William T. Vollmann, Poor People ** 1/2

I had high hopes for this non-fiction meditation on the subject of poverty. Vollmann is a writer who I've been meaning to read, and he took an intriguing approach to a subject I am interested in. In disparate parts of the world, Vollmann would meet poor people and ask them. "Why are you poor?"

The first few chapters — wherein Vollmann describes his first few encounters and outlines the issues that arise when thinking about the nature of poverty, its causes and possible cures — are thought-provoking. He quickly discovers that poor people are not the most articulate chroniclers of their situation. He deftly describes the contradictory impulses that arise for a rich person in the presence of poor people. Unfortunately, subsequent chapters are more impressionistic and less engaging, despite Vollmann's strong descriptive skills. The final few chapters regain some of the early strengths, but I remain disappointed by the book overall. I might recommend reading Part 1 on its own.

Neal Stephenson, Anatham ****

Anatham is a 900+ page science-fiction novel whose main theme is epistemology, how we know what we know. There is plenty of action — political intrigue, illegal polar immigration, love affairs, alien spacecraft — but the most pressing concern is whether our knowledge is metaphysically real or constructed in our minds. It presents the most interesting and convincing arguments for the existence of Platonic mathematical entities that I have ever read.

I also enjoyed the world that Stephenson builds on the planet of Arbre. Pure scientists live in convents and only have contact with the outside world once a year (or once a decade or once a century, depending on the order), to prevent their contamination by real-world politics. The details of the society were fascinating to me, although I could imagine others finding them tedious.

For a book so concerned with epistemology, it is ironic that its biggest flaw is that its characters jump to unwarranted conclusions that turn out to be true. It is a common plotting problem that I associate with Dean Koontz: a character learns some small fact, comes up with an outlandish explanation, and immediately starts acting as if that outlandish explanation is established fact ("the mutant child must be telekinetic!"). And it turns out to be right! A few such moments happen in Anatham, notably when our hero Fraa Erasmus and his girlfriend Suur Ala discover an orbiting object that changes direction as it passes across the sun. It must be an alien spaceship! What other explanation is possible? Well, actually, I can think of plenty that comport better with Gardan's Steelyard (to throw in some Arbre jargon).

Another flaw, also common to adventure books, is how the main character and his friends end up at the center of the world-shattering events. They are essentially teenagers, far less qualified than others for the tasks they are given. 

The story includes innumerable philosophical speeches, like an Ayn Rand novel. I imagine most people would identify this as the flaw that bothers them most. But you know, I kinda liked most of the speeches. I found them interesting enough that I could look past their minimal motivation in the story.

Despite these flaws, and despite the length, I enjoyed Anathem. I appreciated the combination of pulp action story with abstract philosophical debate.

Michael Tanner, Nietzsche ***

I followed up the Rawls book with this book about Nietzsche from Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series. Its strengths and weaknesses are a mirror image of the Rawls book. Whereas Rawls gave a solid description of the philosopher's ideas with a minimum of style, Nietzsche is a stylishly written book that doesn't really include details about the philosopher's positions. It is really more an impression of Nietzsche than an introduction to this thought. However, I did enjoy Tanner's provocative style, which fits his subject.

The first chapter talks about how "people of the most astonishingly discrepant and various views have sought to find justification for them" in Nietzsche. So perhaps it is not surprising that the impression I came away with is that Nietzsche is largely a pessimistic pragmatist. That is, he recognizes that our views (especially our moral views) have no objective foundation and that we have to choose to live our lives in a way that best comports with our desires. The biggest difference between him and his near contemporary William James is in their temperament: Nietzsche was a cranky pessimist molded under the influence of Schopenhauer, and also steeped in the emotive style of Romanticism. The fact that we have no real foundations tended to drive him to despair, which he fought against by trying to cultivate its opposite, rapture.

I am also left with the impression that I would not care for reading Nietzsche. He lacks an organized system or organized presentation of his views. On the other hand, I find Schopenhauer's unrelenting pessimism to be hilarious, so maybe I'd enjoy Nietzsche's as well.

Paul Graham, Rawls ** 1/2

This book from the "Oneworld Thinkers" series is exactly what I was looking for: a survey of John Rawls' work with just the right level of detail, sympathetic explanation, and critical commentary. Unfortunately, it is not very well written and fails to develop many of the most tantalizing ideas.

Rawls is a philosopher best known for his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, which Graham characterizes as "one of the most influential books in moral and political philosophy published within the last one hundred years."

"Rawls changed the discipline of political philosophy...by changing its topic from a parochial concern with the meaning of moral terms to the framing of a 'big' question: what constitutes a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation?" (p 6)

Rawls' theory has two aspects: a method for deriving the principles of a fair society and a claim about what principles would be derived by following that method. The essence of his method is to imagine people convening to decide on the rules their society will follow. Each person participates in the convention behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents them from knowing what position they will have in society. The veil prevents participants from rigging the rules based on their self-interest.

Rawls claims that this method would lead to a pair of basic principles: equal opportunity for all; and the "difference principle," which says that any social or economic inequalities are to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (pg 48). In other words, when equality fails (or is impossible), the rules of the society must favor the disadvantaged.

The difference principle is the obviously controversial part of the proposal. However, Rawls says it follows from a rigorous attention to the apparently uncontroversial idea of equal opportunity. For example, university graduates are socially advantaged, so you want the social good of university to be equally available to everyone. Not just technically available to everyone but actually available to everyone. Students from wealthier families make up a disproportionately large part of the student body, largely because they are better prepared. If you take equal opportunity seriously, you have to look at ways to compensate for the advantages that rich children have in preparing for university.

"When you try to pin down the concept [of equal opportunity] and establish what it requires in terms of redistribution, it becomes clear there is a continuum from a weak idea of equal access to favorable positions through a strong notion of state intervention in family life." (pg 54)

Rawls is serious about his egalitarianism. He rejects the idea that different people deserve more money or social resources because they are smarter or work harder:

"No one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting point in society. The assertion that a man deserves a superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic: for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit." (Rawls, quoted on page 57)

"Desert is tied to effort: we get something if we do something. Rawls argues that we are not responsible for our 'natural endowment' — strength, looks, intelligence and even good character — and so we cannot claim the product generated by that natural endowment. Under the difference principle one person may earn fifty units and another fifteen units, but not one unit of that thirty-five unit difference is justified by reference to desert." (p 75)

Now that is thought-provoking! Most people want success to be based on the choices a person makes and not on factors outside of their control. Rawls' radical notion illlustrates how hard it can be to tell the difference between the two.

The biggest problem I had with Graham's book is that his prose always remains abstract. He doesn't provide many concrete examples to explicate Rawls' abstract concepts. For example, Graham criticizes Rawls for a "failure to provide an adequate account of how people come to value things, such as a way of life or personal relationships." (p 88) That sounds like a valid criticism and an interesting idea, but I'm not certain I understand what he is getting at. Other important underdeveloped areas are Rawls' distinction between "rational" and "reasonable." the nature of human autonomy, the question of whether human beings are fundamentally free and equal (as opposed to a natural aristocracy based on native endowments; cf pg 58), and the relative priority of the right and the good.