Since I recently wrote about my love for books, I thought I would share some of what I have been reading lately. I excerpt liberally so feel free to skip around to find what grabs you.
Bad Religion by Ross Douthat
A perceptive critique of American religious heresy, from televangelism and prosperity gospel to therapeutic spirituality and conspiracy theorist revisionism. I found his history of 1960s reform movements particularly fascinating:
The ecumenical efforts that increasingly consumed progressive leaders only added to these difficulties by contributing to the impression that liberal Christianity had no distinctive theological convictions, no principles that couldn’t be compromised in the name of conciliation and unity.
…
It wasn’t just that such leaders failed to attract parishioners to their churches or inspire would-be clergymen to join their seminaries. It was that they themselves often drifted away from the organizations that they headed, looking for something less constraining and restrictive, less dogmatic and demanding. In Catholicism and Protestantism alike, many of the most vocal and active reformers of the 1960s had left organized Christianity entirely by the 1970s and ’80s. The explanation (especially among departing Catholic priests) was almost always that change wasn’t coming as fast as they had hoped, and sometimes this seemed plausible. But more often these defectors seemed to be in the position of a general who has fought and won a series of battles, only to decide that the territory wasn’t worth ruling after all.
American Grace by Robert Putnam and David Campbell
The early postwar era witnessed a profound increase in religiosity relative to previous generations, as evidenced by the adoption of the motto “In God We Trust” (1956), the addition of the phrase “under God” to the pledge of allegiance (1954), and the popularity of religious epics in Hollywood cinema. Putnam and Campbell trace such changes in religious observance across generations, with particular attention to our current period of secularization. Writing in 2012, they viewed the more extreme pronouncements of religion’s demise as premature:
Our calculations suggest at this rate, it would take a century of this same slow generational change to lower average American church attendance from 30 times a year to 20 times a year. People sometimes speak of a process of secularization in America that will bring church attendance to the current levels of Western Europe, but this sort of calculation suggests that if we are witnessing such a process in the United States, at this rate, it will take a couple of centuries to reduce American religious observance to the current European levels.
While my sense is that the quoted rate of secularization has accelerated significantly in recent years, the authors broader message serves as a reminder of how much cultural trends can change across generations.
I also enjoyed how many interesting facts were sprinkled liberally throughout this book:
While Evangelicals were readier to defend racial segregation than non-evangelicals, in part because of where they lived, their distinctiveness on this dimension declined as Evangelicalism grew. The gap between Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals on issues like racial intermarriage or a possible black president narrowed in the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting either that the newly recruited Evangelicals were less racist than average to begin with or that exposure to Evangelical teachings, at least in this period, reduced support for segregation. Thus we conclude that racism and support for segregation were not in fact major factors in the rise of Evangelicalism.
Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald
Many of the stories are made up (and hilarious). But Straussian references to Norm’s private battle with cancer are visible in retrospect.
Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters by Daniel Wegner and Kurt Gray
Recommended by Arnold Kling, whose review is here. Mind Club is beautifully written and offers a lot of insights into how we perceive the many varieties of minds we encounter—including animals, machines, and corporate entities. One key insight they develop is that humans see the minds of others in terms of two distinct sets of mental abilities, experience and agency, which largely determine our moral judgments about them.
To have moral rights you need to have experience, an inner life filled with feelings, and the potential for suffering. Conversely, to be morally responsible you need to have agency, to be able to plan, act, and appreciate the outputs of your thoughts. Babies have more experience than robots and so have more moral rights; robots have more agency than babies and so have more moral responsibility.
The authors convincingly demonstrate how difficult it can be to perceive others’ agency and experience at the same time, which would seem to underscore the challenge modern societies face in preserving the rights of its members while maintaining the requisite sense of responsibility for personal behavior.
The Money Illusion by Scott Sumner
Is everything you know about the Great Recession wrong? Just about, according to Scott Sumner. For example:
The standard view is that American home prices soared to irrational heights during the 2005-2006 housing bubble, so a later sharp decline was almost inevitable. But was it? After all, housing prices soared in many other countries at about the same time. Figure 1.6 [approximated below] shows housing prices in six English-speaking countries. Notice that housing prices (in real terms) rose much higher in all six markets, and yet prices later fell sharply in only two of the markets: the US and Ireland. In the other four economies, housing prices moved sideways in real terms (and rose even higher in nominal terms). Back in 2006, it was difficult to predict which, if any, of these six markets would experience sharp housing price declines.
He goes on to elaborate his view that the Great Recession was caused not by the housing bust or even the financial crisis, but by misguided monetary policy. I am not far enough in to say where I stand, but I am enjoying the book very much so far.
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson
All disasters are at some level man-made political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens.
A fascinating applied history of disaster, with tremendous relevance to current events.
I loved this passage:
Yet the wider ramifications of the eruption of Vesuvius appear to have been minimal. The life and growth of the Roman Empire continued with barely a pause. And other settlements near Vesuvius recovered. Here is one of the stranger quirks of the politics of disaster: humans nearly always return to the scene, no matter how vast the disaster. Naples grew to be one of modern Italy’s largest cities, despite another large eruption in 1631—smaller than Pliny’s but bad enough to kill between three thousand and six thousand people. Today Naples is the third-largest metropolitan area in Italy, with a population of 3.7 million. There is an evacuation plan for the eventuality of another eruption of Vesuvius, but it would be of little use if something on the scale of 1780 BC or AD 79 were to recur.
11 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord:
12 And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.
Amos 8
I think Jordan Peterson’s reach and impact speaks to the hunger many modern people have for substantive religious content. I was struck by this additional fact from American Grace, about those who identify with no religion on surveys:
It is important to keep in mind that the category simply refers to the absence of religious affiliation or identification with any religious tradition. It does not necessarily imply anything about beliefs or church attendance. Many “Nones” say they believe in God and even attend religious services occasionally. As discussed in chapter one, vanishingly few Americans identify themselves as Atheists or Agnostic, terms only five people (0.2%) in our Faith Matters Sample of 3108 Americans in 2006 offered as a self-description. So these Nones, though religiously unaffiliated, do not think of themselves as Atheists… nearly half of them (47%) say they are absolutely sure of God’s existence.
Emphasis mine. It would be interesting to know how many Nones count themselves among Peterson’s audience.
Interested to hear more about the Money Illusion