This is more for my own satisfaction than the edification of our readers, but I can’t let a great meme go to waste. I tried for the ‘gut instinct’ approach, but that left me with about 30-odd books that say more about my interests than what really influenced my worldview. The final list is a pretty hodgepodge distillation of personal interests and political/philosophical influences, and many of them led me to other books that said much the same thing more convincingly or more eloquently. That said, I tried to stay true to what moved me originally.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, Joseph Conrad – Culture, corruption, and state-building, packaged into one easily-digestible adventure story. I’m not sure if a book can make you cynical before your time, but Nostromo came awfully close. No other text does a better job of hammering home the lessons of human fallibility.
A History of the Crusades, Vol. I-III, Steven Runciman – A bit dated even when I plucked it off my dad’s bookshelf, this was the first “serious” historical work I slogged through. “Slogged” is a bit unfair, however, because I kept going back to Runciman long after I’d read his three volume opus cover to cover. There is much to take away from this magisterial survey of the Crusades, but two things stand out: First, Runciman’s humane treatment of Arab and Muslim culture is an incredible example of fair-minded historical scholarship (made all the more remarkable by the fact that these were published in the 1950s). Second, Runciman effortlessly marries a gripping historical narrative with serious, sober-minded analysis. Where else can you get your fill of Frankish chivalry and the legal customs of medieval Palestine?
By the way, Runciman permanently spoiled “low” fantasy for me. Tolkien knock-offs pale in comparison to the Crusaders’ desperate venture across Europe, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land, and what fictional hero holds a candle to Richard Coeur de Lion? I know we have more than a few fantasy aficionados among the League’s readership, and I urge all of them to give Runciman a chance. Deus le volt!
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler – Many people have written about finding a book at just the write time. A few years ago, I was a college student visiting my parents in Riga over summer break. I picked up a battered copy of Koestler at the embassy’s public affairs section. At the time, we were living within walking distance of the Latvian Museum of Occupation, a black slab of a building commemorating the Soviet Union’s unwelcome stay. This passage always stuck with me:
“I don’t approve of mixing ideologies,” Ivanov continued. “There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and human, declares the individual to be sacrosanct. and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community – which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.”
I’m not particularly religious, but this pretty much sums up my ideas about human dignity.
Dispatches, Michael Herr – I read this in high school, and at the time, Herr represented the kind of counter-culture icon conspicuously absent from the early 2000s: an anti-war journalist who went to Vietnam, smoked dope, got shot at, and lived to tell the whole crazy tale. I later read that Herr made half the book up, and I can’t say I’d be totally surprised if this turns out to be true. To an impressionable high schooler, however, Herr was the first person to make writing – and more importantly, journalism – seem cool and relevant and powerful. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test narrowly missed the cut for many of the same reasons.
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Paul Kennedy – Another book I pulled off dad’s shelf. A few lists have mentioned Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a formative influence, and I think this book had a similar effect on me. Kennedy convincingly explained how economic, social and political factors contributed to the rise and decline of every hegemonic power from Imperial Spain to the United States. It’s a great – if overly-deterministic – narrative, and it was the first book to really drive home the predictive power of political, economic and social trends. To me, Paul Kennedy was the real-life equivalent of Hari Seldon, which made economics, history, and political science seem awfully cool.
Of course, his predictions about Japan’s impending rise turned out to be totally wrong (though I heard he threw those in at the behest of an over-eager publisher). There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.
The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman; In Defense of Global Capitalism, Johan Norberg – As a committed teenage leftist, I was determined to remain unmoved by The Fountainhead. At that age, I think it’s impossible to find Rand’s romantic individualism totally unappealing, but I was able to convince myself that Rand’s writing was hackneyed, her characters two-dimensional, and her ideology heartless. I’d like to say this was the result of keen judgment, but the reality is that I knew what I thought of Rand before I began reading, which is a bad way to approach any text.
Why do I mention this? Many on the Right cite Rand’s books as a formative influence, but I came to appreciate capitalism in a less heroic, more consequential light. Friedman and Norberg’s books had a lot to do with this, because it’s remarkably easy to glide through modern, consumer-driven society without considering the immense prosperity and innovation created by free enterprise (a cynic might say this obliviousness is a byproduct of consumer capitalism, but that’s another story). Friedman’s book was particularly influential – while there are undoubtedly many downsides to unrestrained economic growth, the moral implications of broadly-shared prosperity are hard to understate.
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I’d finish the list, but I’ve got to get going. Before I do, however, here’s one last influence I should note: I would not have developed real analytical skills, an appreciation for philosophy and economics, or much of a work ethic if I hadn’t debated policy in college. I mention this mainly as an excuse to congratulate two friends from my school, who just reached the semifinals of the National Debate Tournament, a pretty incredibly feat for a small college with little to its name beyond incredible coaches and hard-working debaters. They went out to the eventual champions from Michigan State, a great run to end an incredible season. Go Mary Washington!
As a committed teenage leftist, I was determined to remain unmoved by The Fountainhead. At that age, I think it’s impossible to find Rand’s romantic individualism totally unappealing,
I was twenty; perhaps that’s why I found nothing worthwhile in it at all.
but I was able to convince myself that Rand’s writing was hackneyed, her characters two-dimensional, and her ideology heartless.
The first two are inescapably true. I’d never heard of Rand at the time (I read the book because a girl I liked recommended it), and didn’t try to reason out the thing’s ideology. I just slogged my way through it, lied that I thought it was “really interesting”, and asked her out to dinner to talk about it.Report
Tell me true, Mike Schilling. Did you really find Howard Roark totally unappealing? Report
Honestly. I’ve never admired either self-absorption or self-righteousness. (And that was years before I started to work in software, and could identify Roark as the prototype of the prima donna not to be touched with a ten-foot pole, no matter how talented he might be.) Though I confess that I’m pretty immune to architecture, so I had no real feeling about Roark’s ability, except that the author insisted he was a genius. If I’d really believed that, it would have been at least one more item on the other side of the scales. As it is, I won’t play the sap for him.Report
Well whatever else we can say about Rand there’ll always be this; Bioshock and Bioshock II. In my little corner of existence that justifies her alone.
Plus the woman was as screwy as a bag full of Philips heads. Have you ever read about her personal life?Report
I know that the friendship between her and Murray Rothbard ended after she repeatedly harassed his wife with anti-Christian rants (she was an episcopalian).Report
How about the fact that her inner circle was a cult in every definition of the term, that she coerced much younger men from her philosophical school into having sex with her and excommunicated them if they refused, that she repeatedly and publicly asserted that a particular serial killer was the ideal of the modern man….Report
Exactly Freddie. For a person who believed strongly in not giving anything away for free Rand was quite generous with giving away free entertainment.Report
North:
I thought she believed that it wasn’t okay for the gov’t to take what you have and give it away to moochers for free.Report
Far as I know she believed in that as well, yes.
If any of Rands writings or characters issued full throated endorsements of charity then I don’t recall hearing about them. I’d be charmed to be corrected though.Report
And Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin.Report
Excellent.
Broadly shared… well. Isn’t that just the thing.Report
Indeed!Report
Total tangent but Paul Kennedy is hilarious and a lush.
At a symposium on imperial power I remember him asking some hypothetical involving the US spanking France. I don’t think anyone had a clear idea what he meant but as far as indistinct terms indicating military action of some kind go, it’s certainly one of the more absurd yet amusing I’ve heard.Report
Just caught this, Kyle, and that’s hilarious. I’m jealous you got to take a class with him.Report
“I don’t approve of mixing ideologies,” Ivanov continued. “There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and human, declares the individual to be sacrosanct. and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community – which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.”
My goodness. I believe I am going to have to read this guy…Report
A totally polar, Manichean binary of ideology? Really? I was surprised that Will quoted it approvingly, and I’m surprised that you do, too. Rigid, right and wrong binaries (“there are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles”)… that just screams of juvenalia to me.Report
I’m a pretty juvenile guy, at the end of the day.Report
Yeah but I mean, I know you don’t like that kind of thing. Or so I remember.Report
What? Manichean binary of ideologies?
No, I’m pretty much a fan. I just have different things that appear on my “matters of taste” and “matters of morality” list than others likely do.
I still very much believe that it’s “wrong” to attempt to legislate matters of taste and, on top of that, it’s “wrong” to act in opposition to what is “moral”.
I go into more detail… ah, I won’t link it again. If you haven’t read it by now…Report
No one ever accused Koestler of nuance, but I won’t apologize for being intensely moved by that passage. Some of it was context – it’s hard not to be touched by anti-totalitarianism when you’re visiting a country that still bears the scars of a brutal Soviet occupation. But some of it is taking comfort in knowing that human dignity is important, and a fierce belief that human beings shouldn’t be treated instrumentally.Report
The spirit of it is indeed intensely moving, apart from the unnecessary reference to Christianity. But its also obviously wrong. Every time we observe that it might be better to save 10,000 lives than fix one person’s broken hip, given the choice, or we’re implicitly, in Koestler’s mind, putting ourselves in the same camp as the Nazis and Bolsheviks. There are Libertarians, and even some Conservatives, who really do seem to believe that’s the case, but I’m certainly not one of them.Report
I don’t think that passage is talking about resource allocation. There’s a clear moral difference between deciding person X shouldn’t get a hip transplant because we need to feed 10,000 starving people and deciding person X needs to be sacrificed to achieve some socialist utopia.Report
Or 20,000,000 person Xes.Report
Or deciding that millions of people shouldn’t get extended unemployment insurance in a brutal recession, because we’re trying to build the libertarian paradise?Report
Or deciding that millions of people should be forced to live under a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein when we have the power to remove his tyranny and install a democracy in its place?Report
We have the power to impose democracy? Really?
A damned shame we didn’t use it during Reconstruction, then.Report
Well, the important part is to recognize the problem and then to do something. Not just say “hey, the status quo is good enough for me”.Report
I have to give a nod to Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country and The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & PowerReport