absurdist novels and Radical Disjunction. Give me something rooted in real life rather than some literary game, words on a page manipulated by an author. Wouldn’t you agree that real life itself offers more than enough absurdity?

So what does the cast of characters teach us? First the good news is that some of the seething racist energy and the predatory criminal elements characterizing Wolfe’s New York City of thirty years ago has been tamed and thus, to some degree, the novel can be seen as a period piece. Yet the ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ that animates virtually every character in the novel is as old as Ecclesiastes and is as fresh as yesterday’s news.

We may do well to ponder in our own existence the degree to which we are defined, entrapped, entombed(?) by our own narrative – career; possessions; pedigree; wealth; alpha-maleness; beauty; partner – as if we’re constructing a monument to ourselves. There is a poignant scene in the novel where Sherman McCoy’s monument finally crumbles and one can’t help but reflect on Jia’s concept of surrender and wonder if the protagonist hasn’t finally achieved bliss.

Expand the notion of vanity to include its scruffy half-brother, hubris, and we may have the answer to the life cycle that confronts many a company (confuse being lucky with being smart) or empire (imperial over-reach).

In any event, enjoy the ride (but, by all means, avoid the movie abomination).

Steve Smith
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson

This will be a new experience Tuesday evening. Past discussions have tended to center around some well-defined theme with the book serving as catalyst for discussion. That’s not so easy here.

Steve Smith
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This will be a new experience Tuesday evening. Past discussions have tended to center around some well-defined theme with the book serving as catalyst for discussion. That’s not so easy here.

Not quite sure how to frame this one. What accounts for the immense popularity of a cold-case mystery tapping into almost every imaginable societal ill: justice aborted; media compromised; family hiearchies self-destructed; Nazi racism unleashed; corporations indicted; and religion perverted? The question probably answers itself.

Did I miss something in the smorgasbord of insults? Yes. My opening thesis in our Tuesday discussion is that the über-theme of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and that which so animates the readership turns on the power of retribution. Lisbeth’s literal and graphic “shove it” is the allegorical answer to every wrong, real or imagined, ever perpetrated on a victim. Let’s discuss.

With “men who hate women” (the original title of the novel) one catches a whiff of the 1970’s feminist movement. The Hedeby world evokes the words of feminist Marilyn French in The Women’s Room, “All men are rapists,” adding by outrageous metaphorical extension, “They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”

Or take the imagined 1950s world of Joyce Carol Oates in her novel Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang as leader Legs Sadvsky tells the gang, “It’s all of them: men. It’s a state of undeclared war, them hating us, men hating us no matter our age or who the hell we are.” Legs Sadvsky then dissolves, goes solo, time warps a halfcentury, acquires a nose ring, tattoo, and genius computer skills and -- poof! -- emerges as Lisbeth.

Anyway, it’s only a thesis and it would be worse than naive to deny real instances of egregious tabloid terribles. But Larsson makes his intention clear through his numerous factoid introductory references (fact check, anyone?). His world is then shrouded in the fine mist of misogyny, as if he’s playing to the cheap seats in the appease-the-sisters arena.

So one question on the table is to what extent the entertainment value of the novel is derived from the exploitation of an ongoing (non-existent) gender war. So sad: to falsely believe we’ve made genuine progress toward sexual equality over the last few decades. Apply that same question to any number of the other wrongs weaved throughout the novel.

So what? The so-what is the vague feeling of being played through victim-mongering. Allow a personal account here. Almost two decades ago a pair of counselors was brought into my daughter’s school. There had been reports at the time of a dozen or so student abductions around the country and the parents were provided guidlines in appropriate defensive measures. Among the rules: instruct your child when walking alone, even on a public sidewalk, to always allow for a minimum ten-foot clearance from any stranger. Never mind the fact that it later turned out that only one of the dozen abductions involved a stranger. So it is here: Code-red instruction as entertainment.

Anyway, feel free to reply here with any of your own personal prediscussion thoughts. It will help frame our discussion.

Steve Smith
The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It’s not about the parties.

Steve Smith
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The Great Gatsby

It’s not about the parties.

Everything about Jay Gatsby’s world is theater – the mansion; the wealth; the parties; the pedigree; the affectation of an “old sport” English accent; and even the circumstances leading to his ultimate demise. His life is a private Potemkin affair with a singular goal: to rekindle a lost love.

Gatsby barely even attended those Long Island extravaganzes he hosted every Saturday night in that summer of 1922. Think of them more as theater with an audience of one – an audience of one, that is, only in the off chance that maybe, just maybe, Daisy Buchanen (now married: details, details) might actually show up and be impressed. Talk about your chick magnet.

We might enjoy The Great Gatsby on a number of levels. In its most base and literal incarnation, we could get lost in the trappings of our own Highland Gatsby event and roll around in snob chic. On this night, this one night, we’d gather and preen and seduce one another with our chosen area of expertise (choose: wine; food; books; carbon footprint; Ming dynasty furniture; our swell vacation in Hoboken) while we snub and sniff and sneer at those who don’t share our pretensions.

The only role already assigned in the faux-Gatsby event would be that of Nick Carraway, the reserved mid-Western transplant who, as both Gatsby’s new neighbor and Daisy’s cousin, has a unique perspective on this would-be mating dance and serves as the novel’s narrator. Yes, that role is mine – that’s me, the reserved one, standing over there alone at the drink table looking vaguely lost.

A deeper reading of the novel, however, would invite our attention to that elusive, wonderful, suck-the-oxygen-out-of-the-room curse called love. Or obsession.

How bad can it get? Let’s put it this way. Gatsby bought that mega-mansion on the West Egg (the nouveau riche) island for the sole reason that it provided an unobstructed view of the green light marking the end of Daisy’s dock over there on the East Egg (old money) island. The Green Light. He’d stare. Longingly. Fantasize. Stare. The Green Light.

We’ve taken a run at the obsession topic before. Our Lolita discussion (9/11/06) was all about this phenomenon of “love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.” That sex-laced road trip may be closer to what we might label today as pathology given it involved a middle-age man and twelve-year-old Lolita but both stories seem to share the same tune.

One common question: the distinction between the power of the illusion versus the worthiness of the underlying subject. Neither Daisy nor Lolita would seem to the “objective” reader to be worthy of the bestowed adoration. No matter. The illusion transcends the subject. Put crassly, even an oil slick is iridescent when the light strikes it right. The light then shifts and yet another Country Western song is born.

Or we can take Gatsby as allegory. The American dream – originally all about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness (per Nick Carraway’s meditation) – becomes corrupted by rampant materialism just as Gatsby’s dream of idealized love (when dreams had meaning) crumbles with the unworthiness of its object (America, as Daisy, devolves into Material Girl).

Those who would write the novel off as simply good riddance to a bygone gilded era of wretched excess would do well to read the article, “Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers” (NYT, 2/18/08). The novel is now required reading at half the high schools in the country and resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

Take particular note of the reflections of Susan Morris, director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching Gatsby for 32 years, “They all understand what it is to strive for something . . . to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love – or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.” Or, to paraphrase an old perfume commercial, their obsession is our possession.

Behold the Green Light.

Steve Smith
Tortilla Curtain

T.C. Boyle

Mexican illegal Candido Rincon is left as so much road kill after having been accidentally struck by Delaney Mossbacher's SUV on a southern California highway. Candido has the audacity to survive and Delaney completes the insult by tossing a twenty-dollar bill into his freshly bashed-in face. Problem solved. Lives then disengage.

Steve Smith
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Tortilla Curtain

Mexican illegal Candido Rincon is left as so much road kill after having been accidentally struck by Delaney Mossbacher's SUV on a southern California highway. Candido has the audacity to survive and Delaney completes the insult by tossing a twenty-dollar bill into his freshly bashed-in face. Problem solved. Lives then disengage.

Were it only so simple. What ensues is a story which lies somewhere near the intersection of Grapes of Wrath and The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe's masterpiece novel describing the dynamics of another culture clash).

The author has the talent to engage our common humanity allowing the reader to inhabit the skin of Candido and his young wife as they claw their way through a hard-scrabble existence. Hard-scrabble is actually a gross understatement. We can really feel their struggle for literal survival beneath this Maslow underbelly where even their best days embarrass us for ever having complained about our very worst.

We will similarly identify with Delaney -- really not a bad sort, a liberal even -- and his family, his aspirations, and his hermetically sealed existence. Thus begins the descent into the heart of darkness.

The book is pregnant with discussion possibilities. How do you personally relate to those "south of the border?" Do you simply regard their presence in terms of a parallel, non-intersecting existence? Does the setting make a difference? Do you make any real eye contact when you happen to cross paths at the Dollar Store or is it a naked stare of disgust and contempt?

The politics of the immigration "problem" sometimes threatens to devolve our regard for others into a stereotype, even into a racist slur. Remember how Pat Buchanan used to score political points by spitting out the hypothetical "Jose" as an epithet as if he were talking about a cockroach?

OK now the discussion gets more interesting. Let's imagine five scruffylooking Candidos with ratty bedrolls working their way up the stream bed and pausing by the City Club at dusk: "Hey, what are you guys doing? . . . you don't belong here . . . "; “No comprende”; "Don’t ‘No comprende’ me . . . get out . . . I'm gonna call the cops" (I'm gonna call the exterminator, same difference).

One could argue that the whole subject has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of racial prejudice. It has everything to do with fear -- fear of those displaced and dispossessed with nothing left to lose. They could just as easily have been Steinbeck's desperate Oakies a few generations ago.

That then leads to a discussion about the meaning of freedom. Certainly Delaney and his upscale neighborhood life must win here as measured against Candido's subsistence existence. But wait. Possessions possess. How does the picture change as Delaney's community becomes gated and the walls grow from six feet to eight feet as the wolf begins to frisk at the door. The metaphor could apply to a neighborhood, to an individual, to a country.

Tortilla Curtain provides a gut-check moment, a glimpse of the skull beneath the skin of civilization. Of course that depends upon who is defining civilization.

Do we really believe any set of laws or walls can ultimately protect "us" against the tectonic shift grinding along our two-thousand-mile mile border? This week marks the start of a test program allowing Mexican trucks to legally enter the United States and drive unfettered on some of our highways. The poison is thereby mainlined directly into the American dream.

And what is it exactly that is being threatened? Perhaps it's the hubris of an entitlement expectation and (what one can see in Delaney's world) wretched excess.

Maybe it’s the same hubris on display with those past monarchs, bewildered and unshaven, as they were led out into the palace courtyard to be shot, thinking to themselves, "Maybe the people do have a point”.

Steve Smith
Catch-22

Joseph Heller

Abandon first the comfort of any logical time sequence. Catch-22 is a celluloid strip twisted in half and doubled back on itself.

Steve Smith
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Catch-22

Abandon first the comfort of any logical time sequence. Catch-22 is a celluloid strip twisted in half and doubled back on itself.

The subject matter is the WWII Squadron 256 (or, more poetically, that's two to the fighting eighth power), presented not so much as a story but as a kaleidoscope: a disorienting collection of character introductions, sleight-of-hand logic, tricks, and paradoxes all mixed together and flushed down the rabbit hole.

This novel was such an assault thirty years ago on my own painfully linear background -- born and bred linear; at a linear time; in a linear place; with a linear education; and (later) a linear profession -- that I recall throwing the book across the room: the reflex of a linear soul beholding a mobius world.

But somewhere these mythic tricks intersect to reveal a larger truth about the limits of rigid thought. It's as if one so totally enamored with the selfdefining internal logic of mathematics is suddenly confronted with contemplating the square root of negative one.

Our book group has taken a low-level pass at some of life's paradoxes: e.g. meaning (Camus' paradox of the absurd: we value our lives and existence so greatly, but at the same time we know we will eventually die, and ultimately our endeavors are meaningless); or the search for enlightenment, even love (the harder we try to achieve it, the more difficult it is to attain); and so on.

But somehow these matter take on a dream-like quality, a subject best left to those professional contemplators, not to those of us in the "real" world. Then circumstances reveal a world to be sometimes (maybe it's all the time, but just seems like sometimes) turned inside out.

The novel’s setting is war -- in this case, the last "good" one -- but the subject is really the absurdity that arises from the surrender of the soul, whether it be to a system, a government, an ideology or a religion. One gets all tangled up as rules unchecked take on a life of their own.

War (in this case) is stripped of all pretensions to reveal the paradoxical madness of that which animates it. The book revels in the paradoxes, "The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with". Absurdity presented as comedy. It's as if Kafka (take, perhaps, The Trial) were an Abbott and Costello routine ("Who's on first? . . . ").

Nothing here is "sacred," whether it be heroism, patriotism, justice, government, bureaucracy, sanity, or even religion, as when the Chaplain questions the reliability of the Bible: "So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome, and Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall"?

Who/What defines sanity in the context of an order which itself is suspect?

Case in point: the hallucination known as Viet Nam. There we have Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense and co-architect of that "conflict", the consummate linear thinker (at the time admiringly referred to as a computer on legs) and working the crowd with language that resonated with me along with the rest of the other like-minded audience at the time -- falling dominoes; maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever-encroaching Doodah -- and then being fast-forwarded three decades later to stand as a broken man confessing (in the preface of his book and as seen in "The Fog of War"), "Mistakes were made, terrible mistakes of judgment."

Oh, sorry 'bout that.

Then you wake up one morning with the realization that you know nothing. The only thing worse than that is the belief of knowing everything.

The satire of Catch-22 is the fun-house mirror reflection of the arrogance and distortion that can arise from any locked-in belief system. What starts as farce morphs into a terrible-mistakes-of-judgment hubris, the tragedy which has befallen many an individual, organization, empire or nation.

Not many people know this but the White House hosts its own book club. Karl Rove chooses the book, invites the author along with a few neoconservative luminaries, and conducts the discussion. This past February the author was Andrew Roberts, author of "The Churchillians." According to a participant, George Bush, in a moment of self-reflection, explained why he believes he enjoys an advantage over Churchill, who was an agnostic. The advantage, he explained, is that he believes in God and, as such, it is easier for him to make decisions and stick by them. He said he thus doesn't worry, or feel alone, if he is unpopular. He has God.

Who's on first?

Steve Smith
Walden Pond

Thoreau

Head north on I-25 and then west on Hwy 14 -- right by mile-post 49 -- for an experience as close to transcendental as you can have in twenty-first century Colorado. The beautifully remote Connor Creek Ranch (which a handful of CC members recently visited for the weekend, courtesy of Ryan Boykin) sets the stage for a book placed right there on the living-room table: Walden; or, Life in the Woods, by Thoreau.

Steve Smith
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Walden Pond

Head north on I-25 and then west on Hwy 14 -- right by mile-post 49 -- for an experience as close to transcendental as you can have in twenty-first century Colorado. The beautifully remote Connor Creek Ranch (which a handful of CC members recently visited for the weekend, courtesy of Ryan Boykin) sets the stage for a book placed right there on the living-room table: Walden; or, Life in the Woods, by Thoreau.

Time-traveling to Thoreau's 1845 Massachusset's Walden Pond requires a certain suspension of present-day reality in the same way the study of a foreign language requires a force-fit into a different cultural context. Some heavy lifting is required. It's worth it. A few decades of life experience makes this a very different read from what you may recall as a pimply foureyed adolescent trying to cop a grade in your high school English class.

The ranch's remoteness made the experience of the first sections -- Economy; Where I Lived, and What I Lived For; Reading; Sounds; Solitude -- flow easily, almost naturally. Then, in the ultimate irony -- no, make that hypocrisy – I continued my reading by way of free Google downloads on my home computer.

Thoreau's steady gaze soon became punctuated by the on-line crap du jour ( . . . Libby's lying . . . what's with Britney's hair? . . .road rage woman shoots at tires . . . ) Pervasive ADD. The Sunday Denver Post (2/18) featured our own CC member Doyle Albee as poster-child for email addiction. Life becomes a series of interruptions interrupted by interruptions.

How far we have devolved from Thoreau's grand experiment: build a small cabin in the woods, strip away the superfluous luxuries, live a simple life and thereby fully explore the sublime lightness of being. What has been lost? What has been gained? Who are we kidding?

Put aside for the moment the skepticism surrounding Thoreau's attainment of a truly independent life, given Walden's proximity to town (Concord, two miles away) and the fact of its construction from tools and property literally borrowed or squatted from Emerson and others. And perhaps we shouldn't get too cuddly too quickly with the sentiments of a recluse in the woods. Meet Thoreau's scruffy half-brother, Theodore Kaczynski.

Maybe the book works better as metaphor. The impulse to simplify may be more the innate desire to shed the dispiriting cloak of the respectable life. It is the pursuit of the "savage delight," visually depicted best by Elisa Love's larger-than-life savage-in-drag image hanging in the CC library.

Then that particular dream is suddenly over and we look at ourselves, once again, blinking in the light and wearing the sash you see covering those high-end hotel toilets, "Sanitized For Your Protection."

We all feel it. SUVs that hermetically seal you from the world. The computer terminal that sucks you into the net. The disembodied voice in that commercial phone-tree hell (Your call is important to us. Just press #6 to drop dead.).

Our existence becomes reflex over reflection. We become an input/output device, a node on the network. Our overly socialized lives deaden us to feeling, thought, and morality (ironically, a theme also developed in the Unabomber Manifesto, by the way).

But it's efficient, isn't it? The best answer to that came from the guy you sometimes see walking the streets of Boulder who looks just like Einstein, when he stood up and addressed one of the seminars at the World Affairs Conference a few years back, "Well, you know, in a perfectly efficient society, man is redundant."

Or perhaps all that misses the point. After all, Thoreau's experiment in redemptive isolation lasted a mere two years, two months, two days and there are those who regard this whole thing as nothing more than a stunt, the expression of New England elitism and its frustrating entanglement with the "real world."

We are very fortunate, by the way, to have among our CC (and specifically the book club) members Charlotte Sorenson -- someone who has "walked those woods" and is on a first-name basis with the ghosts of all those transcendental founders: Emerson; Thoreau; Hawthorne; Whitman (ask her about the stay at the Brook Farm commune).

But the real "fun" to be had with this book may reside totally outside the metaphorical. There is a scenario rooted very much in actual events, percolating just below today's headlines, and potentially as real as the day after tomorrow. Indulge me a few paragraphs and please refrain from any eye-rolling.

Most people regard the nuclear threat in terms of an oh-the-humanity devastation wrought by the mushroom cloud. But there is a totally different take on this blast from the past way of thinking.

A high-altitude nuclear detonation, through a well-known phenomenon of physics known as the Compton effect, would produce a microburst of energy called an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). One properly-placed burst, in literally a micro-second, would wipe out each and every unshielded (as virtually all are) electronic device within its line of sight i.e. the entire continental U.S.

There would be no warning. No casualties. No physical damage to buildings.

The only sound to be heard would be, "Honey, what happened to the damn T.V.?" Gone. Just like the phone (cell and land-line), the radio, the computer, the power (as the grid is controlled by electronic circuitry), the car. Everything. Everything, that is, involving technology more advanced than the candle. Look upon it as the ultimate hard boot with a recovery time of . . . who knows?

Fanciful? Perhaps. But there is no shortage of those who wish us ill and are on a pretty fast technology learning curve (use your imagination). And, from "their" perspective, what could be more elegant -- no, make that poetic -- than putting us (poof!) back into the Land of Lincoln.

The point of all this is not to fear-monger but to set the stage. All of a sudden the sentiments arising out of Walden Pond do not seem so . . . quaint.

Maybe there's a book in there somewhere. The little existing EMP fiction seems to be rooted in the cheap-thrill cyberpunk genre. What this needs is a bit more of a philosophical shaping. Something like Lord of the Flies inhabited by the grown-ups.

Come to think of it, we have the resources right here in the CC to pull this off. Maybe the book club and the writers group could joint venture the project. We'll incorporate state-of-the-art input from the environmental, health and spirit, and metaphysics contingents. John Mattingly, of course, would coordinate the entire effort.

All rights would be assigned to the club. It'll make a fortune and the proceeds would be used to purchase our own Walden Pond club annex somewhere on Vancouver Island.

Talk about a transcendental experience.

Steve Smith
Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

Our February discussion will be Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. This was a somewhat difficult choice for two reasons.

Steve Smith
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Atlas Shrugged

Our February discussion will be Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. This was a somewhat difficult choice for two reasons.

First is its prodigious length -- the 35th anniversary paperback edition is 1,074 small-type pages. The number of characters appearing in the book lends itself to an explanatory spider-web diagram similar to what one sees as a supplement to War and Peace. I recall needing most of a high school summer to conquer it.

Then I had a revelation of sorts, a way to cut through most of the heavy lifting while still retaining, maybe even enhancing, its usefulness as a discussion subject. More on that later.

Second is the intense opposing passion the book has evoked. On the one hand, it attracted a tremendous following soon after its 1957 publication -- a 1991 joint survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, in fact, placed Atlas Shrugged second only to the Bible as the most influential book among American readers. I recall a self-proclaimed previously "messed up" girl in my high school confiding to me that the book's powerful message completely changed her life.

On the other hand, others have reacted so strongly to the dogma of its underlying philosophy -- Objectivism, often (if not entirely accurately) described as unabashed greed-is-good unfettered capitalism -- that Ayn Rand had been regarded by many as the devil incarnate. Even conservative luminaries had been known to run for cover. William F. Buckley Jr., in the preface to one of his books, stated that in every page Ayn Rand seems to be whispering "to the gas chamber."

Come to think of it, perhaps this dueling passion makes this the ideal discussion book.

The shortcut referred to earlier calls for cutting out the first 927 pages of the novel with a set-up micro-encapsulation here, leading right up to John Galt's radio speech, a powerful distillation of the underlying philosophy without the foreplay.

The protagonist appears in the first two-thirds of the novel primarily in the form of a rhetorical question, "Who is John Galt?" The nation (time unspecified) is in a downward economic spiral. Businesses are closing; men are out of work. Other countries have become socialist states and are destitute.

Colorado (it so happens) is the last great industrial center on earth. This relative strength is the result of one man's innovative method of extracting oil from shale. Exploitation of this resource, however, requires enhanced train service. The availability of such train service requires a combination technological improvements, new inventions, and clear-eyed planning. All this is available, in theory.

In theory, were it not for the meddlers. The world (and thus the novel) is populated by two types: the Doers (Thinkers); and the Others. The Doers are often distinguished by talent and genius of almost mythical proportion. However, what really sets them apart is their absolute, unequivocal, unapologetic devotion to the power of reason and rationality in both thought and deed.

The Others are the remainder, the Ur-takers, in whatever form. They operate from faith and emotionalism, not rationality. This weakness manifests itself in such ways as brute control, regulation, compromise, sacrifice, love, and, for God's sake (itself a weakness), anything devoted to serving the needs of others. These are represented as nothing less than the would-be leeching emasculation of those who would truly contribute -- the Doers. Contribution arises only from the human application of the rational mind.

The novel plays out the theme. The Others do their thing (hey, fish gotta swim) and the Doers protest this oppression of their intellect and creativity. They go on strike. They simply disappear in the face of this enforced moral code of self-sacrifice. They make the sign of the dollar. This is Objectivism in action.

That takes us to page 927.

Mr. Thompson (an Other) is the Head of State. He is set to address the nation by radio about the continued deterioration of the economy. Virtually the entire panicked country is awaiting the address. It is the appointed hour of 8:00 p.m. The (commandeered) voice begins:

"Ladies and gentlemen . . . Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear. . . . (John Galt continues this 57-page radio address . . . leading up to the thundering essence) . . . I swear – by my life and my love of it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

Atlas Shrugged begs two (at least) questions that would make for fascinating discussion. It so happens that both matters have been brilliantly addressed recently in two separate articles in The Economist magazine (Holiday, Double Issue, 1/5/07). Perhaps you could read these two articles in exchange for forgoing those 927 pages.

The first, Happiness and Economics (pp. 33-35), hits on the precise question that has bothered me for a long time i.e. how valid is the "invisible hand" in truly addressing man's underlying quest for happiness (if, indeed, that is the quest). Perhaps it is a function of where one finds oneself on the Maslow hierarchy, but I have long felt that Adam Smith's dictum somewhat lacking.

This questioning started way back in the college years while attending a reception and a fellow guest -- someone you'd call an acquisition-oriented rich-boy Yuppie (before that term had been coined) -- told me he had had more fun at that one ethnic wedding than during the rest of his entire life put together. Hmmm.

So, then, what is it that animates, truly motivates, the Atlas Shrugged characters? Were it the thrill of achievement and creativity for their own sake, then why the strike? Were it for the recognition, as measured by the sign of the dollar, then one wonders about the next step. The characters seem pretty dour and one wonders whether entitlement-riches would have made that much of a difference. One squints and sees Ayn Rand's idea of a wonderful life as being married to a Mr. Potter.

The second article, "A Survey of the Brain" (pull-out, after p.78), is a remarkable synopsis of the workings of the human brain. Particularly insightful is the organic interplay between cognition and emotion. The question raised is whether the Objectivist ideal ignores the very fundamental nature of man when it beholds the world proper as the Starship Enterprise commandeered by a Mr. Spock.

Full disclosure here. Atlas Shrugged made a tremendous impression on me when I'd first read it. The notion of a tooth-and-claw existence was quite appealing, as both an individual and as a member of a growing society. Maybe it's a function of moving down the food chain in this Darwinian world, but I would never, back then, have even raised the questions posed above. In fact, had my former incarnation known that some day I would be writing this, I would have disowned my future self.

Yet viewpoints (and the questions) change. Has the Atlas Shrugged ideal morphed into a kind of happiness-by-snobbery existence? Possessions no longer seem terribly meaningful in any absolute terms (what is it that we truly require?) but only in relative terms. The pleasure of that new flatscreen television immediately dissipates once it becomes just another lousy carton from Costco that everyone else is lugging home.

An acquisition arms-race ensues. The "Doers" experience a hamster-wheel existence. Any real sense of community suffers. The middle class becomes hollowed out. We continue the march toward greater isolation

Or am I being too pessimistic here?

Perhaps life quality will again be measured primarily in terms of our experiences. A CC membership will be held in more esteem than an SUV. A reverse-snobbery will take hold -- we'll call it peasant-chic.

That wouldn't be anything new. Sebastien Chamfort wrote in late 17th century of a nameless French gentleman: "A fanatical social climber, observing that all around the Palace of Versailles it stank of urine, told his tenants and servants to come and make water around his chateau."

Who is John Galt?

Steve Smith
Man’s Search For Meaning

Victor Frankl

We'll conclude 2006 and our meditation on the metaphysical underbelly with a December discussion of Victor Frankl's work Man's Search For Meaning.

Steve Smith
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Man’s Search For Meaning

We'll conclude 2006 and our meditation on the metaphysical underbelly with a December discussion of Victor Frankl's work Man's Search For Meaning.

This is powerful stuff. Frankl's concentration camp world was about the black bats of human existence -- unimaginable privation, subsistence humanity and no expectation of the next heartbeat. It's the kind of a scene that can only be witnessed with a hand over the eyes and absorbed in glimpses through the cracks between the fingers.

Yet Frankl emerges, indeed flourishes (Nietzche: That which does not kill us . . . ), to become M.D, Phd., world-renowned neurologist and psychiatrist, author of thirty books and world-wide speaker with another 29 honorary degrees. What powerful life force could account for such a drive to survive, indeed, thrive? His answer is reflected in the philosophy he founded -- Logotherapy, which includes, among its tenets, the assertion that our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.

How could anyone presume to even question the conclusion of one so wise - - a wisdom obtainable only through a depth of world experiences of almost unimaginable proportions? Yet my own I'm-not-worthy intimidation then gave way to honest inquiry.

My stab at the subject started with a visit to an old favorite: Joseph Campbell. We're not all seeking a meaning in life, he maintains, but rather the "experience of being alive . . . so that our experiences . . . . .(resonate with) the rapture of being alive" (Power of Myth, pp 4-5). Bill Moyers pushes back in the interview asking whether he mean "the experience of meaning"? -- thereby drawing the distinction from Campbell that no,” not the experience of meaning, but rather the ‘experience of life.’"

Sorry for the free-floating introduction but that exchange puts the issue in stark relief. Campbell sums it all up by invoking the Zen rhetorical question, "What's the meaning of a flower?"

Perhaps the search for meaning is nothing more than the search for permanence in drag. Look at me, commands some inner voice, look at me, my progeny, my novel, my wealth, my discovery (see that new planet I found? -- it even has my name on it!), my donation to PETA, my granite inscription and, most of all, my belief (no, my certainty) in my own personal everlasting cosmic abstraction.

The point is not to denigrate the instinct; the point is to see it for what it is. Carol Batrus hit on it in her Africa lunch talk as she wondered aloud about how much done in the name of altruism is really a form of ego-stroking. It's that background whisper, "Oh what a good boy am I . . . that is, indeed, how I want to be remembered."

Were the search for meaning to itself pass for the experience of living then (one might argue) life truly is one grand illusion, even a cruel delusion. For we are, in truth, nothing within the context of life's grand contingencies. Sad to think that mister everyman in the geat Roman or Mayan (or any other, for that matter) empire may have confused the two. Behold the god of provisional outcomes.

And then there's the whole question about meaning as an end in itself. In the universe of the absolutes the man probably with the most self-regarded sense of purpose in Frankl's hell was the camp commandant, right down to his polished belt buckle.

Perhaps we'll treat ourselves in this last session of 2006 to a private showing of Casablanca -- we've seen it a half-dozen times before; we can recite most of the lines -- and watch it as allegory. It becomes the myth of sacrifice (of meaning). Rick's Cafe' Americain is the world. Rick Blaine and Victor Lazlo are splintered aspects of the same man. Rick meets and beds the widow of Idealism. Rick is selfish desire, "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill 'o beans." Ego arises above selfish despair. Idealism soars and Rick retreats into the fog.

Or perhaps we'll just forget the allegory. Forget meaning. We'll just watch the story unfold and splash around in its sentimentality.

Like life.

Steve Smith
The End of Faith / Letters to a Christian Nation / The God Delusion

Sam Harris / Sam Harris / Richard Dawkins

Talk about your high stakes.

Steve Smith
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The End of Faith / Letters to a Christian Nation / The God Delusion

Talk about your high stakes.

In the back corner of the CC sitting room is a book propped up by the lamp and just in front of Dr. Seuss' "Oh The Places You'll Go" (talk about irony). The book is The Divine Comedy by Dante.

Open the Dante book to the Gates of Hell ("Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,'" p.5, line 4) and go to the two pages ix-x for an index to the circles of Hell from The Inferno. In order: Unbaptized; Carnal Sinners; Gluttonous; Misers and Prodigals; Wrathful and Sullen. Cross now the River of Styx and you will land in the Sixth Circle dedicated to The Heretics. There we are. This is where you'll go. Believe (in) me.

Or not.

Our next book group session (11/21) will center around Resolved: There is no God. Discuss.

The books are one (or more) of: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; and The End of Faith as well as Letters to a Christian Nation, the last two by Sam Harris.

Bring up the subject of God in polite company and there is often a pregnant pause. One can almost hear the gears grinding as an answer is formulated: "Well, you know, I don't believe in someone up there with a white beard but. . . . well . . . there is some sort of spirituality or uber-force at work somehow, somewhere . . . you know, a cosmic connection . . . well, got to run now . . " Then there are those who regard the very question as blasphemy and will whip out scripture to prove it.

No such position or bet-hedging in these books. View the Dawkins book as the ultimate white paper written to decimate anything ever presented to support God's existence -- Thomas Aquinas' proofs; Pascal's Wager (belief as game theory); the ontological; scripture -- thereby leading to his conclusion that belief in God is nothing but a pernicious delusion. This is also the "logical" extension of another work we were briefly exposed to in our earlier discussion on religious fundamentalism, that is Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I Am Not a Christian."

The rebuttal, of course, is that God and science (logic) have nothing to do with each other in that they represent two different conceptions of the universe. The problems arise when one attempts to reconcile the two. It is the equivalent of the Capulets and Montagues collaborating over a baby shower.

And they do tend to tread on each others' turf now and then. Dawkins seems pretty comfortable with the beauty of Darwinian evolution and ascribes religious belief to certain virus-like "memes," a kind of culture bit, that is subjected to the same sort of natural selection as are genes (see book for details). On the other hand, he saves his real energy for the times religious concepts presumes to creep into the "real" world e.g. description of "miracles" or into the notion of life itself (say, stem cell research).

All in all, though, the reader is left with a sense that the whole subject is somewhat intellectual and that belief (or non belief) is of somewhat a personal indulgence.

Not so with the Harris books. Religion represents nothing less than a clear-and-present danger to our very (physical) existence.

Harris' view is that the very essence of religion creates a toxic intolerance among fundamentalists which virtually assures our collective elimination in a world of WMD. The enemy, however, is far broader than fundamentalism, as religion of whatever kind and moderation is not only madness but acts as an enabler for the toxic kind.

One winces as he holds up a mirror: "The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim any more ludicrous or offensive." A poll revealed that 44% of Evangelicals believe literally in the Rapture of an Armageddon within the next fifty years.

Condi Rice once justified the invasion of Iraq (no, this isn't meant to be a political point here) as an assurance that the smoking gun won’t be a mushroom cloud. To think that someone with the literal belief in Revelations may be in a like position would seem to make this entire subject pretty relevant.

For those who are short on time, I'd recommend just the second Harris book (Letters to a Christian Nation) which could be completed in two sittings. Also, in today's (10/22) The New York Times book section are excellent reviews of The God Delusion as well as The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan (review by David Brooks).

Steve Smith
Why Is Sex Fun?

Jared Diamond

The book title begs the question. Sex. Is it? Fun? It certainly runs the cosmic gamut from the most sublime to the punch line of a bad joke.

Steve Smith
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Why Is Sex Fun?

The book title begs the question. Sex. Is it? Fun? It certainly runs the cosmic gamut from the most sublime to the punch line of a bad joke.

Is the subject simply the sum of all those things, or even greater than the sum: a gestalt of every fantasy, release, anticipation, pursuit, seduction, rejection, reptilian urge, and candlelight cliche; the sum of all fears animating every Portnoy complaint and Woody Allen anxiety; from bellringing ecstasy to the ultimate source of profound loneliness; the enabler of our progeny; the very concept of oneness yet sometimes the mere substitute for talk; faded memories of past loves, both requited and unrequited? All that, is all that, rolled into the word "fun?"

Two questions here: is the topic worthy of discussion in the "safe" CC environment; and, what book(s) do you have to supplement Diamond's.

As to the first, the question is whether the subject even lends itself to analysis. Maybe it's like humor and how its essence is lost if one has to explain the joke. In addition, there may also be a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work here in that the very act of trying to measure it may change that which is being measured.

The limitation of the Diamond book, despite the promise implicit in the title, is that his approach is somewhat utilitarian. Human sexuality is described mostly with reference to the strategies and coping mechanisms found over the millenia in the rest of the animal kingdom. Sex as game theory.

It works pretty well as a start, as a base for discussion, especially applied to the macro level, with the emphasis on the propagation of the species. We learn, for instance, the reason the woman offers ongoing sex is to keep the man around to protect the brood and change the oil. But perhaps the notion of animal wisdom hard-wiring human sexuality goes too far.

Analysis at times threatens to morph into a Gary Larson world: one sees offthe- leash humans chasing, circling and sniffing each other as they romp in the park. (Hmmm . . now that would make for a special CC outing,) Not everything in this area (I believe) can be answered in atavistic terms.

What, for instance, compels the middle-age man with a bad comb-over to hit on the Hotties? We read lots about the male seed-spreading compulsion while Clinton was in heat but the explanation seems woefully inadequate.

Fortunately we have past studies from which we can draw. Remember Everyman? Remember Everyman’s low-level, unconsummated pass at the young girl on the boardwalk? What was that about? Sounds like a microcosm of the moshpit called middle-age dating. Participants are no longer breeders, having been relegated by nature or otherwise to become mere sports models.

No. there has to be something else going on here. How would hard-wired evolutionary procreation account for homosexuality, for instance?

That something else may be the exact same element we've contemplated in previous sessions: life being the mosaic of layered illusions and concepts accumulated over a lifetime. Sixty-something-year-old Everyman tapped into some formative picture, say a grainy 16 mm movie he watched as a horny adolescent, saw the girl and said to himself, "You are da man!" (Just like he saw himself as a kid riding the waves at the Jersey shore.) The image then devolved into some sort of a reptilian perversion of Descartes: I screw; therefor, I am.

Anyway, just a theory. Would like any book suggestions to support or refute.

Steve Smith
The Female Brain

Louann Brizendine Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

The recent report (9/7) from the Health and Spirit Group presents a wonderful opportunity. Let's take the cited reference -- The Female Brain -- and add it to the Jared Diamond book for an expanded two-month session. There would also be a third work, introduced below, to help us triangulate on the fascinating but elusive topic of sex, intimacy, and gender differences.

Steve Smith
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The Female Brain

The recent report (9/7) from the Health and Spirit Group presents a wonderful opportunity. Let's take the cited reference -- The Female Brain -- and add it to the Jared Diamond book for an expanded two-month session. There would also be a third work, introduced below, to help us triangulate on the fascinating but elusive topic of sex, intimacy, and gender differences.

The Diamond book addresses the subject from the perspective of the need for species propagation. That's interesting but at times the book reads like one of those old National Geographic articles with pictures of the barebreasted African women. It didn't really get into the how it happens -- show me the wiring diagram.

That's the province of neuroscience (so far as it goes) which, in fact, seems to be the key to many of our other past subjects: religion; evil; (attitude toward) death. Much in life may be little more than a neural construct. Perhaps all reality is, in a sense, virtual.

Virtual or not, many of us have seen how the Shakespearean power of love, passion, and the sexual imperative can go well beyond the cute and the cuddly, transcend rationality, and oftentimes suck all the oxygen out of the room.

That's the subject of the third book, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Some of you may recall this as a "dirty" book. It's not, in the usual sense. There aren't any steamy sex scenes or even any four-letter words. In fact, it's easy to miss the actual consummation (accomplished in a series of three times, no less) of the relationship between middle-aged Humbert Humbert and twelveyear- old (but precocious) Lolita.

Following Humbert's obsession with his "nymphet" is a little like driving by a car wreck -- you want to avert the gaze but something keeps drawing you back to sneak a peek. What makes this novel so compelling is the unflinching perspective of Humbert, this testosterone-marinated Female Brain (as all males apparently are).

What neural wiring could account for the "bubble of hot poison in your loins" that results in a "love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives?" One reaches for clues from his formative years -- maybe something up with mom; details of his early formative sexual experiences -- but nothing Freudian jumped out for me.

There's plenty of Freudian chit-chat, however, as Humbert's hyper-active Id continually ricochets off the Super-Ego. Humbert regularly beseeches the reader, as his "judge and jury," to understand, even if not to fully accept, that fire in his loins.

What lessons can be applied from the pathology of pedophilia (whoops, can't judge here, we're here to learn) to our own, perhaps repressed, psychological make-up?

What jumped out for me was the absolute bleakness of Humbert's world outside this single blinding passion. Take Lolita out of that lengthy, passion-laced road trip and the rest of the world sounds like a description of the surface of the moon. But maybe that's the point -- this one flower colored the universe. But, seen another way, even an oil slick is iridescent when the light strikes it a certain way.

What happens when the light shifts?

Having earlier poked fun at the National Geographic, I'd like now to reference its February 2006 cover story: Love -- The Chemical Reaction. This was a compelling read at least to this lay person interested in the how and why of an otherwise mysterious phenomenon.

The chemical profile registered in the brain of hot love is similar to that of one suffering an obsessive-compulsive disorder, giving special meaning to "madly in love." Particularly interesting is the post-chemical stage, when the dopamine then somehow morphs into the dope-of-mine. The answer, it turns out, is the big "O" -- no, not that -- but rather Oxytocin, the attachment chemical.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Steve Smith
Evil, An Investigation

Lance Morrow Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Our next session is now set for August 15. You should know that the word is getting out about the book club. Kim Hayes was turning heads at the Flatirons Athletic Club where she was walking the track outside while simultaneously reading a book with a black cover and the four technicolor letters --. . E . . V . . I . . L . . -- on the front. Great visual. You simply can't buy publicity like that.

Steve Smith
Read Full Review

Evil, An Investigation

Our next session is now set for August 15. You should know that the word is getting out about the book club. Kim Hayes was turning heads at the Flatirons Athletic Club where she was walking the track outside while simultaneously reading a book with a black cover and the four technicolor letters --. . E . . V . . I . . L . . -- on the front. Great visual. You simply can't buy publicity like that.

For the book is Evil: An Investigation, by Lance Morrow. It is a series of bite-size essays.

Can we even define evil or is it a case of we know it when we see it? How do even know we can see it? Is it understandable only in terms of its duality with good?

We reach for metaphors. Was Moby Dick merely the immense, vengeful, malignant destroyer of life? What if the life being destroyed were itself evil? Does that elevate Mr. Dick's status from that of evil to good, even God?

It seems some times we see Ahab's harpooners everywhere -- some would maintain we them straggling on deck dressed as Hezbollah, as Hamas. Must destroy. But wait a minute. That destruction includes significant collateral damage. Little innocent cabin boy Pip suffers equally with Ahab himself. It would also be nice to get the harpooners' side of the story.

There was an interview this morning (7/21) on NPR with Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the issue whether War Crimes or even the elevated Crimes Against Humanity are now being perpetrated by the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Lebanon. Say what you will about the U.N. and the obvious point that these casualties are hapless shields for legitimate military targets, this chilling articulation gets right into this heart of darkness.

What's this? The Great Whale may be called to account? Little Pip may yet have a voice.

One would think the question of evil would be much more clear at the retail level. Certainly some transgressions -- pedophilia, for example -- deserve the judgment of the absolute. But wait. It is my understanding that many, if not most, pedophiles were themselves abused as children. That might mean they are both the perpetrators of and victims of the same evil. Shouldn't there be some sort of cosmic cancellation before we cast the final judgment?

Damn and we thought this evil stuff would be easy.

Steve Smith
Under the Banner of Heaven

Jon Krakauer

Under The Banner of Heaven will certainly break the ice on our next subject -- religion. The book opens up with an exclamation point: the July 24, 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica. This, however, is no mystery in the traditional sense. The deed is fully described and the perpetrators are identified in the Prologue.

Steve Smith
Read Full Review

Under the Banner of Heaven

Under The Banner of Heaven will certainly break the ice on our next subject -- religion. The book opens up with an exclamation point: the July 24, 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica. This, however, is no mystery in the traditional sense. The deed is fully described and the perpetrators are identified in the Prologue.

Did someone say murder? Actually it was, ahem, a "revelatory removal."

Krakauer's subject is the world which made such a revelatory removal possible. The Church of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) is American-born and pretty young as religion go -- not even two centuries old. That makes it far more amenable to examination. The events, the people, and even the thought processes are more open to the corroboration of eyewitness accounts and other objective chronicles than are the millenia religions, shrouded in the mists of mystical happenings and mumbo-jumbo vernacular.

It will be argued that the subject of Krakauer's book is the exception, the work of nothing more than an aberrational and virulent fundamentalist splinter sect of the LDS. You will be the judge of that but it certainly appears to be part of the bigger story. Krakauer's non-fiction work -- and I saw no reason to doubt the accuracy of his rich historical account -- gives us a glimpse of the whole phenomenom as if we were witness to some sort of a fast-forward-time-lapse petrie dish and could see this entire organism form and grow and mutate and reform within its own hermetically-sealed universe. Sects splinter off as competing self-proclaimed, ambitious prophets duel over the meaning of a split infinitive and carry out their respective territorial imperatives.

But the issue is not really the LDS itself. The real discussion centers around the potential abuse and distortions which can arise out of any fundamentalist system, especially where men presume to speak for God. Religion seems thus to be so easily defined by what it is not rather than what it is: Don't call me the Great Satan; You're the Great Satan. Morality becomes collateral damage as too much inbreeding gives birth to the moral equivalent of bowed legs and crooked teeth. Or so it seems.

Maybe the ultimate irony of these dueling religions is that they're all true in one way or another i.e. they are all true when understood metaphorically. Stop reading religion as prose and start experiencing it as poetry. Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods and all the devils are within us. Joseph Campbell speaks to this in The Power of Myth, the most compelling (and short) treatise on the transcendence of God I've ever come across.

Then comes the question of why we need religion at all. For this we may fall back on Camus who presents us with the paradox of the absurd: we value our lives and existence so greatly, but at the same time we know we will eventually die, and ultimately our endeavors are meaningless. Perhaps religion is a desperate attempt to cut through the paradox by promising the delay of the final curtain call into the Everlasting.

Should be an interesting discussion. Let us hope we can maybe agree in the end to that transcendent Emersonian sentiment: I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
From: “steve smith” Sent: Friday, July 07, 2006 4:59 PM Subject: Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer

I was thinking in terms of slightly re-casting this as more of a discussion group than a pure book group. The discussions would center around some central paradox or theme with the books as supporting material. There will be thus only one (not two) assigned book with a few supplementary suggestions. You may even choose to skip the books entirely and rely solely on these totally unbiased introductions.

So re-cast, our July session will be religion and the centerpiece book is Under the Banner of Heaven. The subject of the Krakauer book was briefly covered in an earlier communication but is essentially the birth, care and feeding of a splinter sect of the Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) and, more to the point, its consequences. The issue is not so much the LDS but religious fundamentalism in general.

A discussion theme may be Camus' Paradox of the Absurd, first introduced in our June discussion on death: we value our lives and existence so greatly, but at the same time we know we will eventually die, and ultimately our endeavors are meaningless. Is religion the ultimate loophole solution to the riddle i.e. a construct to postpone this eventuality into the Everlasting? Is it this yearning for the Hereafter that empowers some to presume their way into the control of others?

One suggested companion book was The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell. Every religion is portrayed as true one way or another when understood metaphorically. There are plenty of others from which to choose (or not) e.g. Buddhism Without Beliefs (religion stripped down to philosophy) or our very own Cynthia Kneen's book Awake Mind, Open Heart (which I have not yet read but Cynthia's account of the Shambhala Warrior piqued my interest here).

With less than two weeks before our next session I hesitate to even mention another possible work from which comes that wonderful quote: "Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." You may be more familiar with a different quote "Call me Ishmael," as the book is Moby Dick and the referenced cannibal is Queequeg who teaches us, among other things, the difference between religion and morality.

That provides a segue into the August session -- Evil -- which sounds abstract but is as real as yesterday's news at both the wholesale and retail level. The assigned book is Evil: An Investigation, a collection of 34 essays by Lance Morrow. Take the essays as discrete readings. Should time not permit a full reading, select maybe a few of the essays (even if it's only the Introduction plus, say, The Rifleman's Dilemma). One suggested companion book, suggested by Rita, is Saturday, by Ian McEwan.

Maybe then we'll also touch on the Epicurean paradox: if God is allpowerful and thus can can abolish evil, and wants to, why does evil exist? That should wrap up our series, the unholy trilogy, of death/religion/evil.

Steve Smith
Everyman

Philip Roth

As a newcomer to the City Club, I am soliciting members interested in an evening book club. The orientation would be to books that lend themselves to group interaction on the "hard questions." The books, then, are to be more of a catalyst to frame the issues than they are a subject for dissection. The discussion would not be on (say) whether Philip Roth or Saul Bellow is the better literary stylist. The discussion rather would be comparing our own individual Portnoy's complaints (were we teenagers). Books as Rorschack.

Steve Smith
Read Full Review

Everyman

As a newcomer to the City Club, I am soliciting members interested in an evening book club. The orientation would be to books that lend themselves to group interaction on the "hard questions." The books, then, are to be more of a catalyst to frame the issues than they are a subject for dissection. The discussion would not be on (say) whether Philip Roth or Saul Bellow is the better literary stylist. The discussion rather would be comparing our own individual Portnoy's complaints (were we teenagers). Books as Rorschack.

We'll meet for the first session on Tuesday, June 13 at 7:00 pm. It will not be a food event and will be complimentary. We'll try to keep the session to two hours. I've found the ideal number for good group discussion is eight to ten. More than a dozen seems to somehow change the dynamics: people feel as though they have to give a speech and spontaneity is lost (but maybe that's just me).

Speaking of Philip Roth, the book for the first session will be his recently published novel Everyman. It certainly fills the bill as an introduction to a hard (at least uncomfortable) question. The subject is death. Not only is the subject death but death stripped of any spiritual, religious and even philosophical trappings. It lays bare the starkness of the final nullity. The book is a fast read and I'll donate my copy to the CC library. You can probably complete the book in two (maybe even one) sittings.

There is a very good review by Nadine Gordimer (author, "Get A Life") in the recent (May 7, 2006) New York Times Book Review so I won't provide one here except to say the protagonist -- we don't even know his name, hence Everyman -- is introduced to the reader at his (Everyman's, not the reader's) funeral. We get to know the man through a few eulogies and through a number of wonderfully done time-disjointed (a la Catch-22) sequences and see he is: the son of Jewish immigrants, secular, financially successful, man-on-the-come, advertising executive, thrice-married, father of three adult children (functionally connected to just one), part-time assisted living resident, medically challenged, and amateur painter. And lonesome. "In the depths of despondency . . . a motionless cipher angrily awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute."

Maybe you, as I, will focus on how your own life story differs from that of Everyman but it will be difficult to avert your eyes from the overriding themes. Among the issues worthy of discussion:

Everyman learned too late that selfish behavior in middle age can lead to terrible isolation. How are we any different? What if Everyman had had an anticipatory retrospection of his own life. Would Everyman have changed his behavior? Or, more to the point, does this provide us with our own opportunity for anticipatory retrospection? What does that mean? No cliches please.

Let's get specific here: would any of you fifty-something-year-old guys jeopardize a perfectly serviceable marriage with a run at a twenty-four year old Danish model? What's with this late stage sexual appetite? Is it a way of resisting mortality through sensual experience while the sap's still running, thereby invoking the glory of having been alive even while eluding death?

My own father's life details differed significantly from those of Everyman but there was one startling similarity. I had the chance to witness "up close and personal" the last six months of my dad's life until his death last December and the only lament he ever voiced was the desire to be back there on the Jersey coast again body surfing the waves. That was the only one. Just like Everyman, to be "the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft . . ." Is this what it all comes to -- the childhood memories -- that is truly the last hurrah, that which animates a life in the final reckoning?

Is death merely a biological ending or an act to be performed? Compare Everyman to the literary antecedent, Tolstoy's short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich (just kidding, this isn't school). Does it mean actively embracing the inevitable? Does it require something beyond that which the secular can offer? Is this perceived need the true foundation for the man-creates-God school of thought?

What if the active embrace involves the "S" word or maybe it's better expressed as self-induced euthanasia with Millicent Kramer as poster "child?" Can anyone judge her at any level? We get perilously close to the Gov. Lamm (mis)quote regarding duty to die but the question hangs out there with our Everywoman, once so full of life and of meaning reduced to . . . this. Go one step further and multiply one soul by a generation. Add in the fact that sixty percent of this country's medical expenditures are applied to the last six months of life. What if the resources were directed rather to the real and potential "tubular sprouts" out there? Sometimes I look upon the Boomer generation as collectively the most selfish of all mankind.

Lastly, could anyone invent an ending even happier than the one revealed in last four sentences in the book?

Steve Smith

Book Reviews

The Lucifer Effect and On Hitler’s Mountain

The Lucifer Effect and On Hitler’s Mountain

The Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning

Deep Survival

Deep Survival

Night Train to Lisbon

Night Train to Lisbon

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

Tortilla Curtain

Tortilla Curtain

Catch-22

Catch-22

Walden Pond

Walden Pond

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged

Man’s Search For Meaning

Man’s Search For Meaning

The End of Faith / Letters to a Christian Nation / The God Delusion

The End of Faith / Letters to a Christian Nation / The God Delusion

Why Is Sex Fun?

Why Is Sex Fun?

The Female Brain

The Female Brain

Evil, An Investigation

Evil, An Investigation

Under the Banner of Heaven

Under the Banner of Heaven

Everyman

Everyman

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