No civilised person is supposed to make bonfires of books. ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in the century before Nazism. Burning books is a sacrilegious act, and the taboo against it particularly binds writers. So what was I doing in a Somerset field lighting a match under the 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica?
ReadJohn Gray has given us a lot to think about, and has done so provocatively and eloquently. But The Silence of Animals suggests he needs to push his own thinking too. The work of demolition is done and there is little to be gained from continuing to swing the wrecking ball over the ruins. Gray needs to say more about how civilised westerners should live, at least as individuals if not as a society, once we have given up the most egregious myths and illusions of western civilisation.
ReadWe seem to have bought into a computational, ledger-based model of health which breaks everything down into its constituent parts and counts what goes in and out. Look at the reports I’ve highlighted and the key concepts are “BMI”, “calories” and “units of alcohol”, all things that can be measured and then used to create rulers with which to measure us. Our bodies, however, are more complicated than that. They are systems in which all the different elements work together. As soon as you try to isolate one, you lose the bigger picture and can easily be led astray.
ReadIf men are from Mars and women are from Venus, that would explain why philosophy so often reads like Martian. Both in the UK and the US, women account for only around a fifth of philosophers in the academy, fewer than in most comparable disciplines. Does this suggest there is something essentially masculine about philosophy, that cold, hard logic comes much more naturally to the less touchy-feely sex?
ReadTaleb overstates his case, committing errors he attributes to others. His overconfidence, ironically, makes his arguments more fragile to refutation than they needed to be. This is a shame, because his book is full of important warnings and insights.
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