Books 2008

When I started graduate school in 1999 I began keeping a list of all the books I read each year. I only put a book on the list if I read every word of the book carefully. The title for this post is not a typo - I never posted my top ten list for 2008, so I'm doing that now, and will soon post my 2009 top ten. These are ten of the books I most enjoyed in '08 in the order that I read them . . .

1. Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (New York: Random House, 2007). This book has an excellent website. As the subtitle suggests, the work is part adventure book and part love affair. It follows the careers of several different people who are in love with the Redwood forests of Northern California and who are passionate about finding the world's largest trees - and in some cases, climbing them.

2. N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Westmont, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2006). N.T. Wright is an Oxford trained New Testament scholar and the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England. This is a profound argument - personal and based strongly in reason - about how evil can be reconciled with belief in a just God. Wright was moved to write this book by the Southeast Asian tsunami of late 2004. One can get a solid precis of the argument by reading his sermon, "God, 9/11, the Tsunami, and the New Problem of Evil." You can read more of Wright's work here.

3. Umberto Eco, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006). Eco is a medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, novelist, communication professor at the University of Bologna, and owner of a 50,000+ volume library. This work is a collection of writings Eco published, mostly in European newspapers, about the role the media plays in politics, war-making, and other public controversies. Eco takes a rather long view about these things, choosing to see much of what goes on today in light of what went on a long time ago.

4. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). MacIntyre is a well known philosopher whose earlier book, After Virtue, was an invitation to return attention to Aristotle's ideas of civic virtue. In this later work, MacIntyre explores what it means that humans are animals, born helpless and entirely dependent, with the longest period from birth to maturity of any animal species. Beginning with man's weakness, dependence, and weak rationality, MacIntyre builds a case for why humanity needs virtue.

5. Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Modern Library, 2002). This novel, by France's and perhaps the world's greatest novelist, is a romantic story about the work required by humanity to master nature. A more accurate translation of the title might be "the workers of the sea," with all the socialist overtones possible of term "workers" in English. The work was originally entitled L'Abime, "The Abyss," and much of the book deals with the Channel islands and the vast Atlantic. When Hugo wrote the book he was living in exile on the Island of Guernsey where he was inspiring his countrymen to revolt against Louis-Napoleon (later, Napoleon III). As Graham Robb writes in the introduction, "Hugo's imagination had thrived on banishment and defeat." (By the bye, if you've not read Graham Robb's biography of Victor Hugo you're missing a great read.)

6. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2005). Stanley Lombardo has given the world a great gift. He has translated all three of the world's great epic poems - the Iliad, Odyssey, and the Aeneid - into American. Yes, that's right, not just the good old King's English, but a truly American translation that allows us in our own time to truly understand by analogy what on earth these great poems are really about. Exhibit A for this claim: go to amazon and check out the cover art on these great works and you'll see what I mean. For a snippet, consider this description of the angered Turnus, leaping down from his chariot, and careening madly through the enemy lines:

Think of a stone crashing down a mountain,
Either a storm has washed it free, or time
In its passing has loosened it, and now
The shameless mass of rock sweeps down
The steep slopes and bounds over the earth,
Rolling along with its trees, herds, and men.

7. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). This is a monumental work by one of the world's leading philosophers attempting to explain secularism to itself, historically and philosophically. No precis could do it justice. The work was very well written and taught me much that I didn't know about knowledge and belief and how they're inextricably related, among many other things about history, religion, secularism, &c.

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). The argument of this book is that nations are imagined before they are realized, and that the first reason why a Minnesotan and an Arkansan, for example, think of themselves as part of the same community, but the Minnesotan and the Canadian just 100 miles away do not is because we've imagined the world to be a certain way. In other words, it is language and ideas that drive political realities, perhaps more than political or material realities drive political realities. This is a short work, but very much worth reading for those interested in political philosophy, &c.

9. Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). Reeves is a journalist; Mill was a journalist, philosopher, and, effectively, secretary of state for the British Empire. Reeves approach to Mill is one I like because it doesn't treat him as philosopher living in isolation, but an active participant in politics and public life.

10. David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994). When I read this book I was overcome by Tyndale's single-minded purposefulness in translating the Bible into English. Not only did he literally give his life to this cause, but he had to sacrifice a great deal to bring about his great achievement before he died. He translated the New Testament first. When he decided to translate the Old Testament there was one problem. He couldn't read Hebrew. When he discovered that there was no other English speaking person alive at the time who could read Hebrew, he moved to Germany to learn it so he could continue his work. Now that's determination. I wish I had some single-minded purpose of such scope and noble meaning and the Christian courage to carry it out by giving my life to it. Inspiring.

Honorable mentions in 2008 should go to Kenneth Burke, Walter Bagehot, Jules Michelet, David Hume, and the ever-readable Cicero.

May you have more time to read this year than last . . .

Book Review: The Mystery of Capital

Book Review: Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

Hernando de Soto, named after the Spanish explorer, is a Peruvian economist and President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru. He is a former economist for the GATT and former governor of Peru's central reserve bank. In this well-researched and clearly written book he seeks to explain why the world's poor seem to find no traction in the world's economy despite the fact that they have considerable assets. Yes, that's right, de Soto's starting claim is that the world's poor have tremendous wealth, but virtually no capital. They find themselves in this unfortunate predicament primarily by virtue of the laws of the countries in which they live.

The poor inhabitants of these nations - five-sixths of humanity - do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses, but not titles; crops, but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work (6-7)

Wealthy westerners live in a world where they can convert their money to capital and back again easily. The world's poor are not so lucky. To gain an idea of how difficult the migrant life of the world's poor is, de Soto's research associates decided to run an experiment in Lima, Peru. They would start a legitimate business by legal means. They filled out forms, took bus trips to central Lima to get certifications, filled out forms, &c. The team spent six hours a day and finally succeeded in registering a small garment workshop - 289 days later - having spent $1,231 - thirty-one times the monthly minimum wage! They then decided to obtain legal authorization to build a house on state-owned land. This process took six years and eleven months, requiring 207 administrative steps in fifty-two government offices. To obtain legal title for that piece of land took 728 more steps. To obtain official recognition for a private bus, jitney, or taxi took twenty-six months of red tape (pp. 18-20).

They and their associates repeated the experiments in other poor nations:

1. In the Philippines, to purchase legally a dwelling that has already been built on state-owned or privately owned urban land necessitated 168 steps, involving fifty-three public and private agencies and took 13-25 years. If the dwelling is in an area considered "agricultural," the settler would have to clear 45 additional bureaucratic procedures before 13 entities, adding two more years to his request (20).
2. In Egypt, to acquire and legally register a lot on state owned desert land - 77 procedures must be performed at thirty-one public and private agencies,taking anywhere from five to fourteen years. This explains why 4.7 million Egyptians have chosen to build their dwellings illegally. If, after having done so, he wants to legitimize his property, he risks having it demolished, paying a steep fine, and serving up to ten years in prison (20-21).
3. In Haiti, one way an ordinary citizen can settle legally on government land is to lease it from the government for five years and then buy it. This process takes 65 steps and a little more than two years just for the privilege of leasing the land for five years. To buy it requires 111 more steps, and twelve more years, 19 years in total (21).
   

"Yet even this long ordeal will not ensure that the property remains legal. In fact, in every country we investigated, we found that it is very nearly as difficult to stay legal as it is to become legal" (21).

The poor, not being stupid, of course end up building, holding, buying and selling their domains in an "extralegal" market - a domain outside the official law. The result is that their resources are essentially invisible.


HOW MUCH IS THIS DEAD CAPITAL WORTH?
A shanty in Port-au-Prince: $500.
A cabin by a polluted waterway in Manila: $2700.
A substantial house in a village outside Cairo: $5000.
A respectable bungalo with a garage and picture window in Lima: $20,000.

Collectively, the value of holdings by the world's poor outweighs the total wealth of the rich! (33) "By [de Soto's] calculations, the total value of the real estate held but not legally owned by the poor of the Third World and former communist nations is at least $9.3 trillion" (35). This is twice as much as the total circulating US money supply, nearly as much as the total value of all the companies listed on the main stock exchanges of the world's twenty most developed nations, more than 20 times the total Foreign Direct Investment into all Third World and Communist nations in the ten years from 1989-1999 (35).

As de Soto repeats again and again: the world's poor are not the problem, they are the solution.


THE PROBLEM for many of the world's poor is that they do not have access to capital. They cannot use their wealth. With no address and no legally recognized title, the owner of a plywood shack with a cement floor and a tin roof, worth about $500, cannot secure a fifty dollar loan to buy a bicycle - or whatever. The point is that they are hampered by their lack of access to capital - capital being not money, which they have, however little, but potential to turn that money into a better life.

To unravel the mystery of capital, we have to go back to the seminal meaning of the word. In medieval Latin, "capital" appears to have denoted head of cattle or other livestock, which have always been important sources of wealth beyond the basic meat they provide. Livestock are low-maintenance possessions; they are mobile and can be moved away from danger; they are also easy to count and measure. But most important, from livestock you can obtain additional wealth, or surplus value, by setting in motion other industries, including milk, hides, wool, meat, and fuel. Livestock also have the useful attribute of being able to reproduce themselves. Thus the term "capital" begins to do two jobs simultaneously, capturing the physical dimensions of assets (livestock) as well as their potential to generate surplus value (40-41).

In short, capital comes from inside your head. Capital is a mental phenomenon. For some reason, many poorer nations have imagined that the poor are not a part of the nation's wealth.

As the flux of extralegal workers continue to gather in the world's cities (see this TED talk about the world's shadow cities and its 1.6 billion squatters), politics and the law will have to respond appropriately to the needs of the world's migrant poor. They face the same choice that the United States faced in the 19C when they had to decide what to do with the thousands of peoples flocking to the American West. Either they must take these "extralegals" and make them part of the dominant legal system or they must fight the common sense of large communities and ultimately undermine the cohesion of society as well as the coherence of the state's legal system. (In one country, a newspaper inspired by de Soto's research discovered that the mansion in which the nation's president lived had no legal title!)

In conclusion, Hernando de Soto believes that the best way to enrich the world's poor is to take the perspective of the poor to understand their needs and coopt the elites by showing them the economic potential of the poor. There is much more in this detailed book, but the most powerful implication of de Soto's argument is that people are a safe bet, whether rich or poor.

This article was cross-posted to www.omninerd.com

'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend'

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa
loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leaved how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look, fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build - but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

A September Morn

This is to atone for my last video.

The King of England

I don't know why I find this so funny. Perhaps it has something to do with submitting final grades and finishing another semester. In any event, I can relate to the "it's like eating crunchy air" comment. Happy Holidays, y'all!

Why not a Global Pledge of Allegiance?

A lot of my colleagues complain about having to grade student papers. I suppose I sometimes fall into that trap, but often I read papers by students that are brilliant. Tonight was one of those nights. We have been discussing the possibilities of a global civil society, and the students were assigned to read Mary Kaldor's book, Global Civil Society. One of my students wrote a line in her paper, mimicking the United States pledge of allegiance, asking why not?: "I pledge allegiance to the world." This prompted the following from myself:

I pledge allegiance to the citizens of the world, and to the Republic of hearts and minds, prayers and tears, life and death to which we ALL belong, one people, the children of God, indivisible, with liberty, love, and justice for all.

How about it? Something wrong with the idea? Are the ties of nationalism outdated? Isn't it time to look for a Republic of Conscience? To carry our own burdens? To recognize our origins in salt and tears? To recognize our dual citizenship? Why not a pledge of allegiance to our humanity, our dependence, our weakness? I love my country, don't get me wrong, but I love other countries too. "My heart is large enough for all men," said Joseph Smith, and I feel much the same way today. Who can separate us?


P.S. Bonus quote: "What we seek is . . . to improve the quality of human life while at the same time respecting the natural environment which sustains it: Not a heaven on earth but a better earth on earth." - Paul Wellstone

The Crucial Crisis

The first and, finally, the sole history that I know and can accomplish is my own contingent, limited, mortal history. All history amounts to my history, because it derives from it. There is no solipsism in this circle, just the admission that my life remains mine, unsubstitutable, unique, unrepeatable - thrown forth and lost at once. Why does history itself amount to my history and my history to irrevocable uniqueness? Because I must die. To die signifies to die alone. To die signifies that nobody will die in my place; the proof: if someone commits himself to die in my place, that will not exempt me from dying, later, on my own account, and, if it can be put thus, in my own place; there is no one but me who can truly die in my place; my place is even defined by this unsubstitutable death. Death will never be taken from us, and in the end it is death that attests to our irreducible singularity. No one can separate me or dislodge me from my death, for in order to take it from me he would have to begin by giving it to me. In this death, which makes me me at the very moment when it undoes my me, all is decided for and by me, and all the former antagonisms are settled. We must say, then, that one crisis remains accessible to me when all the others have lost their edge and slipped away - my death.

- Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity

Corners of Peace

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
- Thomas à Kempis

Everywhere I have searched for peace and nowhere found it, except in a corner with a book.
- Thomas à Kempis