Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

Theodore Dalrymple is a British psychiatrist who has spent a lot of time counseling people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. He's also a penetrating author with a terrific prose style. He's worth reading for the style alone.

In this book Dalrymple asserts the strong thesis that modern psychiatry is not only largely a waste of time, but actually counterproductive. He's not talking about the cases of obvious pathology, where he is fully willing to concede that psychiatry has made genuine and valuable contributions. He is talking more about psychiatry as it tends to expand into a general philosophy or comprehensive view of human nature in the form of Freudian psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.  Dalrymple holds that in these forms psychology either teaches things that are trivially true and well-known, or novel ideas that are inherently destructive. Chief among the latter is the idea that some controlling force - be it childhood trauma, our genes, or our conditioning, etc. - dictates our behavior.

Dalyrmple is a master of the pithy phrase. Opening the book at random: "Psychoanalysis, like death, is a bourn from which no traveler returns."

Highly recommended.

Double Fault by Lionel Shriver

I haven't been keeping up with this reading log, although I've been reading. I'll post on the books I can remember I've read over the last few months.

This one is a novel by the same author as We Need To Talk About Kevin. And like that book, it explores a sort of Nietzschean theme of the will to power as fundamental to human relations. Shriver likes to take the most intimate of human relations - in the case of Kevin, that between mother and son - and tell a story of two people attempting to overcome the will to power to know each other. And if you are at all familiar with her work, she's not too optimistic about the outcome.

Double Fault does to marriage what Kevin did to motherhood. Shriver ups the ante by making the marriage partners both struggling professional tennis players. Since competition is at the heart of what they do, there is the danger that the marriage will become a contest as well - and it does.

This book isn't quite as compelling as Kevin, but still a good read.

Badlands by C.J. Box

CJ Box has a new hero in Cassie Dewell, a sheriff's deputy who moves to North Dakota to take a position as chief investigator in the expanding shale oil country. This looks like the beginning of a new series just as good as his Joe Pickett series.

Re-read of An Intellectual History of Liberalism by Pierre Manent

This book, along with Manent's The City of Man, is indispensable for understanding what it means to be modern. And we are all inevitably modern.

Adios America by Ann Coulter

I generally don't read these types of contemporary political books, but my library had this and I gave it a shot. A very easy read and Coulter is actually pretty funny and, unfortunately, right about immigration.

The Enlightenment - Invention of the Modern Self by Leo Damrosch

This is a series of lectures by Prof. Damrosch and produced by the Great Courses. The theme is the development of the "modern self" during the Enlightenment, and touches on Boswell, Rousseau, Hume and others. I listened to this while doing my long runs. It's an excellent series and understanding the Enlightenment is critical to understanding ourselves, as we are all children of the Enlightenment whether we know it or not.

Re-read of The City of Man by Pierre Manent

This is one of my favorite "companion" books and is the most thorough and penetrating analysis of modern thought that I have read. It's always worth re-reading every year or two.

Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman was a philosophy professor at Yale and now lives in Berlin. This book wasn't quite what I thought it would be and turned out to be a vigorous defense of the Enlightenment, invoking Kant, Rousseau and their pals. Neiman tells us that there are forces conspiring to keep us infantile - principally government and corporations - because an infantile population is easier to manipulate and control. The answer is to embrace the Enlightenment challenge to think for yourself.

While I don't agree with Neiman's assessment of the Enlightenment, I always appreciate a sincere, principle, and straightforward defense of a philosophical position. And Neiman is a clear and excellent writer.

The Martian by Andy Weir

An outstanding science fiction thriller about an astronaut stranded on Mars. It's "near real" sci-fi, in the sense that Weir stays as close to known science and a realistic mission to Mars as possible. One of the best works of fiction I've read in years. Looking forward to the movie.

Faith vs Fact by Jerry Coyne

I've written some posts about this book on my main blog. A great look into the modern scientistic mind.

The Future of Marriage by David Blankenhorn

I had read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America some time ago, and wondered if he written a follow on. It turns out he did, an excellent work on the state of marriage and its future. He's got the best take on gay marriage and its effect on marriage in general that I have read. And his predictions (it was written about 10 years ago) have been coming true since.

Purgatory Ridge by William Kent Krueger

Third installment in the Cork O'Connor series. Every entry has been solid.

Boundary Waters by William Kent Krueger

Second installment in the Cork O'Connor series. Just as good as the first entry.

Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger

Mystery/thriller series concerning ex-Sheriff Cork O'Connor in Minnesota. Like in the series by Bryan Gruley or Steve Hamilton, or the Joe Pickett series by C.J. Box, the protagonist is a relatively ordinary guy (no Jack Reacher or James Bond) with integrity trying to do the right thing in a corrupt world. Excellent start and I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

Endangered by CJ Box

The latest in the Joe Pickett series and doesn't disappoint.

The Pale House by Luke McCallin

This is the second book in the Gregor Reinhardt series. It's even better than the first book, The Man From Berlin. The story has advanced from May 1943 to the spring of 1945, but it is still set in Yugoslavia. Reinhardt is now part of the feldjager korps, a kind of super unit of the German military police, created to help maintain discipline in the Wehrmact as the Third Reich crumbled.

McCallin has written that these two books are part of a trilogy, and I can't wait till the third installment.

The Man From Berlin by Luke McCallin

This is an excellent mystery story featuring a German Abwehr (military intelligence) officer in Yugoslavia in World War Two. Captain Gregor Reinhardt is a decorated First World War veteran, a former Berlin detective, and a man of conscience trying to hold on to his integrity in a world given over to the devil. He is called on to investigate the murders of another Abwehr officer and a female journalist which, naturally, are more than they seem. Reinhardt has to navigate the treacherous waters of Nazi and Wehrmacht bureaucracy, not to mention the local Yugoslav authorities and Communist partisans to boot. The book has a strong moral depth and profoundly investigates the questions of the end justifying the means, and what it means to maintain integrity in a world without true law.

I listened to this story as an audiobook while running.

Cover Her Face by P.D. James

The first Adam Dalgleish mystery novel, a classic locked room mystery. Listened to audiobook while running.

Aquinas by Edward Feser [re-read]

I've read the book, now I've listened to the audiotape while running.

The Money Bubble by James Turk and John Rubino

Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, my financial strategy was simply to plow the recommended income percentage into my 401k accounts, and into conventionally recommended mutual funds, then forget about it. Finance wasn't an area in which I had much interest.

The dot-com bust in the early years of this century did not bother me - stocks go up and down and the occasional sharp correction is to be expected. But the crisis of 2008 seemed to me to be different - and it was especially the response to it that disturbed me. This wasn't merely a correction in the stock market. We were told that the international financial system was on the verge of collapse and only massive monetary intervention by the government could prevent a catastrophe.

I was stunned by this declaration. Banks have the reputation of being conservative and stodgy institutions. How did these great international banks get into the position of having their books so unbalanced that they were dangerously vulnerable to a downturn in the real estate market? The people running these institutions were either not as clever as I thought or not as responsible as I thought, or both.

Common sense said that the banks got into so much trouble because they were "overleveraged" - a term I later learned meaning that they themselves had borrowed too much money and speculated with it, much of it in real estate market, which is why the bust in real estate put them in so much trouble. Our national answer was to bail out the banks with hundreds of billions of dollars - itself borrowed money. All we did was "solve" the banks' debt problems by transferring it to the national debt.

That might have been OK if we had acknowledged that it only actually solved anything to the extent that we got our national debt under control. But while the bank bailout solved the immediate financial crisis, the stock and real estate bust had resulted in an economic recession as well. Our response to that recession was even more stunning than the declaration of the catastrophic condition of international finance. The near fatal collapse of the banks should have been a wakeup call to the danger of too much debt: But instead of that crisis chastening us in our profligate ways, our answer to the recession was a massive increase of government debt and the spending of borrowed money!

This combination of events thoroughly convinced me that the idea that the people in charge basically know what they are doing is dangerously naïve. And so is the idea that you can more or less chuck your retirement savings into a reputable mutual fund, forget about it, and be confident that it will be there for you when you retire. I no longer believed any of the conventional wisdom about financial planning and realized I'd have to rapidly educate myself on matters financial or risk being disillusioned when I eventually retired.

I won't rehearse all that education, but The Money Bubble has certainly been part of it and I've read the book as well as listened to it several times while running. The authors elaborate some fundamental matters that everyone in the current situation really must know, like the true nature of money, the historical role of gold in international finance, and the relationship between inflation and government debt. They flesh out the common sense that should have woken us up in 2008 - that you can't solve a debt problem by more debt. Most importantly, they discuss how to prepare yourself for the inevitable financial crisis that has only been postponed, not avoided.