Love and the Dignity of Human Life, by Robert Spaemann

This is an interesting trio of essays by philosopher Robert Spaemann.  The first is on the many meanings and paradoxes of love, especially the tension between desirous love and beneficent love.  The second is on human dignity, particularly its inalienability when the person does not consent to its loss. The third on the modern concept of “brain death”—is it the same as the traditional concept of death, and can a “brain dead” person properly be considered dead?   

Since I have no philosophy training, I thought the book would probably be over my head, but Spaemann explains things very clearly.  Highly recommended to clear out the fog that results from the intentionally deceptive wording we are accustomed to using these days to lie to ourselves about reality in order to justify ethical shortcuts.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

In this series of eight essays, Isaiah Berlin recounts the intellectual dispute that took place in the late 18th to early 19th century that gave rise to the Romantic movement, and how ideas from both sides of the debate combined and recombined in the heads of various thinkers over the years so as to produce the fascist and socialist movements of the twentieth century.

One side of the dispute consists of those who believed in universal, objective truth, scientific rationalism, a common human nature, the possibility of an earthly utopia, and the non-contradiction of values. On the other side were those who believed in various degrees of relativism, the value of local traditions, even those that could not be traced to any rational basis, the possibility of different hierarchies of value that could contradict each other, and that human societies are ultimately founded on an irrational factors.

The second essay, called Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century Thought is particularly valuable because it explains how pluralism is different from relativism, and how pluralist thinkers of the eighteenth century (like Vico and Herder) are sometimes mistaken for relativists.  I read that one twice.

Included among the essays is an exposition of the life and thought of Joseph de Maistre, who is often mistaken for a conservative Catholic reactionary, but whose ideas contradicted those of Church and those of other conservatives, such as Edmund Burke, on important points, and whose dark, illiberal, eerily modern outlook presages twentieth century totalitarian movements.  Berlin recaps much of the content of this essay in this lecture.

The last two essays in the series, The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will and The Bent Twig are about how in the Romantic movement, the will, particularly in art, began to displace objective truth and nature, and how appreciation for local customs, thought to be the least enduring part of the Romantic movement, morphed into the nationalist movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries, from the desires of small ethnic or linguistic minorities to become independent states, or the sense of entitlement of large states to take over regions in other states inhabited by people of the same race or language.

I learned a lot reading this.  Great read if you're interested in the art, literature, and thought of the Romantic era, how ways of thinking we now take for granted originated, and in the causes of some of the most important events in twentieth century history.

The Hall of Uselessness, by Simon Leys

Great collection of essays from an author whom I think is one of the best essayists ever!  The topics in this collection are wide ranging, from literature to China to history to the sea.  My favorites were the ones on Chinese art and history (a subject I know little about, so I learned a lot reading them), and the ones on Cervantes, Victor Hugo, and Magellan.  Included in this collection is the one where he (rightfully, in my opinion) excoriates Christopher Hitchens's negative comments about Mother Teresa.

The World's Last Night, by C. S. Lewis

I enjoyed this little collection of essays by C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite essayists ever.  As always, they display his gift for clear, logical expositions in straightforward language and his way of bypassing currently popular ways of looking at things by showing how they can be considered differently.  Reading Lewis nearly always helps to broaden my mind and this collection is no exception.  My two favorite essays in this book are <i>Lilies That Fester</i> and <i>The Efficacy of Prayer</i>.

Le bonheur des petits poissons, by Simon Leys

Une très bonne collection par un essayiste cultivé et subtil. C'est le premier livre de Simon Leys que j'ai jamais lu et je vais définitivement lire plus. J'aurais préféré une collection un peu plus grande; le livre est beaucoup plus mince que j'attendais. J'aime bien L'empire du laid, Les mensonges qui disent la vérité, et Du goût.

On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society, by Gertrude Himmelfarb

This is an excellent series of essays on various thinkers and philosophical ideas that have filtered out of academia and become influential in the modern world to the detriment of clear and logical thinking based on objective truth.

Her essay on John Stuart Mill, <i>Liberty: One Simple Principle</i> is especially good as an introduction to Mill's work, particularly <i>On Liberty</i> and the effects it has had on how people define "liberty" today.  Also particularly enjoyable is the essay on footnotes <i>Where Have All The Footnotes Gone?</i>, which suggests that their increasing absence in scholarly works, and scholars' increasing insistence on dispensing with them, is a symptom of the blurring of the line between history and fiction, footnotes being one of the ways a scholar's work can be checked by readers.

The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern, by Victor Davis Hanson

This is a collection of articles by columnist, historian, and classicist Victor Davis Hanson that shows why the neglected study of military history is important for everyone, not just those who want to serve in the military.  Studying past wars in past ages helps put current wars in perspective and helps one learn why and how wars are fought and justified.  Studying the Greek and Roman classics used to be one way that people learned about past wars but few schools below university level now teach about them.

Speaking of the classics, I have [author:Thucydides|957]'s big behemoth [book:The History of the Peloponnesian War|554178] on my to-read shelf and this book makes me feel guilty about not having had the courage to crack it just yet.  Maybe next year.

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

In these three brief essays, C.S. Lewis takes up the issue of moral relativism, how our view of what is considered rational and objectively true has narrowed significantly in modern times, and how that affects our outlook on morality, culture, art, etc.  He makes the point that children can be accustomed to this narrow view quite early in life before they can be aware of what is being done to them and the result is an adult with an impoverished moral imagination.

Stages on the Road, by Sigrid Undset

This is a collection of six essays written by Sigrid Undset in the 1930's.  The theme that is common to all is that each details how various ideas or attitudes that had been established by the Catholic Church and that helped shape Western culture were lost when the faith in which they originated was lost or adulterated--starting with the Reformation.

In the first four essays, she presents a Catholic idea or custom, how it disappeared or is disappearing, then shows how that idea was manifested through the life of a prominent Catholic, many of whom are now canonized as saints.  I liked how she picked less well-known people because it gave me the opportunity to learn about them.  The four are:
- Spanish mystic Ramon Lull de Palma, who established a monastery in North Africa to enable friars to study Hebrew and Arabic, and whose goal was to spread the faith through persuasion and argument as Christ had directed
- English martyrs St. Robert Southwell and St. Margaret Clitherow, victims of the state taking control of the church
- Italian founder of the Ursuline order, St. Angela Merici, whose life shows how women with unconventional callings were respected in Catholic societies

<I>To St. James</I> is about the harmfulness of the sin of gossip--one that is only all too neglected today.
The last,  <I>Reply to a Parish Priest</I> deals with later developments in the Christian world that are controversial issues even today, such as changes in the definition of marriage, and euthanasia.

Two Essays by Wilhelm Roepke: 'The Problem of Economic Order' and 'Welfare, Freedom and Inflation'

These two essays are actually a series of lectures delivered by the author in the 1950's and they discuss problems that are still very relevant today.

In the first essay <i>The Problem of Economic Order</i>, Roepke shows how socialism, contrary to its partisans' claims, does not solve the problems that arise from the market economy--in many ways socialism aggravates them.  He addresses three different forms of socialism: 1) The redistributive type- the government taxes income and redistributes it among the lower earning population, while leaving the business world alone otherwise, as in many Western countries today, 2) The Marxian type- industries are nationalized so that government becomes the owner of the means of production, as in the USSR, 3) The St. Simonian type- government controls how various industries interact with each other to produce goods or services while leaving formal ownership to private owners, as in Nazi Germany.  One of the things I learned from this essay is that inflation tends to lead to increased collectivist tactics on the part of the government: As money loses its value in inflation, prices go up, and the government tries to cover up the inflationary effects through wage or price controls, at least for necessities. This leads to shortages of the things people want the most, and overproduction of nonessentials whose prices are not subject to the controls, what Roepke calls "the artistic ash-tray economy."

In the second essay <i>Welfare, Freedom, and Inflation</i>, Roepke concentrates on the first type of socialism, which in the West at least is the most popular kind.  He discusses how the establishment of a provider state both increases inflation and decreases freedom and emphasizes the point that increased credit and investment that is not backed up by increased savings leads to inflation.

I am not an economist, but I found these essays very clearly written and I learned a lot from them.