Amsterdam

Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City
© 2013 Russell Shorto
369 pages

In the early 14th century, a group of fisher-folk around the Amstel river came together with a dream: to build a place where people could smoke weed and bicycle to their heart's content.  And so they built a dam, and canals, and a town, and they called it Amsterdam. And they all lived happily ever after, except for the people who toked and cycled simultaneously, because they fell into the canals.

...well, okay. Not really. But there were fishermen, and there was a dam.  Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City  reviews the history of the city which took its name from that dam, though it focuses more on Amsterdam's culture of liberality than municipal matters. That culture begins not in the 1960s or even the enlightenment period, but at the very beginning.

Most European cities can point back to a spot of land, the center of the old town, and say "Here is it where it began."  Not so with Amsterdam, which had to be reclaimed from the sea itself, by dredging rivers, redirecting water through canals, building dykes, and driving massive of wood into the Earth to secure a foundation for buildings.  This effort was a joint private-communal affair, as people worked as a corporation to accomplish and maintain projects, but held the results -- the parcels of land raised from the sea--  as private family possessions. Amsterdam's peculiar origins gave the city a unique character, writes Russell Shorto.  It fell outside the feudal system that governed the rest of western Europe, sharply curbing the influence of any native aristocracy, and priming it to reject them totally when cities grew and political authority became a matter of public debate.  The relatively shallow roots of feudalism's cultural authority made it much easier to embrace a  social policy of gedogen -- a game tolerance of difference or vice, so long as it wasn't aggressive.  This tolerance made Amsterdam  a refuge for persecuted minorities (exiled Spanish Jews) and minorities who would love to do the persecuting if the shoe was on the other foot (English Puritans). during the medieval-industrial transition

.Amsterdam's geography meant that it could not be a city with vast estates;  although many of its citizens were staggeringly rich during Amsterdam's golden age, when it was a trading titan that gave its sister-nation England painful competition,  even the wealthy would live in relatively modest townhouses. The broad outlines of Amsterdamer, or at least Dutch, history may be known -- if nothing else, at least the Dutch provinces' early participation in the Protestant movement, and their war of rebellion against the Spanish Hapburgs.  Amsterdam was slow to be caught up in the protestant tide,  as a medieval miracle made it an object of pilgrimages, and made the city as a whole more Catholic -- at least, for a time, before it was quickly supplanted by liberalism. Although the word "liberal" means apparently opposite things on either side of the Atlantic, Shorto holds that both meanings were originally rooted in the supremacy of the individual, and Amsterdam can claim to embody that cause more than any other city.  Compare it to the cradle of Anglo-American democracy, the  home of the House of Commons:  London's streets once fell under the shadow of cathedrals and the Tower; now they falls under skyscrapers.  Amsterdam, however, is a city not of skyscrapers and massive complexes, but of buildings that have remained at the human scale. Its innards, too, have remained human: its streets are dominated by human figures on bicycles, not oversized for speeding automobiles.

Although this is certainly an enjoyable history of Amsterdam's contribution to the human existance,  particularly  on its progress at achieving the golden mean between individual and community life,  those who are curious about Amsterdam's physical expression will probably be a little disappointed. The physical form of the city is covered early on, but after that municipal matters take a distant back seat to the evolving social history. Admittedly, most readers are probably more interested in reading about cars than about canals and such, but I thought it was very odd that Shorto didn't dwell on the rescue of the 'human city' from cars in the 1970s. 

Related:
In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist, Pete Jordan
The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama. Not one I've read yet, but it's about the Dutch Republic's golden age.

Rousseau and Revolution

Rousseau and Revolution
© 1957 Will and Ariel Durant
1092 pages

"...little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."

Edmund Burke, on the execution of Marie-Antoinette

In the tenth volume of Will Durant's  Story of Civilization, we now approach the latter half of the 18th century.  This is an age of titanic personalities, in every field.  Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia,  Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Bach, Schiller, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire -- what an age to be alive in!    For those unfamiliar with Durant's epochal series, his approach was a symphonic history that covered politics, economics, religion, architecture, music,  and literature. This particular volume opens with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of reason, and -- amid all the politics -- examines the influence of the Romantic reaction on the arts and politics, ending with the storming of the Bastille.

This is an age of enormous change; the industrial revolution has spread beyond England, and its social consequences are brewing political revolution, especially in France. It is an age of war, like most ages; Russia, Austria, and Turkey bicker incessantly over the Black Sea, and western Europe sees several wars of succession. The most influential conflict, however,  is the Seven Years War. This saw most of Europe allied against Prussia and England, with from some instability on Russia's part. While the consequences in Europe were minimal,  this was the war that made England an superpower.  While everyone invaded (and was rebuffed by) Prussia, the English chased the French out of  both India and North America, creating an incredible global empire.  The Seven Years War would set the stage for the American War of Independence, removing as it did America's great opponent on the continent, and pressuring the British to make the colonies pay for themselves via taxation.

Although the Enlightenment has already provoked its reaction in the form of the Romantic movement in the arts, the 'age of reason' itself is not yet spent: it is only now beginning to enter some subjects, like economics.  Irreligion among the intellectual caste is de rigeur, although in the Protestant north, a few individuals (Boswell and Gibbon, for instance) get their subversive kicks by embracing Catholicism, if only temporarily.  Writers like Voltaire and Rousseau write constantly of novel approaches to old problems: Emile, for instance,  is ostensibly about the proper education of a human being. (A curious subject, given that the author sent his own children to an orphanage on their birth.)  In the decline that which had been sustaining public morality, the Church and faith in general, people tried to find new ways of justifying a moral life. Some, like the Marquis de Sade, didn't bother; they rejoiced in the fact that without God, all things were permissible. Much of the philosophy here, skeptical as it was of the old authority, also rebelled against reason; this was an age of Feeling, of sensibility -- hence a larger role here for literature, theater, and other arts in the history. Rousseau in particular is used to epitomize the beginning of the romantic age, for his writings condemned cities, civilization, and material learning as corruptive elements leading the inherently good hearts of men astray. (Burk's comment about sophisters and economists almost echoes him there.) His emphasis on humanistic morals, however, did not make him a traditionalist; he regarded the Church with suspicion because it threatened patriotism, being an institution which transcended nations. (This was an age of French literature, Italian opera, and German music -- every nation had something to be extremely proud of.)  Rousseau is most remembered for his political philosophy, which emphasized the 'will of the people'.  While sometimes cited as an inspiration for the American revolution, Rousseau did not believe that representative legislatures truly served the will of the people; that had to be effected through full democratic assemblies, and so genuine democracies must remain small.   Rousseau's emphasis on popular will  and republics put him at odds with Voltaire, who distrusted the populace and smiled upon enlightened kings. In general, Durant noted, the revolutions of the 19th century would follow Rousseau in politics and Voltaire in religion.

Rousseau and Revolution is, like  all of the books in Durant's series, formidable in its size but not in its writing. Durant, when he shows his personality, is utterly amiable. He is not as personal with his pen here as he was in The Age of Faith or The Reformation, but at times we witness the human being behind the pen, mindful that he is not writing of abstractions but of real people. He cautions the reader to never lose sight of the individual people whose lives were creating what we perceived as larger trends. Accordingly,  Durant writes not just of big things -- the epic novels, the epic personalities -- but of passing affections, like fashion and frivolities, the concerns of the flesh and blood creatures who then walked abroad. The Durants are gentle and humane authors, students of the very history they write, forgiving of their subjects' sins and excesses.  We'll see if that lasts throughout the French Revolution, for this book ends with the storming of the Bastille.

We move now to Napoleon and the end of civilization; or at least, the end of Will and Aerial Durant's Story thereof.

Yokohama Print from Cultural History of Japan

In my "On the Horizon" post, I mentioned a print reproduced in  an art history of Japan which depicted a woman in traditional dress riding a bicycle. The book mentions it only as a Yokohama print, with Fuji in the background.

Source: The Cultural History of Japan, Henri Stierlin.  Printed by Aurum Press in London, 1983.  All photographs and prints were attributed to Stierlin.

American Independence Wrapup & On the Horizon

Well, gentle readers,  July's halfway marks the conclusion of my American Independence series, at least for another year. What ground did I cover this year?

• Revolutionary Summer, Joseph Ellis;  a history of the summer of 1776,  in which the States declared their independence, and the British fleet arrived to squash the rebellion.
• Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet, Bill Kauffman;  a biography of Luther Martin which is principally about the Constitutional debates. Martin was the most prominent republican ('anti-federalist") in attendance
• The Lost Continent:  Bill Bryson travels the United States to revisit childhood trips through small-town America, regaling the reader with memories and reflections. Though Bryson pines for an image of small-town America, whenever he arrives in a small town he complains about the lack of restaurants and the presence of locals.
• A Place in Time, Wendell Berry. Stories about the Port William membership, a ready remembrance of the America that was.
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck; a family epic set in the Salinas Valley of California that revisits the story of Cain and Abel.
• Passionate Sage, Joseph Ellis; on the character and beliefs of John Adams.
• Unsettled America, Wendell Berry.  Berry's first and most famous defense of agrarian America, doubling as a condemnation of the thing that replaced it.

I'd also been reading Founding Federalist, on the life of Oliver Ellsworth, but halfway in realized I am very tired of reading about the Constitutional convention.  It's time to move along, and resume this year's study series: the Discovery of Asia. I've eased myself back into the waters with Japan: A Cultural History, which is presumably dated given its early-1980s publication,but contains some outstanding photography.  The author takes readers briefly through a sketch of Japanese history that mostly serves to provide context for the art that is commented on;  the era of the pre-Shogunate civil wars is covered in the chapter on castles, for instance.  Architecture is the chief focus here, but there are also sections on laquerware and prints.  A favorite of mine features two Japanese women and a bicycle.

This isn't the print...I am still scouring the web for any digital reproduction of the one I saw.

Earlier in the week I also finished India: A New History, so the Discovery is on the move!

Real Music

Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church
267 pages
© 2016 Anthony Esolen

In his book Out of the Ashes: Restoring American Culture,  Anthony Esolen devoted an entire chapter solely to music. Here he does one better! To sing is to pray twice, wrote St. Augustine, and Real Music demonstrates that emphatically. There is nothing quite like the musical tradition in Christian liturgy; a newcomer to an Anglican or Catholic church may first appreciate the mere sound of the organ or harp, but when time is invested in these services -- when one attends throughout the year, for several years -- the real beauty and power of its hymns, offertories, anthems, etc. reveal themselves. These hymns are not merely pretty lyrics put to pretty music, but are themselves poetic articulations of the Church's theology and scripture. The Christian music tradition can do much more than make a listener feel "nice"; hymns can fill the soul with beauty and the mind with poetry. Esolen attempts to convey this experience not over a course of years, but into one book, devoting different chapters to distinct areas of the tradition. He here covers Eucharistic hymns, hymns of glory and penitence, hymns celebrating life and challenging death. Esolen does not merely present hymns to the reader and comment on their theology; he guides the reader through how the hymns' very meter and grammar strengthen the meaning. This book is a treasure for Christians who love traditional hymnody, or who have heard it on the wind before and yearn to know more about it.

Heretics and Heroes

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World
© 2013 Thomas Cahill
368 pages

It seems the more I read of Cahill, the less I enjoy his cavalier histories, which at this point border on gossipy. Part of Cahill's hinges of history series, covering pivotal moments in western history where there was a sea change, the crucial shift here is the emergence of the Individual -- demonstrated in art, and shown at work in disintegrating Christendom into a multitude of violently passionate sects, all supremely secure in their 'truthiness'. In attempting to tell this story, though, Cahill covers everything from the Reconquista and Columbus to the Counter-Reformation. Perhaps as a consequence of the Renaissance and Reformation occurring concurrently, Cahill isn't nearly as well-organized here as he usually is, and readers go back and fort from art to history to theology in a higgedly-piggedly fashion.

I enjoyed the sections on art, since Cahill provides readers with a bounty of colorful plates to aide his commentary, but viewed the theological bits suspiciously. It's hard to take seriously an author who dismisses the Great Schism as a mere ethnic division, especially since that schism's key issue, papal authority, had a massive potential connection to his chief subject, the reformation. Cahill seems fairly oblivious about Orthodoxy altogether, referring to it as the 'Greek church' and apparently not realizing that ecumenical councils to weigh orthodoxy are not some Protestant invention, but have been part of the Orthodox-Catholic church from its inception. Cahill constantly editorializes, often on things that have nothing at all to do with the subject -- complaining about his grammar school, or reminding readers of how terribly racist the Greeks were, and how evil certain modern people are. The more I read Cahill, the more trivial and whiggishly narrow-minded he seems. (There are occasional glimpses of nuance, though, as when he defends the much-abused Mary Tudor despite a pronounced contempt for her cause.)

In the end, if you want a taste of Renaissance art, try Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation". There you shall find erudition and glorious music -- and Cahill keeps referring to Clark, anyway, so why not save the step? As far as the Reformation goes, Will Durant's volume is much more intelligent, and daunting only in its size. I'm sure there also better histories of how the individual burst on the western scene as well.

Related:
The Renaissance, Will Durant; The Reformation, Will Durant

Horse

Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Human Civilization
© 2006 J. Edward Chamberlin
288 pages

How do I love thee, O horse? Let me count the ways.   J. Edward Chamberlin’s Horse begins with one lonely native American mare separated from her tribe  recounting, from long memory, the many centuries that horses and humans have traveled together. Even after moving to more conventional historical narrative, the book remains highly storied, drawing much from art and poetry and   never far removed from recollections of Blackfoot, Greek, Chinese, or other horse-related mythology.  In terms of history, war and sports predominate, with the scant mention made to an actual workhorse   appearing and vanishing in the last chapter like the twinkling of a star.  The history itself sits under the shadow of mythology;  the author's claim that chariots were used more to taxi infantry to the battle than as weapons themselves is illustrated with nothing more than The Illiad, and he manages to put the cart before the horse (ho, ho) by referring to Islamic expansion as a reaction to the Crusades. Say again?   There’s useful information here – on the evolution of  different breeds, saddles,  riding styles – but  it’s altogether very general.  It’s a loving tribute to creatures that inspire awe and have been at the center of human history for thousands of years, but shouldn’ t be approached for too much substantial history.

The Battle of the Atlantic

The Battle of Britain
© 1977 Barrie Pitt, series editor William Goolrick
208 pages
Time-Life History of WW2

Long before panzers roared through Paris and Stukas littered the fields of France with burned-out machines, the Phony War existed only in name. The months of silence on land in Europe that prevailed between the Allied declaration of war and Hitler's spring seizure of everything in grabbing distance were loud indeed on the sea -- filled with crashing waves as U-boats and raiders  plowed through the waves hunting for supply ships to sink.  So sooner had the war begun than ships inbound to England were being sent to the bottom, and with them precious lives and supplies.  The threat of strangulation by U-boat had imperiled Britain before, during the Great War, but naive trust that future conflicts would abstain from a now verboten weapon  meant Britain's neck was again on the line. Battle of the Atlantic, part of the Time-Life history of World War 2,  combines full-page spreads and photo essays to deliver a sense of the action and peril at sea, where civilians were military targets and the stakes were never higher for the Allies.

Unlike the Battles of France and Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic stretches out over not weeks or months, but years. Despite catastrophic losses -- over half the boats and lives committed by German to the U-boat fleet would be claimed by the sea --  Germany continued producing and sending out submarines against Allied shipping until the very end of the war.  The worst ravages would be over by 1943, but for Britain and her allies, the struggle was uphill. Lessons of the Great War's  anti-submarine campaigns had to be relearned, and new strategies created as the U-boats came this time not alone, but in radio-coordinated packs.   The convoy system was Britain's best hope, comprising multiple cargo ships guarded by whatever escorts could be found.  Escorts were not necessarily warships, even aged ones; a fishing trawler equipped with racks for depth charges might qualify for duty.  The U-boat menace could have been even more dire had Hitler committed naval resources to a full undersea fleet, instead of insisting on a 'balanced' fleet that involved big and shiny surface ships like the Bismarck, which made for great press but poor strategic weapons.   The Allies also produced new weapons to take down the U-boats, developing shipboard radar that could locate vessels on the surface of the sea, where -- despite their name -- Unterseebooten spent most of their time.  They also learned to use the U-boats' frequent radio communication  (vital in coordinating the wolf packs) to triangulate on their position, and began to incorporate airplane patrols to boot.    By the time the German command realized  how advanced British radar had become and began to develop countermeasures,  Germany was waist-deep in Russia and fighting an Allied invasion of Rome. The combination of bitter experience, new tactics, new weapons, and increasingly green and scattered German mariners, broke the wolf packs' control of the sea.

The Battle of the Atlantic is valuable as a brief overview of the naval war between the Allies and Axis, providing raw data as well as first-hand accounts by both British and German mariners (sometimes from the same battles) to put the reader on the deck of their subjects. There is also a collection of art produced by  sailors who wanted to recreate the scenes burned into their memory, like the despair of huddling lifeboats, watching as their home sinks into the deep. I appreciated the attention given surface ships at the beginning, and the surprising chapter on Caribbean altercations. The data presented is also surprising --  while I knew U-boats patrolled the eastern seaboard of the United States, the amount of tonnage sunk places the seaboard as one of the most perilous places to sail, along with the 'western approaches' that paralleled German U-boat bases in France.

Civilisation: A Personal View

Civilisation: A Personal View
© 1959 Sir Kenneth Clark
359 pages

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion -- poetry, beauty,  romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. (John Keating, Dead Poet's Society) 

In the mid-20th century, in the wake of a war that destroyed much of Europe and created a new tension between the capitalist West and the collectivist East that threatened to put paid to the rest of the world, Sir Kenneth Clark wondered: we are facing a new dark age?  Having posed the question, he returned to study the aftermath of the last dark age, Europe after the collapse of western Rome in hopes that it might offer an answer. Civilisations, he writes, compose political histories of themselves -- but it is the unofficial histories, the evidence they leave behind them, that really speaks. So to study the revival of Europe, to ascertain whether the 20th century west has again lost its vigor, Clark studies the book of art. Civilisation: A Personal View is a sweeping history of western art, primarily visual with a musical interlude.  A political history reveals the ambitions of its author, or patron; but the arts sweep across the human spectrum.  Lavishly illustrated with scores of full-page color photographs, most of the subjects Clark addresses are glorious sights that strike Awe into the heart of the viewer. They are churches, town palaces, sweeping vistas -- but there are the humbly but artfully-built homes, and the scenes of humbler life, too.  Although Clark comments on the evolving technical aspects of art -- the growing skillfulness at depicting man through the middle ages, for instance, from rudimentary figures with helpful "Image of a Man" labels, to the stunning life-like portraiture of the Renaissance -- he is more concerned with the spiritual import of the art. This means more than scenes of religious devotion; Clark believes that civilizations perish because they are exhausted, as though they were tired of being living things. Great art -- art that looks toward the future, that is intended as a lasting monument -- is one sign of life. For Clark, truth, beauty, and goodness are intermingled, though great monuments are not in themselves evidence of moral greatness.  After a lingering look at Byzantine glory, Clark addresses mostly north-western Europe: Britain, France, and Germany.  There is no discounting the book's richly satisfying content, however, for want of geographic range.

The Age of Voltaire

The Age of Voltaire: A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756
898 pages
© 1965 Will and Ariel Durant

            The ninth work in Will Durant’s sweeping Story of Civilization, The Age of Voltaire picks up with the death of the Sun King in the dawn of the Enlightenment.   It’s an age of tumultuous change; though its survey ends before the French revolution, Europe is already in the throes of the industrial and scientific revolutions. New worlds are opening; not only are new goods flowing in from the recently-discovered parts of the globe,  but western man’s entire worldview is shifting. The modern age is dawning.

           Voltaire follows the titular philosopher as he travels from France to England, Germany, and later Switzerland, though the first three countries are Durant’s focus here.  As with the rest of Durant’s integral history,  this book carries weight because it examines not only political and military history, but considers in depth the literary, artistic, philosophical, and religious developments of the time. These ideas are not isolated from one another;   individualistic philosophy drives changes in both politics and religion, weakening the claims of absolutist monarchy and state churches alike. England grows with the times;  her king is superseded by Parliament and the prime minister. France hardens and resists, but the tide of history sweeping Europe will break it as surely as the waves break shorelines. 

           Of course, in this era it's less a gentle tide and more of a water-cannon. The radicals of the era are not content with careful, prudent change; no, things must be set on fire. Christianity is beyond reform for the rising philosophes; the world must be overturned, priests must die, churches must be burned. This is the  cradle of the French revolution, the nursery of those who would  take a machete to society until their ideals are satisfied. On a more constructive note, science and technological prowess are abounding, and Durant sets aside a large segment of the book to look at it seperately. 

       Durant is a genteel moderate on the religion and philosophy debate; from Our Oriental Heritage on, he has favored religion as an institution offering stability, comfort,  beauty, and more to the human race, though he is never blind to its abuses. His conclusion, a dialogue between a pope and Voltaire, makes plain his attitude that the tumultuous era his history is heading into is one of mixed blessings; while Durant is thankful that the rise of the philosophes advanced human liberty, checking the abuses of monarchy and organized religion alike, in their enthusiasm they became arrogant.

Benedict: You thought it possible for one mind, in one lifetime, to acquire such scope of knowledge and depth of understanding as to be fit to sit in judgment upon the wisdom of the race --upon traditions and institutions that have taken form out of the experience of the centuries. Tradition is to the group what memory is to the individual; and just as the snapping of memory may bring insanity, so a sudden break with tradition may plunge a whole nation into madness like France  and the revolution. [....] We should be allowed to question traditions and institutions, but with care that we do not destroy more than we can build. 

p. 788

As with his judgment of the impact of the reformation, the entire dialogue puts his tender appreciation for both sides, and the wisdom in appreciating them both, on display.  I suspect his criticism will grow a little sharper in the next volume.

Religion for Atheists

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
© 2012 Alain de Botton
320 pages

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? [...] Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?   (The Parable of the Madman, F. Nietzsche)

Three years ago, former Baptist minister and now-agnostic Biblical scholar Robert M. Price posed a question to his audience of skeptics on Point of Inquiry: is the Bible  Mein Kampf?*  He asked the question to prompt religious critics to consider their animosity toward the Bible, which though flawed or offensive to them in part, still contained in it  beautiful stories and reflective wisdom; to reject the Bible because it had become the tool of fundamentalists to harp and rule over everyone else was folly, Price said; a loss to human art. It would be as if we were to spurn The Iliad because Achilles was a brute and the gods were fickle tyrants.  In the same spirit,  here agnostic Alain de Botton offers an appraising look at religion, and suggests that abandoning it entirely because we no longer believe its creeds is likewise folly, the willful abandonment of cultural adaptions humans created for their own benefit. In Religion for Atheists, he examines why religion worked for us for so long, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, then suggests ways in which skeptics, humanists, and so on can recover the strengths of the old permanent things without the witch-burnings. It is a profoundly thoughtful and wise book, which will no doubt annoy both the orthodox religious and anti-religious,  but offer  more moderate souls in and out of belief new ways to appreciate religion, and think about it seriously.

After enough glasses of wine, even the most antagonistic of atheists might admit that religion has a few redeeming virtues, mostly in the creative realm -- music, architecture, and art. Who would deny the beauty of the Sistine Chapel or the Parthenon? de Botton incorporates discussion of these into his work (with the astonishing absence of music), but his appreciation of them is linked to greater moral concerns. What does art do for us?  In de Botton's view, art should be not viewed as mere decor, as distracting prettiness: his view of art is one fully grounded in higher meaning,and he advocates using art in ways to provoke thought about the human condition. He practices this himself,  skillfully employing pictures throughout the text to truly illustrate his meaning: one plate shows a father at the end of his youth, beginning to bald as he enters his thirties, holding his toddling son and gazing upon a portrait of an elderly man in diapers:  a reflection on the realities of age.

de Botton's more broad appreciation for religion stems from the fact that life is difficult, and living a meaningful and moral life within it ever moreso. The actual beliefs of religion are irrelevant to the fact that as institutions, they provide places for people to escape from societal norms and find community among other people who have taken time to recognize that they, too, are troubled;  these same institutions constantly remind  and push their adherents to practice compassion and strive for moral excellence while giving them a broad sense of cosmic perspective. We need those reminders and encouragement, de Botton writes, because we are forgetful. Even if modernity wasn't actively pushing us into behaviors which are detrimental to our happiness and general well-being, our very nature incites us to wrath against those we love, our minds constantly bedevil us with worries that we then fixate on.  Although philosophy is an able guide and ally, as de Botton' own writings have demonstrated (see The Consolations of Philosophy, for instance),  we are at root social creatures, and find our best strength among one another: there is a reason Epicurus included companionship as part of his holy trinity of happiness (along with economic self-reliance/independence and mindfulness).

de Botton's goal is not to make extant religions attractive to nonbelievers, however much he may admire Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism. Instead, after divining out what makes them so successful and useful, he suggests ways for the nonreligious to capture its advantages.  This means changing existing ways secular progressives have sought to improve the human condition, art and education, by taking a note from religion and making them more meaningful, and thus more effective at communication.  Instead of organizing the study of art or literature by historicity or methods, why not arrange them by emotional theme; he inserts the layout of an existing London museum which exhibits have been reorganized into Galleries of Love,  Self-Knowledge, and Suffering, among others. University curriculums, too, could do with some priority-adjustment, as academics spend their lives studying increasingly esoteric questions, and devote no attention at all to figuring out what attitudes and practices best serve human relationships, or how to teach people to deal with the reality of Death.  From there de Botton's ideas broader support: he suggests temples to human virtues like Tenderness. Some of the ideas are fanciful, like a yearly recreation of the Feast of Fools, in which people are free to indulge with great abandon every passion and impulse of the flesh. (The illustration provided shows wanton public sex in the Agape Restaurant, which in a prior chapter had been the setting for relaxed conversations between people who were otherwise strangers, encouraged to talk about their lives and intimate hopes and fears.)  According to de Botton, this was an old medieval tradition, but it reminds me of nothing so much as a Star Trek episode, "The Return of the Archons", in which Kirk and co find themselves in a society filled with dour zombies who, once a week, go absolutely mad.

Most of the author's gentle suggestions would take a great deal of popular support and concern to institute, and so I imagine the book is more useful to skeptics trying to understand the power of religion than to humanist communities trying to create a more structured way of cultivating values and meaning. Those who attack religion should realize that it is these strengths they are attacking, not a simple, fervent belief in childhood credos. True or not, the great religions of the world deliver something of value to the world. To attack them is not only threaten people by going after sources of comfort and strength, but perhaps to succeed in doing so, and leave a vacuum to be filled with malignant consumerism or worse. Even if nonbelievers succeed in spreading the gospel of irreligion, those with any regard for humanity ought to be cognizant of the consequences, and go in knowing that we must give back more than we destroy.

Religion for Atheists is the best de Botton I've read in a long time, and a definite recommendation.

 How shall we comfort ourselves [...]?  What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?  (Ibid)

Related:

• The Evolution of God, Robert Wright
• Good Without God, Greg Epstein

* Price now hosts 'The Human Bible', which examines the Bible as literature, history, and philosophy, his intention being to coax skeptics, freethinkers, and co into appreciating it for its own human merits, instead of recoiling from it as the tool of dogma.  The show is on temporary hiatus while a new producer is found, but Price also independently creates The Bible Geek, in which he fields questions about biblical and religious history.
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/robert_m_price_is_the_bible_mein_kampf/
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/biblegeek.php
http://www.thehumanbible.net/

This Week at the Library (16 November)

It's been a slow week for reading, at least from the library. Unable to pursue my library reads, I re-read Prelude to Foundation and began re-reading Forward the Foundation. Otherwise, so little has been catching fire lately that after reading The Greater Journey by David McCullough, I returned my books to the library and spent a couple of leisurely hours sitting and strolling in various aisles, hoping to find something that would. I think I did, but first, a minireview...

©  2011 David McCullough 

558 pages

David McCullough is a popular name among American historians, known most for his 1776 and a large biography of John Adams.  The Greater Journey is somewhat less focused, but is essentially a history of Paris (1830-1900) as seen through the eyes of American visitors, most of whom were visiting professionally. For the majority of these Americans -- whose numbers include famous names like Samuel Morse and Fenimore Cooper -- the journey to Paris was their first trip outside the United States, and the novelty of being a 'foreigner' made their experiences all the more vividly memorable.  Through them we experience Paris as it was in the late 19th century, beginning in the Bourbon Restoration era but enduring decades of political change -- a Second Republic, a Second Empire, and a Third Republic, in addition to war with Germany and several protracted sieges. The Americans featured here are professionals of one kind or another -- physicians,   architects, writers -- but the artists dominate the work outside of the space devoted to political change. The range of years allows the reader to experience the tremendous change of those years, as the globe shrinks underneath telegraph cables and steam engine tunnels.  Given my interest in France and this period, I certainly enjoyed the book for the most part, although all the art history overwhelmed me. The photographs and prints of artwork included are stunning.

This week...

• Plan and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish, Sue Bender. I am at the same time intrigued by the Amish devotion to simple living and revulsed by their cultish atmosphere and suppression of individuality with practices like shunning. Sue Bender is an artist who shares my objection to forced conformity, but felt herself mesmerized by Amish art and decided to spend a summer living with them.
• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, Bernard Lewis. I read Lewis' What Went Wrong? concerning the effects of modernization in the middle east and the ongoing hostile reaction to it during the summer, and have been meaning to sample more of Lewis.
• A Light in the Window, Jan Karon; the second in the Mitford series..
• Vagabond, Bernard Cornwell. Alas, my library doesn't appear to have Sharpe's Skirmish, and I've been mulling over whether or not to pursue in the series or attempt to acquire the novel first. 

I was really in the mood for something WW2-related, specifically a novel -- but I didn't feel like getting into James Jones' From Here to Eternity, and the loud colors and huge rendering of W.E.B. Griffin's name on his  several rows of books left me with the impression that they were meant as cheap thrillers.

Cave Paintings to Picasso

Cave Paintings to Picasso: The Inside Scoop on 50 Art Masterpieces
© 2004 Henry Sayre
93 pages

I found this book while looking for something else (books on wolves, strangely enough), and its title grabbed my attention immediately. Upon arriving at the library I found it to be a different book than I'd imagined, but still amply useful. Cave Paintings to Picasso contains information about fifty works of art from around the world, ranging in medium from the predictable (paintings and sculptures) to the more esoteric (tapestries and medieval books).  I'm reasonably sure that the book was written for children or younger readers, given its shortness and 'wacky' font arrangements, but the author manages to cram in a surprising amount of detail in one-page descriptions, explaining the work's significance in more florid language than I would have expected for a children's book: the author positively waxes poetic in some sections. Most of the fifty sections are divided into two pages: a full-page print and a page of explanation. A few works were only given a quarter of a page, but they are in the minority. While the full-page representations allowed me to soak in the artists' detail and gifts, Sayre's explanations increased my appreciation: he pointed out, for instance, how one particular Chinese work blended calligraphy with the picture, depicting a mountainside in the same general shame as the Chinese symbol for 'mountain'.  Most interesting (for me) was the presence of a painting depicting Muhammad, since I thought Islamic rules forbade the depiction of human forms in art.  Sayre does not mention who the author was, though.

Artworks covered:

• Woman from Brassembouy
• Hall of Bulls
• Toreador Fresco
• Nebamun Hunting Birds
• Nefertiti
• Burial Container for the Organs of Tutankhamen
• Colossal Olmec Head
• Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game, Exekias
• She-Wolf
• Nike of Samothrace
• Moche Lord with a Feline
• The Horses of San Marco
• Book of Kells
• Easter Island Ancestor Figures
• The Bayeux Tapestry
• Early-Spring, Guo Xi
• Romance of Lancelot
• Muhammad Placing the Black Stone Upon His Cloak
• The Effects of Good Government, Ambrogio Lorenzetti
• Bamboo, Wu Chen
• January, Les Très Riches Heures, Limbourg brothers
• Camera Picta, Andrea Mantegna
• Hundreds of Birds Admiring the Peacocks, Yin Hong
• Sight
• Primavera, Sandro Botticelli
• David, Michaelangelo
• Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci
• The Small Cowper Madonna, Raphael
• Still Life with Flowers, Goblet, Dried Fruit, and Pretzels, Clara Peeters
• Jahangir in Darbar, Abul Hasan and Manohar
• Head of an Oba
• Mandan Battle Scene Hide Painting
• The Great Wve off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai 
• Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, George Caleb Bingham
• The Railroad, Edouard Manet
• Dance Glass, Edgar Degas
• Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Mary Cassatt
• The Umbrellas, Auguste Renoir
• Irises, Vincent van Gogh
• Mahana no atua, Paul Gauguin
• Water Lily Pond, Claud Monet
• Improvisation 30 (Cannons), Wassily Kandinsky
• Man with a Pipe, Pablo Piasso
• Sugar Cane, José Diego Maria Rivera
• The Migration of the Negro, No. 32, Jacob Lawrence
• Nighthawks, Edward Hopper
• Convergence, Jackson Pollock
• Ladder to the Moon, George O'Keeffe
• Big Campbell's Soup Can, 19c, Andy Warhol
• The Son of Man, René Magritte