Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind ***

The main thesis of this book is that research in moral psychology (distinct from moral philosophy) supports the view that moral judgments are made intuitively rather than rationally, and that societies/political communities use a small set of fundamental moral concepts to construct conflicting but equally sincere moral codes. Haidt provides a fairly clear exposition of ideas I already shared.

The first third of the book argues that people make moral judgements intuitively rather than rationally. In Haidt's formulation: "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second"; in David Hume's formulation: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." He points out that the most prominent moral philosophers––John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant––prioritize, even fetishize, rationality over other aspects of human flourishing.

The middle portion of the book identifies six moral "taste receptors" from which we build our moral intuitions. In Haidt's view, WEIRD liberals rely almost exclusively on two of the tastes (care and fairness) while WEIRD conservatives appeal to a wider palate. He doesn't explicitly make this point, but I noted that care and fairness are the easiest receptors to justify with dispassionate rationality. They don't carry the taint of irrational emotion that, say, loyalty and sacredness do. Like Mill and Kant, the liberal view prioritizes rationality. 

I wish I could say that the final section addresses the mechanisms that result in cultural variation and/or methods for communicating across moral matrices. How do cultural norms become pre-rational intuitions? Alas, Haidt instead tries to explain the evolutionary origins of the fundamental concepts. Early in the book he mocks evolutionary psychology for providing "just so stories," but here he indulges in the vice himself. The material is simplistic, obvious, and felt condescending toward conservatives and religious believers. He also suggests a genetic basis for political orientation despite earlier complaining that psychologists try to "explain away conservatism."

One insight I gleaned from The Righteous Mind is that liberal "egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se." Commentators often suggest than liberals equate fairness with equality while conservatives equate it with proportionality, but Haidt suggests that both sides equate fairness with proportionality, but that liberals believe inequalities to be largely the result of external factors. I was also intrigued by the studies regarding "altruistic punishment," which show that the ability to punish slackers is an important ingredient in fostering cooperation.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo *** 1/2

Pedro Páramo is a classic of Mexican literature, "one of the best novels in Hispanic literature" according to an entire generation of Latin American literary giants -- Borges, García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa. The recent Grove Press edition (with English translation by Douglas Weatherford) includes a forward from Gabriel García Márquez about the immense influence the book had on his own writing.

A man swears to his dying mother that he will track down his estranged father. He travels to the rural town of Comala but finds it essentially a ghost town. No worries though because the dead still whisper to him and tell the tragic story of the town's downfall.

Why has Pedro Páramo remained mostly unknown to English-language readers? I would guess that it's because Rulfo's writing is experimental and prioritizes mood over story. Pedro Páramo reminded me of later Faulkner with its blend of memory, allegory, and rural themes told non-sequentially. It also reminded me of Tarkovsky's film Mirror, which creates a similar oneiric mood for a story about a man seeking his father. Mirror is a favorite Tarkovsky film among filmmakers but not his most popular ("While highly acclaimed, Mirror continues to be viewed as enigmatic" [Wikipedia]); Pedro Páramo is canonical among Spanish-language writers and critics but is too rarified to be popular.

Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds *** 1/2

The Best Minds blends memoir, biography, and social commentary in a way that reminded me of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace.  Like that book, The Best Minds traces the life of a man who overcomes adversity to achieve success at Yale before his demons inevitably come to claim him. Both books were written by friends of the protagonist, at least partly as a means of coming to terms with the tragedies.

Michael Lauder was a charismatic and brilliant young man who graduated summa cum laude from Yale in three years. Not long after college he suffered a psychotic break and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nonetheless, he completed Yale Law School and became an advocate for the mentally ill. Ron Howard's production company started developing a film based on his life, with the theme of removing the stigma from schizophrenia. But then Michael murdered his pregnant girlfriend.

While telling the story of his childhood friendship with Michael, Rosen subtly notes the cultural changes taking place in our understanding of mental illness. The Beats popularized the idea that madness is a reasonable response to the oppression of the wider culture; Michel Foucault presented mental illness as a construction of the powerful; Derrida and the deconstructionists used mental illness as a metaphor for all "texts"; the de-institutionalization movement promoted community care over hospitalization. Unfortunately, the idea that mental illness is controllable combined with the lack of a viable community care network lead to our current situation where people get hospitalized only for being (potentially) violent rather than for being sick.

I appreciated Rosen's well-rounded assessment of the difficulties in knowing the right things to do. He clearly believes we've strayed too far in honoring the rights of severely ill people (whose denial of any problem is a symptom), but he also recognizes that it may be impossible to tell when a person's delusions are truly disabling or dangerous.

Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity ****

Shyness and Dignity is a short novel about a fateful day in the life of Elias Rukla, a Norwegian secondary school teacher. It starts as a portrait of the discontents of an ordinary man and builds gradually into a powerful vision of how life passes one by.

The story has three distinct sections that could almost stand alone as short stories. 

In the first, Elias teaches a class about Ibsen's The Wild Duck. On this particular day, Elias feels like he's on the trail of an epiphany about the import of one of the play's minor characters but recognizes that his students couldn't care less about it. This contrast causes him to reflect on the role of teachers in passing culture on to the next generation. The section ends with an unexpected burst of frustration.

The second section flashes back to Elias' own student days and his friendship with a promising philosophy student Johan. The story focuses on Johan's development but you can feel Elias trying to apply his Wild Duck insight to himself, to assess his own import as a minor character in Johan's life. This section too ends with an unexpected burst of frustration, from Johan.

In the final section, Elias thinks about his relationship with his wife, built on shared intimacies and reference points, which leads him to think about how he no longer shares intimacies or cultural reference points with the larger society. He feels left behind. He has a moment of joy when a fellow teacher references The Magic Mountain, but alas it doesn't evolve into a closer friendship. This section, and the book, ends with the reader understanding the previously unexpected bursts of frustration.

I related to Elias' feelings and was moved by them. You can––and should––read Shyness and Dignity in a couple of sittings.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus ****

Doctor Faustus is one of those books that I admired more than enjoyed. Like The Magic Mountain, it's a "dizzyingly rich novel of ideas." However, the ideas in Doctor Faustus are much heavier and (consequently?) presented less satirically. It was perhaps difficult in 1947 to be light-hearted about the rise of Nazism and the destruction of German culture.

The most consequential aesthetic decisions Mann made were using music as its foundational metaphor and having a first-person narrator. The first decision pays off brilliantly, because the music theory is interesting for its own sake as well as embodying Mann's ideas about intellectualism versus sensualism, barbarism versus culture, and progressivism versus conservatism. These antitheses wrap around to meet each other. The second decision is less successful, because Mann is stylistically trapped in the humorless temperament of his narrator Serenus Zeitblom. 

(As an aside, I did find humor in many of the character names. Griepenkerl the bassoonist, Helmut Institoris, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Rudiger Schildknapp, Deutschlin and Dungersheim. These may be ordinary German names but they struck me as overly elaborate and funny.)

The title of the book foregrounds the composer Adrian Leverkühn's supposed pact with the Devil. My hot take is that the pact is not fundamental to the story. Leverkühn's artistic development flows from the powerful cultural forces that Mann examines, and his personal development flows from his character and his syphilis; his meeting with the demon changes nothing.