Book Review: "El abismo del olvido" ("The Abyss of Oblivion") by Paco Roca and Rodrigo Terrasa

El abismo del olvido (The Abyss of Oblivion) (2023)
Paco Roca (1969)
Rodrigo Terrasa (1978)
295 pages

Along with grisly pitched battles and destructive city-sieges, the Spanish Civil War (July 1936 – April 1939) also included wide-spread violence far from the frontlines. Although the two sides – supporters of the elected Republican government and of the rebel nationalist military junta that rose up against it – quickly established control over particular regions of the country, many cities, towns and villages behind the lines experienced what often became a kind of vigilante violence. This included killings not only to eliminate partisans of the side not in power in that area, but also, under the cover of the general political and social disruption, to settle old scores.

During the war, both sides perpetrated such violence. But, after the war, the fascist dictatorship continued summary executions of those accused of clandestinely supporting the Republic, and some townspeople took advantage of the opportunity to incriminate and have executed those who had sided with the Republic during the war and against whom they harbored a grudge.

Estimates of the numbers killed during and after the war remain the subject of significant scholarly disagreement. Many people disappeared, with some executed while others fled for their lives. Those killed had their bodies unceremoniously dumped into common graves – the records of their death often deliberately destroyed in an attempt to hide the extent of these transgressions.

Post-dictatorship Spain has experienced a long running debate about how to deal with these mass graves – fosa in Spanish; things came to a head with the passage in 2007, by the then ruling left-wing party, of the The Law of Historical Memory, authorizing government funds for families who sought to exhume the remains of family members. Although families of the victims welcomed the opportunity to get closure through a proper identification and burial of their loved ones’ remains, many on the right decried the law as unnecessarily opening old wounds.

Although the topic has remained a political football, with right-wing governments in Spain eliminating funding and left-wing government’s reinstating it, some graves have been exhumed. In the graphic novel The Abyss of Oblivion (El abismo del olvido ) Spanish cartoonist Paco Roca and journalist Rodrigo Terrasa tell the story of the exhumation of one such mass grave, fosa 126 in the town cemetery of Paterna, in Valencia, as a way of illustrating the past horrors and present-day opportunities for dignity and reckoning such exhumations represent for Spanish families who had a loved one executed.

By using the graphic novel format, the pair transform what could have been a dry chronicle of history into a powerful, visual story, one that brings to life people who so long ago disappeared into the anonymity of a mass grave. It reveals, too, their relatives’ long years of suffering, as well as their tireless efforts to bring closure to their decades of trauma.

The story opens with the execution of 15 men in September 1940, more than a year after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and their burial in fosa 126, one of 180 such mass graves in the cemetery in Paterna alone. The scene then shifts to some sixty years later, as archeologists begin their exhumation of the grave; as one archaeologist notes, they approach their work with dual goals:

'The first is to recover and identify the bodies for those family members who want to obtain them…. The second function of the excavation [is to] document it as the archeologists we are, with engagement and scientific rigor … as if this was a crime scene.'

‘Which it is,’ [points out a colleague]. (40)

 Shifting smoothly between past and present, Roca and Tarrasa explore the histories of several of the men in the grave site, and in parallel the lives of their descendants. They build their narrative around one family in particular – exploring the life of one of the men executed and his daughter’s long struggle to get permission to have the fosa in which he is thought to have been buried exhumed. She seeks to have her father’s remains recovered and identified, so she can bury them next to her mother.

And, like the dual goals of the archeologists, the story Roca and Tarrasa illustrate serves two purposes. On the one hand, they tell a powerful history of the evils of the fascist regime as it continued to seek out and persecute anyone thought to be an enemy, as well as the depravity of those among its flunkies who leveraged their positions to have those they disliked arrested and executed. The story pointedly demonstrates the pervasive environment of fear created – which was, of course, the regime’s intent.

By tying the narrative to particular families, however, the pair manage to rescue at least some few of the vast number of the executed, and their families, from the abyss of oblivion that had engulfed them. By telling their history, both in the text but also through illustrations of their home life and the events they experienced, the story gives voice to the lives they lived. And it reveals how much the victims and their families lost, from the moment of arrest up to execution, and through the long decades that followed. It also explores the courage of those who quietly found ways to undermine the regime’s attempts to cow people into submission as well as the enduring strength of the families who for so many years kept the memory of their loved ones alive.

The events of the civil war now lie more than eight decades in the past, and the subsequent dictatorship fell over half a century ago; the why and the what and the how have been extensively covered in numerous tomes of history, perhaps none more famous than Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War (my review linked to at right). While historians continue to debate many of the details, one of the enduring legacies of the war has been the disagreement between those who want to leave the history buried and those who feel it is important – for themselves and for the country – to remember. In that sense, unlike histories of the war and the dictatorship, this graphic novel provides a window into a tension that continues to exist in Spain, especially in rural communities, where people often have intimate knowledge of who did what.

While at times heartrending, Roca and Tarrasa also tell a story of hope and strength. Of how so many people caught in the violence and destruction of autocracies and dictatorships managed to persevere. And of how, to adapt a quote attributed to Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe though long, does indeed sometimes bend toward closure, if not necessarily justice.

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Other notes and information:

As an epilogue, a short prose essay, with a sprinkling of photographs, details the facts of the case of the main characters in the story.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael J. Sandel

The Tyranny of Merit (2020)
Michael J. Sandel (1953)
272 pages

In the United States, the mantra that if you’re talented and work hard, you too can succeed has taken on the force of dogma. How could one possibly disagree with the idea that a tight link exists between effort, talent and success?

For philosopher Michael J. Sandel, however, this unquestioned belief hides a complex reality, one which includes significant negative impacts for American society. In The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?, he explores how the concept of merit became so deeply ingrained as a guiding principle in the US, describes the negative implications this has had for both those who succeed as well as those who fail, and proposes alternate, healthier ways to view success and failure.

He opens by arguing that one significant consequence of meritocracy’s consummate hold on the US psyche has been the growth of populism over the past decade:

It is a mistake to see only the bigotry in populist protest, or to view it only as an economic complaint. … The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an angry verdict on decades of rising inequality and a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered. It was also a rebuke for a technocratic approach to politics that is tone-deaf to the resentments of people who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind. (17) 

Trump’s reelection in 2024 only reinforces Sandel’s conclusion.

As an example of such resentments, he notes the continued decrease in mobility in the US over the past several decades that has accompanied the dramatic increase in inequality. American’s have long viewed mobility as core to their understanding of their country as the land of opportunity, and yet as journalist Edward Luce pointedly notes in The Retreat of Western Liberalism (my review linked to at right)

today it is rarer for a poor American to become rich than a poor Briton which means the American dream is less likely to be realized in America. (41, Luce). 

 When a significant portion of a society discovers that one of the fundamental stories it believes about itself has become defunct – and particularly when it impacts their children’s future – it can’t be surprising that they eventually rise up in anger.

Sandel makes clear that the idea of “hiring people based on merit … is generally the right thing to do” (33) – most everyone desires the best possible plumber, electrician or airplane pilot. The difficulty comes when one transforms one’s success or failure into an indication of one’s moral status. He argues that exactly this has occurred, however, as an outcome of how deeply meritocratic thinking has instilled itself into American consciousness, expressed as a

rhetoric of opportunity … summed up in the slogan that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise ‘as far as their talents will take them.’

 He notes that “politicians of both parties have reiterated this slogan to the point of incantation.” (23) And this has led to psychologically unhealthy effects that now haunt our society and politics.

Those who haven’t elsewhere encountered arguments describing the difficulties with meritocratic thinking will likely approach this book imagining Sandel will have a hard time convincing them to view merit negatively. As it happens, however, his principal critique of it in the essay makes an extremely convincing case. Perhaps most surprising is his demonstration of the ways in which it perverts the thinking and lives of not only those who are successful, but also those who aren’t.

Those who succeed, Sandel notes, come to believe in their success as a justified reward for their hard work, as a reflection of their personal effort and ability – that they deserve what they have in terms of wealth and power. The dark side of this belief reveals itself in their feeling about those who have not succeeded: it becomes too easy to reverse the logic of success and conclude that those who fail do so because of lack of effort and ability – that they, too, deserve what they, in this case, don’t have. This can become evident not only in how those who have failed are treated, but also, in a tendency to reject social and political policies for supporting the broader community.

A similar dynamic plays out among those who fail, as they have also fully internalized the idea of merit as an appropriate measure of a person. They feel deeply the humiliation of their failure, Sandel argues, believing that they have failed because they, personally, somehow did not put in the necessary effort or have the necessary ability to succeed. And yet, they too will reject proposals for broad-based social or political support, considering it to undermine personal responsibility.

Sandel traces American meritocratic thinking back to Christian theology, as early church leaders attempted to make sense of the presence of suffering in the world and understand what would lead to salvation for a given person. To answer this question, they invoked the idea of merit, based on one’s behavior before God. In more recent times, however, a more aggressive religious view of merit has set in, as “American Christianity has produced a buoyant new variant of providentialist faith called the prosperity gospel.” (46) In this view, health and wealth indicate who is being rewarded by God, and who punished. It was a short step for such a belief to carry over into secular society:

The tyranny of merit arises, at least in part from this impulse. Today’s secular meritocratic order moralizes success [as] the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. (42)

What has been lost, Sandel argues, is an “ethic of fortune [that] appreciates the dimensions of life that exceed human understanding and control. [Which] sees that the cosmos does not necessarily match merit with reward. [Which] leaves room for mystery, tragedy, and humility.” (43) (The group Dead Can Dance has a musical piece that turns on this idea, in Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book.) Both people who have experienced success as well as those who have suffered failure ignore the role of such outside forces; they need to recognize that 

a lively sense of the contingency of our lot conduces to a certain humility: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of fortune, go I.” [Even] a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind tyranny, or unjust rule. (25) 

To paraphrase an extreme version of this argument that Sam Harris has made on his podcast Making Sense: we, none of us, had any say, whether through effort or talent, in our not having been born in the middle of the civil war in Sudan. Sandel puts forward a variety of less dramatic examples of consequential circumstances that people too often ignore or discount in their success – or failure.

Sandel goes on to describe how the ethic of the deserving versus the undeserving propagated through US society and, particularly political rhetoric, over the last century. A shift has occurred, he argues, from an early 20th century focus on solidarity and the country as a common project, to one of expectations on the individual, characterized by phrases such as personal responsibility, in which people’s “success would be the measure of their merit.” He notes the debates since the 1980’s over welfare, that “have been less about solidarity than about the extent to which the disadvantaged are responsible for their misfortune.” (64-65)

Although President Reagan first made this critique of welfare mainstream, President Clinton and politicians on both sides of the aisle have continued such rhetoric into the 21st century. It has crystalized around a concept that Sandel refers to as a “rhetoric of rising,” the idea that the government’s focus needs to be on giving everyone the opportunity to get as far as their hard work and talent can take them.

By 2016, however, such language no longer inspired, as people experienced dramatically increasing inequality and ever shrinking mobility, both for themselves and, perhaps more dispiritingly, for their children.

When the richest 1 percent take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population, when the median income stagnates for forty years, the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow. (73) 

Hardly surprising, then, that anger with Democrats as well as traditional Republicans for perpetrating this system, if each side in its own ways, caused a shift of a sufficient number of voters to Trump.

What these voters rejected, argues Sandel, is what he refers to as the technocratic approach to politics that has dominated over the past several decades. That approach includes a focus on education, with an emphasis on the need for a college degree. Here again, individual responsibility does the heavy lifting, with “low educational achievement [considered] to represent a failure of individual effort.” (96) Sandel finds technocratic thinking to be driven by “credentialism” – a belief by those with college degrees that they not only should, but in fact, deserve to arbitrate social and economic policy.

Referencing the debate over climate change, he provides a pointed example of the pitfalls of the classic claim of a technocrat:

The idea that we should all agree on the facts, as a pre-political baseline, and then proceed to debate our opinions and convictions, is a technocratic conceit. Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question. Whoever succeeds in framing the facts is already a long way to winning the argument. (110) 

In fact, he suggests, the arguments over climate change

are not scientific questions to be answered by experts. They are questions about power, morality, authority, and trust, which is to say they are questions for democratic citizens. (112)

Toward the end of the book, Sandel offers potential directions toward solutions to shift away from the worst consequences of meritocracy. His take-off point is that compensating people with money "will do little to address the anger and resentment that now run deep, … because the anger is about loss of recognition and esteem … [more than] diminished purchasing power.” Instead, he proposes that we re-define the common good from our current focus on consumer welfare, to one based on what he refers to as a “civic conception [in which] the most important role we play in the economy is not as consumers but as producers.” In such a viewpoint, the value of our contribution is not “simply a matter of satisfying consumer preferences, [which leads to a view of] market wages [as] a good measure of who has contributed what.” Instead, the focus becomes on “the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve.” In such a social and economic structure, for example, the common refrain that teachers should be better paid would likely be translated into reality, as opposed to simply lamented as not possible due to market forces. (208-9)

He does concede that “the notion that economic policy is ultimately for the sake of consumption is today so familiar that it is hard to think our way behind it.” (209) He’s essentially asking Americans to give up the belief in market fundamentalism that, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway lay out in their compelling work The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (my review linked to at right), business spent much of the 20th century inculcating Americans in.

Market fundamentalism … has blinded its adherents to the realities around them, while making it hard for all of us to see the range of [economic] options that have worked in the past and could work again in the future. (424, Oreskes)

An implication of Sandel’s conclusions is that while the distribution of a universal basic income (UBI) might seem like a viable solution for people not earning enough to survive, given stagnant wages and now increasing automation, it will not alone solve the fundamental issue of returning a feeling of self-esteem to people’s lives that currently comes from their work. Although he does not address UBI directly, based on his arguments pursuing it would require an extensive project of decoupling this present-day connection between how much one is paid for one’s work and one’s self-esteem from doing the work. He notes that

In market-driven societies, interpreting material success as a sign of moral desert is a persisting temptation. It is a temptation we need repeatedly to resist. One way of doing so is to debate and enact measures that prompt us to reflect, deliberately and democratically, on what counts as truly valuable contributions to the common good and where market verdicts miss the mark. (213-4)

He does acknowledge that such a debate would not be easy or lead to universally agreed upon answers; market fundamentalists have, in that sense, the easier argument, because they have allowed themselves to – and convinced all of us to allow them to – ignore a whole range of socially, politically and environmentally damaging externalities. Make enough simplifying assumptions, and a problem can seem to have an easy solution, one that, however, fails at some point in the implementation. Ultimately, the key is to shift from a simplistic vision that markets can solve all problems, to a recognition that our present approach, whatever benefits it has provided in the past, is leading to an increasingly unsustainable and dangerous social and political volatility in the present.

In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel makes a persuasive case that while the idea of merit in hiring for particular positions can seem natural and appropriate, the real-world consequences of a culture of meritocracy have had a corrosive and damaging effect on the cultural and social fabric of the US. It has destroyed the concept of the US as a communal project of its people, by over-emphasizing personal responsibility and ignoring the range of sometimes intangible but often simply ignored accidents, fortunes and contingencies that play a profound role in any individual’s success or failure.

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Other notes and information:

More quotes from this book

Although Sandel shows how Christian belief led us to the current culture of deserving, it could be interesting to consider whether a shift in religious belief away from the prosperity gospel could transform into a shift in secular thinking away from meritocracy and toward support for a new conception of our economy.

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 In their book mentioned above, The Big Myth, Oreskes and Conway include a fascinating history of the real story behind the novels in the series that includes The Little House on the Prairie, and the associated television series. The novels and show present a very individualistic story, of the family making it largely on their own. Oreskes and Conway report this to have been a significant re-write of the actual history – by the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was a libertarian:

The stories [in the Little House books] were not true, not in their details and not in their overall framework. In the Ingallses’ real lives, hard work didn’t bring success. Nor were they rugged individuals: they relied on neighbors and community for their very survival, and their presence on the frontier was predicated on the federal government’s removal of native Osage peoples and distribution of their land to white settles. Yet in the books, the state scarcely appears, save in a negative light.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis" by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain

World Without End (2023)
Jean-Marc Jancovici (1962)
Christophe Blain (1970)
193 pages

The basic facts of the causes of the climate crisis can be fairly easily understood. Even without a technical background, one can grasp the fundamentals of the greenhouse effect and how increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution have led to rapidly rising global average temperatures; understand plots comparing recent such temperature increases to historical values and associated climates; and make connections to current changes in our climate and environment. While complexities and uncertainties introduce variability into forecasts of future impacts, one can understand enough to accept the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community of dire implications for our civilization.

It’s the other side of the issue, however, where the true challenge to our understanding lies: deciding what we can do as a global society to improve our chances of avoiding this bleak future – or at least minimizing the damage. Instead of a single, relatively straightforward physical cause and effect, such as greenhouse gas emissions leading to increasing global mean temperature, determining the most appropriate approach to reducing CO2 emissions requires one to understand complex systems of systems involving the limitations of current technologies and the physical world, as well of our global economic and social structures.

Not recognizing and taking these realities into account, and so acknowledging the full ramifications of the various paths available to address the climate change crisis, can mean being beguiled into supporting or promoting solutions that at first glance seem obvious, but on a deeper level reveal fundamental limitations. Worse, those with a vested interest for or against particular solutions can take information out of context and so – unintentionally or intentionally – mislead the public.

Given the inherent complexities, arriving at a sufficient understanding of what one needs to know about potential approaches for dealing with the situation can seem daunting. Into that breach step Christophe Blain and Jean-Mark Jancovici, with their engaging and timely book World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis.

Blain, a graphic novelist, begins by describing how he first became interested in learning more about the climate crisis, including its potential impacts and solutions, eventually leading him to reach out to Jancovici, an engineer who has been working on climate issues since the late 1990’s. Blain presents their discussions in graphic novel format, and through his clear and engaging illustrations and graphics relays what he learned from Jancovici about how humankind has become so profoundly reliant on energy, why this has led to the climate crisis we face, and what constitute the challenges of potential solutions for trying to address it.

In the opening section, Jancovici makes evident through both data and clarifying examples the ubiquitousness of energy consumption in our lives. He notes that we tend to be most sensitive to the direct cost of the energy we get billed for – to heat our homes or fuel our cars – although that generally represents only a small fraction of our income, “in France … between 5 and 7%.” (14) Meanwhile, we too easily overlook the vast and growing set of products and services in our lives that each require the input of energy for their realization – from mining, transporting and refining raw materials, to designing, producing, selling and using the final product. In order to make the full extent of this energy consumption more concrete, he demonstrates to Blain the trail of energy in just our morning routine, from the clothes we put on, to the food we eat, and the products involved in brushing our teeth, as shown below (pages 24 and 25).

 

Jancovici points out that much (if not nearly all) of what we now take for granted in our lives first became possible only roughly two centuries ago, with the shift from primarily human and animal energy (and some windmills and water wheels) to fossil fuels. These fuels have dramatically increased the amount of energy available to do work, and he demonstrates their significant advantage in producing goods and services by noting that “a worker can produce between 10 and 100 kWh [kilowatt-hours] of mechanical energy per year … [while] just a liter of gas yields the same capacity to transform the environment as 10 to 100 days of hard work for a human.” (28) Again seeking to provide physical insight into these numbers, he illustrates for readers the amount of human effort that would be required to use different everyday devices powered by electricity, as shown in the image shown below, from page 29.

This shift to cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels – coal in the 1800’s, then eventually also oil and natural gas – enabled the industrial revolution, which fundamentally changed our civilization in ways that have resulted in dramatic “population growth … more hyperbolic than exponential” (49) over the past two hundred years. During that time, the average per-person energy use of this growing population has quadrupled, from about 5,000 kWh of energy per year in the mid-1800’s to now around 22,000 kWh per year and continuing to increase. (This is a global average; in the West it’s significantly higher.)

And such growth in energy use (and population for that matter) is, in fact, an inherent part of our economic system; Jancovici points back to economic theorists of the early 1800’s, who argued that “Natural resources are inexhaustible, because otherwise we would not get them for free. As they cannot be multiplied nor exhausted, they are not the province of economic sciences.” (84) At the time, not only resources but also the available space for production and for disposing of the wastes of production appeared limitless; the primary constraint was the amount of labor available to operate machinery. These assumptions enabled an economic system based on the idea of, and really the demand for, persistent growth. And such thinking continues today – the need for economic growth driving ever more consumption and so ever higher per-person energy use.

In recent decades, however, challenges have appeared to the assumptions supporting such growth. These include, for example, the increasing costs associated with oil production, as the extraction of cheap conventional oil has peaked and so pushed the industry to pursue more expensive options, such as shale oil. And while sources of coal remain plentiful, Jancovici argues that

Scarcity isn’t the most worrisome thing about coal. The real worry here is its potential, as the most carbon-intensive energy, to destroy the climate. We’ll be burnt to a cinder before we have to worry about running out of coal. (102)

With this pointed comment, he shifts to a discussion of the climate crisis, describing the greenhouse gas effect and its implications. His explanation concludes by tying together the ideas in the first half of the book, relating the generation of carbon dioxide to the emissions from our energy sources, the fundamental expectations of our economic system, and the size of the world population. This, then, sets the stage for the central question Blain and Jancovici explore over the remainder of the text: the challenge of deciding how best to address the present climate crisis.

Efficiency has been one commonly championed approach, and Jancovici, while not dismissing its benefits, points out that although machines have become more efficient over the past century, we have dramatically increased the number of them as the population has grown, swamping the improvements. And, as noted earlier, per-person energy use continues to grow, in part due to the spread of modern conveniences to an ever-larger share of the global population. The end effect is that, at this point, 

making significant energy savings has nothing to do with turning off the lights or using recyclable coffee cups. All the things we buy during the year, how we get around, what we eat, the size of the house we live in and its heating … that’s what counts. (47)

A key element to addressing the climate crisis involves how we generate energy, for all of these items in our lives, which leads to a discussion about the potential for renewable energy solutions to help reduce future carbon dioxide emissions. For readers who view the deployment of renewable sources such as solar and wind as the best possible path to addressing climate change, Jancovici counters with several concerning realities.

The first, and most basic, touches on the widely reported growth in the number of renewable energy installations over the past several years. Though the increases seem significant, and a basis for hope, the devil is in the details, as Jancovici demonstrates in the chart at right (from page 42). First, while the growth rates for renewables have been high recently, the actual magnitude remains small, providing as yet a tiny percentage of total energy consumption. More disheartening, the growth in renewables has only slowed the overall growth in energy use – the amount of fossil fuel use has also continued to grow larger. Thus, the increase in renewable energy installations has only displaced a portion of the increase in fossil fuel use.

Even ignoring the fact that all the increase in renewables so far has come on top of continued increases in fossil fuel use, one could argue that civilization must simply shift more aggressively to renewable energy sources. Jancovici describes, however, several issues with such a plan.

One is the space required – significant tracts of surface area would need to be covered in some combination of solar panels and wind turbines. Another is that these systems currently require significant amounts of fossil fuels to produce and install.

And finally, and perhaps most critically, since energy from solar and wind won’t be continuously available, a huge amount of dispatchable energy – that is, always instantaneously available – would be required to back them up. Potential options for dispatchable energy are problematic, he notes, especially when considering the need on a national scale: batteries remain unviable at this scale for technical reasons; the amount of hydro that would be required boggles the mind; fossil fuels are effectively the current solution to dispatchable energy but keeping them running doesn’t help the greenhouse gas situation.

In the text, Jancovici effectively walks Blain – and readers – to a particular solution: nuclear energy. He describes his own journey through the science of climate change and exploring the potential solutions among energy sources that do not emit CO2, and his initially reluctant conclusion that only nuclear power can make a significant impact on the drive to reduce CO2 emissions: “it took me years to wrap my head around it and really understand it.” He finds nuclear to ultimately be the most advantageous (or, perhaps, least disadvantageous) solution, based on the complex realities that need considered.

Aside from being a power source that is, unlike solar and wind, always on (‘dispatchable’), other advantages include a lower amount of CO2 emitted in the materials for and construction of the plant compared to a comparable amount of solar or wind, a much higher load factor (the amount of power producible relative to the potential possible), a much smaller footprint, and a much better return in energy for the amount of energy invested to extract the necessary materials from the environment.

Those against nuclear power may acknowledge some or all of these advantages, yet raise concerns about the dangers of a nuclear power plant exploding or of the waste material that results. Jancovici meticulously dispels such concerns, explaining the reality of how nuclear power plants work, especially newer generation designs now used. And these newer designs use significantly less uranium – he estimates that, along with generating much less waste, the world has enough uranium to last “thousands of years.” (149)

The primary impediment to nuclear power remains, of course, having the political will to pursue it in the face of the combined resistance of environmental groups aligned (if unintentionally) with oil and gas interests focused on preventing it. Jancovici describes these challenges for Europe, where France has built a significant number of nuclear power plants (providing ~65-70% of their total energy supply) but faces stiff resistance to nuclear energy from the broader European Community and its regulations.

For me, perhaps the most startling conclusion in the book, dramatically highlighting the importance of considering the entire energy infrastructure as a system, relates to the interaction between nuclear and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Recall Jancovici’s emphasis on the need to match wind and solar with a significant amount of dispatchable power, and his conclusion that the dispatchable source must be nuclear power (to avoid the carbon emissions from fossil fuel plants). Given limited funds to invest, he concludes that it doesn’t even make sense to deploy significant solar and wind energy, as any installed wind and solar will require an equivalent amount of dispatchable nuclear power. Since nuclear power plants require significant capital investment to install and cost to operate, it makes more sense to simply shift to nuclear energy, using wind and solar only to a limited extent where appropriate.

Nuclear power is not, however, a silver bullet:

it can’t replace all fossil fuels. It’s like a reserve parachute. It’ll let us hold on to part of what we have today, but just a part. And it’ll keep the fall from being too brutal. (162) 

For, aside from power generation, there exist other significant carbon dioxide sources, from machinery such as mining equipment and heavy trucking that require fossil fuels, to cattle burping methane. As a result, he argues, we cannot avoid rethinking our lifestyles – learning to get by with less. Not giving up everything, he makes clear, or even all of any one thing – just moderating our consumption of goods: “the climate problem is a matter of quantity [and] the solution is also a matter of quantity.” (166)

In World Without End, a graphic novelist and an engineer have come together to collaborate on an engaging and thought-provoking introduction to the challenging and polemical topic of climate change. In a format radically different from other (often excellent) works on the topic, Blain and Jancovici cover the origins, implications and potential solutions to our present climate crisis by combining illustrations and text that communicate the technical details in a clear and readable way. And, while not sugarcoating the decisions that have precipitated the crisis and the challenges we face, their exchange manages to present the daunting reality of our present situation with a bit of humor – softening their message without diluting it.

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Other notes and information:

In his discussion about European reaction to nuclear power to this point, Jancovici notes that influential Germany has been shutting down nuclear power plants and so has had to ramp up the use lignite, a relatively dirty form of coal.

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One sometimes hears the argument that renewable energy sources have become cheaper than fossil fuel energy, and that this will therefore drive the shift to renewable energy sources. But this comes with a challenge pointed out by, for example, Andreas Malm in his book Fossil Capital (my review linked to at right):

It would be foolhardy … to trust in demand and supply as the mechanisms of the transition. If solar and wind were to become radically cheaper than fossil fuels, demand for the latter might fall – only to induce a corresponding fall in their prices, reviving demand and reestablishing an equilibrium of profligacy. (382, Malm)

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead (2022)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955)
548 pages

My mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back. (97)

At just eleven years old, the title character of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead has had his childhood stripped away from him. And he has clear and painful awareness of what’s been lost. 

Not that his life to that point had been easy, his father having died before he was born and his mother ever struggling to stay sober and hold down a job. His birth name was Damon Fields, but it didn’t take long for those around him to switch it to Demon and, having inherited his dead father’s red hair, his dad’s nickname Copperhead. The kindness of a neighboring family toward him and his mom somewhat eased his early years, allowing a boyhood spent exploring the mountain forests around his rural home. Sheltered for a time from the worst of the world, he could at least imagine the possibility of a decent future.

Events conspire, however, to crush any such hopes, culminating in a moment that definitively destroys the life he has known, forcing him to recognize that his childhood has been left irrevocably behind. It causes a profound scar, with consequences that he contends with every day that follows. He struggles to ever again generate enough faith in himself – or the world – to take a risk on a good option when it arises, as opposed to assuming that the worst path is inevitable and so might just as well be chosen upfront.

The setting both in time and place plays a core role in Kingsolver’s story. Demon grows up in the Appalachian hill country of western Virginia, near the borders with Kentucky and Tennessee. And he enters his teenage years around the turn of the 21st century, as drug use spreads like wildfire through rural communities such as his.

With mining jobs disappearing and little else besides farming and some service work for job prospects, all too many people around him are unemployed or underemployed. Underfunded social services unable to fill the huge gaps that result, people sink into poverty, leading to frustration and hopelessness. Narcotics like OxyContin come to fill the breach.

Compared to the view of OxyContin abuse one typically gets in news stories, Kingsolver gives a far more complex picture of the insidious ways that such drugs create an ecosystem of dependency.

Not surprisingly, her characters include a drug rep who wheedles and bribes doctors into prescribing increasing amounts of the painkiller to patients by providing kickbacks such as exotic vacation getaways, and doctors who freely prescribe the drugs in response. But at the heart of her story lies the impact of OxyContin availability on the community.

Users abound, of course, attempting to deaden their suffering; but some end up selling a part of what they get to other users to make money – whether to eat, pay rent or buy yet other drugs. It’s a kind of underground economy, one able to grow in the absence of other opportunities, but that only further undermines the community’s future. Demon resists this siren song of OxyContin use for a time, but finally slips into its dark embrace, hesitantly at first, then more fully, any reticence he feels overwhelmed by his desperate needs and the pit of hopelessness he’s fallen into. 

And yet, Kingsolver brings sensitivity and complexity to her description of the lives of Demon and, through his experiences, his community. She distinguishes the misery and poverty weighing down the people in this region bypassed by our present-day economy, from the love of place that coexists with it. At a distance, it can be all too easy to assume that those who leave such places must think “good riddance,” while those who stay are only waiting for the opportunity to leave. The reality, Kingsolver reveals, can rather be that while those who leave simply follow a path of survival, those who elect to stay fight to do so despite the long and tough odds.

We observe this love of place through Demon’s eyes, when he ventures beyond his rural home. Early in the story he makes his first trip to a large city, traveling with family friends to Knoxville, to visit relatives. He struggles to make sense of what he sees in the city, his shock palpable. He can scarcely imagine why anyone would want to live there, describing the apartment building of the aunt they visit as a

doom castle. A thousand other families living there, every front door opening into one hallway. … Outside the main front door, a street full of cars and cars, people and people. There was no outside anywhere … no running wild here like we did at home … [a child] not on [their] own for one second, due to all the unknown people and murder potential. (23) 

Much later, when he has to live in a city for an extended period, he comes to realize how

Up home, it’s different. … you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by. … Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. … Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. (516) 

Demon, however different he may wish his life to have been, recognizes the goodness that accompanies the many challenges that weigh upon his community.

And, although not something Kingsolver explores directly in the story, there is a tragic dilemma for such communities. Bringing the present-day economy to the area – companies and so jobs – would increase people’s standard of living, but likely at the cost of much of what those who’ve grown up there love about their region. Not that one cannot imagine that a business could come in and attempt to fit within the existing lifestyle, but it all too often seems to take a low priority. Wendell Berry makes that point about agriculture, forestry, and mining in particular, in his powerful collection of essays, Our Only World (my review linked to at right), though his point applies broadly to businesses in a profit-focused economy:

Once they have been industrialized, they no longer recognized landscape as whole, let alone as homes of people and other creatures. (6, Berry) 

Threading that needle – not losing what they have in order to gain the temptations of the modern world they see on TV – is challenging in a broader social and economic system that prizes scale and commonality and profit. As one of Demon’s friends tells him in describing what their community has been up against:

It’s the ones in charge…. They were always on the side of the money-earning [city] people, and down on the land people…. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par … to turn [us] into wage labor. … [The result has been our] two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains. (522-4)

This threat is pointedly captured by William Kauffman, quoted in an article in Utne Reader in 2000: 

For almost 60 years, the placeless have waged war on the rooted, stealing their children, devastating their neighborhoods, wiping out local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. What we have is class war – though this war has never been acknowledged because the casualties are places and attachments and sentiments; nothings, really; everythings, in fact – waged by the mobile against the immobile, by the cosmopolitan against the rooted, and the winners are he professionals, people so depraved that they would actually move to a different place for mere money. How bizarre.

Another, more psychological challenge haunts the story for readers. While some of the pain Demon experiences results from the actions of people that he, as a child, must simply submit to, in other cases he reaches a decision point conscious of the correct, or at least better, option, but unable to choose it. With Demon as a sympathetic protagonist, it can be frustrating to watch him again and again choose the more destructive path, and to do so with full self-awareness. Through Demon, Kingsolver forces readers to recognize how someone beaten down long enough can come to imagine that pain and misery are their due, and for that reason pick the worse choice at any given moment, seeing it as what they deserved in a life that has cut them no breaks.

In Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver provides readers a clear-eyed yet sympathetic portrait of rural America. Communities gutted by job losses and cajoled by drug companies into burying their frustration and disappointment in painkillers, struggling to keep and get by on what little they have left. An eye-opening and disturbing revelation for those readers on the other side of the resulting social and political chasm. Giving Demon the last word for his world:

If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight. (103)

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Other notes and information:

This book is one of three that journalist Nicholas Kristof recommended in an article entitled Join My Bewildered Liberals Book Club.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Human Condition" by Hannah Arendt

The Human Condition (1958)
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
333 pages

I’ll freely admit from the get-go that I’m not a philosophy major, or even someone who’s read a lot of books on philosophy. Not surprisingly, then, reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition represented a pretty significant stretch. Nonetheless, I learned much as I – quite literally at times – worked my way through it. In the following, I’ll aim to give a flavor of her arguments and what I found most impactful, particularly her analysis and conclusions regarding our present-day economic system, and its implications for our society’s future.

Arendt opens by pointing out the sharp distinction made in ancient Greece between one’s private life – home and family – and one’s political life – engaging in the activities of the city-state; she describes these realms as having been “mutually exclusive” for Greeks. Beginning already with the Romans, however, this dichotomy evolved and weakened, and eventually leading to

the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, … [and] whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state. (28) 

This rise of the social realm has led to a dramatic shrinking of the importance of the private – the household – and its public nature has engendered an enforced conformism, with “society always demand[ing] that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest.” (39)

She notes that, contrary to the common understanding, this social conformism came before the focus on equality, and that “the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm.” (41) This enforced conformism has also had a variety of follow-on effects, including enabling “economics … [to] achieve a scientific character,” (42) and suppressing deviation to the extent that “large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism, be this the despotism of a person or of majority rule” (43) in order to enforce it.

I found particularly intriguing Arendt’s observation that such conformism also enables the social sciences to work with “laws of statistics … valid only where large numbers … are involved, and acts or events … appear only as deviations or fluctuations,” (42) and that this, effectively, results in the “obliteration” of analysis of politics or history, making it “a hopeless enterprise to search for meaning in politics or significance in history when everything that is not everyday behavior … has been ruled out as immaterial.” (42) As I argue in my review of the trilogy Granada, by Radwa Ashour (linked to at right) , historical fiction can help fill the breach here: while history texts tend to focus on the elite of a society and the broad directions of a period, fiction can take a reader into the day-to-day lives of people, how they experienced and reacted to the events of the moment. The generality one loses by focusing on the particular reactions of a few people is more than made up for by achieving a much more intimate and impactful understanding of that period in history.

To analyze in detail the dramatic changes in the human condition that have occurred from ancient Greece to the modern age, Arendt defines “three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action.” (7) Action involves our engagement as humans with one another. Work and labor she notes, broadly overlap in modern usage, but have a fundamental distinction: labor consists of all activities required to directly sustain life, to produce the consumables necessary to stay alive; work, on the other hand, results in what can be considered durable goods – chairs, buildings, the infrastructure of life. She distinguishes the implications for the human conditions as:

Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. (8-9)

Arendt argues that in antiquity, people exalted action and contemplation. In order to pursue these activities more fully, they relegated both labor and work to slaves, based on their view

of the slavish nature of all occupations that served the needs of the maintenance of life. It was precisely on these grounds that the institution of slavery was defended and justified. To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity. (83) 

Thus, the human condition in antiquity was based on the primacy of action, at least for those fortunate few who were wealthy and powerful enough to have others perform the labor and work required to provide life’s necessities.

In the modern age, however, (which she defines as having begun some several centuries ago) the human condition has fundamentally changed. There has developed “a glorification of labor as the source of all values,” (85) as well as an emphasis by theorists such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx on distinguishing not between labor and work, but between productive and unproductive labor. She notes that Smith classified

all occupations which rest essentially on performance – such as the military profession, “churchmen, lawyers, physicians and opera singers” – together with “menial services,” [as] the lowest and most unproductive “labor.” By contrast, for early Greeks it was precisely these occupations – healing, flute playing, play-acting – which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man. (207)

This focus on productivity over all else has so dominated humankind’s thinking in the modern age that it can be difficult, she points out, for historians to recognize that

the institution of slavery in antiquity, though not in later times, was not a device for cheap labor or an instrument of exploitation for profit but rather an attempt to exclude labor from the conditions of man’s life, [since] what men share with all other forms of animal life [that is, the labor required to stay alive] was not considered to be human. (84) 

Aside from helping historians more accurately interpret the past, a recognition of our present-day obsession with productivity and our capture by capitalist, free-market fundamentalist ideology could open our current thinking to consider alternative ways of structuring our economy and society in the future – discussions that could finally move beyond the tired, dead-end, either-or debates over capitalism versus communism. (Historians Naomi Orestes and Erik M. Conway provide an engaging and thought-provoking review of the crusade for, and ultimate conquest of, free-market fundamentalism in the United States in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market; my review linked to at right).

With the subsequent atomization of production through the division of labor, argues Arendt, we have largely abandoned a reverence for work – for craftsmen who create durable goods. We have sacrificed the “ideals … of permanence, stability, and durability” of work, shifting instead to an ideal of abundance, becoming a consumer society with “labor and consumption … but two stages of the same process, imposed on [us] by the necessity of life.” Concrete examples of Arendt’s observations abound: the tendency to settle for less expensive furniture that we construct ourselves and do not expect to last perhaps even our own lifetime, as opposed to buying the work of a craftsman that might last generations; more generally, the ubiquitous lament that products today seem made to have a short life, forcing us to buy a replacement.

As a consequence, our social and economic systems now require that we be productive to demonstrate our worth. We have arrived at a

leveling [of] all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of “making a living,” such is the verdict of society. (126) 

The only exception granted, Arendt observes, is for the artist, the only worker left; otherwise, anything not labor (not productive) is considered play, or a hobby. And she finds that the growing focus on labor has become self-reinforcing for society. For a modern laborer,

spare time is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites. That these appetites become more sophisticated, so that consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities but, on the contrary, mainly concentrates on the superfluities of life, does not change the character of this society, but harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption. (133)

Critically, this shift to a focus on labor has effects far beyond what we spend our lives doing: the resulting ever-increasing consumption leads to the consumptive destruction of the natural world, as “our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared.” (134) As a result, as Wendell Berry observes in

Our Only World, present-day enterprises “regard landscapes as sources of extractable products … ‘efficiently’ shed[ding] any other interest or concern [for people and other creatures].” (6, Berry) (My review of his book linked to at right.)  And given that we measure our worth by the productivity of our labor, it becomes almost unthinkable to break out of the labor-consumption cycle and so reduce the destructive impact on our ecosystem.

More profoundly for our future, Arendt also foresees an inability of our society “to recognize its own futility,” (135) in no longer striving for the durable, the permanent – that which distinguishes humans from animals. This lack of recognition of what we have lost has the dire consequence that with the increasing implementation of automation, we now live in

a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. … We are confronted with … the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse. (5)

Perhaps the most dramatic confirmation of the success in our present day of this “glorification of labor” and “transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society” (4) is how unintelligible and counter-intuitive it is for most people to imagine “higher and more meaningful activities” than their job. We have come to believe (that is, have been raised to be convinced, as Orestes and Conway make clear) that laboring and being productive are the only metrics by which we can legitimately judge the success of our lives. We can no longer imagine it otherwise. And the seeming threat of having free time, even with some sort of universal basic income, to pursue activities that interest us but that may not be considered by society (and so by us) as productive, feels scary for many, if not most. In a future in which automation paired with artificial intelligence will likely (whether 10 or 50 years hence) make many or most humans “irrelevant” as laborers (to borrow historian Yuval Noah Harari’s phrasing in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, my review linked to at right), the question may not be whether we can afford to pay for people to live in such a world, but rather whether we are psychologically fit to benefit from it.

There is much more to learn in Arendt’s deeply considered analysis. But the challenges to our future that she identified already some 70 years ago as arising from a shift in the human condition to an economic structure of laborer-consumers have only become more pressing as our technologies have progressed. How will we address the increasingly widespread environmental destruction that our economic system causes? How will society adapt to a future in which labor may for many no longer be necessary or even available?

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Other notes and information:

More quotes from this book

Arendt has a fascinating discussion on the shift, since Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter, from science as a contemplative exercise of philosophers to one focused on experimental results, eventually reaching the point in the 20th century that “scientific truth may not only not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason.” (290)

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She discusses a consequence of the shift in the human condition in modern age as “a glorification of violence as the only means for” making a “new body politic,” (228) noting “Marx’s dictum that ‘violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,’ that is, of all change in history and politics.” (228) Pankaj Mishra arrives at a similar conclusion in his book Age of Anger, in which he argues that the loss, during the Enlightenment, of seemingly immutable social structures and the introduction and spread of the idea of equality for all, has meant a constant roiling of society as the

have nots repeatedly rise up against the haves. (My review linked to at right.) 

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In the chaos of the first half of 2025, hard not to stop and reflect long on Arendt’s observation that: “The will to power … far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possible even their most dangers one.” (203)

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At the dawn of the space age, Arendt lamented the idea that humankind welcomed the initial steps into space as being, quoting a front-page news story, the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.” She notes “the banality of the statement” and observes that

nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon,” and goes on to describe “the earth [as] the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which [humankind] can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. (1-2)

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

Meditations
Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Translation and Introduction by Gregory Hays
191 pages

I don’t recall now how many years ago I first heard about Marcus Aurelius’s collected writings, Mediations. Coming across an edition in a bookstore a few months ago, however, I decided the time had come to read it. The wait turns out to have paid dividends, both for my understanding, as well as for more fortuitous, personal reasons.

In terms of understanding: since Sam Harris introduced his Waking Up meditation app in 2018, I’ve been doing the daily mediation (regularly the first few years, more occasionally the past few), as well as listening to some of the other theory, practice and conversation sessions included. Harris has described his intent with the app to be less about helping a user relax (though that can be a side benefit) than to explore – by evoking our direct experience – how our mind works, what consciousness is. Through his teachings one can approach mindfulness, but they go far beyond the typical kind of popular training one receives on that topic.

While freely acknowledging that I’m hardly more than a novice at meditation and the understanding that comes with it, through Harris’s lessons (as well as conversations with others on the concepts he introduces and reading books such as the one linked to at right) I’ve deepened my understanding of the mind and consciousness. And, bringing this back around, what I’ve learned set me up well for engaging with the ideas I encountered in

Meditations. Without the preparation, I can imagine I would have struggled with the extreme … austerity … of the vision in Marcus’s notes.

This edition was translated by Gregory Hays, associate professor of classics at the University of Virginia, and he provides an extremely helpful Introduction, in which he discusses what is known about Marcus’s life, the present understanding of what these writings might have represented for Marcus, and the Stoic philosophy at their heart. He notes that while Marcus’s writing contains other philosophical influences, Stoicism was “the most important philosophical tradition both for Romans in general and for Marcus in particular.”  Hays points out that, “of the doctrines central to the Stoic worldview, perhaps the most important is the unwavering conviction that the world is organized in a rational and coherent way. … a deterministic system that appears to leave no room for human free will or moral responsibility.” (xix-xx)

The text consists of a series of entries, grouped into 12 books that “represent the individual papyrus rolls of Marcus’s original, or perhaps of a later copy.” (xxxix) Begin to read, and it immediately becomes evident that, as Hays notes

Marcus … did not think of [the collected entries] as an organic whole …. Not only … not written for publication, but [he] clearly had no expectation that anyone but himself would ever read it. (xxxvi)

 The entries vary in length from a few lines to perhaps a page. Most, if not all, seem to have an implicit Remember: in front of them, as though Marcus captured private notes or reminders of how he should live his life. Hays seems most convinced by one scholar’s suggestion that the entries represented for Marcus “ ‘spiritual exercises’ composed to provide a momentary stay against the stress and confusion of everyday life … a means of practicing and reinforcing his own philosophical convictions.” (xxxvii) Such an interpretation is reinforced by the repetition one encounters in the entries, both within and across books, as Marcus returns again and again to certain key themes and ideas, sometimes almost verbatim.

Summarizing these entries risks trivializing the profound, if stark, depths that Marcus explores; trying to select among them for which to share means ignoring so many one would want to include. But a few comments, admittedly focused on entries that had the most impact for me, will give a new reader an idea of what to expect.

Broadly, the entries emphasize the importance of living in the present moment, but with a depth far beyond the simple kinds of mindfulness one encounters in present-day popular culture.

Concentrate every minute … on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can – if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? (2.5) 

He reminds himself, here and throughout, to recognize the possibility – and benefit – of living within a mind that does not allow itself to be distracted by either painful experiences – whether external from the actions of others or internal such as from bodily pain – nor, importantly, by pleasurable ones.

Ultimately, he seeks a mind having engaged equanimity, in the face of whatever goes on around it. Thus, “choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed,” (4.7) and recognizing that your mind can stand above and outside that which is painful such that “things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside it. Disturbance comes only from within – from our own perceptions.” (4.3)

One theme that recurs, and that held particular resonance for me, relates to developing an understanding that everyone has their own problems – to quote a peasant in Ignazio Silones wonderful novel Bread and Wine: “everyone has his fleas … probably even the government has them,” (136) so why complain. Marcus repeatedly reminds himself that 

When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard? (7.26) 

Later, more concisely, he gives a simple prescription for helping himself (and us) avoid the distracting and self-destructive path of anger:

Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?”
Starting with your own.” (10.43)

 Although many of the entries speak across the millennia to our present-day concerns, one seemed directly intended for those on both sides of our fraught present moment of (self-) destructive hyper-partisanship:

How cruel – to forbid people to want what they think is good for them. And yet that’s just what you won’t let them do when you get angry at their misbehavior. They’re drawn toward that they think is good for them.
– But it’s not good for them.
Then show them that. Prove it to them. Instead of losing your temper. (6.27)

 As I mentioned above, reading this book came at a fortunate moment for me in a very personal sense. I’ve dealt with back pain for several decades and was in the middle of a period of significant pain as I read this book. In conjunction with the training I’ve had from Harris’s app, the direct reminder of Marcus’s words helped me, at least for periods, compartmentalize the pain – not ignore it, precisely, but not have it overwhelm my thoughts. In that context, he observes that “The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh – gentle and violent ones alike.” (5.26) And, he recommends:

Unendurable pain brings its own end with it. Chronic pain is always endurable: the intelligence maintains serenity by cutting itself off from the body, the mind remains undiminished. (7.33)  

I can’t say I managed to face the pain with complete equanimity, but for moments, periods, I did find a bit of serenity – feeling the pain as something that was happening, but not having it impact my mind, my thoughts.

As much as I find sensible and helpful in these entries, I will say that the starkness of Marcus’s vision gave me pause at points. I recognize that pleasure can be as capable as pain of distracting our minds from focusing on the moment, on “justice, honesty, self-control, courage” (3.6); but I struggle with several of Marcus’s appeals, such as “throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted” (2.2) and “discard your thirst for books” (2.3), or when he proposes that

to acquire indifference to pretty singing … Analyze the melody into the notes that form it, and as you hear each one, ask yourself whether you’re powerless against that. That should be enough to deter you. (11.2)

 As Hays notes, “there is a persistent strain of pessimism in the work;” he quotes a scholar as having observed that “reading the Meditations for long periods can be conducive of Melancholy.” (xlv)

 But if one guards against such feelings – perhaps by following Marcus’s own advice to protect “your mind from false perceptions” (3.9) – there is much wisdom to be found here. Understanding his entries can be enhanced by having some prior meditation training; such preparation is not, however, absolutely necessary, if one enters open to the concept of a complete separation between the mind and what is external to it.

I can certainly understand why, as Hays mentions in his Introduction, so many return to re-read Meditations. Instead of a long and deep tome on how to live one’s life, Marcus’s entries guide a reader in short, direct, concrete observations. I look forward to revisiting Marcus’s text.

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Ruin (2019)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)

565 pages

[Note: although I make it a point to not include spoilers in my reviews, this one discusses the second book in a trilogy, and it’s not possible to write about it without including some context from the first book, Children of Time. So, if you haven’t read that first one yet, I suggest you jump back to my review of it here.]

Generations have passed since, late in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, the Portiids of Kern’s World accepted into their midst the desperate, surviving humans of a forlorn spaceship from a destroyed Earth. To enable these humans to live among them, the Portiids used the human-engineered virus that accelerated their own development to remove the humans’ evolutionary aversion to spiders – and so allow the two species to co-exist.

Working together, the Portiids and humans have integrated the two civilizations’ technologies to create spaceships capable of interstellar flight. Early in the second book of this trilogy, Children of Ruin, a mixed crew of Portiids and humans launch a spaceship toward a distant star system from which they have detected a signal – one that seems to indicate a potential remnant of Old Earth civilization that remains among the stars.

Arriving at this new system, the crew encounter radically altered Old Earth technology operated by a civilization that they struggle to communicate with. The rudimentary contact they do establish quickly goes dangerously awry for reasons the Portiids and humans strive mightily to understand. Only slowly do they come to realize that they’ve inadvertently tripped into the middle of a bitter, inter-civilizational conflict, one that now also threatens them. Having revealed their existence, can they survive, and also prevent the conflict from reaching back to imperil Kern’s World?

Tchaikovsky tells the story as alternating sections of chapters, those set in the past that detail how the human terraforming mission to this new system led to the situation the Portiids and humans now encounter, and those set in the present, in which the consequences of the past developments play out. As opposed to a simpler, linear narrative, this structure helps build and hold the tension in the story as, like the Portiids and humans who have arrived in the system, readers only slowly come to know the nature and depth of the threat.

This second entry in the trilogy doesn’t have quite the surprise power of what Tchaikovsky created for the first story, which wowed me from the opening paragraphs. But it definitely reaffirms him as a master of world-building, as I’ve described in my reviews of that book, his wonderful Elder Race, and the thought-provoking short story collection Terrible Worlds: Revolutions (my reviews linked to at right).

As strange as the arriving humans found the Portiid’s of Kern’s World, the civilizations in this new star system are even more alien, and Tchaikovsky thoroughly and brilliantly lays out their evolution. To his credit as a storyteller, he eschews the easy way out of something like, say, a universal translator in the old Star Trek series (I can still hear my dad asking, “how is it all the aliens can speak English?”); Tchaikovsky’s human and Portiid characters spend significant effort, and often make only halting progress, at communicating with each other and the new species they encounter.

Centering this trilogy on the interactions between vastly dissimilar species means that Tchaikovsky has set himself the formidable task of wading into ever more bewildering depths with the introduction and evolution of each new civilization, and the second book concludes with biological and technological advancements that pale even in comparison with what has come to that point. Hard to even imagine where he could take all this in the third book – which, I suppose, is the pleasure of it…

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Other notes and information:

The story includes one of the best lines I’ve read in a while: 

[he] had been absolutely convinced of the rightness of his own actions, and it had all been wholly amusing until it had become utterly fucked up. (51) 

It reminds me a bit of the quote from John Pike, Director Space Policy Project of the Fed. of Amer. Scientists, responding to a question on Mir repair work some decades ago:

If they go in there and do their work and all goes according to plan we'll conclude it was relatively straightforward. If they all end up dead, we'll conclude it was very hazardous.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf