July 2010

I plan to write about Stephen Prothero's God Is Not One on this site soon. Aside from my commentary on the book itself, I'd like to quote with approval a surprising argument from the book's introductory pages:

Scholarly books on religion often use diacritical marks to indicate how a word is pronounced in Sanskrit or other sacred languages. In fact, use of diacriticals is a key way to signal one's scholarly bona fides. But diacritical marks are gibberish to most readers -- is that a breve or a cedilla? -- so I avoid them here except in direct quotations, proper names and citations. If an "s" with a mark underneath or atop it is pronounced like "sh", then it appears here as "sh": the Hindu god Shiva instead of Siva, the Hindu goal of moksha instead of moksa. Diacritical marks also present a barrier to the integration of non-Christian religious terms into English -- a barrier that is better torn down than built up. One reason the Sanskrit term 'nirvana' made it into English dictionaries was its willingness to drop the macron over the a and the underdot accompanying the n. And Hindu scriptures such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are already finding wide acceptance among English speakers without their respective circumflexes.

Amen to that. This is a minority viewpoint, but I completely agree, and am pleased to hear a respected scholar making a point I've often wished to make myself.

It's easy to misunderstand a book about religion. My first impression of Stephen Prothero's God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run The World -- And Why Their Differences Matter was not good; I read a summary of the book he wrote for the Boston Globe that seemed to strain for Tea Party relevance by mocking the popular idea (attributed to the likes of the Dalai Lama) that all religions are the same, and hinting that this had something to do with national security:

... this lumping of the world’s religions into one megareligion is not just false and condescending, it is also a threat. How can we make sense of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir if we pretend that Hinduism and Islam are one and the same? Or of the impasse in the Middle East, if we pretend that there are no fundamental disagreements between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?

I went to hear him speak two months ago in New York City, and happily found Stephen Prothero to be more subtle and moderate in person than his publicity department probably wants him to be. HarperCollins may be trying to ride God Is Not One on the coattails of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great. They even swung him an appearance on the Colbert Report, where, again, he came across as thoughtful and knowledgeable, and clearly no firebrand.

I'm taking a little summer break from the heavy-thinking blog posts, but here's a picture and a song to take their place.

I wonder if the essence of romantic love is not that you always see beauty in the other person's face, but that you find their face endlessly fascinating. That's what my wife Caryn's 365 Flickr project has really brought out personally for me.

I recently impulse-bought A Philosophy of Evil by Lars Svendsen, a Norwegian philosopher I'd never heard of. The book called out to me from the bookstore shelf, the title on the stark cover promising a brave attempt to tackle a very difficult subject head-on.

The nature of evil -- along with the closely related question of the nature of good -- is one of the primary unresolved questions of ethical philosophy, and has remained unresolved from the age of Plato to today. To frame the terms "good" and "evil" in a philosophical setting is to suggest that they can be defined in some kind of meaningful, pragmatic and universal way, but few attempts to provide these definitions have ever been considered successful. Religions and rigid political doctrines define good and evil, sure -- but academic philosophy is held to a different standard of objectivity, and tends to fall far short of a sturdy anchoring point for any kind of moral language.

In Paul Auster's City of Glass, a mad linguist named Peter Stillman pounds through the streets of Manhattan's Upper West Side, observed by a writer named Daniel Quinn who is impersonating a private detective named Paul Auster. Quinn tracks Stillman's movements in a red notebook and eventually realizes that his daily walks are spelling out the words "TOWER OF BABEL".

I'm impressed that many of you correctly identified the location of the Litkicks Mystery Spot #6. The book was published 25 years ago (!) to little immediate acclaim, and has gradually emerged as one of our era's modern classics. I'm sure I'm not the only person who can't walk through New York City's Upper West Side to this day without thinking of City of Glass.

Why does philosophy get so little respect?

I first noticed this problem when I was in college. Sometimes people thought I was joking when I told them I was a philosophy major. Others pitied me. "What are you going to do with that?" The true answer was that I was trying to learn some principles to live by, but I never got very far explaining that.

Nothing's changed since then. The field is considered a joke, a dead art, a complete waste of time. At best, the study of philosophy is considered a quaint immersion in the past. Nobody seems to believe it has anything to do with the future.

Was it ever different? This is an important question, and I'm not sure of the answer. It's a common mistake to think that past civilizations were better than ours. I doubt there was ever a golden society that embraced the pursuit of knowledge above the pursuit of wealth or material satisfaction. It's our basic human nature to scoff at high-level intellectual pursuits, and this must have been true in every civilization since the beginning of time.

A little less than three years ago, Jeff Bezos of Amazon became the human face of the much-anticipated e-book revolution with the launch of the Kindle. The Kindle's launch was big news, but big sales did not follow, and the book industry gradually realized that software, not hardware, was the key to popular acceptance of digital reading. A complex equation of factors -- format, presentation, compatibility, pricing, DRM, rights and royalties -- would have to fall into place before the book publishing industry could revolutionize itself. Last week a well-known literary agent named Andrew Wylie made a big move to slash through the confusion and establish a new approach to e-book publishing. The reaction from industry insiders was swift and severe. Andrew Wylie is now the human face of the e-book revolution.

Many of the articles linked above vilify Wylie, for one big reason: his partnership with Amazon cuts traditional book publishers completely out of the equation. Wylie's company is a literary agency -- they represent writers directly, for a standard (usually 15%) agency fee. In the new arrangement, Wylie's own newly formed company Odyssey Editions will publish books directly with Amazon, using the Kindle format (which can be read not only on a Kindle device but also on computers, iPhones, Droid phones, etc.). There are exactly two parties in this venture: the literary agent (Wylie) and the bookseller (Amazon). The publisher has no place. No Random House, no Penguin, no Macmillan, no Simon & Schuster. Just an author, a store ... and, hopefully, a reader with money to spend. That's how the new system works.