On Cultural Relativism and some books I've recently read

A grab bag of recent thoughts

My break managed to last only three weeks, and in a few days I’ll be leaving for Beijing, where I’ll be for six days before spending a few days in Seoul, then returning home. It’s a quick trip, given the distance, but I’m genuinely looking forward to it, despite two sixteen hour flights.

That I don’t mind the long flights to and from Seoul is reflective of why I keep returning to Asia—I know I won’t be stuck on a plane full of loud, inconsiderate strangers, as Koreans, like their broader culture, are generally respectful when traveling.

I canceled my last trip for personal reasons, but I also wasn’t particularly looking forward to spending time in Mumbai, because I kind of knew what I would be dealing with, which is a lot more confusion, incompetence, and grime than in Korea and China, and after three years of continual travel I’m not currently in the mood for that.

I am still committed to seeing all of the world, and will be making some of those harder trips going forward, because I always learn a lot during them, and no trip is ever all bad, but there are some cultures I respect and prefer more, and most of those are in Asia and Europe, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Why Asia has been so much more successful in the last fifty years than Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America is one of those questions that academics have tussled over for decades, but the culture of respect, of a personal responsibility to the greater good, and the consequent self regulation of behavior, has certainly played a role. Cultures matter, more than policy, which in my opinion is also downstream of culture.

When I went to Senegal, I took a direct flight from JFK on the national airline, and although it was only eight hours, it absolutely sucked. Nobody cared about anything, and so packages spilled into the aisles, people blasted music, wrappers and trash were tossed onto the floor, and the bathrooms, within an hour, were a disgusting close to unusable mess. I had a similar experience flying to Kampala. I’m only singling out Africa, because of the length of the flights. Traveling to Latin America, and domestic flights in the US, can feel the same way.

I'm a culturalist in that I believe the behavior of most residents of a place is largely shaped by the culture in which they are raised. This culture defines them both on a surface level—how they act in daily life—and on a deeper level, shaping their fundamental views on the purpose of living.

These are not static, deterministic traits because culture is always changing. How it changes is my current obsession, but that is for another essay. Fifty years ago, not many people would have characterized Korean or Singaporean culture as clean, efficient, and competent, and so I don’t believe Africa’s future is one of assured disappointment, but success will require large cultural changes, many of which will feel like a renunciation of the past and all that it means to them, which will result in substantial non-economic losses that they might not consider worth it. But that is their own decision to make, not mine or that of the broader international community.

The result of all of this is that for the next six months, I will be focusing on Asia and Europe (especially Central Asia), starting with Beijing this Friday the 14th until Thursday the 20th, and then Seoul until the 24th. As usual, if you want to walk with me in either place, please send me a message or leave a comment.

Also on Friday the 21st, I will be hosting an evening at the Woodstock Vinyl Bar in the Sillim-ro neighborhood of Seoul. All are welcome, especially polite music nerds. If you wish to attend, please let me know ahead of time by email or in the comments. I need to tell the owner how many guests to expect.

Things I’ve been reading

Six months ago I asked reader for questions, and while the most common request boiled down to versions of, “Who are you really?”, something I tried to answer soon after (I owe a part 2, sorry), the second most frequent question was what did I read, or listen to when walking.

I do read a lot, both when traveling and when walking via audio-books, and yes, I believe audio-books count as reading, especially of less dense material¹. I also watch a little TV, particularly on long flights, but the sheer volume of content available today is overwhelming. Rather than attempt to keep up, I’ve largely stopped watching, as little of it has left a lasting impression. It’s a firehose of mediocrity, and I’ve decided it isn’t worth drinking from.

So, here are the best books I’ve read in the last few months, in no particular order:

The Maniac (Benjamín Labatut)

The author lists this as fiction, although it’s firmly based in real events, mostly around the life of John von Neumann and uses it to explore the issue of science versus the humanities, or the contrast between rationality and a broader, more organic, less systematic epistemology, which he uses to consider AI, madness, and fame.

He aims high, and manages to pull it off, while also being very entertaining. It is an excellent book and I highly recommend it. While reading it I found myself going down a lot of tangential paths, reading more deeply about the game of Go, early computing, social life in turn of the century Budapest, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the last of which led me to the next book.

I also read his earlier book, When We Cease to Understand the World, which is good but not as accomplished as The Maniac.

Incompleteness (Rebecca Goldstein)

I was a math undergraduate major, which led me to get a PhD in theoretical physics, so I’ve worked through the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, although forty years ago, when I didn’t appreciate the philosophical implications.

This book does an admirable job of both explaining the math, the historical story, while also correcting the misconception that have resulted from Gödel’s work (and his close friend Einstein’s relativity theory) that he believed there is no capital t Truth, and science, along with religion, are discoveries reflecting the workings of the human mind, rather than being partial glimpses of a larger reality.

Both Gödel and Einstein saw their work as arguments for the exact opposite. They believed in a real external world that had rules, which we puny humans might eventually get close to understanding, but which we would never fully comprehend because of our own built in limitations.

In that sense they had more in common with theologians who understand humility, rather than with the majority of rationalist who sight them as inspirations.

Parts require a college level understanding of Calculus, but the first and last thirds don’t, and they are its strength. The writing could be clearer, but that’s a minor issue and overall the book is worth reading if you are interested in the philosophy of science.

China in Ten Words (Yu Hua)

Over a year ago I decided to read a few novels from the countries I was planning on walking. I did my best, but after a few months I mostly dropped it, because I was having trouble finding fiction that, to be blunt, didn’t suck. Most of the recent works I found were polemics produced by elites now living in Paris, NYC, or London who had fled their country decades ago, and wrote about their culture as some exotic, magical thing. Those works felt out of touch with what I ended up finding when I did go to the cities they were set in.

Still, I do try out a few books before each trip, and last week I found Yu Hua and now I’m now a big fan. I’ve read three of his books (they are all good), but I’m suggesting China in Ten Words because it’s the most informative. It’s listed as non-fiction since it ends up effectively being a memoir of his childhood during the Cultural Revolution in a rural town, but given how absurd that period was, it reads like fiction.

Much of it is about growing up under basically five years of anarchy, complete with a lot of trauma, violence, and death. Yet it doesn’t lapse into an “Oh, woe is me” feel, even though that would be justified. Instead, this is his normal, and he and his friends are children doing silly childlike things and trying to make the best of it, because that is what people do, including finding lots of humor even in places where it seemingly shouldn’t exist. It is, despite the serious subject, a funny book—assuming you appreciate dry, absurd humor.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs (Andrew Hickey)

I sometimes listen to music and podcasts when walking, especially when home, and this podcast is something special. It’s entirely made by one very obsessive, eccentric music fan, and while it overflows with pedantry, it is also very well done, entertaining, and insightful.

So far there are close to two hundred episodes, some stretching to over two hours, and while I’ve only listened to about thirty of them, I’ve learned about things I’ve never expected to, which have sent me off on intellectual tangents about the British Mod movement, the psychedelic wave of the 60s, including the Harvard research, and various other social phenomena.

This isn’t for everyone, since his style can be off-putting, so I suggest starting by finding an episode about a song or band you already know and like, and see if it works for you. I did that with the Beatles, all twelve hours or so about them, which was fascinating, but also reinforced my belief that records are one off works that can’t be reproduced live, and to the degree they can, it makes little difference if a song recorded by the Beatles is played by the actual group, rather than let’s say a tribute band, because both are approximations that will never match the studio work. Similarly, live performances are entirely different beasts from singles and albums, which is perhaps the only thing I agree with the Grateful Dead about.

Napoleon (Adam Zamoyski)

After watching the remarkably boring and confused, Napoleon movie on a flight I realized I didn’t know much about him and so I read this book which, while long, was a lot more interesting than I expected because Napoleon, regardless of all else, read widely, including ancient philosophy, and decided he was going to be a philosopher king and designed a new society, built by him, his technocratic advisors, and his family.

He truly believed he was playing a real version of SimCulture and I find that especially fascinating because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how cultures change, and my general view is that they are built from the top down, by elites, either explicitly like Napoleon and the CCP in China, or implicitly, without such a direct plan, but still with a desire to mold, shape, and reform society.

I’ve written before about James C Scott, and I thought of including in this list his book Weapons of the Weak, which argues that the masses have a large say in how society gets shaped, mostly in less obvious ways that end up pushing the elites into doing something, but the changes still almost always end up coming from the top down.

I didn’t include it because I didn’t like it as much as his Seeing Like a State, and because I think A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is actually a better, and far more entertaining, example of how cultural forces do bubble up from the bottom, forcing the hand of elites to either get on board or suffer the consequences.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution…. (Joseph Henrich)

I’m mixed on this book. It is a tad too socio-biological and reductive for me, but it provides a nice overview of what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: how culture is shaped and why.

I’ve written before on how central culture is to what it means to be human, noting how different we are from every other species, since we have the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of lives, and which we end up living is largely about what group we are born into.

The author refines that by noting the obvious but essential point that what allows us to do this is not our brute intelligence, but its focus on the desire to learn from others. We are unique creatures, using culture as our survival tool. We are social while also having a fair degree of individuality (relative to other social animals like insects), and we leverage both to acquire a collective intelligence that far surpasses any other species. That is how we survive as a species, with the sum of what we know growing ever larger, and hopefully more exact.

That also means people who are raised in different cultures can be very different, at a deep level. When I was discussing this with the philosopher Agnes Callard, she pointed me to a quote by Wittgenstein,

“The older I get the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn’t expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.”

While I don’t believe different cultures make for different species—especially given the ugly consequences that can follow from a stunted version of that view—I do believe our differences can at times be insurmountable and far greater than the well-meaning platitudes humanists want us to believe.

Sick Societies (Robert B Edgerton)

At various times in my career I’ve been accused of falling for, or at least trafficking in, the noble savage myth, which I always find a little funny because I entered college intending to major in Anthropology but was turned off by the prevalence of that myth in the field. I still am and do my best in my writings to not get lulled into romanticizing much poorer cultures and ways of life, although I do have a tendency to be pulled in that direction, as any lifelong traveler does.

That isn’t to say I’m a full-on modernist, and my most noble-savage-y belief is that we have indeed given up something as we rushed toward modernity — something hard to define and whose loss isn't without consequences. But again, I'm not some weirdo who has a fetish for poverty, which really sucks. To circle back to where I began, I’m going to China instead of India because I currently want to be around success and to try to understand exactly what it is we are giving up—mostly community—and to see if a society can have both material and spiritual wealth, or if those are mutually exclusive.

That is not what Sick Societies is about, but it is about the long history of the noble savage myth in anthropology and how it corrupted the field and how to correct it. Given that it was written in 1992, and given the articles I’ve seen in recent anthropology journals, I’m not sure the book has accomplished what it intended to.

After Virtue (Alasdair MacIntyre)

After Virtue is not a simple book. I’ve now read it a few times, and I’m still not sure I fully understand it, but it has impacted me more than any book I’ve read in the last decade.

His thesis, that our current ethical discourse is incoherent because it’s lost a foundation in a shared moral tradition (Aristotelian), can be seen in a lot of my recent writings, although in larval form. He is the opposite of a moral and cultural relativist, and I suspect he believes in a capital-t Truth, which is similar to Einstein and Gödel believing in an objective reality independent of the observer.

He is very critical of moral relativism, spending the first six chapters documenting and dismantling various philosophical movements in that direction. I will admit to being out of my depth for much of this book, which is why I keep re-reading it. Each time, I learn more.

Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

I’ll end this with something more fun, which is my favorite novel. After my daughter’s college class read Bleak House, one of my least liked Dickens novels, I bought her a copy of Great Expectations for Christmas, and then I picked it up before giving it to her and read it for probably the fifth time in my life because I got pulled into the story once again.

I like Dickens for his humor, and his minor characters, which are often over the top stereotypes, but ones that work for me because I know they’re drawn from people he met and with a little toning down I feel as if I’ve also met them.

Dickens met such a variety of people because he was a prodigious walker whose style matches mine,

“My walking is of two kinds: one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp.”²

His walking-to-learn approach, which I strongly advocate for, shows up in his writing, which is why I’m sure I am so drawn to him. Through his books I can get as close as possible to walking 19th century England.

Dickens' weakness is his lack of subtlety, which is less pronounced in Great Expectations. However, I also don’t mind his tendency to caricature because, as I’ve written before, I think most people play ‘character types’, and that was certainly no different two hundred years ago. While he might overdo it, sometimes that’s necessary to get your point across to less engaged readers. Also, it makes for some good laughs.

One last point: since re-reading Great Expectations, I’ve also been reading the stories in my daughter's other literature courses, sometimes re-reading a book I haven’t read in over forty years. I’ve gotten so much more out of them than I expected, and far more than long ago, which reinforces my view that the best time to go to college is when you are sixty, not twenty.

On that note, one truly last reading suggestion—Bartleby the Scrivener— which is great, but do make sure you have ginger snaps on hand for when you finish.

Until next week!

1. If I “listen” to a book I really like, I will purchase a hard copy to use as reference, and often re-read the physical copy.

2. Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller