The 96 Works I'd Recommend Everyone Should Read

 

I have meant to do this for a while, but only just got around to it. These works are the most important to me, and are presented as I might present them to an alien race from another planet, who visited earth and asked for recommendations for what I think are the essential books that they should read to see us at our best.

Why 96? Because I'm not going to include books just to make a more attractive and catchy title - after all, how could the list be authentic if it includes books merely for the purpose of rounding off the number? Plus, immediate investigation will show that there are way more than 100 in this list.

Notable omissions: I had better mention that Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald have never made much of a conquest of my tastes. And it may seem almost sacrilegious to say this, but I'm not especially enamoured with Thoreau's Walden either - despite many friends I regard having a huge fondness for it. I don't even have a fondness for Thoreau in the way I do for D.H. Lawrence, like a man has for a car he has no intention of driving. There are some good lines in it, but I have to confess to finding it a tad boring in large parts. I don't deny F Scott Fitzgerald the regard as a good writer, and Gatsby is packed with good lines. But I like my good lines to be almost imperceptibly woven into the story, not presented on the page like paintings in a gallery. One other omission worth mentioning purely due to ignorance is Finnegans Wake, which, despite having got to my mid-forties, I have never read. I bought a copy about 5 years ago, and it's still in my 'to read' pile.

That's it for the preamble - let's get to it. A good rule of thumb here is that the further down the list we go, the less the numerical order becomes as important.

1) The Bible

Comment: More essential than the rest on the list combined. The Bible tells us who God is, and who we are, in ways that are so simple a child can understand, and so complex that everybody who has ever lived and will ever live will only be able to understand a fraction of it in the aggregated lifetimes of us all. That is an absolutely remarkable accomplishment - and unless due respect is paid to it, we'll remain like chimps trying to understand the Internet.

The Bible tells a love story between God and humankind, and it does so by engaging with us at every level we require to fulfil our deepest needs: through philosophy, morality, theology, psychology, art, storytelling and all intellectual and emotional pursuits. Our best attempts at science, philosophy, psychology and morality are like the husk of a bone; Christianity is the marrow. Try to take Christianity out of the equation and all you’re left with is dry, crumbly flakes of membrane. Many people have fallen in love with the membrane like how Eve fell in love with her own reflection in Paradise Lost.

Whether you're a Christian or not (I am), let me tell you one thing with absolute certainty: if you don't try to evaluate the Bible through the starting lens of 'This is the most astounding book ever written', your interpretation of it will be grossly inadequate to the task of uncovering its deeper rewards.

2) The Complete Works of Shakespeare

Comment: Unmatched in writing style and depth. What more is there to say that hasn't already been said? It's simply genius - so good that it is out there on its own in fiction, in its own league. Shakespeare's plays are what one might expect if a large creative committee were pooled together and commissioned their best ever outputs over a number of years. It's astonishing that these works came from one man's mind.

3) Selected works of C.S. Lewis - Especially Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Four Loves and The Chronicles of Narnia

Comment: Nobody writes about the profound matters of Christianity with more elegant simplicity and beautiful accessibility than C.S. Lewis: he is the master Christian apologist - the best there's ever been. He's such a good writer that when I read his analogies and illustrations I'm amazed that no one before him had ever thought of them. It's like they've been waiting to be expressed for centuries, and we had to wait until 2000 years after Christ's incarnation for someone to finally state these truths so brilliantly.

4) Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Comment: I don't think anyone has written better on the nature of meaning in relation to the psychology of religious faith. Dostoevsky is probably the most balanced author I've ever read when it comes to the big questions. It's like an exploration of love, faith, guilt, fear, justice and mercy through the lens of dreaming and at the same time how those qualities play out in real life. He shows their qualities not just by their presence but by their absence too, like how you can see the beauty of Christian faith not just by looking at the many excellent believers who have it, but in the absence of it in those that do not. It's a bit like how we appreciate the sun in one way in the summer, and in quite another way in the winter - that's Dostoevsky's characters in a nutshell.

5) The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

Comment: Absolutely ingenious tour of the underworld and afterlife - a masterly mix of Christian theology, philosophy, literature and mythology that takes us on the journey from sin to redemption, explicating the truth that the worldly profane things will pass away by the end, and that, like Milton's Paradise Lost, the devil is easily exposed as a schemer. There's a good reason Beatrice sent Virgil to guide Dante through Inferno and Purgatorio. Virgil represented the virtues of a good Roman, especially reason and virtue, and was an ideal guide. But he remained in purgation, unable to enter Heaven, because he wouldn’t be able to comprehend anything Divine. The Divine Comedy is a place to learn about our own journey, our exile, what we were created for, and the most important values of life. After the Bible, this is probably the most influential book in the western world.

6) Selected works of Soren Kierkegaard

Comment: At his best, Kierkegaard takes us into some deep theological contemplations that are unequalled in any writer I've read. Yes, sure, Kierkegaard is flawed (aren’t we all?), with some inadequate expositions (especially around subjectivity's relationship with truth and morality), but in writings like Works of Love, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Purity of Heart and Sickness Unto Death he tapped into a way of thinking that has, in my view, rarely been surpassed. If you're thinking of a foray, start with Fear and Trembling - it's his most accessible: it's a brilliant exposition on the Genesis story of Abraham being called to sacrifce Isaac. Here we encounter the phemomonel concept of ‘a teleological suspension of the ethical’, which throws ordinary morality up on its head.

7) Paradise Lost - John Milton

Comment: Nails the topic of fallenness like no one before or since. This contains some of the deepest ever thoughts about Heaven, Hell, Satan, Adam and Eve - an absolutely epic poem and one to read and re-read. Milton shows better than just about anyone how our minds have the power to make heaven out of hell, and a hell out of heaven. And along with Dante, Milton is also one of the best exponents of the idea that hell is a mental state into which you’ll be ensnared if you don’t pursue good - and that it is far more than a mere human invention. Paradise Lost really nails this by showing Satan’s delusion in thinking he doesn’t need God because of his own qualities. Satan falls in love with his own mind, and believes that that is a sufficient condition under which to operate. This delusion makes his reality more and more like hell.

8) Pensees - Blaise Pascal 

Comment: At its best, this contains the most brilliant Christian writing I've ever read. I read this twice about twenty years ago when I first became a Christian, made loads of annotations in the margins, wrote about them in my own books, and I've never opened Pensees since. I suspect that's because I don't want to find that my matured self thinks a little less of it. This is also where you'll find the proper laying out of Pascal's Wager, which is much more deep and profound than the crass, diluted form that so often does the rounds. I blogged about it here.

9) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Comment: In my view, the best ever British novel. It was said of Ginger Rogers that she wasn't Hollywood's best singer in her era, or the best dancer, or the best actress - but in terms of the Gestalt whole she was the best star in musicals. That's how I feel about Jane Eyre - when it comes to love, grace, providence, self-determination, class stratifications and social status, this isn't the best novel in any one individual element, but it's the best English novel in terms of the Gestalt whole. Certainly my favourite of its kind.

10) The works of Charles Dickens

Comment: No real point singling any out - simply one of the greatest ever storytellers and character creators. Great Expectations is probably the best, but I have the softest spot for A Christmas Carol: it's the quintessential story of grace and redemption for all ages!

11) Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust

Comment: I’m not entirely sure why this allures my palette as much as it does; it has many of the traits I dislike in novels. It’s overlong, pretentious in places, and the narrator of the story is not so fascinating that you feel such an epic length is justified. No novel needs to be this long. But all that said, there is a quality about this work that maybe exists in no other, except perhaps Ulysses. This is effectively about the phenomenology of being; it’s about life, about squeezing as much of the juices of life into one narrative – the observations, the streams of consciousness, the state of being. It’s about what it means to be alive, to see vulnerability in oneself and others, and in essence, about self-discovery. Just in writing this my memory has brought to the fore several episodes from my past where I’ve learned something valuable from an everyday interaction. I don’t think any book has ever elicited that kind of recall better than Remembrance of Things Past. Then again, I guess the clue's in the title, after all.

12) Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot

Comment: As good psychology as it is literature. Rarely does an author understand humanity so well that she understands her own creations with such aplomb.  

13) A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume

Comment: The most important philosopher and his most important works. Hume's greatest contribution to philosophy is in laying out the proposition that everything is derived from experience (this is the basis of Hume’s fork – everything is classified as either Relations of ideas and Matters of fact). Hume lays out the important distinction between causation and causality.

14) The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy - G.K Chesterton

Comment: Apart from the works of C.S Lewis, these two books are my favourite books of Christian apologetics. This is Christianity at its smartest. GK Chesterton reminds us that even a watered down Christianity is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. Here's the man at his best in Orthodoxy:

"The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world".

15) The works of Carl Jung

Comment: In my first office job as the junior admin, I snuck to the photocopier over several days and printed just about everything Jung had ever published. I've had a complicated relationship with Jung, not quite love-hate, more like love-exasperation. There's no denying the depth of his mind. Perhaps the best homage to Jung is that it would be unwise to even start writing about his ideas - there are so many brilliant ones that any brief commentary would be inadequate to the coverage of their depth.

16) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Comment: An absolutely brilliant incursion into a psychological realism that takes us far beneath where we feel comfortable going. We engage with the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff; the class conflict, the psychology, the bitterness, and the obsession with revenge – it is one of the best deconstructions of traditional love while departing from the traditional love narrative that I’ve ever read. Emily Bronte quite brilliantly seduces the reader with romantic gestures at the beginning, leading us into a false sense of security about willing Heathcliff’s redemption and renewal, but then spends the rest of the book chipping away at the structure of that notion by showing him (and most of the characters for that matter) to be more and more cruel, self-centred and damaged. This is a kind of emotional Hades into which we just don’t want to be going often – a masterclass in expressing dormant, unfulfilled passions and longings, and what beasts lurk beneath the subducts when they remain unchecked. Stunningly good.

17) The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith

Comment: Adam Smith's two great works - both thoroughly excellent, but while the majority of people associate Smith with the Wealth of Nations approach to humankind, where the market develops by virtue of our self-serving instincts, his Theory of Moral Sentiments is much more concerned with our propensity to be kind and generous towards each other, and is equally good.

18) On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin

Comment: Racist book that's made almost no contribution to society. It should be banned! 😀

19) Selected works of Tolstoy - especially War and Peace, Anna Karenina and A Confession

Comment: Heck, this man suffered - he really suffered. He went through the whole gamut of pain, and came out as a stronger thinker and a believer. Isaiah Berlin placed Tolstoy as the greatest writer because he most aptly incorporated the skills of the Hedgehog and the Fox into his work (see further down the list). It was perhaps Tolstoy who gave us the most profound illustrations of human nature in war (as did Wilfred Owen in a rather different way) – illustrations that move us to consider human psychology in battle, and conclude that in spite of the horror, toil and misery, a few moments in war can teach us more about humanity than a lifetime of peace. But best of all, I think, Tolstoy wrenched the truth out of every arm of resistance. About our progression towards ‘truth’ itself, he concludes that “Our progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold”. Tolstoy’s language is evocative of something awaiting discovery – that these truths are already part of reality, and the human job is to gradually uncover them, much like we mine for gold. Only a man of faith could be that perspicacious.

20) Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

Comment: An absolutely wonderful achievement. So many sharp insights and witty observations. What an adventure of the logical mind as well as of the literary one.

21) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comment: One minor criticism would be that it's a little bit too long for my liking - Hugo doesn't quite have the capacious mind of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to justify this length. But that aside, this book has one of the greatest expositions of grace in all of literature, with recidivist Jean Valjean and the hugely benevolent Bishop of Digne, who helps him, takes him in and gives him shelter. But in the middle of the night, Jean Valjean steals the bishop’s silverware and runs. He is caught, but the bishop even though he was badly let down after various acts of charity and grace, rescues him by claiming that the silverware was, in fact, a gift, and at that point gives him his two precious silver candlesticks as well, reproving Jean Valjean for leaving in such a rush and forgetting these most valuable gifts. As you can imagine, Jean Valjean is stunned by such an act. That act of grace changes Jean Valjean's whole outlook on life and transforms his character (and no doubt many readers too). His life ethos is to emulate the grace and love of the bishop, just as Christians' life ethos should be to emulate Christ's outlook - the One who gave the greatest act of love and grace ever poured out on the world at Calvary. A wonderful story about redemption, and the futulity of being blind to its quality.

22) Persuasion -Jane Austen

Comment: I could actually make a case for all six of Austen's great novels - they are all quite different, and all just about equally good in their own right. I nearly went for Pride and Prejudice, but didn't because it's a slightly more charming fairytale, which is a point against it when measured alongside Persuasion (and perhaps Emma too).

23) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Comment: One of the great comedic novels; farcical, sublime, where sanity and insanity are seamlessly blended together with brilliant writing - but in the end it's really a horror story too. Heller laughs at bureaucracies with absurd subordinates and even more absurd leaders. It's part book of Ecclesiastes, part Evelyn Waugh, part Ernst Lubitsch, with a touch of the Marx Bros about it too. Everyone knows what a Catch 22 situation, but few know the exact text:

"Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."

24) To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

Comment: Two of the best works on deeper introspection, wayward imagination and streams of consciousness. There are few more talented than Woolf at understanding her characters and using them to draw out our most intimate contemplations. Not an easy author to read though – as she cuts such a lonely, tragic figure, who never got to understand the really glorious truths about life. Like her characters, she was always giving herself over to social occasions to cover the silence.

25) The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Comment: I have to declare some personal distaste in enjoying this – I don’t really vibrate to the Marxist undertones that Steinbeck conveys, as the Joad family, plagued by the dustbowl storms that battered the land and ruined livelihoods, cross the Panhandle in search of better things in California. And the message about the nefarious divide between workers and owners is generally without sufficient nuance. But all that said, this is an astonishing novel about survival, about self-respect, about family, and most of all about humanity. This story really does convey a spirit of an impoverished group that demands to be taken seriously, because they are so full of dignity and authenticity.

26) Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

Comment: Don’t forget Of Mice and Men too – it's an absolutely beautiful, essential read. A hugely gratifying expression of humanity and heart – and in the friendship of George and Lennie we have one of the best relationships captured in all of literature.

27) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Comment: Rarely does an author press a spike into the heart of your mind the way Nabokov does. Such beautiful language too. Nabokov is one of the best writers at showing us the periphery, making us believe we are there, and that the perceived centre is really quite illusory. This author understands better than most that, with complete knowledge and perfect hindsight, what most thought was the periphery will actually turn out to have been the centre.

28) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Comment: A fantastic story with great characters. Waugh treats his readers as though they are witty and intelligent, and that's why his novels are so good.

29) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Comment: Tremendous work, a well told story about wretched racial tensions, prejudices and bad attitudes, but where the noble characters rise above the culture and the zeitgeist. This is an unambiguous portrayal of what’s good and what’s bad, where Harper Lee shows that empathy, compassion and insight drives goodness, and apathy, blind ignorance and lazy-mindedness drives badness. 

30) Ulysses - James Joyce

Comment: A hard read, but one to admire. The problem I suspect a lot of people have with Ulysses, including me, is that they read it for the first time too early. Begin your foray into classic literature, and you're likely to want to devour the most highly regarded works first, of which Ulysses is definitely one. Rudyard Kipling once said “What do they know of England, who only England know?”, and what he meant was, not only do you not know much of other countries if you only know England, you don't know so much of England either without knowing other countries with which to make comparisons. Lovers sometimes say that of beloveds too - they love them not just by knowing the beloved and all the qualities she has, but by knowing how the qualities and faults of others give further exhibition to what the beloved has to offer. I think this Kiplingian observation is true of Ulysses too - it is all the more appreciated extrinsically in light of other literature, as well as intrinsically on its more intimate contemplations.

One of the salutary observations that runs through Ulysses is that greatness in reality can be found not just in the splendid parts of life but also in the insipidly ordinary things we experience every day – that angels may well be treading in the most profane places and situations, as well as in the sublime, profound and beautiful instances of living. It seemed to Joyce, I think, that a wise person is someone who can get wisdom and truth from every situation, whether bad or good, right or wrong, or tragic or joyous – he is a bit like a gardener who can make the most of all different kinds of soil in his garden and not just cultivate plants, flowers, and vegetables in the soil that is obviously good.

31) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Comment: Everything that’s bad about authoritarianism is captured in this novel - and my oh my, Huxley is such a good writer. The quintessence of a dystopian novel is that the tyrannies that preside over us purport to being so for our good, where subjects are reconstituted into automata and develop Stockholm syndrome. Huxley is smarter than Orwell because his imagination of the future’s ’look’ and its technological advancement is more perceptive. What I think also gives Huxley the edge is that he captures the reality of how easy it is to obtain happiness in a life of unthinking. Most of the dystopian characters elsewhere aren’t very happy and content with their lot. But in Brave New World, the characters aren’t miserable at their plight – they have blindly accepted the system into which they have become ensnared.

32) Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

Comment: Absolutely superb psychological thriller, so tremendously written. Daphne Du Maurier smartly observes through unlikeable characters that wholesome qualities are earned not bestowed, and dark traits are not prized from the influences of others, but well up from the inner states of mind.

33) Selected works of Nietzsche

Comment: Well.... where do I start with my love/hate relationship with Nietzsche? It’s not easy to summarise my thoughts so succinctly, not least because I don’t believe Nietzsche would find it easy to summarise his own philosophies succinctly – they don’t make easy summations. The thing really worth mentioning about Nietzsche is what a brilliant writer he is – almost like a literary philosopher. Despite being replete with reality checks, I find him a joy to read. There’s no doubt too that he’s a brilliant mind and a deep thinker, offering profound perspectives on what it means to be human in a world where everyone gets so much wrong, and readily conforms to bad intellectual practices. He is mostly justifiably damning of a human species that doesn’t competently know itself or understand itself as well as it might. If you’re going to get into Nietzsche, you’re going to need to roll up your sleeves – but you should find it worth the journey. You could start with Beyond Good and Evil and then On the Genealogy of Morality – there Nietzsche is salutary and constructive in his observations. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a tough read though – it is full of great lines, but its underlying thematic is profane, irreverent and misguided. If only Nietzsche took his ideas to their most profound conclusions, he might have been the greatest writer of his age.

34) The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant

Comment: A terrible writer, but if you take the time to sift through this, there are some great rewards, and plenty to appreciate. Kant sought to establish the categories as a priori modes of thought that are applied to concepts in order for them to be used by the mind via the faculty of judgement, and to determine what the categories themselves are, and what role each plays in their specific area of cognition. You'll know quite a bit about these categories anyway - they are now part of philosophy's general idiomatic structure (a priori, a posteriori, analytic, synthetic, noumena, phenomena, etc).

35) Jean Piaget's works

Comment: It's hard to come by in one simple fait accompli swoop - you have to lots of digging to read, but it's essential stuff. This should be taken as way more than mere cognitive development: It's great epistemology too.

36) William Blake collected works

Comment: There are several versions of this. Make sure the one you buy includes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and the Marriage of Heaven & Hell. The Clod and the Pebble is probably my favourite of the short poems - it's about the superiority of selfless love over selfish love.

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

37) Leibniz' Philosophical Writings

 Comment: In Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God we find one of the greatest ideas ever - his "Best of all possible worlds". A deep thinker, and like the selected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a great compilation to dip into when you're in quiet solitude and have time to think. Like Jung's works, Leibniz is probably one part reading and three parts stopping and thinking about what you've just read. 

38) Aesop's Fables

Comment: The influence of this book on the world is astounding. There's so much wisdom for young minds to distil from these brilliant fables. This is where we get so many of the dictums in common parlance, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Tortoise and the Hare, Sour Grapes, The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg, and so on. Every child should devour this stuff.

39) Areopagitica - John Milton

Comment: An essential work, and the best book ever on free speech and freedom of expression. Milton lays down the edict about the necessity of having a free press, the liberty to not be silenced or censored, and the wisdom that people who try to impede the freedom of expression in others harm themselves too, because they rob themselves of the ability to hear and think. That observation alone is one of the most profound and perceptive in the history of prose. Mill's On Liberty is worth reading too.

40) The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

Comment: A deep and compelling novel about a love affair that gets stopped in its tracks by a promise to God, where questions of depth of love, sacrifice, loss, hate, cruelty, suffering and faith abound. Without wishing to give too much away, Bendrix's moment of realisation “I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.” is worth an essay in itself.

41) Principia - Isaac Newton

Comment: The foundation of classical mechanics and gravity - what's not to love?

42) Howards End - E.M Forster

Comment: This is powerful and reflective work, that explores the depths of love, friendship, social convention, familial differences, vulgarity within social classes, told within the juxtaposition all the three significant stratified classes of Edwardian England. There's a great subtext here too about the banalities associated with love of money, and the liberation of art and mind.

43) Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan

Comment: Wonderful book about escaping the thrall of sin and finding a whole new world.

44) Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

Comment: As gripping as many great works of fiction. Although I think the underlying premise about black holes is wrong, as one of my books will explain – I have a hunch that they don’t exist at all in the way are conceived, and are really just reality being rinsed out in the mathematical wash of dark matter, which is also a feature of our conscious cognition. My multi-lens theory of reality theory predicts that difficult counterintuitive things like black holes, infinities and singularities are examples of us being locked into limited physical perceptions by virtue of our being physical agents. Here’s a blog on it

45) Richard Dawkins best works on biology - The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow

Comment: Absolutely terrible philosopher, and he’s utterly daft when talking about religious faith. But few write more beautifully about evolution than Dawkins – he really does justice to the beauty of biology and diversity in the animal kingdom.  

46) The Evolution of Everything & The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley

Comment: In my opinion, these are two of the most entertaining books in recent years. In The Rational Optimist, Ridley lays out the wonders of modern human achievement, and in Evolution of Everything he develops the case that bottom-up evolution rather than top-down design is the main driving force that has shaped much of our culture, technology and society, and is shaping our future. His central argument in both books is spot on: that change in technology, language, morality and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual and spontaneous, and that much of the success of the human world is the result of local human action, not of centrally planned human design; it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the top down organisations of a few.

47) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

Comment: Joyce at his most accessible: a terrific account of challenging and leaving behind the dogmas and uncritical cultural thralls into which one is born, or by which one is seduced, and parting company with one's roots for a life of self-determination and pursuing one's own inner-self and creative talents.

48) Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

Comment: Amusing, clever and insightful. I find it better in small doses than lengthy readings. It's even better if you read it aloud.

49) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

Comment: This isn’t as beautifully written as some of the literary classics I’ve loved and omitted from this list. But its central message – that all is contained within, in potentia - is one so alluring to me, and so important to my own deliberations, that I think it’s a must read. My inner conflict about whether to include this is, of course, part of the book’s quintessence, and maybe in dealing with this duality, I slightly edged towards the book’s inclusion.

50) Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

Comment: Tremendous novel, full of providence, and perhaps the best explicator of Byron’s great observation that “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt in solitude, where we are least alone”.

51) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Comment: I've known a few ladies in my life who were like Emma Bovary - ruined by their imagination and sense of adventure when it isn't anchored to ethical discipline. It's not a novel I especially like, but I greatly admire it, which I guess is, in itself, a kind of liking. Flaubert does, at least, know the cheat of a degenerate mind, and exposes it with depth of imagination.

52) Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

Comment: Hardy’s such a good writer, and such a good storyteller, and this is probably him at his best – the tale of Bathsheba, who becomes more likeable as the novel progresses, as she is able to learn about self-determination from her experiences with her three suitors. The novel is packed with great lines, and profound insights about the talents and worth of women, and how we should abhor societies and cultural practices that expect mere compliance and temperance. Most of Hardy's works are worth reading. 

53) Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Comment: Masterly creation, superb embedded narrative, but such a real tragedy of a tale too. Mary tells an even better Prometheus tale than Percy, and the central message is always the same. Today we are still stealing fire, and bringing about our doom while expecting too much from our creations. I have a particular fondness for epistolaries too.  

54) Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift

Comment: Classic adventure full of biting satire, sardonically disapproving of dry English customs and even drier politics. This mordantly captures the many silly things that divide humans – it prefigures Freud’s narcissism of small differences – and recognises that the good we do for each other by mutual cooperation far surpasses the good we try to do in politics.

55) Animal Farm - George Orwell

Comment: Orwell’s best book, I think. Orwell wasn’t as witty as Aldous Huxley, but this amuses me more than 1984, even though the extremities are nothing to find funny. Ironically, the animals seem so much more human than the actual humans in 1984.

56) The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

Comment: Tremendously eerie. Whether the ghosts are real or whether the governess is mad isn’t really the main debate in my view. It’s the apprehension of both that always tells the greater story.

57) The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris

Comment: I haven't read much modern fiction, but this is one for which I made an exception, as the film is so good. The book is terrific, and has so much great Lecter dialogue not in the film.

58) - Games People Play - Eric Berne

Comment: The best book ever on transactional analysis. Berne explores units of social interaction (what he calls 'strokes' - how we revert to adult and child modes with ease) and conveys the psychology in the form of social games. Once you've read this, you'll never see your social interactions in the same way again.

59) The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

Comment: Worth the purchase price for the fence painting scene alone. I don't think all the storytelling is exhilarating, but it's a must-read, especially when you are young enough to be edified by coming-of-age narratives. 

60) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Comment: I don't love its heart, but I love its wit - full of brilliant aphorisms and clever wordplay.

61) Philosophical Investigations - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Comment: Tractatus was a load of tosh. Thankfully Wittgenstein rescued things with Philosophical Investigations - a book that showed he'd thought through his life's work much more meticulously. Private inner experiences, language games - pretty much all the best insights you associate with Wittgenstein are here.

62) The Trial - Franz Kafka

Comment: Another work that we in the modern age hope isn't too prescient. A scary prospect that is, sadly, in some countries, a reality.

63) Look Back in Anger - John Osborne

Comment: Jimmy Porter is one of the great characters in playwriting. Cerebral and angry often makes a wicked drama.

64) The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Comment: His most explicitly Christian novel. A deep and brilliant read, in which goodness and beauty is seen through a saintly character called Prince Myshkin. He is the archetypal meek person that Christ describes in conveying who will inherit the earth, and the wise and pious person the world sees as a fool. Prince Myshkin isn't an idiot in the common sense of the word, of course, but he is portrayed as safe and innocent, which purports to make him someone the world ridicules and ostracises. How myopic they are….and still are!  

65) The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse

Comment: This is the best one, but pretty much all the Jeeves and Wooster books are fabulous.

66) 1984 – George Orwell

Comment: Orwell’s abiding misgivings towards the power of authority and the creeping control of the state seem more relevant with every passing decade. The quality of this work isn’t just in its prescience, it’s in how these themes have grown a life of their own – big brother, doublethink, newspeak – and few have been better at excoriating the machinations of undeserved power than Orwell.

67) Candide - Voltaire

Comment: Even though it sends up some of the things I hold most dear, it also lambasts many of the things for which I have the gravest distaste, like uncritical ideas and pliant conformity to leadership. As a man who has a faith, but always feels on the periphery of the mainstream, I can laugh alongside Voltaire. Then again, a lot of what Voltaire would probably call rational free-thinking atheism if he were alive today is to me rather like a group of blind people fighting over a magnifying glass.

68) The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

Comment: One of the best books ever about faith and suffering. It has whisky and reverence - two of life's best qualities combined.

69) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Comment: The book that got me into literature in my teens - it was the first great literary work that I ever read. I read this because I loved Apocalypse Now. This was my gateway into the world's greatest novels.

70) Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman

Comment: Not just one of the great books on free market economics, and the pitfalls of heavy state interference – but of human behaviour and united consequences of bad policymaking. Milton Friedman is the natural heir to Bastiat.

A very apt quote:

“Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action. At any moment in time, by imposing uniform standards in housing, or nutrition, or clothing, government could undoubtedly improve the level of living of many individuals; by imposing uniform standards in schooling, road construction, or sanitation, central government could undoubtedly improve the level of performance in many local areas and perhaps even on the average of all communities. But in the process, government would replace progress by stagnation, it would substitute uniform mediocrity for the variety essential for that experimentation which can bring tomorrow's laggards above today's mean.”

What this means is, even if the government can improve a situation in the short term, the longer term starvation of competition means it will eventually be a sub-optimal solution

71) Notes From The Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Comment: Brilliant exposition of how bitter and tortured the world can make a soul, but how courting false utopia and irrational idealism is a malady against the insight we possess if we try.

72) Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould

Comment: Excellent book about the limestone quarry called the Burgess Shale, and what we can learn about it in broader aspects of evolution’s history, especially how much of a knife edge so much of it sits, and how relatively minor differences in what Gould perceives as ‘chance’ outcomes would have yielded a very different trajectory.

73) Tom Jones - Henry Fielding

Comment: Hilarious and incisive trawl through the adventurous shenanigans and scandalous adventures. I’ll bet they had some great pub nights. At heart though, this doubles up as an intriguing observation of human nature. Never mind its numerous chapters and teeming cast of misfits and scoundrels, the central character is an attractively unbridled young man of fierce temper and unrestrained sexuality who pursues true love through contemporary Britain in a sequence of scandalous and hilarious adventures

74) Oscar Wilde selected works

Comment: For the whole Wilde experience, you need The Picture of Dorian Gray (his only novel, but a good one), then Penguin Plays (which, as the title suggests, contains all his great plays), and last but not least, the Penguin classics version of De Profundis & Other Writings, in which you'll also find The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which is an attempt to embed charitable elements and self-determination into a rotten system, which may be exacerbated by the folk that we don't understand what we are doing to ourselves. I think Wilde is slightly overrated, but even back on his perch he's still one of the world's finest.  

75) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter

Comment: A quite marvellous book about exploring deeper meaning and patterns in mathematics and logic. Hofstader is on the side of mind as a primacy, and that its potential, like the Extended Phenotype, transcends the apparatus that hosts it. A really terrific book.

76) The Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Comment: Masterly account of children in isolation learning profound and harsh lessons about the nature of their own humanity, and that the problems are mostly within not without. This is one of the first novels I would urge parents to give to their teenage children - it will help prepare them for the stark reality of being human, and thrill them while doing so.

77) On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Comment: Maybe not the best read during lockdown, but hugely evocative and full of great accounts.

78) What's So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew - Phillip Yancey

Comment: Apart from C.S Lewis's works, these are the two books I always recommend as introductions to the Christian faith. There are few non-fiction books that would change your life as much as What's So Amazing About Grace?

79) Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

Comment: So many good tales, covering all the big human subjects. One to dip in and out of.

80) Surfaces and Essences - Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander

Comment: The best book ever about analogies. And given that analogies are much of our human thought, it's a very important book. A tad repetitive, so should be about 10,000 words shorter, but a fantastic read.

81) Confessions - St Augustine

Comment: The first really great deep examination of a Christian soul. It's easy to get diminishing returns if you read it for too long in one session, so my advice is to read it in small sittings.

82) The Imitation of Christ - Thomas Kempis

Comment: Probably the best ever Bible commentary that isn't officially a Bible commentary

83) Herzog - Saul Bellow

Comment: I used to be like Herzog, forever dreaming up letters that I never sent. Saul Bellow does it wonderfully.

84) The Republic - Plato

Comment: I probably will not be inclined to read this again, but everyone should read it once – it’s a monster of a book, with a breadth of consideration about justice, political rule, and it’s a fascinating look at classical Greece. The Allegory of the cave is one of the greatest and most relevant observations in philosophical history, and while the Theory of Forms has come to grief, the ideation behind has planted seeds that are still as relevant as ever.

85) The Machinery of Freedom – David Friedman

Comment: Friedman makes a good case for libertarianism here. Some of the data is so 1970s-centric that it will feel a bit anachronistic today, by the central message is generally good, and there’s lots of good material in there to help people think like an economist, especially around perverse incentives and the ‘seen and unseen’ effects of policy, as per Bastiat’s wisdom.  

86) Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond

Comment: One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. It’s a kind of determinism in geographical causality – in other words, how geography plays a huge, often seemingly accidental, part in societal progress and retardation of progress.

87) Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Comment: This is the only book in the list that I haven’t yet finished. I’m working my way through it, a few pages a time in small dips. But I’ve read enough to know how useful this book is – and can recommend it on the grounds that it’s obvious this is one of the most important mainstream behavioural science books. The reason for my small dips – and it is a strange one – is that I quite like treating it as I do my daily meals: it’s easy to get diminishing returns if you overload on material like this, especially as most of it is fairly standard wisdom and has been covered in about 50 works that predate it.

88) The Analects - Confucius

Comment: One thing I like about The Analects by Confucius is his observation, highly influential for the time, that harmony doesn’t have to be about a homogenous group - it’s often found in marked differences. Rather like how a musical or vocal ensemble has harmony in variety, society needs a variety of skills and specialities and talents to have harmony. His observation about creating harmony from difference to make the world a better place is both telling and prescient.

89) The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud

Comment: Here’s something interesting about profound past insights. Their provenance and therefore their influence can get washed up into a cultural norm, whereby people take it for granted to such an extent that due credit is no longer afforded. The Bible is the most extreme case of this: its most important messages have been so readily absorbed into the world’s socio-cultural thinking that they are just taken for granted and they are crassly dismissed as archaic. They are like a concert audience who sits their enjoying the sounds of the symphony while forgetting that there’s an orchestra on stage. We do this with free trade too: the wisdom of Smith, Ricardo, Hayek, and Coase are so culturally ingrained that people enjoy the scent of their flower while trying to break the stork. I think this is also true about Freud, although obviously to a much lesser extent – we take for granted his observations about the unconscious and about the subset elements of personality as competing forces so readily that we now tend to only think of Freud as the flawed psychoanalyst who wasn’t quite so accurate on religion or sex.

90) Proper Study of Mankind - Isaiah Berlin

Comment: Some very good essays. Probably the highlight is The Hedgehog and the Fox - one of the best pieces of non-fiction. I have a chapter on it in one of my books, which I hope you'll get to read one day.

91) The Prince - Machiavelli

Comment: Classic work outlining how to rule a country, especially assuming the base and incorrigible nature of people. This is a book I wish was satire, but seems to me like it isn't, it's just plain old realism.

92) The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper

Comment: Popper's own Kuhnian paradigm shift, using falsification as a criterion of demarcation to draw a sharp line between those theories that are scientific and those that are unscientific, and arguing that all knowledge is only an approximation to the reality. Of course, we are even hotter on falsifiability these days than Popper was - we have out-Poppered Popper. One caveat though, even through a scientific lens, falsifiability has real limits in its utility - after all, "All Xs are Y" is a generalisation which is falsifiable but near-impossible to verify, and "There is a Z" is a singular proposition that can be verified but it's near-impossible to falsify. Falsifiability, therefore, has better utility in generalisations than in specific singular propositions.

93) The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker

Comment: I found this book so valuable - a really important thesis in my lifetime, showing how, in literature, there are only seven ‘storylines’ in the world, and that to the greatest degree all narratives are really variations of these basic seven storylines. The Seven basic plots, according to Booker, are as follows:

1) Overcoming the Monster

2) Rags to Riches

3) The Quest

4) Voyage and Return

5) Comedy

6) Tragedy

7) Rebirth

One minor criticism. Mr. Booker’s analysis is a little too parsimonious for my liking, despite his subsequently adding two further plot types – ‘Rebellion’ and ‘Mystery’. One glaring and obvious omission is the topic of ‘love’, which although containing the potential to be played out in any of the above storylines, was not itself a primary plot in the view of Booker. Another omission is what is often referred to as ‘character study’ or a ‘psychological study’ of a person’s mind – one which involves cutbacks on the external plot, but instead provides a penetrating incursion into the psyche of an individual – an incursion which is so often presented to us with our own selfhood in mind. But this is still an interesting book, and revealing to anyone who hasn't thought along these lines before.

94) Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Comment: Prescient and brilliant - the text is so incisive. Bradbury probably isn't as intelligent as Aldous Huxley, but I think he's a better writer. Check out his Zen in the Art of Writing too - one of the best books I've read on writing.

95) The Cloud of Unknowing - Unknown

Comment: I find a bit samey to read it in large chunks, but it's wonderful for the occasional dip, and usually uplifting and challenging.

96) Freakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

Comment: Packed full of interesting and surprising stuff. One of the most compelling light-hearted commentaries on society and the unexpected things it throws up. What we find in this, and so many other social science books, is that human behaviour, when measured through a societal and statistical study, yields so many important discoveries that are as interesting as the great stuf we make up for entertainment.

Hope you enjoyed!

What Locks & Keys Can Tell Us About Sex, Covid & Other Things

 

Pretty much everyone locks their doors, their bikes, their sheds, etc - and the lock and key industry is worth a fortune. But most people are not thieves and would never dream of stealing from another person. Locks and keys are a necessity for the entire population because of the actions of a tiny minority. The size of the industry is disproportionate to the number of people who make it necessary.

Locks provide a good illustration for some of the other things in life with a similar status. The minimum wage is one example. Most people pay their staff according to the marginal value of their labour. Occasionally rogue employers might pay their staff an exploitative wage - but they are in a tiny minority. Consequently, the minimum wage does a lot of harm, because the scope of the legislation is disproportionate to the number of people who make it necessary.

The same is true with so-called hate laws. People should have the right to express their views freely, with only extreme acts constituting threat or danger being investigated by the police. Again, hate speech laws do a lot of harm, because most people are just too easily offended, and not in any danger, so the scope of the hate crime legislation is disproportionate to the number of people who make it necessary.

The fact that most people are law-abiding when it comes to most laws means that requirement of these laws generally tends to be disproportionate to the number of people who make those laws necessary. But that fact doesn't tell us whether a particular law is desirable or not. After all, relative to the population size, not many people are murdered, raped or burgled, but we still want murder, rape and burglary to be illegal. The wise distinction, I think, is that in suppressing our right to murder, rape or burgle we are not imposing any unreasonable costs on society (as per the Harsanyi model). Whereas things like hate speech laws and the minimum wage do impose many costs because they censor or prohibit valuable human qualities associated with freedom and utility that would otherwise be allowed to flourish more freely. For simplicity, in the future you could think of the good laws as being Harsanyi-efficient and the bad laws as being Harsanyi-inefficient. Pick any law or regulation or policy and you should be able to assess which category you think it might fall under. Sometimes it will be obvious, other times less so.

Covid is a bit like the lock situation. Most people won't be very badly affected by catching Covid, but a minority will, so the economy is decimated and social value diminished to save the few. Opinions will vary about whether the net costs of Covid policies will turn out to outweigh the benefits. My feeling is, we'll have to play the long game and see about that, especially when we have a better idea about how thinly those costs will be spread. I doubt it's even possible to properly measure the costs and benefits - the calculus is probably too complex and epistemologically intractable for the naked eye.

The murder of Sarah Everard was absolutely tragic, but the panicked response about how safe women are has generally been disproportionate to the severity. That doesn’t mean women shouldn't be careful and men shouldn't be responsible, but the response has been politicised for the gain of a minority of attention seekers and virtue signallers. Here's a tip for spotting if something is likely to be based on a political agenda: if masses of people show no tangible signs of concern before an event that doesn't directly affect them, and then an immediate rush for concern after an event, it's highly likely (although not always) the case that the situation is being manipulated for personal gain. Like locks, the size of the panic here is disproportionate to the number of people who pose a threat to women's safety.

That said, it's good for all safe men to be aware that because of the minority of unsafe men, it's not easy for women walking alone to feel totally safe - so it behoves us men to do our best at all times to signal by our behaviour that we pose no threat. By doing that, we don't just increase the chances that women will feel safer, we also increase the chances that unsafe men will stand out more, and help women to act accordingly to avoid danger.

Finally, there is an article doing the rounds telling us we should prepare to redefine the binary categories of sex, because science is making them more and more obsolete. In fact, towards the end of the article, on the question of whether a person is male or female, and whether the varying categories of determination (anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes) cause a clash that undermines assignations of sex, we are told that:

“My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.”

No, no, that just won’t do. The fact is, in the vast majority of cases – by anatomy and by the sex category (male or female) individuals choose to identify as – the vast majority of individuals are easily and autonomously categorised as male or female. However far science progresses, that will always be true. While there are a minority of intersex cases that belie more straightforward categorisations (and we should, of course, be respectful, tolerant and loving towards them), there are empirically grounded methods of determining sex categorisations. Even in the foetal stage the male and female genital plumbing develops to form sexual development and the concomitant levels of testosterone or oestrogen, determining external genitalia and making sex usually easily definable.

The tone of the article tells us that because gene mutations result in chromosomal irregularities (departing from the standard XX and XY) and anomalous hormonal signalling, we should begin to get with the program and recognise that humans are a melting pot of male and female sex categorisation. But I don’t think this is a wise or accurate response. Just because we are a patchwork of cells with different genetic make-ups, that doesn’t stop us being in large part distinctly male or female. Even in the rare cases when an individual's anatomical sex seems to be at odds with their chromosomal sex, that usually doesn’t mean one is intersex – people generally identify with what they sense about their anatomy and feel perfectly comfortable doing so. The fact that there are a wide range of variations in genes that have mild effects on individuals does not equate to the person’s sex needing to be re-categorised.

It’s important to remember that maleness and femaleness conform to a Gestalt identity that is far greater than the parts that make up the sum. The sand on Norfolk beaches is yellow. The yellowness is because of the oxidised iron in the quartz formation. But I am more sure that the sand appears yellow than I am that it contains oxidised iron. Similarly, in the vast majority of individual cases, people are more certain that they are either male or female than they are at odds with what science may tell them they are when there are minor genetic anomalies in their make-up. As with the other cases, like thieves and locks, the size of the population for whom the clear cut categorisations of male and female constitutes a problem is vastly disproportionate to the number of people for whom male and female identity is a sine qua non primacy of their identity and personhood.

Never Overlook The Costs Of Being Creative

 

Creative people are almost like a different animal to the people who aren’t creative. If you’re not a person for whom your creative output is your passion – in music, in writing, in art, in filmmaking, in sculpting, or whatever – then you just won’t be able to fully understand someone who is. You’ll never get a sense of that drive, that passion and that exhilaration that rushes through the veins of someone with a creative passion. There is something about being creative that requires understanding and empathy and a connection that uncreative people just don’t share – they don’t have a radar for it, and therefore the time you spend on your projects will often be a cost for them because they can't possibly love your ventures as much as you do.

I'm so blessed that my wife is supportive of my creative endeavours - it makes such a positive difference. It helps that she is creative too, and smart, and very talented. By the way, if you're single, and you sense that a prospective beloved is highly supportive of your artistic endeavours - don't let them slip through the net. On the other hand, if you're passionate about your creativity, don't be yoked to someone who isn't. If they are not passionate about your work, they are not passionate enough about YOU!!!

For that reason alone, there is responsibility on the creative person too. The world is a better place if creative people are selective about their pursuits, because to do something really well is going to take up a lot of your time and effort while you master your craft. You probably don’t have as much to give the world as you think; you are highly unlikely to make a financial killing as recompense for your effort; and those combined costs will be felt by those closest to you as well - so approach with caution, because artistic indulgences are full of opportunity costs.

I’ll talk about writing, because that’s the one I know best. There are well known maxims that writers should always adhere to: like, write about what you really know; only write when you have something to say; and write authentically (be yourself). Bearing the above maxims in mind, it’s rarely sensible to allocate time to writing unless you have the utmost conviction that your writing session will tick the above boxes, especially if you’re writing non-fiction. When I was a professional gambler, the key to making a living was in being very selective in what to bet on; knowing when not to bet is the supporting wisdom in knowing when to bet in order to make a living from gambling. If you apply that wisdom to writing, you’ll find you’ll spend more time not writing than feels natural (or possibly even comfortable), but that is the pearl of a great price.

To see why, let’s take an extreme example. Suppose Jack, a writer of non-fiction, decided to spend 8 hours writing every day for the next 20 years. There’s just no way that he’s going to produce 8 hours of high quality writing every day. That point would be true of any amount of writing time one allocates arbitrarily. But if you only write when you believe you have something to say, you reduce the chances of wasting time on writing things that aren’t really worth reading.

Finally, if you are thinking of becoming a writer, be really strict with yourself with an honest critical appraisal of your credentials. Have you thought things through sufficiently well that your extended thoughts on a page are potentially edifying to a wide audience? And if yes, can you articulate them in a way that’s fresh, interesting and engaging? If the answer isn't 'yes' to both questions, then maybe think again about whether you should be subjecting the world to your musings. Because you have to remember that the cost to the world of your being a bad writer or artist or songwriter is not just your bad work, it is the good work you could have been doing, but never did. If the answer to both questions is yes, then great, I look forward to what you have to offer, and  thank you for what you've given the world so far.   

7 Things I'd Recommend You Buy

 

As this Blog is general and varied enough to enable me to cover anything I want, I thought I’d do something a bit different and make some consumer recommendations for you. Most consumer purchases are a matter of taste, but there are a few things I’ve purchased over the years that I think are so good and beneficial, and I’ve been so impressed with, that I would recommend every home should have one. I’ll even put them in a hierarchical order.

(Pictures of the top six above, and hyperlinks below)

7) Mekeet Silicone Toilet Brush and Holder

Just a small item this, but it’s much better than the standard toilet brushes, because the soft silicone bristles don’t hold the dirt so much, and seem to clean better.  Thanks to Sam Bowman for this one.

6) Vintage Wall Mounted Bottle Opener with Cap Catcher

Simple and efficient for hosting parties: whip the bottle top off and in the receptacle it drops. Thanks to Julie Fitt for this one.

5) Bardinet Grenadine Syrup

The best kept secret out there - Grenadine is like a superpower syrup that makes every other fruity drink taste amazing (non-alcoholic or alcoholic). I only hope in disclosing this information that there isn't a demand surge that leaves a shortage for our parties!

4) Joywell Sofa Armrest Organizer, 6 Pockets Remote Holder

Fits nicely over the arm of your sofa or chair and has 6 generous slots – 2 extra large (handy for your smart phone) and 4 medium size (for remote controls).

3) Halfords Digital Wheel Tyre Inflator Pump Electric Air Compressor

Such a useful thing to carry in the boot of your car. It’s a handy device to pump your tyres with rather than queuing and paying at a petrol station. And if you get a flat tyre or slow puncture on your travels it can be used to get you to the nearest garage.

2) Shark NZ801UK Anti Hair Wrap Corded Vacuum Cleaner

Such an awesome vacuum cleaner, it almost….almost…makes hoovering quite enjoyable! This is the Bugatti Veyron of vacuum cleaners; it purrs like an engine, it has headlights, great variable suction, and corners like a dream, turning left and right with the utmost smoothness and elegance. And if that isn’t enough, it also has a neat Powered Lift-Away to turn it into a smaller unit for your stairs, behind furniture, shelves and other nooks and crannies. I hope my wife doesn’t read this blog post – she’ll insist on doing all the hoovering.

1) John Lewis & Partners Natural Collection Hungarian Goose Down 3-in-1 Duvet, 13.5 Tog (4.5 + 9 Tog)

The most enriching of all my purchasing tips. A bit more expensive this one, but well worth the cost. I’d strongly recommend everyone goes goose down for their sleeping arrangement. We spend nearly a third of our lives in bed, and there’s no better way to do it than with a goose feathered duvet (I'd recommend that it's at least 90% goose down). It’s gorgeously cool and breathable in the summer, and warm and snug in the winter!

The Absurdity Of Quota-Based Discrimination

 

After just reading an article about Coca-Cola possibly not coming down hard enough on a shameful 'Be less white' element of a training session (assuming this is factual), I was reminded of a headline last year that the BBC is going to spend £100 million of taxpayers' money on increasing diversity on TV. On Facebook at the time, I made a comment that BAME individuals make up nearly 23% of screen contributions, but only 14% of the UK population - and that it's a shame the BBC thinks this is a good use of taxpayers' money, given that BAME people are already more than well represented relative to their ratio of the total population. Amazingly, I was told that that kind of sentiment plays into the hands of the 'white lives matter' brigade. Alas, this is the nature of the beast these days - even a valid statistical observation of a television network's demographic is easily met with accusations that you're not really on the side of BAME folk after all.

I'm going to reiterate two points I regularly make, and then invite you to join me at an intriguing place you might not have considered before. First the reiteration:

Point one
Artificial disadvantage lowers overall quality. I don't care about the skin colour of people making television programmes - I care about equal opportunity to express talent, and I care about quality. And there is no question that quotas lower the quality - in fact, they can't fail to lower it overall, because people are being selected for reasons other than their ability. Talent and competence are two of the best forms of discrimination. Besides, people are much friendlier to discrimination than they let on. Humans tend to discriminate against others based on ethnicity whenever they choose a life partner, because they habitually choose someone who is ethnically similar to them. And when we do choose a life partner, we are literally discriminating against every other person on the planet.

Moreover, it doesn't occur to many people that artificial disadvantage probably isn't actually that much of a good thing for those benefitting from it at the surface level. Ultimately, in the long run, it can't be good for a person to know they have been selected for reasons outside of the criteria for which they have always desired to be selected. Trying to artificially create diversity for diversity's sake almost always leads to sub-optimal outcomes, especially if consumer demand is not driving the thing being consumed.

Point two
We should pretty much always start with the basis that as long as it imposes no unfair cost on anyone else, then everyone should be able to discriminate against everyone else, and everyone else should be able to discriminate against us. And anyone who disagrees with that ought to come up with a pretty good exception to the rule. Moreover, despite what they say, nearly everyone behaves as though they believe in this principle. This is where both the right and left need to take notice. Many on the left need to understand better that most unequal outcomes are not the result of unfair skews in the system; and many on the right need to understand better that equality of opportunity will be easier to attain, and bear more societal fruit, if there are fewer instances of capitalising on unmerited advantage.

I support fair discrimination, but that doesn't make me anti-anybody, because I support your right to fairly discriminate against anyone you want. To make the point even clearer, I'm a writer, but I support your right not to socialise with writers, hire writers or dine with writers - but that obviously doesn't make me anti-writers.

We don't choose our tastes or feelings, and so our actions are good if they satisfy our tastes or feelings and do no unfair harm to anyone else. Under that condition, if Bob doesn't want to date African women, and Sue doesn't want to hire white men, then it is perfectly rational for them to do so. Of course, I'm wholly opposed to harmful or unfair discrimination, not just because it is ethically wrong but because it imposes other externalities on society too. When racist Roy opens a pub and puts up a sign outside saying 'No Muslims' he's announcing that if a Muslim tries to come in for a drink he's going to call the police and ask the taxpayer to subsidise his bigotry (you could also add that the Muslim is making a demand on the taxpayer by trying to enter a pub to which he's disallowed entry, but I think that would be a step too far). Consequently, an optimum society is one in which the law makes no imposition on who Roy can serve, but also where Roy becomes a better person and makes every customer welcome.

Now for the really intriguing point
Suppose I open a theatre and insist on hiring everyone on merit, irrespective of skin colour or ethnicity. If a cast of mine has majority white or majority black representation, then so be it, I’ve hired on merit (to the best of my ability). It sounds like some people are trying to say that I’ve imposed costs on would-be actors by not hiring them based on skin colour or ethnicity. But it's not obvious what costs you think I am actually imposing on them. Besides, if I'm imposing a cost on would-be actors by not hiring them based on merit, are you imposing a cost on them by not opening a theatre? If you're not imposing a cost on would-be actors by failing to open your own theatre, how am I imposing a cost on them by opening a theatre and not hiring them? Under both scenarios they are not getting hired, but at least I'm doing 'something' for would-be actors by opening a theatre.

If not hiring would-be actors constitutes a societal cost, then both of us are equally guilty. If it doesn't impose a cost on society then your objection makes no sense. If there is only one theatre in a town, and that theatre owner is discriminating against people he doesn't hire, then everyone is refusing to hire actors for a performance they want to act in, but only the theatre owner is affording some people the opportunity to act in the theatre.

Also – you’d presumably think it’s ok for an actor to refuse a role in a play because he wanted to discriminate against the theatre, but why then do you think it’s not ok for the theatre to refuse a role for someone on the same grounds? You may think it’s obvious why the two situations are different, but with a little thought you’ll soon find that you can’t easily justify the difference.

As I often say, we've got no chance of making important changes to the world unless we get our own heads sorted out first. In fact, if you are given 25 years to sort your head out and change the world, you should probably spend about 24 of those years sorting your head out, and the final year trying to make large-scale positive changes in the world. It's not easy to come up with a system in your head whereby you have a reliable framework for knowing what you should believe on any number of issues. For example, take discrimination, and think when your intuition says it's ok and when it's not. It's presumably ok for a heterosexual male to discriminate against other people by only marrying one woman. It's ok for a car salesman to discriminate against the guy who can't afford to buy his BMW in favour of a customer who can. And presumably if you're casting for a play, or hiring workers for your firm, it's up to you who you recruit. Some people don't actually think such freedoms should exist, but let's ignore them - no reasoning is likely to get through to them.

I personally think people should be pretty much free to do what they want if they are not imposing any tangible harm on others, so I don't really have many (any?) situations where I think we shouldn't be free to discriminate. If you find you do, what you have to do is take a case where you do think the discrimination is unjustified and compare it to the cases where you don't, and see what you think are the key differences. Are they different in any way that's relevant? If not, they are probably not instances of unfair discrimination.

For example, actors are allowed to discriminate against directors. I'm sure no one disagrees with the proposition that actors should be free to take any role they want. If Robert de Niro had two films to choose between, and he chose to work with Martin Scorsese over Steven Spielberg, no one thinks that's wrong. I'm sure no one has a plausible objection to the idea that actors can chose which directors they work for. And if that's true, it seems plausible ethically to say that Scorcese can choose to cast Robert De Niro over Tom Hanks if he wishes. Actors are different to directors, but are they different in any significant way that undermines the ethical proposition that each can discriminate against the other if they wish? I see no reason why they are. From this we can probably infer that in any competitive industry where competence and talent and skills are primary, it's ok to discriminate fairly.

Some argue that people who have a lot more bargaining power than others are better candidates for having tougher discrimination laws imposed upon them. So tenants deserve more power than landlords, and employees deserve more power than employees, that kind of thing. But I've never been convinced by that line of argument. In a rental arrangement landlords have more at stake than tenants, and employers have more at stake than employees. Employees and tenants need only find another job or apartment, whereas employers might lose their whole business if it becomes insolvent and landlord's their entire property if they default on their mortgage payments. Or consider that Joe the plumber strikes it lucky and ends up dating Michelle Pfeiffer. Joe can't bear to live without her, but Michelle Pfeiffer has many other viable options. Michelle Pfeiffer has significantly more bargaining power than Joe, but few would suggest that she should be forced to stay with him. The argument for justified coercion because of more bargaining power is a highly dubious argument.

In asking the BBC to over-represent, we would be asking them to judge people not on talent or merit, but on skin colour or ethnicity. I remember watching The Apprentice last season where there were at least 7 BAME candidates at the start of The Apprentice as part of the total 16 candidates, which is a 43% BAME representation in a population where 14% of the UK population is BAME. Clearly the BBC is overly-politicised, and loves virtue signalling, but all this showed is that statistically if many of those BAMEs were in there for a diversity box ticking exercise (and statistically it looks like at least 5 of them must have been), then some people are being unfairly discriminated against on the basis of traits that have nothing to do with merit. Now alright, you may say that The Apprentice isn't that important to you in the grand scheme of things, but if you endorse unfairly discriminating against people (in this case non-BAME people) then sooner or later you’ll end up with scenarios that you really do dislike.

Consider this. Suppose you’ve written your best ever novel, and you’ve poured your heart and soul into it, and you’re so pleased with it, but your agent tells you that they are not going to go with it, they are going to go with what you (and her) consider to be an inferior novel because the publisher needs one or two more BAME authors on their books. Tell me truthfully that you could just swallow that with alacrity! The reality is, you’d be outraged from the pit of your stomach, however you reacted outwardly. 

Intuitively I think a good rule of thumb is roughly this; if in a Rawslian-type 'veil of ignorance' scenario we are unwilling to apply a law equally to everyone, then we shouldn't be willing to apply that law to anyone. I'd be surprised if anyone can think of an exception to that. Similarly, granting freedoms to a subset of the population group that you’re not willing to grant to the entire population strikes me as a bad thing. That's why I think individuals should be free to discriminate fairly however they want, but the government should be compelled to treat everyone the same before the law.

Consequently, as everybody agrees we should be free to date who we like or go to any shop we like, it seems reasonable that no one should be forced to hire, serve, or rent a room to someone they don't like. If we always support policies or systems that increase overall utility, then it's virtually certain that any random person selected from the population will be better off than they would be under a system that decreases overall utility.

On The Dunning-Kruger Effect

 

Anyone active on social media will know how flooded society is with absurd, half-baked, ill-conceived theories about how the world works. Our culture is awash with people’s outlandish misunderstandings about faith, politics, economics, the climate - you name it. It’s not just alarming that these views and beliefs veer so far from facts and truth. What's more alarming is that the people subscribing to them do so with the utmost confidence, and not even a flicker of doubt as to whether they are wrong. 

There is a phenomenon that explains this: it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is basically people’s inability to identify their own inability in rationalising a proposition. Ironically, of course, because the effects of the Dunning-Kruger effect create blind spots that stop people seeing the error of their ways, those most in need of understanding the maladies of the Dunning-Kruger effect are the ones who are least likely to be persuaded by the redress.

What happens with the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people who know only a little about a subject are still too uninformed to realise how incompetent they are, and those who know a lot are the only ones who realise how enlightened they actually are. How this plays out is that it’s the people who most need to learn how incompetent they are that speak with the most confidence, and those who are most expert are the humblest as their prodigious knowledge informs them of how much more there is to know, and how complex the world really is relative to what thy think they understand. This graph wonderfully illustrates the problem:

People start ignorant and know that they know nothing (the bottom left) but then learn a bit about a subject and their confidence skyrockets far too prematurely. This peak is called Mount Stupid, and it is the point at which they are most likely to spout the most nonsense, and join misguided groups associated with hostile atheism, false religions, extreme left or right wing politics, and climate change alarmism, and groups of that kind. Once people get a bit more enlightened, they move down Mount Stupid towards the Valley of Despair. This is where confidence diminishes as knowledge increases – we begin to realise how little we know, and march on upwards along the Slope of Enlightenment, trying to master a subject. Those who reach the Plateau of Sustainability are the ones who can speak with the most justified confidence, as they have the most knowledge.

Alas, it’s those standing at the top of Mount Stupid who shout the loudest, and who dominate our political discourse and our media. It’s the people on Mount Stupid who tell us that belief in God belongs in the Dark Ages; it’s the people on Mount Stupid who think the gender pay gap is unfair and lobby the government to take action; it’s the people on Mount Stupid who obstruct people trying to earn a living because they are convinced there is a climate emergency – the loudest and most confident are the most ignorant.

Here's a reality check: it takes tens of thousands of hours to become an expert in something, and even thousands of hours just to know an awful lot. It takes those thousands of hours to learn that when you’re an expert you still know relatively little compared with what there is still to know. Most people haven’t spent thousands of hours on any subject; and most of the knowledge of the people shouting from Mount Stupid amounts to seeing a few articles online, a few comments below it, a meme, the odd video, Tweet, and maybe a book or two. Those on the Dunning-Kruger peak of Mount Stupid really have no idea how little they understand these subjects.

A further call for epistemic humility is in the fact that the majority of what we know and believe comes from other people – we rely on others by trusting their expertise and by trusting the discipline of their field too. If you only kept things that arrived solely on your own personal experience you would hardly know a thing. Think for a moment about the many things you are quite ‘sure’ are correct and see how much of that knowledge you have first hand experience of. Do you know any of the texts in the Magna Carta or the surveys in the Doomsday Book? Can you close your eyes and visualise the fine details on any of Blake’s Great Red Dragon paintings? Have you ever been to Easter Island? Have you ever seen anyone perform a segmental resection on a tiger or an elephant? Did you know that the album cover on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon features the dispersion of light as it travels through a triangular prism? Will you ever physically prove that light being scattered by the prism would produce different visible colours, or will you trust the experts? Will you ever measure the electrostatic force between a nuclei and electrons, or will you just trust the experts that solid objects are made up largely of empty space? I'll bet some of you know that if a DNA molecule is to successfully circularise it must be long enough to bend into the full circle with the correct number of bases which puts the ends in the correct rotation for bonding to occur. But you've probably never observed the difference between the 'axial' stiffness and 'torsional' stiffness of the molecule. 

Those are just a few random and unconnected thoughts about how complex the world is, and how, because of the totality of possible knowledge out there, every single one of us in an amateur when it comes to most things. All of those statements above pertain to true realities in the external world, and I don’t doubt that you could find evidence to demonstrate their validity. But those verified facts are the result of years of hard work from experts in their fields (and of course their great many progenitors too). Most of the people speaking the loudest on Mount Stupid would do well to climb on down, master the subjects on which they pontificate, and come back with better ideas, more humility, and much more respect for the complexity of the subjects on which they think they have informed opinions.

What If Price Robots Could Read Our Mind?

 

Let me start by planting a scenario in your head. Jack and Jill go to the supermarket an hour apart, and they see some pineapples for sale for £1 each. Jack really loves pineapples and would willingly pay £2 for each one. Jill likes pineapples but would only pay £1.30 for each one. Both Jack and Jill each buy three pineapples, and the supermarket takes in £6 of sales. If there was a magic price-setting robot that could adjust the price of pineapples to exactly the most that each customer would willingly pay, then it would charge Jack £6 for three pineapples, and Jill £3.90, meaning supermarket sales of £9.90 rather than £6. In the real world, the supermarket doesn't know in advance what Jack and Jill will each pay, so they both get charged £1 per pineapple, even though they'd both willingly pay more.

Now picture a new scene: this time it’s the year 2045, and the price system is structured rather differently. Whereas once upon a time we would all expect to pay the same price for a pineapple on a supermarket shelf, or a music album on Amazon’s website, these days, in the year 2045, the basis for what individuals are charged for all goods and services is based on their own past consumer habits. In other words, just as the products Amazon shows us in the suggestion bar are based on past consumption, prices too may be dynamically adjusted based on how much we are thought to value something.

The current price system is built on an imperfect approximation of a weighted average of revealed preferences in society. But it does mean that we all get different value for different things. This is revealed in the prices we are willing to pay, and the levels of consumer surpluses enjoyed. That’s why a healthy economy caters for Tom’s love of Star Wars, Dick’s love of model railways and Harry’s love of snooker. Each may hate the other person’s favourite thing, but prices account for all the information signals, as individuals look to maximise their own utility, and are a best approximation of how much to charge for something.

The downside of the price system for suppliers is that there is an awful lot of consumer surplus out there (the difference between the price you’d pay and the actual price), which means prices do not accurately reflect individual demand curves. This may possibly change in the age of the Internet and its concomitant ‘big data’ programs, algorithmically designed to track our every move, purchase, taste and interest. An algorithm that can have a much better idea about our demand curves can tailor bespoke prices for individuals. This may mean that a Star Wars retailer would offer their merchandise to sci-fi geek Andy for a higher price than it would Harry the Star Wars-hating snooker fan. In fact, this is happening already is some areas of retail. There are data mining devices that can evaluate your desire for a holiday (if you’ve visited the page multiple times in a day for example) and adjust its prices accordingly.

While this will probably never be an exact science, as individual utility gathering will be difficult to determine with precision, I can well imagine a time in the future when the majority of prices are much more closely aligned to what people are willing to pay. And while this will benefit suppliers, it will no doubt eat into our consumer surpluses, and therefore reduce the amount of value created in society - that is, unless a very adaptive human psychology can keep us one step ahead of the game.

The 'Evil' Priming Of Greta Thunberg

 

In a rare moment of emotional masochism, I just watched the documentary I Am Greta. A popular view about Greta Thunberg - perhaps the most popular view of all - is that she's a young hero, bravely speaking up against climate injustices in the world, and that she's about to go on to be one of the most significant voices of her generation. It's a view that I think is both dangerous and reprehensible.

Don't get me wrong. Under different conditions, the story could be quite a powerful one. Schoolgirl galvanises millions of people to form an allegiance in fighting one of the world's biggest problems, and even the politicians stand up and laud her. If it was for a cause worth fighting for, with an agenda based on reason and good arguments, we could all stand up and applaud, possibly even gush with admiration at such a seminal moment for a teenage champion and underdog.

But we can't, and we shouldn't, because what is happening with the cult of Greta is bad and perverse (for further reading on this, see here and here). In fact, watching what's happening to her, and observing how a mass delusion is leading her so far off course, engenders such a level of disgust and revulsion in me, that I actually suspect the Greta phenomenon might be tapping into something quite evil.

If that sounds too extreme, here's what I mean. There are two kinds of evil that plague societies, which for simplicity I’ll call the manifestly evil and the subtly evil. Everyone knows the manifestly evil – it’s the evil that upon reflection nobody has any trouble identifying as evil. Examples of which would be political agendas behind Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge and modern day North Korea. But there is another kind of evil that goes unnoticed and unchallenged by most of the masses - the subtle evil of bad things purported to be good things. I believe that the radical left’s extreme economic policies, and the climate change alarmism of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion fall under this category - they are abjectly dehumanising entities.  

Now there’s no question that in terms of intentions and moral response, the manifestly evil acts are a lot worse than the subtly evil ones. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Hitler is an all round more repugnant human being than John McDonnell, Paul Mason, Elizabeth Warren, George Monbiot and Naomi Klein (although two caveats: 1: the ideologies they espouse can very quickly turn into manifestly evil regimes - it's only a matter of scale; and 2: under the wrong conditions most people are capable of far more evil than they would wish to acknowledge).

Regarding the profiling of Greta Thunberg - I want to be clear here: it’s not manifestly evil that a group of unbalanced extremists are politically grooming a scared, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive young girl with Asperger’s to be the poster-girl for their cult of delusion. But it may be subtly evil to exploit a vulnerable teenager in this way. It may not contain murder or torture or overt cruelty, but it contains many of the defects associated with moral wrongness, like manipulation, grooming, falsehood, delusion, scaremongering, civil disobedience, narrow tribal agendas and the hugely damaging ‘unseen’ effects of only looking at costs (and ignoring benefits) and trying to demand over-simplistic solutions to extremely complex problems. If not manifestly evil, the cult of Greta is plagued with manipulations, falsehoods and delusions that clear the ground for greater evil to manifest itself, while at the same time damaging a vulnerable child with paranoia and brainwashing.

Something that really strikes home about the past couple of generations is how they unashamedly lack gratitude for the monumental human achievements of which they are beneficiaries, and how so immeasurably better off we are compared with our ancestors. People in the Western world live in the most privileged time of any humans who have ever lived, yet they go around bemoaning the fact that their world is so utterly terrible. Anyone who goes about their business with almost existential ingratitude is barely awake, in my view, and is quite unbalanced and deluded. 

There is, to my mind, a subtle evil about that kind of mentality when it is used to scare the youth of today into an intense lack of gratitude, an entitled arrogance, and an abject failure to apply a proper balanced perspective to the world. Given the harm that such brainwashing has done to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people over the last 150 years, don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea that there might be something a little evil about the conditions that created the cult of Greta!

The Dubious 'What Has The EU Ever Done For Us?' Meme

 

For obvious reasons, this meme above has been doing the rounds recently - purporting to offer a Monty Python-esque rhetorical look at how we've benefitted so greatly from being in the EU. It's a remarkable creation, because pretty much none of the proclamations on the list actually do offer a net benefit to our being in the EU, and the few that do point towards being benefits that would require a lot more unpacking before a robust conclusion is reached, making the list almost entirely superfluous.

To show why, I've grouped them into my perceived categories of error, and highlighted them in the following way:

Category 1 Yellow - Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy: in these cases: Since Y (outcome) followed event X (the formation of the EU), Y must have been caused by X. It almost certainly would have happened anyway, especially with the technological advances we’ve made.

Category 2 Red  - Irrelevant, this is one for markets to solve in accordance with their own domestic political legislation, not the EU.

Category 3 Blue - Not a benefit at all because it’s a bad policy, or at the very least one that falls under number Category 1, and probably would have been introduced domestically if good.

Category 4 Green - Too vague to be meaningful, and/or no attempt to justify net benefits in a cost-benefit analysis to determine which aspects of the policy are good and which are not.  

(Some have two colours where both apply)

The ones un-highlighted, I've left for comment – they are:

• The right to work in the EU

My comment: Sorry, no, that’s slippery. You can’t create something like the EU, tell us we have a right to work in it, and then claim it as a benefit. People should have the right to work wherever they want

• 3 million jobs

My comment: No, this fails to understand the basics of economics. Jobs are a cost, not a benefit. Plus if you create the EU and it's a net bad institution, then the jobs are providing less value than if the workers would doing more productive things. The opportunity cost of EU jobs is probably through the roof, like it is with green jobs.

• Single market, with no export charges or red tape

My comment: Indeed, but the whole world should be a single market with no export changes and as little bureaucracy as possible.

Final comment: I think the best things about the EU involve connectivity and collaboration for the mutual benefit of EU citizens – things like mutually established healthcare across Europe, visa-free travel across Europe, co-operation on counter terrorism intelligence, the European arrest warrant, and investment and collaboration in science – where we make ourselves stronger by working together and cooperating for shared progress. 

Alas, most of the so-called benefits listed on the viral document are embarrassingly weak - and the creator needs to think a bit harder.

 

A Covid-19 Armchair Summary

The responses to Covid-19 from various subsections of society have been fairly predictably representative of society as a whole. If the whole UK population was represented by 100 people, then the reaction to Covid-19 would read something like this (feel free to suggest a more accurate breakdown – this is only a rough guess):

-  8 people are so terrified of Covid-19 that they have been conditioned to think that avoiding Covid-19 is the most important thing in the universe.

-  45 people are following most or all of the rules with alacrity, taking one or two reasonable risks here and there.

-  45 people are highly sceptical about the responses to Covid-19 and believe the decimation of our economy and well-being has been a bad error, but they are reluctantly following most of the rules.

-  2 people are so paranoid and sceptical about Covid-19 that they think it’s little more than a global conspiracy to control us like a Dystopian nightmare.   

As is usually the case, not being a man of extremes, if one person’s mind could be represented as a weighted average of those views, I would probably have sympathy with him. One thing we should all agree on is that in a world full of trade-offs, the Covid-19 situation is a highly complex nexus of considerations, with no easy answers.

One thing seems fairly non-contentious, though: if the NHS had significantly more capacity (that is, if the people likely to need the NHS if they caught Covid-19 chose to risk catching Covid-19 by living a more purposeful, active life), then within reason, with the use of PPE, and in conjunction with some obviously sensible restrictions prohibiting major crowds, the majority of people could have lived and worked according to their own risk calculi, and most of the catastrophic damage to jobs, businesses, the economy, human well-being and relationships could have been avoided. That's a very complex and wordy argument to lay out in full, but I feel fairly sure it's largely true. The NHS workers have done a fantastic job with the odds stacked against them, but through no fault of their own they don’t have the funds, capacity or resources to cope with the kind of scenario I laid out above.

Given the foregoing, I’m also quite sceptical about the wisdom of lockdowns – not just because of the obvious damage they will do to society (and especially in the longer term), but also because it’s possible that the pre-lockdown activity spreads the virus more prominently as people take more risks and socialise more and take greater risks knowing they are soon going to be in lockdown. Then again, there have been some ridiculous contraventions of the law (and general wisdom) with large scale gatherings, without which the situation probably would have been much less severe. These fools make lockdowns much more likely to be imposed on the rest of us.

Perhaps to be the kind of society that definitely doesn’t need a lockdown, we would need a human system that’s capable of assenting to a complex top-down Covid-19 directive that significantly helps stop the spread, but one that’s also capable of facilitating complex bottom-up local incentives connected to social and familial needs, relationships, jobs, businesses and human well-being - and it’s clear we don’t have anything very close to that optimal balance (again, because it’s a very hard balance to strike).

It’s also impossible for any individual mind to ingest the full range of costs of Covid-19, and of associative government policies, because it’s just too much information to comprehend. The lost income, the thwarted behaviour, the cessation of activities that can’t be done online, the social declension, and the effects on well-being and mental health are too multifarious to be absorbed by a single brain - so it’s likely that in making policies to protect us from Covid, politicians and health experts are overestimating the benefits of these policies and underestimating the costs. 

Again, through no real fault of our own, what we also certainly don't have is the sophisticated central intelligence to deal with the fact that Covid-19 poses different threats to different people, and the fact that its existence means very different things across society, as people juggle all kinds of priorities and decision-making. And it should be acknowledged too that not all the economic damage is caused by government-mandated lockdowns - there are many workers and consumers who have chosen to stay at home more and not risk much exposure to infection.

I'm sorry to disappoint any readers who may expect more, but I don't have any grand-slam wisdom about Covid-19 that can act as a panacea against the perceived wisdom of the so-called experts. Something as epistemologically intractable as Covid-19 just makes me inclined towards Ecclesiastes 9:17, which says that "The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of a ruler of fools."

I do, however, think it is remarkable and alarming how so many people have pushed the narrative that all that really matters these days is avoiding Covid-19, and that no other goals are worth considering if they don't wholly espouse the absolutist position of Covid-avoidance. It's also outrageous to me that our political elite has made virtually all of its decisions without even a flicker of a justification for why these decisions are better than the alternatives. They have acted all the way through as though the alternative consideration doesn't even need an acknowledgement, let alone an argument as to why an alternative model is a preferred one.

Covid-19 is serious, but for most people, the avoidance of it is not the most important thing above all else - we just don't have the central intelligence to facilitate those complex human needs and preferences. And nor will it turn out to have been worth pursuing Covid-19 avoidance at all other costs. I have little doubt that that will turn out to be right, although I have somewhat more doubt than anyone or any group really has enough wisdom and foresight to have got us through the crisis very much better. So I think we should adopt a humble, forgiving spirit of pulling together, and encourage each other with kindness and grace wherever possible.

Writer's Update: Preparing For A New Perspective

Having enjoyed the time-out in 2020 for my awesome wedding, fabulous honeymoon and below average DIY projects, I’m back to editing the books. Focusing on just one book has been helpful. It’s not as much fun, as I love the variety of multiple forays, but present James thinks future James will be glad I was more singularly focused.

Recently, my wonderful wife gave me some sage advice regarding my writing (this is especially pertinent for writers of non-fiction). She said: "Prioritise the book that only you could write". Yes, how right she is. It's great advice for all writers, so we can protect our time and allocate those precious writing hours to the projects that we were born to write. This gentle nudge brought me back to a particular project I'd been dabbling in for years, about God's Genius. Although I'd had lots of fun writing about all kinds of subjects - because let me tell you, there are few things more liberating than the luxury of knowing you're free to write about absolutely anything you like, and that there are no artificial constraints on you - I figured that it was unlikely that anyone else would be writing exactly the kind of book I'm writing about God and Genius, so that was where I should return and focus for now. It's going well.

One of the perpetual joys about the Christian journey is that a relationship with God is forever invigorating the mind with fresh and exciting perspectives. In fact, one has about the same inevitability of discovering profound new truths every day as a man walking on a beach has of finding new grains of sand. There are so many conduits through which God can speak to us; through prayer and scripture, through direct revelation, through friendships and relationships, though our own inner thoughts and reasoning, through our life experiences, and through the multitude of great writers out there, that it's almost impossible for a devoted heart and a dedicated mind to fail to find new treasures every day.

If you want some good Christian philosophy, Kierkegaard is one of my favourite Christian thinkers – a rare brilliance not seen in many writers. Pascal had it in patches, so did Dante, and Milton, and Blake. Shakespeare had shadows of it in another, different, sense, as did Proust, and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky had it in a different way, still. But at his best, Kierkegaard takes us into some deep theological contemplations that are unequalled in any writer I've read. Yes, sure, Kierkegaard is flawed (aren’t we all?), with some inadequate expositions (especially around subjectivity's relationship with truth and morality), but in writings like Works Of Love, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or and Sickness Unto Death he tapped into a way of thinking that has, in my view, rarely been surpassed. 

Of course, in a fallen world, the flaws and the genius have an inextricable entangling - you can't have the latter without the former. For as Blake shows wonderfully in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for the genius, his flaws are very much a part of the brilliance, acting as a counterpoise. What is it he says: improvement makes the straight roads, but the crooked roads are roads of Genius – which, even in itself is a conflicting expression of brilliance and flaw. 

Finally, here's a piece of advice to end with. In life, I'd say there are only three necessary things we should be doing:

1) The things we are compelled to do.

2) The things we have to do.

3) The things we do for fulfilment.

The things we are compelled to do are things related to morality and ethics, like being good citizens and doing what is right. The things we have to do are things related to survival and proprietary, like eating, drinking and wearing clothes. And the things we do for fulfilment are things like being creative, learning, building relationships, distilling pleasure and finding purpose. Alas, so many people do things for reasons other than those three. They do things to court cheap status, or to follow a trend, or to beef up their public persona, or to appear more intelligent than they are. Spend your time doing the necessary things and not the expedient things and you'll give yourself the best chance of a blessed and authentic life.

Three Dimensional Left & Right Wing Politics

I've written before about a widespread misunderstanding of the complexity of left and right wing positions (like here). Today I want to try to visualise those complexities with a 3D graph representation. When people talk about left and right wing, they really shouldn't be making their statements without defining the type of left and right they mean, because there are (at least) three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right.

Consequently, I think a more accurate measurement of socio-political society would be a 3D graph like the one I have pasted below, with the Z axis determining a place on the spectrum of collectivism (top) vs. individualism (bottom), the Y axis determining a place on the spectrum of economic left and right wing, and the X axis determining a place on the spectrum of social left and right wing too.

As you can see, I've put a red dot to determine where I would stand, generally speaking: economically right wing (because markets are the primary driver of prosperity), individualist (because liberty and freedom are the primary drivers of progression), and socially left wing (because I believe in togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable).

(It's only supposed to be an illustrative model - it's obviously not a fine-detail representation).

Now even if you can get people that far so they think about different types of left and right wing, there's something interesting that plays out in people's perception of left and right wing politics - something I began to think about a bit in a little more depth after I heard Douglas Murray introduce the proposition (although Douglas Murray's consideration was fairly general as he didn't break down the categories of left and wing). The proposition is this. If you start from a fairly moderate position on the social left-to-right spectrum - say somewhere perceived as near the middle - you find that the shift to the extreme right (a fascist dictatorship) is a shorter journey than the shift to the extreme left (a communist dictatorship). It looks something this:

Social left and right spectrum:

Far Left -------------------------------------------------Moderate-------Far Right

In other words, once you veer away from the moderate position to the right, there aren't many perceived steps to take before you fall foul of a dangerous, totalitarian collectivist mentality. If you get brainwashed into Islamic fundamentalism or extreme ethno-centric nationalism and xenophobia, the walk from relatively intolerant moderate to a 'send all immigrants home' or 'Death to all kafirs' mentality isn't that far, because once you tap into a hateful collectivist mentality you are already in touching distance of the kind of extremism that dehumanises people and sends masses to their grave.

But things aren't the same with the walk to the far left: the journey is much slower, and much more Machiavellian. It ends with the gulag, but there are many more steps in between, because shifts to the left disguise their maladies in a more insidious way. They might start with virtue signalling, like endorsing redistributionist policies, bogus missions to save the planet, safe spaces and extremist rallies promoting what has recently been coined 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture', and end up mirroring the dystopian nightmares portended by Orwell, Huxley, Burgess and Bradbury - but they will take more time to be found out than those steps to the right.

A similar thing is true with the economic spectrum of left and right, it looks similar, as does the collectivist-individual spectrum, but perhaps more like this:

Economic left and right spectrum:

Far Left-----------------------------Moderate------------Far Right

Here the shift to the right involves mostly positive things like a freer market, more liberty, greater freedom of ideas, but you only have to champion those qualities a bit more passionately than the moderates and you're soon accused of being a heartless capitalist with no concern for the poor and needy. This is a misconception, of course - for as anyone well versed in economics will know, a freer market, more liberty and greater freedom of ideas are the primary qualities that benefit the poor and needy - they are the answers to most of the problems the economic left are trying to solve.

On the other side, the creep leftwards, if unchecked, will end up with the old Soviet Union or the modern day Venezuela, but along the way it will present itself as a benign, good-intentioned striving towards social justice and the narrowing of the so-called 'unfair inequality' gap. Like a Trojan-horse, the collectivist, authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far left ideologies more easily creep into public discourse than the authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far right ideologies. We appear to have a more acute radar to the dangers of extreme right wing politics, which seems to mean undue suspicion of right wing economic sentiments, which are really a synonym for increased growth, progression and a higher standard of living for all.

And with the collectivists versus the individualists, we find that collectivists on the social left and the right want to demarcate everyone into groups as the primary identifier and pit one group against each other through tribal factions based on power and class, and deny that competence and intelligence and hard work and creativity play the primary role in successes. Moreover, what's often unnoticed is that it's very difficult to align yourself with a group (race, ethnicity, political, regional, national) and not want to be in conflict with others, because tribalism is built on a 'them vs. us' mentality, and is hundreds of thousands of years old in our evolutionary legacy. And as those who've read it will know, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, perhaps better than any book, explores how the totalitarianisms of both the left and the right are cut from the same cloth of impulse.

Luxury Government

 

You may have heard of a phenomenon called Wagner's Law (which I've blogged about before), which observes that with increasing economic growth we generally see a rise in state expenditure. Or to put it another way, the richer a country gets, the more it can afford to splash out on luxuries like government, and state-funded projects our forebears could have scarcely afforded.

What's driving Wagner's Law is that capitalism has made people rich enough to be able to afford more government and more public services - and with a more complex, more diverse range of competing forces, we can afford more state regulation and better public services, as long as they are not inefficient and not best left to consumer choice.

But there is also the phenomenon called Gammon's Law (after Max Gammon), which follows a predictable pattern whereby increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production, where the more resources a system swallows up, the less efficient it becomes in terms of production per unit of investment. Pretty much any big centralised institution falls foul of this - schools, health, taxation, the EU, the church - when it gets so big it passes through the efficiencies of economies of scale and gets so inflated that it begins to suffers from diseconomies of scale (see also the Dunbar number), and will show a pattern whereby increased input produces decrease quality of output.

What muddies the waters even further is that there is much overlap between the social, political and economic landscapes, especially regarding human motivations. Humans are incentivised by a complex range of aspirations; material well-being, safety, self-preservation, community, purpose, status and tribal affiliation. So it's not always easy to say that economic freedom is an exclusively 'right wing' trait and redistribution is an exclusively 'left wing' trait, because all humans are motivated by a complex interaction between those and the other factors.

Moreover, we all have stronger ties in serving our closer family, and weaker ties with the wider community, and it is inevitable that human motivations, in large part, begin locally and extend outwards as we have more to spare. That's why, even in a country that sees continual economic growth and raised living standards, more parochial issues related to social standing, status and self-preservation can make people sound as they have missed some of the story. Similarly, those who proclaim that everything is ok and that the market and science can take care of all our problems are also living outside of truth.

Although bottom up driving forces are usually superior to top down central planning, they are not always, because local iterations in bottom up dynamics are not often sufficiently collectively ordered enough to deal with large scale problems or major changes in the status quo (like a war, a pandemic or a big natural disaster). However badly we may think the government has handled the problems created by Covid, there would have been many more problems and deaths if society tried to manage purely by the invisible hand of the market.

On the other hand, despite the raving left's dumb lament that Covid has handed more power to the capitalists, it has been evident that when people have had to live in restrictive times, it has taken businesses with enough scale and size to be able to quickly adapt to the changing needs and demands of the population (supermarkets, Amazon, Royal Mail, tech companies). The government has done a lot of harm to small business by forcing them to close while the big players hoover up the custom, but it takes big players with a capacious business model and prodigious infrastructure to be able to service a nation in crisis.

That's why in previous writings I have been keen to point out that the motivational factors in the left and right wing bifurcations extend far beyond principles of economics - they extend to qualities like motivations for togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable - and neither the comprehensive free market approach of the economic right nor the comprehensive socialist approach of the economic left satisfies the full gamut of human needs and motivations.

Once people rightly frame left and right wing into the three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right, they will begin to learn that the contributions of right and wing mentalities are both necessary to strike the right kind of balance in a thriving society. As always, we'll need the right balance of freedom and restriction, individualism and collectivism, risk and safety, self-determination and redistribution - you name it, there'll be a balance to be struck.

I suppose the socialists will never be very keen on markets, because they are primed to only see the concentrated faults and miss the more thinly spread benefits. And I suppose free marketers will always have a bit of a blind spot towards the community and solicitous-based nature of socialism because they rightly abhor the economic illiteracy and crass hypocrisy that underlies it. 

Is God 'Pulling' The Universe With His Genius?

Readers familiar with this blog are probably familiar with the genius Kurt Gödel, and his incompleteness theorem, which shows that any finite system of axioms is insufficient for proving every result in mathematics, and that any formally mechanised system in which a categorical set of axioms exists cannot be captured in one grand slam rationale without leaving a brute residue of incompleteness.

I mentioned this because I saw an interesting quote from Kurt Gödel that I hadn't seen before:

“I believe that mechanism in biology is a prejudice of our time which will be disproved. In this case, one disproof, in my opinion, will consist in a mathematical theorem to the effect that the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

This caught my attention because it got me wondering if that's right in a similar way to how my biased random walk theory might be right. While Gödel isn't denying evolution happened, he seems to be friendly to a kind of Intelligent Design: that the evolution of intelligent life forms in the time since the big bang is not mathematically likely unless one assumes a vanishingly unlikely set of initial conditions with a cosmic mathematician as the source of it.

That is to say, in a 14 billion years old universe, biologists tell us that random genetic mutations plus natural selection explains the life we observe. So, the consideration taps into algorithmic information theory (like the notion of Kolmogorov complexity) and tools from complexity theory to study if the biologists’ explanation is consistent with the 14 billion year old age of the universe - and in terms of the timeframe a computational problem like biological life requires - whether this problem possibly even requires exponential time. If a problem requires exponential time, then any algorithm for the problem requires at least (roughly) 2^n time units where n is the number of bits describing the initial conditions of the problem.

So if Gödel is right, then this is the biased random walk I've been writing about for all those years, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe. If evolution requires an exponential amount of time to achieve the complexity of life we see after a few billion years of space expansion, then it required far more time than the ordinary polynomial time with which physics measures the cosmic story.

I'm quite a visual thinker, and I keep picturing an idea of the cosmos being pulled rather than being pushed, and that perhaps that's true of everything significant about Christianity. If we consider that biased random walk, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe - you could say the universe is being pulled by the mathematical structure that exists in the configurational search space of the universe's mechanisms, and was already implicit in God's creative blueprint.

In addition, now consider the narrative structure in the Old and New Testaments. We can't think of the Old Testament except through the lens of how it culminates in the New Testament. In fact, by Genesis 3:15 we have already seen the whole summary of the story, from creation, to the fall, to salvation through Christ. Rather than the Old Testament pushing towards the New Testament - as Christ is the Creator of the universe, then the New Testament superseding the Old is not like a development towards improvement, it is more akin to the notion that the improved state is already implicit in God's mind, because it is older than creation. Hence the New Testament is not just pulling the Old Testament forward - it is, in a sense, also pulling everything that follows it forward to the culmination of God's grand plan. To that end, God's created word has the same model as God's created universe. 

The foundation of my hypothesis can be found here:

The Mathematical Bias Theory Redux: Why There Probably ‘IS’ a God – in 20 Steps