Great Books Archives - Page 16 of 26

Chesterton and the Elves

Are elves real?

(Yes, I hear your groan. Bear with me a second.)

Are you sure about your answer? Why are you so sure?

G. K. Chesterton raises this question in Orthodoxy. (There is even a chapter entitled “The Ethics of Elfland”!) This tells you everything you need to know about what a curious book Orthodoxy is.

At one level, the book looks like it is an attempt to prove the truth of Christianity. Chesterton certainly spends a lot of time explaining why he thinks Christianity is true. But when you look closely at what he is actually arguing, he is not doing anything at all to convince you, the Reader, that his beliefs are right.

Instead, he is doing something more radical. He is trying to convince you, the Reader, that his views are not necessarily wrong, that there is nothing about the Christian faith that is unreasonable or inconsistent with either the external world or its own internal logic. He also has a merry time showing the internal and external failings of alternatives to Christianity.

The set of people who come in for the greatest mockery are those who insist that they are being rational and reasonable and that they will only accept things which have been proven to be true by reason. These people reject Christianity because it is not reasonable, or because there is no proof of the existence of God, or because accepting anything at all on faith is inherently silly.

Enter the elves. Why do you reject the existence of elves? I read this book with a reading group and asked that question, which has resulted in even more conversations since then as other students have heard about this odd professor who seems perfectly willing to posit the existence of elves. I have thus heard an array of answers to the Elf Question.

First and foremost is the retort, “There is absolutely no reason to think elves are real.” Ah, but there is. We have a massive number of historical records reporting the existence of elves. People throughout time and around the world have reported the existence of elves. Indeed, it is unquestionably true that more people in this world have said they have seen elves than have said they have seen Socrates or Julius Caesar. Moreover, the people who say they saw Socrates or Julius Caesar were all located in a single location at a single period of time. People who have seen elves have come from all over the world throughout time. Is it more believable that a small number of people in the same location at the same time could be mistaken or that people from all over the world and at every time have been mistaken? So, why do you believe the first set of people, but not the second?

In other words, if your proof of existence is reports of eyewitnesses, we have an incredible amount of evidence that elves exist.

“Ah, but if there are elves, wouldn’t there be some tangible evidence of their existence? Elf bodies or elf bones or abandoned elf buildings?” That question has made a fundamental mistake about the nature of elves. Elves are magic. Their corpses and structures vanish upon the demise of the elf. So, of course there is no physical evidence; there can’t be physical evidence.

“Ah, but there is no such things as magic.” Really? How do you know that? Are there no unexplained phenomenon in the world? ‘Well sure, there are things we have not explained yet. But they are explainable using perfectly normal physical laws.” And do you know all those physical laws? Why isn’t it possible that one of the physical laws is that elf bodies disappear, they turn into pure energy, when the elf dies? Do you even have the ability to test that theory? So, why do you reject it?

Anyway, you get the point. It is a very merry conversation. The conclusion? Chesterton describes it perfectly when discussing whether miracles can occur.

But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

Why does this matter? It points to a conclusion which is so obvious that it is stunning that it is so widely rejected. Every philosophical or theological system, every world view, ultimately rests on faith. The Christian has faith that Jesus Christ is God and died on a cross to provide redemption for the world. The believer in elves has faith that there are magical creatures in the woods. The believer in materialism has faith that nothing immaterial exists. The believer in Reason has faith that Reason reveals true things about the world, that it is a trustworthy tool to uncovering Truth.

I have faith in the first and last of the propositions in the previous paragraph. Others have faith in the third. Still others have faith in the second. But in the end, we all have faith. There is no proof that any of these things in which we have faith are true or false. You can no more prove the existence of elves than you can prove that we exist in a real world and not a dream state or that Americans really did land on the moon. You have faith that there are no elves, that the world is real, and that the moon-landing actually happened. I share your faith. But, good luck trying to prove any of these things to someone who believes differently. Good luck trying to prove to a believer in elves that they don’t exist, to a believer that we are brains in a vat that the world is real, or to a conspiracy theorist that the moon-landing was not an elaborate hoax. You will fail to prove it to the thoughtful person with faith. And similarly, they will fail to prove the opposite conclusions to you.

Faith, in other words, is the starting place for our views on the world. This is true for everyone whether they believe it or not.

So, what is conversation between people with different faith systems? Well, it would look a lot like Orthodoxy, a rather fun book where you get to think along with Chesterton about what it would be like to have a belief system like Chesterton’s. You learn something reading a book like this whether you agree with Chesterton or not. Indeed, a book like this is a perfect example of what a good conversation is like. You not only learn things, but you get to think about why you believe the things you believe. Indeed, there is no better way to figure out what you actually believe than to read books with which you disagree and constantly ask, “Why do I think this argument is wrong?”

Maybe after reading enough about elves, you will decide your faith in their nonexistence was wrong. At a minimum, reading Chesterton will give you a good excuse to talk with other people about elves. What could be more fun that talking about whether elves are real? Well, how about figuring out if Santa is real?

Wonderless Woman

Who is the most famous female superhero? Is there even a doubt? As much as it pains aficionados of Marvel Comics to admit it, nobody beats Wonder Woman. Not only has she been around vastly longer than all the new female superheroes, she had a hit TV show in the 70’s, was a hero in the Saturday Morning cartoon about the Justice League of America that I used to watch as a kid, and starred in what is inarguably the best DC superhero movie since Christopher Nolan hung up his spurs. (Joker doesn’t count in this category—different type of movie.)

So, I launched into Wonder Woman: A Celebration of 75 Years with great anticipation.

Sigh.

The short version: If this selection of comic books from the last 75 years represents the Best of Wonder Woman, you have missed absolutely nothing by not reading Wonder Woman comic books.

There are 19 comics in this book. It starts with a two part origin story. That leaves 17 more selections. Of those, another half-dozen or so are more or less revamps of the origin story. So, a third of the time, we get a “Who is this Wonder Woman?” storyline.

What about the other stories? What does she do in them? Whom does she fight and what is accomplished?

Well, that leads to the Big Question: what are Wonder Woman’s Powers? Well… she is kinda strong. She can punch and kick really, really well. She sorta can fly…maybe. A quick glance at her Wikipedia page reveals a whole bunch of other powers which seem to come and go—none of which are on display in the selection of comic books collected here.

OK it’s not all about her shifting set of superpowers. She does have a magic lasso! It makes you tell the truth! She has these bracelets and she is really fast so she can move her hands to cause all the bullets to hit her bracelets. And she has an invisible jet—in which oddly, you can still see the pilot, so it isn’t clear what good an invisible jet is.

So, with all those powers and cool toys, she must have a mission, right? Yep. Stop war. Which apparently you do by running around breaking things.

OK. You think I am being harsh. Well, you are wrong. I am being kind.

What is the real point of a Wonder Woman comic book? You just have to look at them to know. The creator of the comic book has four issues collected here. And there is a remarkable visual feature in those. There are sure a whole lot of women in bondage. One might think the whole point of Wonder Woman was to be able to draw pictures of women who are tied up.

One would be right, by the way. That was exactly what the creator of the character, William Moulton Marston, was keenly interested in doing.

(Side note: Every now and then, someone at Mount Holyoke likes to brag about the connection between Mount Holyoke and Wonder Woman. As it turns out Marston’s wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, was a Mount Holyoke alum. She helped Marston dream up this superhero, patterned after Mary Olive Byrne, who was (cough, cough) the third member in their little ménage a trois involving lots of not-so-magic ropes. Yeah, people at Mount Holyoke brag about this sometimes.)

OK, what about later on? Well, in the later issues, there are not nearly as many people being tied up. Insert sigh of relief.

However…

…there is a much larger number of ridiculously scantily clad women running around beating people up. When I say scantily clad, by the way, that means that the clothing all these female superheroes are wearing seems designed to make sure that the clothing doesn’t actually you know, clothe anyone. The skin to clothing ratio throughout is somewhere in the vicinity of 25:1.

Now don’t get me wrong. I understand that comic books are often being marketed to adolescent boys. Before reading this book, I would have thought someone making this complaint was just exaggerating for effect. But is there any reason at all that the creators of these comic books, spanning 75 years, could not have included a plot in any of these stories? I mean other superheroes have comic books, also often marketed to adolescent boys, but they often manage to have something in them that is fun or interesting. Why don’t any of these?

It’s not like Wonder Woman can’t potentially be interesting. But, again maybe it is just the selection here. Maybe there is a wealth of Wonder Woman stories which have an interesting villain worthy of Wonder Woman. But here, there are no clever plot twists or ingenious plans which are foiled. There are a couple of times which someone comes along to compete with Wonder Woman to be the new Great Scantily Clad Superhero, but in every case, this doesn’t actually generate all that much of a story line.

The oddity is that the rebooted origin stories are above average selections in this volume. Which tells you a lot about the volume.

And so, Dear Reader, while I really would like to draw some larger lesson here, some moral tale or fascinating or witty observation to make this all worthwhile, I am at a total loss. The best I can do: Don’t bother reading this book—just go rewatch the recent movie instead. It is vastly better than anything in this book.

The Rise and Decline of John Stuart Mill

Free speech is under assault these days. You know that. You don’t need more examples of what is happening on college campuses. Even the idea of discussing free speech is under assault.

It would seem to be a good time to read (or reread) John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

First though, we have to overcome the idea that even talking about whether free speech is a good idea is permissible. You see, if you are going to seriously talk about free speech, then you can’t just talk about whether people should be allowed to say things you like. You have to talk about whether people should be allowed to say things you dislike. Things you intensely dislike. Things you think are wrong. Things you think are morally wrong.

Enter Mill:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

That is bracing stuff. That is the sort of thing that you hear and you want to cheer and say “Atta boy, Johnny!”

But, alas, it’s not so easy. Mill loves the idea of liberty to be sure. But, he also insists there are limits on my liberty. I have the liberty to swing my hand through the air if I want to do so. Well, I have that liberty up until my hand comes into contact with your head.

[The] sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

If you ask an undergrad these days what are the limits to liberty, they all cite Mill. Well, technically most of them just cite the principle that my liberties end when they infringe or your liberties. Most of them have never actually read Mill.

At one level, it is hard to argue with Mill on the end result. I surely don’t have the right to sock you in the face so hard that you stay plastered. (Bonus points if you get the reference without Google.)

But, does this also apply to speech? Suppose you say something that hurts me. Does your right of free speech end when it causes me pain?

Mill’s answer about liberty is fundamentally utilitarian. He says my liberty ends when it infringes on yours. But, then the canonical example is not sufficient. If I hit you, I am not depriving you of liberty to do anything. We also have to add that you have the liberty to not be hurt by my actions.

Consider this: I would be hurt if you hit me in the face. I would also be hurt if you tell me the Oakland Raiders are losers. Suppose the second hurts me more than the first. In Mill’s formulation, if the first is prohibited, why isn’t the second?

And from that line of reasoning comes speech codes and the attack on free speech. It looked like Mill was giving us grounds for a robust argument in favor of free speech, but in the end, he may very well have undermined his own argument.

So, if we are going to still have free speech, then we really need to build the argument for it on grounds other than Mill’s shifting sand. Natural Law gives firmer ground, but it has gone so far out of fashion, it is a tough sell today. That doesn’t mean it is wrong; it just means that we should not expect any sudden change in the attack on free speech. It will take some time to build up a more robust defense of free speech which is persuasive in the modern world.

Another way of saying the same thing, there is not currently a close race between the opponents of free speech and the defenders of free speech over the future of the academy. The opponents are winning. As the general climate of opinion on a campus turns against free speech, then it gets harder for the lonely individual to assert the right to say anything the individual wants to say. As the social pressures to conform mounts, it gets even more difficult.

The freedom to say what you believe is not guaranteed. If you think it is important, then you need to defend it. And that means you need to defend the right to speech by the very people with whom you disagree most.

Will You Be Honest With Me?

Should you always tell the truth? That seems like one of those questions which is really easy to answer. Set aside the question of whether it is permissible to lie in order to save someone’s life. Suppose you are asked a simple question and nobody will die if you are honest. Should you be honest?

Let’s take a particular example. Suppose someone you know tells you they wrote some poetry and they would like your honest feedback on it. Suppose the poetry is unbelievably awful. If you want a good example of what this could be like, consider the poetry collection described in a recent blog post. Suppose I came up to you and told you I was really proud of this poetry collection I wrote and asked you for your honest evaluation of it.

Would you tell me the truth? Would you say, “That collection of so-called poetry is too lame for words. I have never seen something so unbelievably idiotic. What were you thinking?” Or would you politely tell me that, well, you aren’t the best judge of poetry, but it isn’t your sort of thing but you are sure that people who know about poetry would really like it.

Why wouldn’t you tell me the truth? It is objectively bad. It is inane. Indeed it is so unbelievably horrid that nobody could ever think it was worth reading.

Moliere examines exactly this problem in The Misanthrope. It is a funny play, laugh out loud funny. What gives the play its comedic force is Alceste, who always tells the truth. If someone were to ask him if a poem is bad, Alceste would not hesitate to tell the truth. Indeed, he does exactly that in the play. Calling the poem “tedious rot,” he proceeds to dissect just how awful it is.

Should we admire Alceste? He is the type of person who, if asked “How do I look?,” would actually give an honest answer. Is that the right thing to do?

We read this play in one of my reading groups, and the students were fascinating. When asked the pair of questions about a situation involving a polite lie “Should you tell the truth?” and “Would you tell the truth?,” the majority of the students said Yes to the first and No to the second.

We had an impossible time sorting out when you should be honest and when you should engage in a polite lie.

On the other hand, the play also has a character, Celemine, who is the perfect flatterer, always telling everyone exactly what they want to hear. Nobody thought that was a good idea. Such lying always catches up with you sooner or later.

So what then? Moliere does not give a good answer to how we should live our lives. But, he does do a marvelous job explaining why there is so much bad art and so many bad arguments. People simply are not willing to be honest with others if there is any danger of hurting someone’s feelings.

One complaint about the current generation of college students is that they have no resiliency, that they collapse at the slightest criticism. There is frequent blame on others for never telling these students “Not good.” As a result, they grow up never learning the difference between a good poem and a bad poem. So, they write horrible poetry. Nobody ever tells them that their writing is awful, so they are awful writers. They grow up never knowing the difference between a good argument and bad arguments. So, they make really bad arguments.

Moliere comes along with a play that is a perfect illustration of the problems with this generation…well, except this play was written over 300 years ago. It seems that even thee centuries ago, the idea of just being honest was laughable. Maybe college students today are not all that different than people in France in the 1660s.

What then shall we do? It seems pretty obvious that it cannot be a good situation if nobody ever tells the truth. It also seems pretty obvious that if you decide you will always tell the truth, nobody will talk with you anymore. We expect people to tell us those polite fictions, but that means we also know that nobody is ever being honest.

Is my poetic collection from the earlier post worth reading? Is this current reflection on The Misanthrope any good? I know the answer to both. The more interesting question is whether you would be honest with me if I asked you.

A New Poetic Masterpiece

One fine summer day, I wandered over to the Stimson Room in the Mount Holyoke library. It’s a gorgeously wonderful place to read—quaint, comfortable chairs, and quiet. It’s also the room where they house a large selection of books of poetry. Looking up from the serious tome I was reading, I noticed on the shelf a small volume of poetry with the title coffee coffee.

Not surprisingly, I was deeply intrigued, and so I picked it up to look at it. I then proceeded to read the whole volume. It took less than 2 minutes. Really.

(Since you will soon think I must be making this up, I will remind the reader that the book covers in these posts are links to the Amazon web page for the book. So, if you doubt the book is real, click on the picture of the book cover above and feel free to buy yourself a copy.)

The first poem:

though

That’s not the title of the poem, by the way. That’s the whole poem. Other poems:

Acre
sleep
phone

That’s not one poem; that’s three different poems. Not all the poems were one word long; there was, for example:

Air
air
air
air

Each poem is printed roughly centered on the right hand page (what would be the odd page in a book with page numbers). The font resembles that of an old manual typewriter.

I cleverly realized that this volume of poetry was different from the sort of thing which Milton used to do. I figured it was some new statement about something or other, then got to wondering why Mount Holyoke had bought the volume, so I looked it up. Much to my surprise, the volume is a reprint of an old 1960s volume of poetry. Curiouser and curiouser. Then I found out that the author, Aram Saroyan, once received an NEA award for the masterpiece:

lighght

Your tax dollars at work.

Now many people might grouse about this sort of poetry, but it inspired me. So, I herewith offer up the following manuscript of poetry for any publisher who would like to publish the Next Big Thing.

The volume is entitled

cancoffetos

It is a series of 100 poems, broken into three sections. The first section has 34 poems, the following 2 have 33 poems each. The poems are printed on the left hand page (what would be the even page, though this volume has no page numbers). The first poem in each section is printed one-third of the way from the top of the page; the following poem is printed one third of the way from the bottom of the page, and the placement then goes back and forth for the remainder of the section. The poems printed in the top third are in the font Cambria; the poems printed on the bottom third are in Perpetua. The exceptions are the last poem in each section, which is printed in Old English Text MT and in all three sections is located one-sixth of the way from the bottom on the right hand page. The poems in the first and third sections are in 18 point font; the poems in the second section are in 16 point font. The first twelve poems in the volume are as follows (each line is the complete poem):

Dawoodrk
mammattermoth
agearlyainst
flaquaticits
tilaplethorapia
orabluenge
deficlefning
googeigeinvaluele
bruqwertynch
esgablesence
iwhaled
flophalynxuride

The volume ends with the poem

comstarsedy

Also of interest to a prospective publisher is that the volume of poetry clearly will market itself. Indeed, a large initial print run will be desirable due to the truly innovative and avant-garde nature of the work. I am also happy to pass along one of the initial reviews of this volume:

A breathtaking new work of poetry, cancoffeetos, by James E. Hartley, has recently been published. In what is clearly a bold update of the tired work of Aram Saroyan, Hartley has taken Saroyan’s idea and inverted it, showing us how the world around us envelops us even as we seek to master it. The human effort in this technological age to make sense of our surroundings through the ever increasing drive into the microcosm, epitomized by the ubiquitous cell phone and Saroyan’s single word poems, is called into question on every page of this volume as simple concepts are wrapped up in often surprising ways, invariably smothering our original notions on how to make sense of the world, problematizing the very question of our existence. The very location of the poems on the left hand side, alternating between top and bottom of the page, point out the conventional nature of Saroyan’s work, demonstrating that what we used to think of as bold innovation was really just sterile adaptation of the sterile modernist era. The locations change and the fonts change, leaving us with the realization that here we have no firm ground on which to stand.
The poems are puzzles in themselves, refusing to reveal their secrets until the reader has worked at it. For example, the poem

bupuntter

stares out from the page at the reader, asking for interpretation, but offering no immediate clue. Gradually, the reader begins to notice that the poems all consist of one word thrust violently into the heart of another word. The outer word encompasses the inner word, revealing a juxtaposition of the attempt to understand the irrefragable nature of the conventional definition with the hermeneutical epistemology of the broken outer word (or should that be broken outer world?). In the poem reprinted above, for example, the realization that punt (which could be either a boat or a term from American football) loses its solidity of (dual?) meaning in the substance of butter, which has no solidity. Why is the butter being divided by the punt (verb or noun?)? Are our lives simply being transported (by boat or kick, notice) from a state of solidity (hardened butter in the cooler) into a state of dispersal (spread over bread). The poem tantalizes with possibility, never quite revealing its full secret.
The very title of the book offers up this exploration of the duality in which we live. Coffee is clearly a reference to the work of the epigone Saroyan, and it is surrounded by cantos. Thus, the title of coffee inside cantos conjures up the image of Bach Coffee Cantatas, a secular work by a religious composer. The cantos (or songs) make up a Bachian (or should that be Bacchanalian) opera, while the coffee provides stimulus to the brain.
In short, this work is a masterpiece, and its reception will undoubtedly rival that of The Rite of Spring or The Wasteland.

I should also add that while that review does capture many intriguing things about this proposed volume, the reviewer did miss some things which should have been obvious. Note that the structure of the volume, divided into 3 sections of 34/33/33, is the same as the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, each section of which is, of course, called a canto. Furthermore, the embedded word at the end of all three sections is stars, again echoing Dante. Moreover, the reviewer also completely missed the change in font size and its obvious significance to the work as a whole. These and the other such hidden clues (e.g., the connection between the 14th poem and the 41st poem, the relationship between half of the prime numbered poems (and since there are 25 primes, it is uncertain if that is 11 or 13 poems which are related), the importance of the missing secondary color and the sole tertiary color in the series) scattered throughout the work, mean that literary scholars will inevitably favorably compare this magnificent volume to Finnegans Wake.

A Pirate’s Life for Me

So you want to be a pirate?

Not one of those newfangled pirates running around shipping lanes off the coast of Africa or Indonesia, but a good old-fashioned 18^th century pirate on a wooden sailing shop flying the Jolly Roger.

You saw Pirates of the Caribbean and thought, “I want to be Captain Jack Sparrow.” You read Treasure Island as a kid and thought you could outsmart Long John Silver. Mostly, you just want to find buried treasure marked on a map by a big X. Or maybe what you really want is to bury the treasure and make one of those cool maps.

Ah, but you aren’t bloodthirsty enough to join a pirate crew? Or are you worried you’d have to walk the plank or end up marooned with a pistol and a single bullet?

Or maybe (gasp!) none of this has any appeal to you at all.

In any event, everything you know about Pirates is wrong, so sorry, you couldn’t have had that life anyway.

The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates is one of those marvelous books that not only will you enjoy reading (regardless of whether you care about pirates), but when you are looking for a fabulous gift for someone who reads books, it is a surefire hit.

Peter Leeson (the author) is obsessed with Pirates and Economics, and the book is a perfect marriage of the two. I was recently asked what book would be the best for teaching economic intuition to a home-schooled high school student. Hands down, this book should be at the top of the list.

What do we learn? Pirates were a much more organized society than they at first seem to be. They have the reputation of being an anarchic, lawless bunch of sadistic scum of the earth. But, for example, did you know that before they set off on a voyage, they would all sign a contract specifying each individual’s voting rights, rules and responsibilities, and share of profits?

These Pirate Constitutions are amazing documents. The Captains really were elected. There was a quartermaster whose job was to curtail the authority of the captain. The crews could depose a captain. There was a rudimentary health insurance program; the size of the payment for a loss of limb or life is well set out in the constitution.

In what is perhaps the most surprising revelation in the book, if you compare life on a pirate ship to life on a legal merchant vessel, there isn’t much doubt in which place you have more rights. Merchant ships of the day were run as complete totalitarian dictatorships. The captain’s word was the Law. If the Captain wanted to abuse you, there was nothing stopping him from doing so. And merchant captains were very happy to abuse you. As it turns out, one of the biggest source of pirates was the crew of merchant vessels who realized life on a pirate ship was much better.

So, what about all the evil torturing? Pirates spent a lot of time cultivating a reputation as being brutal sadists. Why? Well, suppose you are a pirate and you want to steal the cargo off another ship. The worst thing for you is if the other ship decides to fight to the death. So, to convince the other ship to surrender, you cultivate the reputation of being unmerciful to anyone who fights with you. Then surrender is much more likely. Lives are saved, the cargo is unharmed. Everyone wins. Well, everyone except the owner of the ship the pirates just stole, but the owner was off in some nice country house, so nobody really cared about him.

Something similar happens with pirate conscription. Suppose you decide it is in your best interest to join up with a pirate ship. The danger is if you get caught, you will be hung, which is not a painless way to die. So, you make it known that you were kidnapped by pirates and forced into service. Then if you get caught, people feel bad for you and you walk away free and clear. It was in the pirates’ interest to pretend that everyone was forced into service.

And so on. This book is a masterpiece of showing what happens when an economist walks into a literature. The economist just sees things differently. By constantly asking, “Why is this action in the interest of the person doing it?” you can uncover all sorts of interesting things.

But, truth be told, the real reason you want to read this book is not just all the economic insights into pirates. It is because pirates are cool. And a well-written book with lots of pirate stories? Yeah, you really want to grab a bottle of rum and read this.

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