04.20.12

Descent of Man Revisited now available: Amazon

Posted in Booknotes at 1:00 pm by nemo

Descent of Man Revisited is now on sale at Amazon: Buy the book! It won’t be free online like World History and The Eonic Effect.
I think that the issue of human evolution is a permanent crisis created by the stranglehood of Darwinian fundamentalism, which is incapable of explaining human emergence. There is one way we can get a new hint: world history, which gives the game away.
In any case, it is completely unrealistic to think that random evolution via natual selection did the job.

http://www.amazon.com/Descent-Man-Revisited-World-History/dp/0984702903/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334320689&sr=1-1

Descent of Man Revisited deals with the questions of world history and human emergence, as it explores issues of evolutionary theory, biological self-organization, and the history of biological thought, from the period of Lamarck and the predecessors of Darwin. The relationship of evolution to history remains a source of confusion, and the text explores this problem, along with the issues of non-random emergence visible in the archaeological record. This invites a close look at the data of the so-called Axial Age. Included is a new perspective on the rise of modernity, and the debates over secularism. The text contains a set of outlines of world history, attempting to examine the idea of ‘evolutionary chronicles’ as the early emergence of man passes through a transition from ‘evolution to history’. This idea requires considering the idea of the ‘evolution of freedom’. This creates a connection with issues of so-called Big History, and the classical philosophy of history. There are many additional topics discussed, from the evolution of ethics, and consciousness, to the riddle of evolutionary enlightenment, finally to the question of the ‘first and last man’, an idea from Olaf Stapleton, in a consideration of the future evolution of man, in the ‘conclusion’ or ‘self-evolutionary epilog’ of homo sapiens.

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04.13.12

Descent of Man Revisited now out at Amazon

Posted in Booknotes at 12:02 pm by nemo

Descent of Man Revisited World History: The Hidden Clue to Human Evolution [Paperback]
John C. Landon

Descent of Man Revisited is now out at Amazon! The book turned out nicely, and I feel very satisfied. It has a nice cover, I am told by several people, lots of interior images, and a massive amount of useful material on evolution, history, and the nature of science, theories, and their relationship to biology.

Buy the book!

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03.02.12

Pagels on Book of Revelation

Posted in Booknotes at 1:11 pm by nemo

(A&L): Who but Elaine Pagels can drain the melodrama from the Book of Revelation, turning the climactic confrontation between good and evil into an anti-Christian polemic?… more»

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12.15.11

Debt by David Graeber

Posted in Booknotes at 11:12 am by nemo

http://www.bookforum.com/review/8762

Dec 15 2011
Debt by David Graeber
by Justin E. H. Smith

David Graeber has been much praised of late as a prophet of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and even if one doesn’t want to go that far, his book is remarkably timely. I received my review copy the day of the October 5th NYPD pepper-spray incident in Zuccotti Park. By the time I finished reading it, copycat occupations had sprung up in my adoptive home city (Montreal), my native city (Sacramento), and spots around the world. Graeber’s book shows that mass movements that result in debt cancellation—whether through revolution or amnesty—are inevitable, and suggests that we may be entering such a period now. We may also be entering a moment in which the philosophical and cosmic nature of debt finally becomes apparent.

Debt’s striking synchronicity with OWS should not overshadow the fact that it’s also a formidable piece of anthropological scholarship. The book spans the concept’s evolution from the great Axial Age civilizations—adapting Karl Jaspers’s label to describe the period between 800 BCE and 600 CE in Greece, India, and China—into the age of global conquest, and finally though its bizarre mutations over the past forty years. As Graeber shows, debt could not have taken the form that it did during the Axial Age without the appearance of currency, but it was also far from being only, or even principally, an economic matter. Debt was originally a moral and cosmological notion, about our debt to the gods (in India), to our parents (in China), or to the cosmos (in Greece, and sometimes in India).

To support this claim, Graeber argues that the expansionist wars of the Axial period were motivated largely by the need to find new sources of precious metals to plunder; a development that came at around the same time as the innovation of coinage systems and the rise of a new professionalized soldier class. All this spurred a new sort of debt: the kind that could be abstracted from goods. This, in turn, motivated reflection on humanity’s place in the world, and gave rise to what we know today as the great Axial Age religious and philosophical traditions: particularly Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Greek philosophical rationalism. Underpinning all this was the question of how debt should be paid, or whether it can be paid at all.

The guiding principle of Graeber’s sweeping global history is that debt must not remain the exclusive property of economic historians, and moreover, that anthropologists are better equipped to take on the issue. The foundational myth on which economics rests, and which Graeber relishes debunking, is the “touchingly utopian” idea that money emerged directly out of primitive barter systems and had only to do with interest-maximizing exchange. Arguing against this from an anthropological perspective, Graeber claims that debt is the basis of society, and as such is inherently ineliminable. He illustrates this point through the example of debt to one’s parents: to seek to cancel that debt would be impossible. Graeber describes a system of gift-giving in traditional societies that takes place over time, and involves gifts of slightly more or less value than the ones that preceded them, thus ensuring that everyone is always slightly in debt or in credit to everyone else. This sort of debt, he says, is nothing less than the continual creation of society. It is not so much that we owe something to society, but that it “just is our debts.”

This good, society-constituting debt, as opposed to the society-destroying kind the Occupiers are speaking out against, is sustained by what Graeber calls “human economies,” where money “acts primarily as a social currency, to create, maintain, or sever relations between people rather than to purchase things.” Graeber makes no secret of his affection for these sorts of economies, nor of his skepticism for what came after it: religion, morality, politics, and the criminal-justice system, all of which might be seen “as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid.” Curiously, then, the bad debt seems to emerge only when it is conceived of as something that can be paid in full. If it can be paid, then the claim that debt exists in the first place is a fraudulent one—as when the IMF demands repayment from impoverished Third World countries—and should accordingly be cancelled. By contrast, real human debts, should never be paid or cancelled.

Given his anarchist orientation, Graeber is especially interested in cases where these kinds of human economy live on despite state efforts to impose new values and desires, and by extension, new forms of debt (where people act ‘as if they are already free’). One of Graeber’s most charming anecdotes (and there are many) tells of the French colonial efforts to get the newly subjugated Malagasy people addicted to imported luxuries, laying the foundations “of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to France.” Graeber reports that many locals understood the ruse, and resisted simply by preserving a human economy that kept them more or less autonomous in spite of their political domination: “More than sixty years after the invasion… inhabitants would dutifully show up at the coffee plantations to earn the money for their poll tax, and then, having paid it, studiously ignore the wares for sale at the local shops and instead turn over any remaining money to lineage elders, who would then use it to buy cattle for sacrifice to their ancestors.”

Graeber admires hold-outs like these, people who participate in the capitalist system because they have to, but at the same time resist full integration. He believes that we can learn from them, and that at a moment when capitalism seems unsustainable, the great hope for the future is to turn back to traditional human economies of mutual, loving indebtedness. For Graeber, capitalism is as much a fantasy as any utopian option: “We could no more have a universal world market,” he writes, “than we could have a system in which everyone who wasn’t a capitalist was somehow able to become a respectable, regularly paid wage laborer with access to adequate dental care. A world like that has never existed and never could exist. What’s more, the moment that even the prospect that this might happen begins to materialize, the whole system starts to come apart.”

What new modes of living might become thinkable if the system does come apart? For guidance, Graeber suggests that we focus on the non-industrious poor, who he believes “might just be the “pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-destruction.” In tracing the genealogy of the noxious form of debt that we are familiar with today and contrasting it against an ancient, society-grounding conception of human indebtedness, Graeber has given us a significant piece of historical scholarship, one that demonstrates how a new understanding of debt might provide us with some clues for the future.

Justin E. H. Smith is associate professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, and is an editor-at-large of Cabinet Magazine.

________________________________________________

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09.27.11

The Opium War by Julia Lovell – review

Posted in Booknotes at 11:57 am by nemo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/02/opium-war-julia-lovell-review

The Opium War by Julia Lovell – review

Julia Lovell gives a mythbusting account of a shameful episode in British-Chinese relations

The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China
by Julia Lovell

reviewed by Rana Mitter

The newly refurbished National Museum of China opened in March 2011 in Tiananmen Square, adorned with groundbreaking technology and architecture. But the story it tells is far less innovative than the design. In the museum’s narrative, China’s modern period of history opens with the opium war, the original sin of western imperialism in East Asia that forced China to open itself to a century of humiliation, conquest and exploitation until Chairman Mao came to sweep all that away. It’s titled “The Road to Rejuvenation”, but it could just as easily be called “1842 and all that”. This version of the past says more about contemporary Chinese politics, still drawing on China’s history as a victim of western imperialism, than it does about the reality of the clash between the 19th century’s greatest land and naval empires. Even in a 21st-century museum, the stain of a history more than 150 years old is central.

Yet not all the simplified views are on the Chinese side. One of the most persistent excuses for the British invasion of China, when it is discussed at all, was that it opened up a closed, xenophobic empire to the outside world. Actually this was never true. The China of the Qing dynasty was at the heart of an international system looking west and east, expanding its territory by conquest and by treaty in central Asia, and building contacts with Korea, south-east Asia and even Japan (never quite as closed as its shogun rulers would have liked to believe). China also took part in an intellectual and commercial network that went beyond Asia, as the influx of blue-and-white pottery in English country houses in the 18th century easily demonstrates. And long before the British arrived, China was even ruled by outsiders, the nomadic Manchus who had galloped in from the north-east. By the time of the opium war, they had spent nearly two centuries combining traditional Manchu culture at court with the Chinese traditions of governance across the empire.

Julia Lovell’s new history of the opium war is a welcome piece of myth-busting. It uses a wealth of Chinese and British sources to tell, in her words, a “tragicomedy” that is “far more chaotically interesting” than the ideological positions on both sides might suggest. The tragedy part is as simple as it was in 1839. British opium from East India was brought into China in huge amounts from the early 19th century. In the 1830s, concern about the drug’s effects on the population and economy led the Qing dynasty to ban it, and they ordered a senior official, Lin Zexu, to blockade British opium ships in Canton harbour until they agreed to hand over their cargo. In Britain, this was seen as an insult to the Crown (much of the opium was produced by the East India Company), and a fleet under Admiral Charles Elliot was sent out to teach the Chinese a lesson. British military technology soon smashed through Chinese defences, and after three years of coastal fighting, the war ended with the Nanjing treaty of 1842 which handed over Hong Kong island and opened up the interior to trade and Christian missionaries. For the next century, China would be subject to further invasions and humiliations, which ended only with the termination of special western rights in China in 1943 under Chiang Kai-shek (not under Mao in 1949, as the Chinese Communist party tends to suggest).

The comedy part lies in the characters whom Lovell paints with affection and a dry wit. Lin, the upright official tasked with destroying the opium he had seized, had “self-belief” and a “passion for freight management”. Lord Palmerston, who sent the fleet, is described as “Free Trader, libertine, arch-villain of Chinese historiography”. The gulf in diplomatic niceties between the two sides was shown particularly starkly in the run-up to the signing of the treaty, when one high official insisted that he must first feed sugar-plums directly into the mouth of the British negotiator Sir Henry Pottinger, who showed, in the words of a witness, “determined resignation after he found remonstrances were of no avail”. The book also paints the many shades of grey: for instance, voices such as William Gladstone, who declared “a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated … to cover this country in permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of.” And the Chinese officials, from Lin to the high Manchu official Qishan, come over not as arrogant xenophobes but as worried, sincere men faced with their civilisation in existential crisis.

The opium war did help to bring about the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty, a fact worth remembering in 2011, exactly a century since the revolution that deposed the last emperor. But their significance was to hasten violent changes already under way. The expansion of China’s territory and population, without any increase in the size of the bureaucracy (shades of current debates about austerity versus spending in the west), meant that government functions had become less competent and more corrupt. And while the opium war itself had a direct impact on relatively few Chinese, one of the results of the opening up of China demanded by the 1842 treaty was the Taiping war of 1856-64, when a lunatic inspired by Christian missionary theology managed to spark off one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, which killed some 20 million people. Throughout the 20th century, the opium war has remained a rallying-cry for Chinese nationalists seeking to overcome “national humiliation” and restore China to its rightful place in the world.

Lovell’s book is part of a trend in understanding the British empire and China’s role in it. Earlier this year, Robert Bickers’s The Scramble for China gave a compelling account of the aftermath of the opium war, which saw such a heightened presence of British missionaries and adventurers that the Shanghai lifestyle was nicknamed “the Mock Raj”. Niall Ferguson’s recent Civilization revived the argument that there was a distinct western imperial modernity that was more successful than any other system from the 18th century onward, but he framed the book as a comparison with China in the 17th century and in the early 21st, a device that would have seemed unlikely just two decades ago. Lovell’s major contribution is to remind us of the different worldviews involved: not so much a clash of civilisations but two sets of incompatible software, as we read, over and over again, a British politician give one view of events, and a Chinese official define it in completely different terms. The sense of an unfolding tragedy, explicable but inexorable, runs through the book, making it a gripping read as well as an important one.

The opium war is capable of creating waves in China even today. One academic, Mao Haijian at Peking University, recently had the temerity to question the official Chinese narrative of the opium war in his book The Collapse of the Empire, rehabilitating the Qing official Qishan, generally regarded as the weak villain of the piece who failed to stand up to the British, and criticising Lin, traditionally regarded as the upright hero of the story. His book was subjected to a storm of criticism, but the debate did not result in the purging of the dissident scholar, as it would have done in an earlier era. The signs of a livelier debate among Chinese academics make the account of the war in the new national museum even more disappointing. Britain may have forgotten the history of its Chinese empire, but the Communist party also continues to be highly selective in what it chooses to remember. The conquest of China by Mao in 1949 was not an endpoint to the story started in 1842, but brought its own horrors of history with it: the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed millions of people (described in Frank Dikötter’s recent Samuel Johnson-prizewinning book), the cultural revolution (officially repudiated and hardly mentioned in the new museum), and the killings of non-violent students and workers just a few hundred metres from the site of the museum in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. This book serves a crucial purpose in reminding Britain of a shameful episode in its past that still shapes relations with China today. But official China could also learn from it that reconciliation with the past comes by understanding its complexities, rather than turning it into a simple morality tale.

Rana Mitter’s Modern China: A Very Short Introduction is published by Oxford University Press.

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09.18.11

New Pinker book

Posted in Booknotes at 11:58 am by nemo

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/steve-pinkers-new-book/

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09.17.11

Confidence Men

Posted in Booknotes at 11:48 am by nemo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/suskind-book-female-advisers-in-obama-white-house-sidelined-and-ignored/2011/09/16/gIQAAOSSXK_story.html

Book: Women in Obama White House felt excluded and ignored
By Nia-Malika Henderson and Peter Wallsten, Friday, September 16, 11:13 AM

A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations.

“Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President,” by journalist Ron Suskind due out next Tuesday, details the rivalries among Obama’s top economic advisers, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. It describes constant second-guessing by Summers, now at Harvard, who was seen by others as “imperious and heavy-handed” in his decision-making.

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08.30.11

Repost: Bellah review at Amazon

Posted in Booknotes at 10:31 am by nemo

I just wrote an initial take on Bellah’s new book Religion in Human Evolution. I promised to return to the review (if Amazon posts it) for upgrades over time. But I wanted to make an initial appraisal given the clear suspicion Bellah is being ‘bashful’ about Darwinism. I cannot figure out his views of Darwinism, which puts the whole book on hold, up in the air. A fascinating book in any case.
Repost: Bellah book

4.0 out of 5 stars Evolution and the Axial Age enigma, August 29, 2011
By John C. Landon “nemonemini” (New York City) – See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Hardcover)
This is a massive book I am still studying, one filled with some novel perspectives, among them that rarity: scholarly acknowledgment of the existence of the Axial Age. There is so much that is of fascinating interest that one could/should resolve to spend a good period of time going over the rich details. But there is an instant problem here. For better or for worse, if you mention ‘evolution’ and the ‘Axial Age’ in one breath, it is easy to close in for the ‘kill’ if author’s motives are murky and/or he is too ‘scare d cat’ to challenge Darwin. So for that reason, suspicions aroused, I can easily begin a preliminary review of the overall aspect of the book, a review to be revised and extended perhaps.
The book deserves commendation for even mentioning this data on the Axial Age. And it is good to raise the issue, but fatal also. As most scholarly propagandists probably realize, to even mention the subject means the jig is up, make as many mistakes as you wish, but the data will come to demand a real analysis, one that will endanger current paradigms. So in that sense I praise this fine book for its lesser audacity: the jig is up, and it is only a matter of time before the question of the Axial Age and its revolutionary implications become clear.
I could be wrong. Karen Armstrong almost succeeded in completely asphiaxiating this topic, and as a result the jig wasn’t up.
It is almost taboo to even refer to this phenomenon. But unfortunately, as with Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, one is reminded of the classic barb: ‘we have not come to praise Caesar, but to bury him’. The scholarly community, if it can’t suppress this data, will absorb it into something that will confuse it completely, as with Karen Armstrong’s book, a tour de force that summoned up the ‘Axial Age’ and left the subject beyond recognition.

Bellah’s book seems like a more sophisticated version of this tactic. Is this fair?
The first question must be, has Bellah perused John Landon’s book World History And the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution Fourth Edition and resolved to produce his own take and/or save the world from that underground text, and without any reference to it (and such reference being the end of one’s public reputation)? It is hard to believe the author is not aware of, and wary of, that book with its comprehensive view of the Axial Age. Which book demands a larger pattern of ‘axial ages’, a new view of historical evolution, evolution in history, and thence of the descent of man, and, yes, the ‘evolution’ of religion, which is not Darwinian. The Axial Age shows us precisely the kind of ‘macrovevolutionary’ process at work in both the evolution of religion and of civilization. You cannot compromise with Darwinism once you grasp what is happening with the Axial Age.
And this makes us ask, what is Bellah’s take on Darwinism? Examine this book and you will have a hard time knowing where Bellah stands on the question of Darwin’s theory: plus and minus are most cleverly braided together in one unified sophistry of scholarly legerdemain, far more polished than Karen Armstrong’s idiotic venture here.
I can see Bellah’s problem: evolutionary psychology is a hopeless mess on religion, but to say so is risky, and indirect methods are required. I can’t really determine his stance (there is even a reference to natural selection, which is fogged out), and that is unfortunate, because the suggestion is still left that in the final analysis the Axial Age is just a smorgasbord of cuteness, not the real insight into global teleological macroevolution that the data demands.

That’s thrown out as a caution as I continue to study the book, which is well worth reading, and which has many interesting takes. Unlike too many books on the Axial period, this one gives a real discussion of the Greek Axial, not shunting it to one side in a kind of ‘generalized age of revelation’ treatment of religion.
The real Axial Age is an elusive totalizing process that rises beyond religion to the whole question of civilization, and from there to the question of evolution as such. The data must force us to suspect that Darwinism is totally off the mark, and that real ‘evolution’ shows this kind of discontinuous near planetary top-down process that operates metagenetically. That is the kind of heresy that drives people to cover up what the Axial Age is showing us.

In the nonce, as I study this book further, it must be seen as a remarkable innovation (beyond that of WHEE already cited) attempting to do justice the original insights of Karl Jaspers (who did not however seem to understand his own book on the Axial period). No doubt the impudence of Bellah in writing a book on the Axial period will cause the book to be ignored. We will see. In the worst case it will join the underground of post-Jasperian historiographies.
Let me say that harsh judgments here can be unfair. Grasping the Axial Age is NOT easy, and requires a new mode of thought. Bellah goes part way here, what more can we expect?
Much more to be said here: we can continue the discussion over time.

John Landon
World History and The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution.

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08.29.11

Booknotes: Amazon review of Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution

Posted in Booknotes, The Axial Age at 1:16 pm by nemo

I just wrote an initial take on Bellah’s new book Religion in Human Evolution. I promised to return to the review (if Amazon posts it) for upgrades over time. But I wanted to make an initial appraisal given the clear suspicion Bellah is being ‘bashful’ about Darwinism. I cannot figure out his views of Darwinism, which puts the whole book on hold, up in the air. A fascinating book in any case.

4.0 out of 5 stars Evolution and the Axial Age enigma, August 29, 2011
By John C. Landon “nemonemini” (New York City) – See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Hardcover)
This is a massive book I am still studying, one filled with some novel perspectives, among them that rarity: scholarly acknowledgment of the existence of the Axial Age. There is so much that is of fascinating interest that one could/should resolve to spend a good period of time going over the rich details. But there is an instant problem here. For better or for worse, if you mention ‘evolution’ and the ‘Axial Age’ in one breath, it is easy to close in for the ‘kill’ if author’s motives are murky and/or he is too ‘scare d cat’ to challenge Darwin. So for that reason, suspicions aroused, I can easily begin a preliminary review of the overall aspect of the book, a review to be revised and extended perhaps.
The book deserves commendation for even mentioning this data on the Axial Age. And it is good to raise the issue, but fatal also. As most scholarly propagandists probably realize, to even mention the subject means the jig is up, make as many mistakes as you wish, but the data will come to demand a real analysis, one that will endanger current paradigms. So in that sense I praise this fine book for its lesser audacity: the jig is up, and it is only a matter of time before the question of the Axial Age and its revolutionary implications become clear.
I could be wrong. Karen Armstrong almost succeeded in completely asphiaxiating this topic, and as a result the jig wasn’t up.
It is almost taboo to even refer to this phenomenon. But unfortunately, as with Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, one is reminded of the classic barb: ‘we have not come to praise Caesar, but to bury him’. The scholarly community, if it can’t suppress this data, will absorb it into something that will confuse it completely, as with Karen Armstrong’s book, a tour de force that summoned up the ‘Axial Age’ and left the subject beyond recognition.

Bellah’s book seems like a more sophisticated version of this tactic. Is this fair?
The first question must be, has Bellah perused John Landon’s book World History And the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution Fourth Edition and resolved to produce his own take and/or save the world from that underground text, and without any reference to it (and such reference being the end of one’s public reputation)? It is hard to believe the author is not aware of, and wary of, that book with its comprehensive view of the Axial Age. Which book demands a larger pattern of ‘axial ages’, a new view of historical evolution, evolution in history, and thence of the descent of man, and, yes, the ‘evolution’ of religion, which is not Darwinian. The Axial Age shows us precisely the kind of ‘macrovevolutionary’ process at work in both the evolution of religion and of civilization. You cannot compromise with Darwinism once you grasp what is happening with the Axial Age.
And this makes us ask, what is Bellah’s take on Darwinism? Examine this book and you will have a hard time knowing where Bellah stands on the question of Darwin’s theory: plus and minus are most cleverly braided together in one unified sophistry of scholarly legerdemain, far more polished than Karen Armstrong’s idiotic venture here.
I can see Bellah’s problem: evolutionary psychology is a hopeless mess on religion, but to say so is risky, and indirect methods are required. I can’t really determine his stance (there is even a reference to natural selection, which is fogged out), and that is unfortunate, because the suggestion is still left that in the final analysis the Axial Age is just a smorgasbord of cuteness, not the real insight into global teleological macroevolution that the data demands.

That’s thrown out as a caution as I continue to study the book, which is well worth reading, and which has many interesting takes. Unlike too many books on the Axial period, this one gives a real discussion of the Greek Axial, not shunting it to one side in a kind of ‘generalized age of revelation’ treatment of religion.
The real Axial Age is an elusive totalizing process that rises beyond religion to the whole question of civilization, and from there to the question of evolution as such. The data must force us to suspect that Darwinism is totally off the mark, and that real ‘evolution’ shows this kind of discontinuous near planetary top-down process that operates metagenetically. That is the kind of heresy that drives people to cover up what the Axial Age is showing us.

In the nonce, as I study this book further, it must be seen as a remarkable innovation (beyond that of WHEE already cited) attempting to do justice the original insights of Karl Jaspers (who did not however seem to understand his own book on the Axial period). No doubt the impudence of Bellah in writing a book on the Axial period will cause the book to be ignored. We will see. In the worst case it will join the underground of post-Jasperian historiographies.
Let me say that harsh judgments here can be unfair. Grasping the Axial Age is NOT easy, and requires a new mode of thought. Bellah goes part way here, what more can we expect?
Much more to be said here: we can continue the discussion over time.

John Landon
World History and The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution.

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08.21.11

Booknotes: The Epigenetic Revolution

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 11:22 am by nemo

The previous post cited Coyne’s blog, which gives this link: The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey – review

Time was when scientific revolutions – the discoveries of Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Einstein, Watson and Crick – reverberated around the globe. But although we are living through the greatest discoveries about the processes of life generally, and human beings in particular, the new findings hardly rate a blip on the collective consciousness. In March 2010 Oliver Burkeman wrote for this paper on the subject of epigenetics. The article was provocatively titled: “Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong.” It isn’t, but I confidently predicted to anyone within earshot that this would finally set tongues wagging.
Read the rest of this entry »

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08.05.11

String theory for idiots…

Posted in Booknotes at 1:27 pm by nemo

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Idiots-Guide-String-Theory/dp/1592577024/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312568496&sr=1-2

I promised as a ‘hail mary’ to recommence work on my string theory bibliography. Here it is. Actually I bought an expensive book on the subject, full math, a few years back, but haven’t had the time to get anywhere with it.

I am actually adept in math, or once was, but string theory will defeat the merely clever. So the ‘for idiots’ books hit the spot, more or less.
Actually I ran out of gas after quantum mechanics, and never even got to quantum electrodynamics, so string theory in its mathematical format still remains a ‘to be rescheduled’ project.

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07.08.11

Booknotes: Evolution Exposed and Intelligent-Design Explained

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 12:05 pm by nemo

Evolution Exposed and Intelligent-Design Explained in Walter Starkey’s New Book An engineering professor gives expert-witness testimony on the origin of animals, including many novel analyses
Author Walter Starkey, a Doctor in biology and engineering, has been interested in the theory of evolution most of his life. After years of in-depth study about this topic however, he has made a conclusion about this firmly-held belief by the majority. In Evolution Exposed and Intelligent-Design Explained, he bares all.

Through extensive research and common sense, Dr. Starkey has discovered—backed with concepts on science, engineering, and mathematics—that the theory of evolution is the greatest scientific mistake of all time. This bold account attempts to prove this statement by presenting several facts that readers will find very eye-opening and enlightening. Furthermore, this account asserts that (1) the natural forces of the earth have no intelligence whatsoever, and therefore they could not have designed the animals, (2) human beings are intelligent enough to design machines but they are not intelligent enough to design the animals, and (3) the only entity that could design the animals would be the superhuman being who is much more intelligent than any human being; thus, the theory of Intelligent Design.

This book was not written for the purpose of attempting to change the opinion of any scholar who believes in the theory of evolution. Rather, it is an account that unveils an engineering professor’s expert-witness testimony on the origin of animals, including many novel analyses. It has been written primarily for young people who are in their formative years, and who are interested in learning the truth about the origins of the animals.

Although containing many advanced scientific concepts, Evolution Exposed and Intelligent-Design Explained is easy to read and understand, making it an excellent supplementary reading for students taking biology, mathematics, and engineering, and those in Christian Universities.

For more information on this book, interested parties may log on to http://www.Xlibris.com.

Evolution Exposed and Intelligent-Design Explained * by Walter Starkey
Publication Date: June 16, 2011

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06.30.11

Booknotes: Am I a Monkey?

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 12:55 pm by nemo

Am I a Monkey?

Six Big Questions about Evolution
Francisco J. Ayala

Despite the ongoing cultural controversy in America, evolution remains a cornerstone of science. In this book, Francisco J. Ayala—an evolutionary biologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and winner of the National Medal of Science and the Templeton Prize—cuts to the chase in a daring attempt to address, in nontechnical language, six perennial questions about evolution:

• Am I a Monkey?
• Why Is Evolution a Theory?
• What Is DNA?
• Do All Scientists Accept Evolution?
• How Did Life Begin?
• Can One Believe in Evolution and God?

Am I a Monkey?

Six Big Questions about Evolution
Francisco J. Ayala

Despite the ongoing cultural controversy in America, evolution remains a cornerstone of science. In this book, Francisco J. Ayala—an evolutionary biologist, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and winner of the National Medal of Science and the Templeton Prize—cuts to the chase in a daring attempt to address, in nontechnical language, six perennial questions about evolution:

• Am I a Monkey?
• Why Is Evolution a Theory?
• What Is DNA?
• Do All Scientists Accept Evolution?
• How Did Life Begin?
• Can One Believe in Evolution and God?

Commentary:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/another-accommodationist-book-on-evolution/

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06.19.11

Sci-fi classics, from Tech Review

Posted in Booknotes at 12:06 pm by nemo

The Best Hard Science Fiction Books of all Time

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06.13.11

Hitler’s Ethic by Richard Weikart

Posted in Booknotes at 1:07 pm by nemo

New in Paperback: Hitler’s Ethic by Richard Weikart

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05.31.11

Booknotes: Almost LIke a Whale

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 11:33 am by nemo

Almost Like a Whale by Steve Jones – book review

With a cool assurance that should persuade the open-minded and thrill the converted, Steve Jones tackles the arguments Creationists routinely level against Darwin

Auithors eulogizing Darwin who cannot reference the clear evidence of Darwin’s plagiarism of Wallace (cf. Roy Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy) are not to be trusted.

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Booknotes: The Very Violent Road….Before the Revolution…

Posted in Booknotes at 11:10 am by nemo

NY Review
The Very Violent Road to America
June 9, 2011
J.H. Elliott

Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts
by Daniel K. Richter
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 502 pp., $35.00

Over the last fifty years the writing of North American colonial history has undergone a great transformation. During the nineteenth century and a substantial part of the twentieth there was not much doubt about its scope or its purpose. Essentially the colonial period was seen as a prelude—a prelude to the achievement of independence by the thirteen mainland colonies from British imperial domination, and to the creation of the God-blessed nation that was to become a model and an inspiration to the peoples of the world. The challenge facing historians of this period was to trace the origins and early manifestations of those elements—political and religious liberty, individual self-fulfillment, innovation and enterprise—that grounded the new nation on a set of fundamental principles, and to explore the processes that would enable the United States to win its rendezvous with destiny.

The resulting story, as told to generations of Americans, was relatively simple and straightforward. Its origins were located in England, the England of Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, and the seventeenth-century struggle to save liberty from the grasp of arbitrary power. It was thus an essentially English story, which was then carried across the Atlantic by English emigrants, and was in due course replayed on the soil of America, and primarily of New England. Naturally it acquired new elements along the way. In particular, Frederick Jackson Turner added a fresh dimension to the origins of American individualism with his arguments for the impact of the frontier experience on American society.

The story, however, continued to be shaped by three defining elements. It was Anglocentric, in the sense that it placed the weight of its emphasis on the contribution of British settlers, with some assistance from continental Europeans, primarily those of Teutonic origin, who were granted a kind of honorary Anglo status. It was teleological, in the sense that everything in the story built up to a logical conclusion in the winning of independence. And it was exceptionalist, in the sense that it was a story like no other about a nation that itself was like no other. As William Findley wrote, even before the eighteenth century was over, Americans had “formed a character peculiar to themselves, and in some respects distinct from that of other nations.”

full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/09/very-violent-road-america/

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05.25.11

Booknotes: review of Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

Posted in Booknotes at 11:34 am by nemo

Review of Batchelor’s book

I was going to review Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, but discovered I already had, last year. I was sorry for my original review, which was too kind to the book, and updated my revview.

Buddhist atheism was low key, and emerged in an age before monotheism. The residual polytheism of buddhism is another confusion. In general, buddhist atheism is not the same as the reductionist scientism of the new atheists, who are woefully ignorant of the history of religion.
I think Batchelor should wake up and consider the illusions of modern science, documented since the Romantic movement two centuries ago, and get past this idea that Buddhism is somehow a kind of samsaric feel good cult.

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05.19.11

Review of “Why Evolution is True”

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 10:47 am by nemo

Evolution, Myths and Reconciliation: A Review of “Why Evolution is True”

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05.17.11

Tarpley on Obama

Posted in Booknotes at 1:45 pm by nemo

Obama: The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate
Webster Griffin Tarpley

Tarpley wrote a good book on 9/11 but this book is a head-scratcher, which I am also rereading. In broad strokes I would reject out of hand this kind of wild-pitch analysis but somehow the author manages to come up with some important insights.
The reason I can’t quite set it aside is that Tarpley was one of the few who correctly predicted, and rushed to warn with this too hasty book, of the Obama turn, of the way that his charisma and seemingly left-center ideology was a front, a cover for the triangulation we now see. How Tarpley saw that right away, in the process confusing his thesis with a lot of muddled concepts like the ‘postmodern’ issue, is a mystery, and I am left to wonder how he did it.

Further his confused yet acute analysis of fascism raises an important point: study the real history of fascism: it was able to inspire on the left to start and then show its true colors and end on the right (of course a complex situation), and in the process a plaything of financial capital manipulating the situation. Deja vu all over again with currrent finance shenanigans and the parallel rightward farce, next to the ‘slow coup d’etat’ in motion with the intelligence agencies, the war on terror with its attack on civil liberties, etc… The term ‘fascism’ is thus appropriate in many ways in its original meaning. However, the situations remain different, so this kind of collation is probably false. But Tarpley’s examination of the semantic history of the word ‘fascism’ is useful.

The book also raises the question of the intelligence agencies working on the left, manipulating elections, a phenomenon first visible in the Soros world and the various post-Soviet satellites, from Ukraine to Georgia.
Was this, as Tarpley insists, a factor behind the strange success of Obama? Is the CIA et al. involved in manipulating the left, and various electoral situations?
The left has certainly been fooled by the CIA, and badly. The revolution in secret as a coup d’etat of the American government (plus other shady operators manipulating the CIA) has to be object of leftist analysis, but instead it hasn’t a clue. It is hard to challenge the government if you don’t know what/where/who it is.

So, I can’t decide whether to recommend this book, which is filled with some dubious notions, but the fact is that Obama confusingly misled his fans, and Tarpley shouted out as loud as he could before the election that that was what Obama would do.
I must be missing something. Another misinformed dupe of the mass media. Poor me.

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05.11.11

Booknotes: Dawkins bungles title to new book

Posted in Booknotes at 11:18 am by nemo

The Magic of Reality – new book by Richard Dawkins this Fall
By – - RD.NET
Added: Tuesday, 10 May 2011 at 6:52 PM

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/625578-the-magic-of-reality-new-book-by-richard-dawkins-this-fall

The subtitle: How We Know What’s Really True
The tile iis wrong here: the term ‘magic’ is vacuous for reductionists. Magic should refer to ‘acts of will’ that perform actions (that might seem ‘miraculous’) or else to actions performed by agents who have realized self-consciousness and the will to conscious action (etc, there are many versions here).

The subtitle shows Dawkins’ arrogance in action. If ‘science’ got evolution wrong with Darwinism, it is futile to discover how science achieves certainty.

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05.09.11

Booknotes: the iron cage/max weber

Posted in Booknotes at 12:28 pm by nemo

Currently studying two books on the ‘iron cage’, the problem we see a lot of when examining Darwinian specimens.

The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber [Paperback]
Arthur Mitzman

Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber – Paperback (June 19, 1991) by Lawrence A. Scaff

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05.04.11

Is the Human Genome Garbage?

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 12:01 pm by nemo

Is the Human Genome Garbage?
Biologist says no in new book The Myth of Junk DNA

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/is-the-human-genome-garbage-121174034.html

SEATTLE, May 3, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Forty years ago scientists discovered that more than 95% of our DNA does not encode proteins. Since then the non-protein-coding portion was labeled “junk” and attributed to molecular accidents that have accumulated in the course of evolution.

Now, biologist Dr. Jonathan Wells exposes The Myth of Junk DNA (Discovery Institute Press 2011) and shows that contrary to being just evolutionary flotsam and jetsam, much of our non-protein-coding DNA performs essential biological functions. Wells, author of the acclaimed Icons of Evolution, wrote The Myth of Junk DNA in order to highlight the increasingly abundant evidence from scientific literature and recent genome projects showing that “junk DNA” is but a myth.

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05.02.11

Booknotes: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 10:24 am by nemo

http://www.uncommondescent.com/darwinism/seems-like-just-yesterday-atheist-british-journalist-checked-out-of-darwinism/

1997:

…natural selection can be made to explain opposed and even mutually contradictory individual adaptations. For example, Darwinists claim that camouflage coloring and mimicry (as in leaf insects) is adaptive and will be selected for, yet they also claim that warning coloration (the wasp’s stripes) is adaptive and will be selected for. Yet if both propositions are true, any kind of coloration will have some adaptive value, whether it is partly camouflage or partly warning, and will be selected for.

— Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, p. 130

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04.28.11

Booknotes: The Language of Science and Faith

Posted in Booknotes, Science & Religion at 11:46 am by nemo

BioLogos and Theistic Evolution: Selling the Product

There’s nothing wrong with selling one’s ideas. But it needs to be done honestly, and that’s just what I don’t find in this book.

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04.15.11

Booknotes: new Fukuyama book

Posted in Booknotes at 12:19 pm by nemo

The Beginning of History

As the communist era vanished, he declared history’s end. With the Middle East in revolt and China rising, Francis Fukuyama is back. What is he thinking?

Fukuyama has a new book out, and a bad model, despite its huge success, Jared Diamond’s idiotic analysis of history in terms of wishwashy categories of geographical analysis, etc,… That the book sold very very well should not, I hope, have tempted Fukuyama to imitate this genre. Actually that kind of reductionism was latent in his famous The End of History, concealed in the crypto-Nietzschanism of his not so crypto-Hegelianism. That knack behind that book, despite a chorus of criticisms, was it sly use of Hegelian teleology disguised with a sort of historical materialism drumbeat note in the background. Plus the Kojevian nihilism turned upside down into capitalist ideology. In a word, a tour de force of neo-con deception.
A fast ball that left many wondering what just whizzed over the home plate.
That book tweaked a whole set of unconscious chords, even as it falsely implied that capitalism could ride piggyback on the argument for democracy as the ‘great historical trend’,…. ???!
I think Fukuyama was cleverly timely to say so, at the end of Communism, but in fact he surely got it wrong.
The world of Bolshevism was a form of mass pychosis in the context of its birth in the strange world of ancient Russia plus the nightmare of the First World War. I don’t think Bolshevism is even a candidate, therefore, for any Hegelian discussion of the end of history.

The trend of history toward democracy, pace Hegel, if Hegel is right, should eventually move toward a form of democratic socialism as inevitable if capitalist mechanics proves anti-democratic. Hegel never said that capitalism would grace the ‘end of history’ ( a phrase he never used, leastwise in any Kojevian/Fukuyama sense).
In fact, I fear, Fukuyama may have been a harbinger of the reversal of the classic left toward the right, a phenomenon so visible in the past generation in America. In any case, Hegel is an unreliable indicator of anything, his meaning being often too obscure for common mortals.
If you wish a plain insight into historical directionality and freedom, check out the eonic effect with its discussioin of the strange emergence of democracy in history.

I haven’t read Fukuyama’s new book, so I can’t quite tell if he has been reduced to Jared Diamond’s level of pop historical materialism, and totally imbecile theory of the rise of the West, but the signs look ominous.

The evolution of the state is clear, btw, from the study of the eonic effect, and shows that it is visibly initiating in the classic transitional phase of Sumer and Egypt in the centuries before ca. -3000. That’s not the absolute origin, and somewhere missing in the Neolithic, probably in the early temple complexes to the north of Sumer in the fertile crescent we see the first gestations of the religion/state twin birth in the context of agricultural surplus and the rest of it.
My point is the indication that the state arises to make war, if I have it right from the short article, is another case of reductionist conflict theory in action, pace Darwinism, and the royal road to good book sales and otherwise trashy sociology of the Jared Diamond brand.
What happened to his Hegel? Hegel’s take on the emergence of states is, well, gothic dialectic at its best. His teleology of freedom, done much better in my eonic model, would show how the rise of the state is a first form of freedom, followed by the quest for freedom within that state, democracy ( a version of Hegel’s dubious dialectical triad on the state and freedom) and the revolutionary sequences it generates.
In a word, since Fukuyama’s Hegel was a complex put on, which he got from the Kojevian version which had put Hegel through the marxist sausage machine of historical materialism, it is not surprising that he has ditched that philosophic fetish, so cleverly packaged as mystification in his first book, we should fear he has abanboned fancy footsteps for the dullness of reductionist historicism in the key of militarism and Social Darwinist ideology. We shall see. Will have to read the book.

In this environment books have to be stupid to sell, it seems, and Jared Diamond’s nonsense is a very misleading model.

If he started with the end, Fukuyama is now returning to the beginning: he wants to answer the existential question of politics—where does government come from?
…

Fukuyama explains that with Origins he envisions himself as a throwback to what he calls the “great historical anthropologists” of the 19th century. You may not recognize the names—people such as Henry Maine and Frederic Maitland—but their method seems to be experiencing a kind of resurgence. They wrote books sweeping in scope and grand in ambition, reaching across academic fields and entire eras of human history. “Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably closest to what I’m doing now,” Fukuyama says, comparing himself to the author of a bestseller who argued in 1997 that geography and climate ultimately determined why some societies (like Europe and North America) thrived while others (like sub-Saharan Africa) remained underdeveloped and poor.

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04.10.11

Booknotes: The Nature of Nature

Posted in Booknotes at 11:23 am by nemo

http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/the-nature-of-nature-hot-off-the-press/

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03.13.11

What Darwin Got Wrong

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 12:16 pm by nemo

What Darwin Got Wrong, By Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini

Survival of the fittest…or just lucky?

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03.12.11

Here On Earth, By Tim Flannery

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 12:29 pm by nemo

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/here-on-earth-by-tim-flannery-2238060.html

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02.24.11

Hobsbawm on Marx

Posted in Booknotes, Ultra Far Left at 2:05 pm by nemo

http://www.redfortyeight.com/2011/02/24/booknotes-how-to-change-the-world/

This review is worth reading (as is the book, no doubt). But I think we should be glad that the hold of Marxism has loosened, since the failure of Marx’s approach (more the failure of the Leninists) needs to open up the way to a new version of the basic theme, that goes back to the French Revolution, and whose relevance is even greater today than it was several decades ago. Marx monopolized the whole subject, and then his formulation failed, leaving a void.
Not a single idea in his formulation was original: so we have the way forward, and we can actually start learning from Marx as we move away from him.

We are in a state of crisis, and a formulation of the issues of socialism/social democracy, then the more distant communism, are crying out for some attention. But noone can get past the dead hand of Marx’s theories, Engels’ theories, and Lenin’s quiet appropriation of that legacy for his Blanqui-ism.
Marxists are masters of confusion. If you mention Blanqui, they foam at the mouth. That Lenin was a Blanqui-ist is never uttered in public. So it goes at all points.
Why not just drop all of it? Marxism is suffering from metal fatigue.

The deck has been reshuffled here: we propose A New American Revolution of the bourgeois type, but recast as bourgeois-socialist and democratic. The point is that socialism is a form of liberalism, and the issues should have been addressed within the context of rights based politics. The old left has made an enemy of social democracy, but some of its achievements (and they are real, almost the only achievements of the far left) need to be built into a new form of social democracy . The left needs to put Marx in a museum, and, starting with an emergency version of democratic socialism (with a few ideas from social democracy) that still accepts the market, but one based in framework of rights, commence the hard work of asking if a movement can lead to this, or whether the American system is too corrupt for orderly change. I think that it is beside the point to call this unrealistic. The phenomenon of global warming is making capitalism unrealistic, and we need to start preparing a failsafe version of socialism revolutioin to be ready when the thugs decide they have to create a brand of socialist non-socialism for the rich eco-survivors.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/terry-eagleton/indomitable

Indomitable
Terry Eagleton

How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 470 pp, £25.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 4087 0287 1

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.

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