James E Hartley

Why College Degrees Might Not Be Worth It

“Is the Scholarly Life Still Worth Pursuing?” Phillip Dolitsky recently asked at Public Discourse. The answer depends on what is meant by “scholarly life.” Dolitsky is specifically asking about whether it is worth entering a PhD program in strategic studies.

But his question can be applied more broadly. Is it still worth going to college at all?

Let’s begin by considering a rather curious book: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford. The most important part of this book is the author himself. As one of my students put it, “This is a book which could only have been written by one person who ever lived.” Crawford has a PhD in political philosophy from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, one of the most selective PhD programs in the world. Crawford’s job when he wrote this book? He repaired motorcycles. Note: he wasn’t repairing motorcycles because he couldn’t get another job. He chose this life.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Money, Wealth, and Whuffie

A common fantasy of adolescence is imagining a world without money in which you can get whatever you want without needing those pesky green pieces of paper bearing pictures of George Washington.

The fantasy quickly turns into annoyance that some people have lots of those Washington portraits. What makes those people so special? Why should they get to acquire all that cool stuff when you can’t?

Enter Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a veritable Fantasyland for the indignant adolescent. In this world, money has magically morphed into Whuffie.

Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.

To our embittered adolescent, that seems so much better. Up against the wall, green pieces of paper! Whuffie is here! Whuffie seems like a really amazing new form of money. You get more Whuffie by doing nice things for people. You lose Whuffie by being mean. So if you want to spend your days writing poetry or making puppets, you can still acquire Whuffie and be rich! Finally the right people are the rich ones.

Alas, go one step further and the Whuffie experiment starts unravelling….

Read the rest at Econlog

Beyond Black and White

Richard Wright’s most recently published novel is a cause célèbre. The Man Who Lived Underground, originally written in 1941, was rejected by his publisher at the time. Excerpts were subsequently published in a few places, including the posthumously published short story collection Eight Men. Thanks to the Library of America, we now have the complete novel.

The story: Fred Daniels is a black servant picked up by the police as a suspect in a murder he did not commit. Brought to the police station, Daniels is brutally tortured in order to solicit a confession. He escapes from police custody and goes into the sewers, where he lurks for a few days, observing what is going on aboveground. He eventually returns to the surface where he is killed by the police.

That at least is the gist of the plot summary provided in most of the reviews of the novel. “Eighty Years Later, Richard Wright’s Lost Novel About Police Brutality Speaks Across Decades” (Esquire); “Richard Wright’s newly uncut novel offers a timely depiction of police brutality” (LA Times); “Richard Wright’s novel of police brutality: The most relevant book of 2021 was written 80 years ago” (Chicago Tribune): these are some of the headlines. Innumerable reviews noted that the publisher did not provide a reason for not publishing the book, but (wink, wink) it is obvious that a publisher in the 1940s could not handle a manuscript painting the police in an unflattering light.

That narrative is a bit odd, however…

Read the rest at University Bookman

The Power of Scripture

“O you who dislike certain portions of the Holy Writ, rest assured that your taste is corrupt and God will not stay for your little opinion.”

“How depraved you are if you can perceive no heavenly luster about the Book of God!”

Charles Spurgeon really thinks you should treat the Bible a bit more seriously.

Spurgeon was a 19^th century Baptist preacher. That description does not even begin to capture the force of nature he was. There is a 63 volume set of sermons he preached at a couple of different churches, with nearly 3600 sermons in it. In addition, he published around 50 books in his lifetime. He would have loved the Internet Age.

So, deciding to read some Spurgeon could be a bit overwhelming. When faced with a pile of sermons this high, where does one begin? Enter Jason Allen and Moody Press. They recently launched The Spurgeon Speaks Series, what promises to be collection of short volumes consisting a selection chosen by Allen of sermons given by Spurgeon on Assorted Topics. The two volumes so far are on Prayer and Scripture.

The volume Spurgeon on the Power of Scripture suggests both the potential and the pitfalls of books like these. On the plus side, the volume has seven sermons which is a lot less intimidating than a 63 volume set. You definitely get the flavor of a Spurgeon sermon when reading these. It is not hard to see why he was and remains quite popular. If you want a sermon which feels like it is flowing straight from the source, Spurgeon is your guy. He is passionate, full of vim, and doesn’t mince words.

The downside? When you pick up a book entitled Spurgeon on the Power of Scripture by an author who is widely reputed to be among the most theologically literate preachers of the 19^th century, you will be forgiven for starting out thinking this is a volume explaining and elaborating on the power of Scripture. You might well expect the equivalent of a work of theology, a person systematically setting out the arguments for why Scripture matters. When you see chapter titles like “The Infallibility of Scripture” and “The Bible Tried and Proved” and “The Bible,” you might think you are really sure that is what you are getting.

But these are sermons, not a theological tract, and they are thus much less directed and focused than you would have expected. This should not be surprising, but somehow it is. Spurgeon has a tendency to raise issues in the heat of is argument and never quite trace the thought to its end.

How do you know that God wrote the book? That is just what I shall not try to prove to you. I could, if I please, do a demonstration, for there are arguments enough. There are reasons enough, did I care to occupy your time in bringing them before you. But I shall do no such thing. I am a Christian minister, and you are Christians, or profess to be so, and there is never any necessity for Christian ministers to make a point of bringing forth infidel arguments in order to answer them. It is the greatest folly in the world. It is folly to bring forward these firebrands of hell even if we are well prepared quench them. Let me of the world learn error of themselves; do not let us be propagators of their falsehood.

That is a bit jarring to the academic mind, but we really can’t fault Spurgeon for things like this. He is, after all, preaching a sermon. This sort of argument makes total sense for a sermon, but not for a theological work. The form difference has a rather large effect on the substance. Sermons are not the same as theological exercises.

To get a flavor of the form of argument, consider a matter Spurgeon returns to repeatedly in the sermons collected here. How should we read scripture?

How differently some people read the Bible from the way in which they read any other book! I have often noticed how people let novels get right into them, trash as they generally are, but when most people read the Bible, they appear to be anxious to get the unpleasant task finished. In some cases, they seem to think that they performed a very proper action, but they have not been in the least affected by it, moved by it, stirred by it.
Yet if there is any book that can thrill the soul, it is the Bible. If we read it aright, we shall lay our fingers among its wondrous harp strings and bring out from them matchless music. There is no book so fitted or so suited to us as the Bible is. There is no book that knows us so well, is so much at home with us, has so much power over us, if we will but give ourselves up to it.

Similarly, Consider Spurgeon’s discussion about the encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees in Matthew Chapter 12.

The Savior generally carried in the war into the enemy’s camp, and He did so on this occasion. He met them on their own ground, and He said to them, “Have you not read?”—a cutting question to the scribes and Pharisees, though there is nothing apparently sharp about it. It was a fair and proper question to put to them; but only think of putting it to them. “Have you not read?”
“Read!” they could have said, “Why we have read the book through very many times. We are always reading it. No passage escapes our critical eyes.”
Yet our Lord proceeds to put the question a second time: “Have you not read?” as if they had not read after all, though they were the greatest readers of the law then living. He insinuates that they have not read at all, and then he gives them, incidentally, the reason why he asked them whether they had read. He says, “If you had known what this means,” as much as to say, “You have not read, because you have not understood.” Your eyes have gone over the words, and you have counted the letters, and you have marked the position of each verse and word, and you have said learned things about all the books, and yet you are not even readers of the sacred volume, for you have not acquired the true art of reading. You do not understand, and therefore you do not truly read it. You are a skimmers and glancers at the Word; you have not read it, for you do not understand.

Passages like that apply not just to the Bible, but to every book. As Adler and Van Doren put it in How to Read a Book, the question is not how many books you have read, but how many books have read you. The question is not how much time you spend reading the Bible, but how much time you let the Bible read you.

Thinking about how to read a book, or specifically how to read the Bible, makes it clear that reading a short collection of Spurgeon’s sermons also demands something of the reader. This is not a philosophical book or a theological book. It is a self-help manual. For Spurgeon, thinking about the Bible is an applied science. The ultimate question is not “What does the Bible say?” but rather, “What are you going to do once you understand that the Bible has something important to say?” “How are you going to read this book?” morphs into “How are you going to live your life now that you have read this book?” Sermons are there to educate, sure, but the difference between a sermon and a college lecture is this question of application. A college lecture may inform. As sermon is there to exhort.

So, Spurgeon on the Power of Scripture is an aptly named book. The sermons are there not to talk about the idea of Scripture. The sermons are there to demonstrate the power of Scripture to affect the way you live your life.

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(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)

Godel and Escher and Bach! Oh My!

I actually did it!
I read the whole thing.
Every single page.
All 742 of them.

The Book? Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.

The book was original published in 1979. It won the Pulitzer Prize. If you go to a library book sale, you will likely find a copy of it.

The book is like some rite of passage. At some point you see the book enough times and you think “I should probably read that.” Godel! Escher! Bach! A philosopher, an artist, and a composer walk into a bar! Fill in the rest! It’s like the promise of the Key to All Things that will unlock the secrets of the Universe. Escher with those funny reality distorting pictures and Bach with his O So Precisely Beautiful music and Godel with those accusations of Incompleteness. Surely this book contains the secrets to the Universe. Read it and you enter the secret society of those who know things! And did I mention it won a Pulitzer? So it must be good, right? All the blurbs on the back say it is great!

So, for you Dear Reader who have not read the whole book and wonder about the secrets of the Universe, I am here to tell you all! But first, the amusing bit.

The copy I have is the 20^th Anniversary Edition. (You can work out what year this was printed using the hidden clue above.) It has a new Preface written for this edition. As always, I waited to read the Anniversary Preface (which was obviously written after the book) until after I had finished the book (did I mention I read the whole book?). So, finishing page 742, I turned back to the 20th Anniversary Preface, started reading and instantly started laughing out loud. Really. The Preface is hysterically funny.

Hofstadter begins the 20^th Anniversary Preface by Complaining that Nobody Understood what his book was all about. The whole first page is Hofstadter noting all the people who thoroughly missed the point of the book. He complains about all the people who summarized his book and missed the point. He complains that bookstores would put the book in all sorts of crazy sections of the bookstore—they didn’t even know where it belonged. He spent 20 years collecting Royalty Checks and being Frustrated, yes Frustrated!, that nobody seemed to understand the point of the book.

So, he takes advantage of this opportunity to tell the world what his book was about. Here is the funny part. He then reveals the point of the book…and it was totally anticlimactic. I knew that was the point of the book. If he had asked me, I would have said the point of the book was exactly what he said the point of the book was. It was not that hard to figure out. In fact it was really obvious.

So, why did I know the point of the book and all those people who were frustrating Hofstadter did not? Here is my secret: I read the whole book. You see, Hofstadter doesn’t actually get to the point of his book in the first chapter. Or the second chapter. Or the third chapter…or… well, Hofstadter only gets to the point of his book in the chapter beginning on page 684. So, if you hurled the book across the room in disgust and frustration on page 683, you would not know what the book was about!

What was the book about? “In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.” Yep. That is exactly what I learned in the chapter beginning on page 684!

Now if Hofstadter wanted people to know that was the point of his book, then he really should have given it a different title. Note, nothing about that point has anything to do with Escher or Bach, and the argument leading to the conclusion only has an indirect relationship to Godel. Then, he should have stuck to the parts of the book that actually led to that conclusion. That might have been about 150 page book entitled Mind From Matter or something like that. Some people might have read that book. It probably doesn’t win the Pulitzer, though. There is no 20^th Anniversary edition. Hofstadter isn’t Frustrated, but he also gets a lot less in royalty checks.

What happened? Hofstadter is apparently a very very undisciplined thinker and writer. He starts with his idea and then realizes there is this tangent and so he spins out a whole paragraph on that tangent. Then there is this other really interesting tangent, so he writes about that. Then there is this idea of telling stories with conversations between the Tortoise and Achilles and they can explain philosophical ideas in a whimsical way. Then along comes Crab and Sloth and we have even more whimsical conversations about record players that are destroyed when specially designed records are placed upon them. Then we get wandering off into music theory and all sorts of explorations of how clever Bach was. Escher is also really clever, so we get all sorts of explorations of Escher’s art.

Then Number Theory makes an appearance. Discussions about infinity. Zen koans. Lewis Carroll. John Cage. Lots of philosophers. DNA. Then computer programming language and long discussions about how computers work (remember this came out in 1979).

Opening up to three pages at random (really, I will now open up to three pages at random):

1. A discussion of Bach’s Crab Canon, which you can see visualized here. Escher also has a picture of Crab Canon.

2. An explanation of how to code loops into a program.

3. The transcript of a “conversation” with an early Artificial Intelligence Program, SHRDLU

As I guessed would happen before I picked those three pages at random, that is a perfect summary of the book. The first passage was really fun and incredibly interesting. The second one was a tedious explanation of something that anyone who has ever used computer code would know; if you know it, there is nothing new; if you didn’t know it, it was a pretty lengthy explanation of a pretty simple idea. The third thing was just tedious and rather dull and really I have no idea why Hofstadter decided we would all benefit from reading it.

All of which points to the Big Question. I read the whole book! Should you?

The answer depends on your determination and your tolerance for mental whiplash. There are all sorts of fun and interesting things scattered through the book. Some evenings, you’ll settle in and enjoy the ride. But other evenings, you’ll be staring at the book wondering if there is really any point to wading through the minutiae. Then there are the moments when you are startled because Hofstadter just gave you a full page of homework problems to work out. My favorite problem: “Strangely this one takes great cleverness to render in our notation. I would caution you to try it only if you are willing to spend hours and hours on it—and you know quite a bit of number theory!” Yeah, I skipped that homework assignment.

So, if you like books where you never really know what is coming next and you enjoy learning all sorts of random things along the way and you like looking at Escher pictures, thinking about music theory, and pondering philosophical conundrums and you like fantastical conversations between Tortoises and Crabs, well this book is right up your alley as long as you are willing to also spend many pages wondering what the point of all this is.

If you want to read a book about the thesis of this book, a book about how the self can arise from unthinking matter, then this book is only worth picking up if you are willing to spend 683 pages reading background material, only some of which is actually relevant to the thesis.

I realize that the above description has not convinced many people to read this book. Therein lies the problem. Godel, Escher, Bach falls into the category of “Books lots of people buy with the intention of reading it but then give up on the book long before the end because it just doesn’t seem worth the bother.” The few people who will actually finish this book roughly fall into two categories: 1) people who are fascinated with historical artifacts showing how someone in the late 1970s thought artificial intelligence might work, and 2) people who tell graduating seniors they should make a list of six books to read in the next year and then read those books and because they tell seniors to do that they feel obligated to make their own list of six books and happen to put this book on their list.

Hofstadter should not have been surprised that nobody knew the point of his book. If he wanted people to get that point, he should have, you know, written a book about that point rather than a meandering mess of a book in which he poked into every interesting nook and cranny he came across.

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On Living Well

Sometimes, Admiration is the only appropriate response to a book.

Case in Point: On Reading Well, by Karen Swallow Prior

(Prior’s nom de Twitter is NotoriousKSP, which tells you a lot.)

On Reading Well is remarkable for how cleverly structured it is. When you are looking at a Great Painting, you first notice the image, but as you look at it longer, you notice that the brilliance of the painting is not the object which was painted, but the way the author constructed that image. What separates Michelangelo and me is not the thing being represented—I can draw a stick figure of Adam—but the fact that his image is so carefully and artfully crafted. Don’t get me wrong—the Sistine Chapel is more impressive than On Reading Well. But, On Reading Well is so much more impressive than the typical book in this genre that the comparison to Michelangelo seems apt.

The genre? Books about other books. You know the type. Author picks a bunch of books and writes short chapters about each, telling the reader what is noteworthy about the book in question. Organize these chapters into sections and (presto!) another book about books! I enjoy this genre a lot—it is a great way to learn about new books and to discover things about books I have already read. (As the readers of this here blog will note, ruminating about books is something which intrigues me…)

To be honest, when I picked up this book, I was expecting it to be at best a pleasant addition to the genre. Prior is a genial narrator, obviously excited for the opportunity to share her love of books. She talks to the reader (and presumably her students) as if they are fellow travelers in a journey of discovery; she is less the captain and more the person who has been this way before, pointing out some of the fascinating things she noticed on a previous trek. The more you read Prior’s work, the more you can see why she is viewed with complete Adulation by an adoring crowd. Following the fun on Twitter is like watching a friendly cult in action. (There is even KSP Swag—Target sold a T-shirt with a picture of a woman who looks a bit like Prior; it was amusing watching people asking one another how they could get one of those shirts.)

On top of Prior’s engaging style, the set of books she chose to discuss promised many pleasant ruminations. Twelve Books and every book she chose is well worth reading. It is a mix of well-known Great Books (Gatsby, Tale of Two Cities, Huck Finn, Persuasion, Pilgrim’s Progress ), lesser known Great Books by Great Authors (Fielding, Tolstoy, Wharton, O’Connor), and much to my pleasant surprise a trio of relatively recent authors, all of whom should be much better known than they are (Shusaku Endo, Cormac McCarthy, George Saunders).

By this point, we have an author with a great prose style and a fantastic set of books, but the final touch is the selection and organization principle. The Books are presented as illustrations of assorted Virtues. For example, Huck Finn is Courage; Silence is Faith; Persuasion is Patience. Glancing at the Table of Contents presents a fun thought experiment—what book would you pick for each virtue? Why did the book which was chosen strike Prior as the best example to illustrate the Virtue?

Given all that, I settled in to read the book, hoping it would live up to its promise. (I am sad to say that many books in this genre do not live up to their potential; there are a lot of dreary books about books.) Happily, this book did live up to its promise. Take any chapter at random, and it is a chapter worth reading.

However, the genius of the book is not the individual chapters; the genius is the structure. In a surprising twist, as you set off on the first chapter, you discover that this really isn’t a book about books at all. Chapter 1 is “Prudence: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding.” Given the genre, you would expect this is a chapter about Fielding’s novel, and how it illustrates the virtue of Prudence. But by about half-way through the chapter, you realize that it is the reverse. This is a chapter about Prudence, and Fielding’s novel is just an example. The same thing happens in every chapter.

It dawns on the reader that this isn’t actually a book about books; it is a book about virtue. Chapter by chapter, Prior is explaining the Cardinal Virtues and the Theological Virtues and the Heavenly Virtues. She is admonishing the reader to understand the virtues and to strive to live out the virtues. This is really obvious when you flip to the back of the book and see the “Discussion questions.” For each chapter, Prior provides five discussion questions, the type of thing which could be used to spark a conversation at a book club. What is fascinating about the questions is that for most of the chapters, only one or maybe two of the five discussion questions is directly about the novel discussed in the chapter. “What is the relationship between prudence and morality? Between prudence and immorality?” “What is the relationship between justice and beauty?” Why does materialism so often replace love of people?” “How is nice different from kind?”

The title of the book is On Reading Well. It would be more properly titled On Living Well. Prior hints at this in the title she gave to the Introduction: “Read Well, Live Well.” If you want to learn about the virtue of Hope, you could read Aquinas or N.T. Wright, or you can turn to McCarthy’s The Road to see how hope works out in practice. Armed with Prior’s discussion, a reader who has little interest in struggling through the Summa Theologica can learn a lot about Hope by reading McCarthy.

But, to say that Prior’s book is about how to Live Well misses the point she is making, and this is where Prior’s genius comes through. Consider this excerpt from the chapter on Diligence and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

Modern ways of thinking cultivate a flatter approach to language and stories—as well as to the world and truth—than the ancients had. This modern preference for the literal over the symbolic, metaphorical, and poetic lends itself to a fundamentalism that the Puritans would never have recognized. For the Puritans, the world, even language itself, was charged with meaning both originating in and pointing toward God….Even the word progress in the title Pilgrim’s Progress is suggestive of how allegory functions. Allegory operates on a built-in expectation that readers will “progress” from the literal, material level of the story to the symbolic, spiritual truth beyond. It has an explicit assumption of interpretation that is implicit in all literary writing, indeed and all writing and all use of language. In other words, allegory requires and assumes the exercise of diligence by the readers.

If you want to learn about Diligence from Bunyan, then you have to learn how to read Bunyan well.

Generalize that thought from Bunyan to all the other virtues. Learning to read well is more than just learning the meaning of words and how sentences are formed. Learning to read well means learning how to interpret the book you are reading. One of the unfortunate products of schooling is that while many people learn the skill of reading, they never learn the art of reading. They can read Gatsby for the plot and it is a nice story, well told. But to grasp the meaning of Gatsby requires understanding how literature works, what Fitzgerald is trying to do.

There are lots of books that show people the art of reading. (My personal favorites: Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism.) What is clever about Prior’s approach is that she demonstrates by example, showing the point of learning to read well. We learn to read well because when we read well, it teaches us how to live well.

All those high school English classes full of the tedious exercises of “Find the theme of this story” missed the point. What conceivable good is it simply to find the theme in order to get full credit on an exam? Why destroy the pleasure of a story in the pedantic hunt for the theme? Prior subtly, but masterfully, shows up the pointlessness of that type or reading by showing that the reason we find the theme is to ask ourselves what the theme teaches us about how to live better.

On Reading Well is making a deep point. If you want to learn how to live well, then you need to learn how to read well. While Prior doesn’t put it this starkly, the book seems squarely aimed at all those people who are very sloppy readers of the Bible. On the one side you have people who reject Christianity based on incredibly poor understanding of Christian theology because they have never actually bothered to read the Bible well. But, on the other side are the people whom I suspect are Prior’s real target audience, Christians who do not read the Bible well because they do not read any book well. A person who learns to read well the twelve books Prior discusses in her own book might just realize that the book of Judges or gospel of Luke may also need to be read well in order to understand the ideas the authors are expressing.

That is why this book deserves such Admiration. Prior has written a fascinating argument about how to understand God and learn to live a Christian Life. The book doesn’t look like that it is what it is doing. You could easily read this book and then merrily have Book Club discussion about Prior and the novel being evaluated in the chapter. But if you do that you are absorbing a much deeper lesson. It is surely not mere happenstance that God speaks through a book. Prior is adroitly showing that learning how to read well is an important step in learning how to understand God.

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