Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (2014)

I knew very little about Maimonides when I started this intellectual biography - basically, only that he was somewhat akin to people like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Thomas Aquinas in that they all sought to integrate their religious faiths with Aristotelian philosophy. By the time I was finished with Maimonides, I was, to put it in technical terms, blown away by him. His intellectual audacity was breathtaking. As a type, he reminded me of Max Weber. John Leizman, a colleague at Bard, compared him to Aristotle himself. Maimonides' first major project was a codification of all of halakhah, the great, overflowing and, by design, contentious corpus of Jewish law encompassing the Mishnah and the Talmud. Maimonides aspired to put an end to the contention by codifying and, in a sense, replacing that corpus. This work - Mishneh Torah- drew extensively on Aristotelian ideas. His other great project, however, The Guide for the Perplexed, more directly addressed the challenge of integrating Torah and philosophy. However, unlike the Mishneh Torah, the Guide addressed an elite audience and concealed its radicalism, making it an esoteric text. Halbertal skillfully guides the reader through the theological and philosophical questions Maimonides wrestled with. The decisive question pertained to God's will and God's wisdom. Emphasizing the former meant that God created the world ex nihilo, intervened purposefully and repeatedly in history, etc. This fitted the traditional, and arguably self-evident, interpretation of the Bible. Contrary to it, however, Maimonides's revolutionary theology focused on the wisdom of God, which implied that the world had existed eternally, God did not intervene, God's wisdom could be found in the orderliness of nature, etc. In short, this was a nearly wholesale reinterpration of Judaism in light of Aristotle's thought. Even prophecy and personal salvation were reinterpreted as natural accomplishments. What made Maimonides's project all the more remarkable were the conditions in which he lived and worked. He and his family fled al-Andalus in the middle of the 12th century, upon the seizure of power by the relatively intolerant Almohads. Unlike many Andalusian Jews, who fled to Provence, Maimonides fled first toward the Almohad power center in the Maghrib. Eventually, they settled in Cairo. Maimonides had lost the safety and familiarity of Cordoba and had to make due as a refugee. To accomplish such a revolutionary rethinking of an entire tradition under such conditions is truly remarkable.

Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (1997)

This is a pithy, profound book. In its 130 pages, Halbertal traces the evolving nature of the "rabbinic revolution," which roughly 2000 years ago replaced the priest and prophet with the rabbi and book. In Weberian fashion he distinguishes different species of a common genus - whether canon, meaning, the hermeneutic principle of charity, Kabbalah, esotericism, etc. First came the Bible, of course; but then came the Mishnah and the Talmud, both of which were open-ended, polyphonic, and contentious - the first a collection of legal rulings, the second a discussion of them. The Talmud in particular displaced the Torah as the central text of this text-centered community. In the middle ages, philosophy and Kabbalah (mysticism) each claimed to complement the Talmud. As I was reading about these intense efforts in hermeneutics and legal reasoning, I found myself wondering about the interaction between Jewish and Christian thinking, especially after, say, 1000, when Christian efforts to revive Roman law and to integrate Christianity with Aristotelian philosophy began? Were these Christian and the similar Jewish efforts Halbertal describes merely running in parallel, or was there cross-fertilization between them? My guess would be that any influence there might have been went only one way, from the Christian to the Jewish - simply because I don't believe the dominant Christian thinkers took much interest in the tiny Jewish minority, at least not until the Reformation. But I may be wrong. In any case, this is not a question Halbertal here addresses. The focus is on the evolution of Jewish texts and text-centeredness, but there are all sorts of connections to fundamental questions of interpretation, religious evolution in general, the meeting of cultures (Judaism and Greek philosophy in the middle ages), etc. The second I finished this book, I started Halbertal's intellectual biography of Maimonides, which looks to be superb as well.....

Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart (2025)

This book came out the same day that Chris Hayes's The Sirens' Call did (see my previous post). Generally overlapping in their critical assessments of the digital revolution and even in the responses they recommend, the two books are still different enough to make them both well worth reading. While Hayes is perhaps flashier and more conversational, Carr - as in a previous book of his which I also highly recommend, The Shallows - argues more carefully and writes in sharper prose. One of the threads of Superbloom is the belief that more and more universal communication will knit ever-widening circles of humanity together. With antecedents in Enlightenment thought, this idea animated the early American sociologist Charles Cooley and, in the wake of WWII, Margaret Mead. In a section that I wish Carr had expanded a little, he shows that the same confidence lay behind the fateful lack of regulation of the internet in its 1990s infancy. In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, two key doctrines that had governed communications previously were quietly abandoned: secrecy of correspondence (the Faustian bargain we enter with Google and its ilk is that we get their services for free in exchange for allowing the content of our messages to be mined for opportunities to advertise to us) and the obligation of "broadcasters" to serve the public interest, which had been established in the original 1934 Communications Act but had already been eroded when it came to radio and cable TV in the 1970s. Interestingly, like both Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing) and Hayes in The Sirens' Call, Carr doesn't place great hope in legal or policy remedies for the damage being inflicted by digital technologies. All three emphasize individual action, which may eventually inspire collective action. On the last page of his book, Carr recommends "the taking up of positions, first as individuals and then, perhaps, together, not outside of society but at society's margin, not beyond the reach of the information flow but beyond the reach of its liquefying force." This is almost exactly what Odell means by "standing apart." And it's how I'm trying to live my life.

Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (2025)

I read this book (as well as Nicholas Carr's Superbloom, which came out on the same day - see my next entry) for the class I'm currently teaching, Media and Minds. Hayes's earlier book Twilight of the Elites (2012) had impressed me. Hayes seemed to be a creative thinker and observer, who was able to take concepts from one realm and apply them fruitfully in another (I still remember - and use - his adaptation of Robert Michels' "iron law of oligarchy" into an "iron law of meritocracy"). In Sirens' Call, Hayes again produces numerous insights into a field I thought I knew well. Here are some of the major nuggets I took from the book: - just as labor was turned into a commodity in the industrial revolution, attention is now undergoing the same process. Also in a Marxist vein, just as workers felt alienated from their labor, we now all feel alienated from ourselves. - grabbing attention (siren as in the wail of a firetruck) is easier than holding it (siren as in Odysseus's temptresses). Digital platforms try to do both, but have come to rely on the former. - the slot machine is the main model of digital addiction. - boredom didn't exist for hunter-gatherers, but has been historically conditioned, growing over time as our options have increased and as filling the hole left by boredom (and in turn regigging the hole) has become big business. - the explosion of entertainment over the last 150 years has arisen as industrial capitalism has solved the material struggle for existence. Assured of material comforts, we've lost a sense of purpose - what are we living for?I had previously focused on the suppy side - the technologies that made mass media and entertainment possible. Hayes, drawing on Keynes and others, makes a plausible case for demand-side reasons. - attentional regimes, like raising your hand when you want to speak in a classroom. In our current politics, there no longer is one. Anyone who wants can scream for attention at any time, practically in any way. Despite these considerable strengths, perhaps the book could have used another round of editing to make its argument and writing even tighter. For example, it doesn't fully support its central claim, that attention is now the world's most important resource.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Odell is widely, eclectically read and weaves her reflections on everyone from Diogenes the Cynic to David Hockney's art together with vignettes from her own life in the Bay Area. Odell is a digital artist and also an avid watcher and friend of birds and nature. Both art and nature play a big role in her reflections. She makes a thoughtful, eloquent case for "standing apart" from the attention economy - neither retreating fully, nor succumbing. Standing apart as individuals, she hopes, may prepare the way for collective standing apart and then collective action. I may try to incorporate passages from this book into my current course on Media and Minds.

Christopher Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (2024)

This is an audacious book. Beckwith claims that the Scythians 1) created the first great empire, spanning much of the central Asian steppe from the 8th century BC on, 2) pioneered a feudal structure of decentralized rule that was later copied by numerous others, including the Persians. 3) spawned the Median and then Persian Empires in the west, the Mauryans in south Asia and, most shocking to me, the earliest unified Chinese empire, the Qin 4) were monotheists and sparked the Axial Age in Eurasia's disparate civilizations. Any one of these claims would be striking on its own; together, they are nothing short of gobsmacking. Beckwith's main evidence is linguistic - for example, that words in all of these languages (which this astonishingly erudite man knows) for royal house and language are cognates (Hariya, Ariya, etc.). I can't judge the soundness of these claims, and I know Beckwith has faced criticism. I would love to know what evidence there is from the other two pillars of ancient studies - archeology and ancient DNA. Beckwith spends much more time on the impact of the Scythian Empire than on the Empire itself, about which there is perhaps little linguistic evidence. Again, I'd love to learn what archeologists and ancient DNA scholars have to say about the ostensible source of so much innovation. According to Beckwith, what probably allowed the empire to arise and expand was the mastering of horse-borne fighting, which he thinks first became possible around 900 BCE. Apparently, there's a debate about when this happened, as horse domestication occurred much earlier, around 3000 BCE. And as I understood it, the reason for the initial success of the Yamnaya/proto-Indo-Europeans in spreading was precisely their domestication of the horse and use of it for riding, which allowed them to control much larger herds of animals and thus gain wealth. Did it take 2000 years to go from riding for the sake of herding to riding for the sake of fighting? Also, though this was not of central interest to Beckwith, I was surprised by the fact that the Scythians were Indo-Europeans but originally came from the Altai mountains deep in central Asia. That is, some IEs first went east, far east, but then came back to the west.

Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (2022)

This is a superb and important book. Boys are not doing well in school. Men, especially those without college degrees, are not doing well in the labor market. These facts were known to me. What I hadn’t clearly seen was that the latter fact, in conjunction with the increased economic independence of women, has deprived many men of the sense that they have an important role to play in society. To them, it may indeed appear that “the future is female.” Reeves has a knack for presenting compelling quantitative evidence and for offering nuanced, but still clear, interpretations. His tone is sober, his judgment fair. Like Joseph Henrich (author of The WEIRDEST People in the World – about what makes Europe different), Reeves also knows how to present potentially controversial ideas in disarming ways. Thus, he makes the case that women, due to their role in bearing and nursing children, have an established role in society and even in the world. Men, on the other hand, without a necessary biological role beyond impregnating females, are more “fragile” – they have to construct their role in society. In a sense, Reeves’s argument here reminded me of the traditional view that Simone de Beauvoir skewered in her 1949 book The Second Sex. However, Reeves is no traditionalist; his claim here draws on standard evolutionary theories of differential parental investments in offspring; and – what I’m emphasizing here - his decision to cast males as “fragile” (like Henrichs to refer to Europeans as WEIRD) is rhetorically adroit. Reeves skillfully shows how this important issue of male struggles is being poorly served – like so much else – by our polarized politics. Democrats are generally unwilling to concede that gender disparities can run in both directions; Republicans are rhetorically more sympathetic to men, but offer few real solutions, instead harking back to traditional gender roles. Reeves offers concrete suggestions, such as delaying boys’ start of school by a year, getting more men into HEAL (Health, Education, Administration, Literacy) professions, and, most ambitiously, taking steps to foster a new male identity – one which ties men to their families as both equal breadwinners to their wives and as equal caretakers of their children.