toa books of the year (2021, part three)

Hi reader,

A couple more from the book of the year shortlist as we continue on with our countdown toward the 2021 winner of The Most Irrelevant Prize in World Literature.

Thinking Without a Bannister by Hannah Arendt (March)

TOA Review: not started (likely mid-to-late 2022)

Other notable TOA appearances: I was inspired by this book to comment on a 2021 news story about a "lost" hiker, and also to think about the possibilities implied by her insight into the nation-state system; I made an offhand remark in 2020 comparing this book to broccoli, given that books are brain food.

Notes: The average TOA observer would be forgiven for assuming this book would be a surefire bet to finish among my finalists. Alas, this book reveals the double-edged nature of assessing the "previously uncollected works" style - you end up giving extra credit for range, yet subtract points for the lack of a single ascending arc. I recommend reading this book the same way I read it - a chapter here, another chapter there, with plenty of time (even a calendar or two) separating the start and finish dates.

Parting thought: The challenge of power is that it cannot be checked with a majority - that is, a democracy - because the majority against the minority is itself a form of unchecked power. What checks power is power, an insight found in the root of America.

On Immunity by Eula Biss (May)

TOA Review: not started (likely early-to-mid 2022)

Notes: This book was published in 2014 but I didn't get to it until this past year, which is too bad - I wonder what I would have thought about it prior to, you know, this historic pandemic influencing any and all thoughts about the topic. The other side of the argument is that the COVID situation may have helped me enjoy the work, allowing me to relate to the somewhat meandering style Biss used to describe her exploration of immunity.

The question of immunity, whether in the pandemic context or otherwise, is always linked to each and every aspect of civilization. There might have been moments when we forgot this, perhaps in those pre-pandemic days, so I suppose in one sense a book like On Immunity is the little reminder that we once required to remember a fact we no longer forget. Those who read it in this moment of history will note that even as our minds default to the dizzying array of loose associations which enable routine behavior - thinking, conversing, even browsing the internet from our phones - the matter of viruses and vaccines are always lurking somewhere, ready to offer the necessary interruption such that our efforts in parenthood, careers, basic socializing, and more account for the role of the individual in the wider production of public health.

Parting thought: The way natural is used synonymously with good demonstrates a certain alienation we have with the natural world.

a stupid story

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned having problems condensing my thoughts on Thinking Without a Bannister, Hannah Arendt's 608-page collection, which covered a wide range of topics such as history, philosophy, and politics through selected essays, speeches, and conversation transcripts. My strategy for these tougher reviews is to focus on my personal reading experience instead of merely summarizing the work, reasoning that anyone could read it on their own to gather the same facts and insights I could otherwise list here. This inevitably leads me to focus on the things I learned from a particular read (such as the thought shared in January that we accept the last resort of war when we participate in the nation-state system). This method seems like the safest bet - if I focus on the things that caught my eye, perhaps I'm inadvertently honing in on the things other readers would find equally instructive. 

But there are cases where the passage of time allows other directions to emerge in my belated reading review process. What I'm discovering about Arendt's book is that certain passages have remained with me since I finished reading, popping up from time to time to help me better understand a given interaction or situation. It may be that the best way to review a reading experience is to write about how I changed after finishing the work. A good example came up this week when I saw a news story that reminded me of a comment from Thinking Without a Bannister. Arendt describes a story about a farmer from World War II era Russia who hid starving refugees in a space beneath his barn. This farmer liked to talk about his experience, describing the way they would eat anything, but Arendt makes her verdict clear to the reader - in her mind, the farmer's story was a stupid story because it was merely describing the behavior of starving people, and the fact of placing them in a particular time and space did nothing to change the underlying fact that this story revealed nothing about the world.

The news story that reminded me of the above example described a lost hiker who ignored phone calls from a search and rescue team (here's a link to The Guardian's brief article about the ordeal). It's probably the headline that caused it to spread across the internet - the lost hiker ignored calls because he didn't recognize the number! Oh, us damn millennials, at it again with our misguided ways! The problem should be apparent to anyone who pauses for a moment to think - how lost can someone be if they are still getting cell service? I could go on, detailing more discoveries made after I clicked into this stupid story, but I think my point is already clear - this so-called story is like so many others, stupid at the core in the sense of Arendt's comment, since it's doing nothing more than describing what a certain type of person does all the time. In other words, when you describe what someone does all the time, you aren't telling a story.

I'm temped here to suggest that the fact this became an international story speaks to some larger issue, the deterioration of both mind and soul perhaps reflected in the way we collectively allow what Arendt calls stupid stories to pass for urgent information. However, I think this would be mistaken - for Arendt, it came naturally to stop and think each time she encountered new information, but the rest of us are not up to that standard. What we do instead is rely on personal experience to highlight relevance, whether that be in the news, in life, or even in the struggle to write a reading review, and we do this with the hope that no one exposes the truth - our fascinating lifetimes of small revelations and sudden discoveries are nothing more than a string of non-sequiturs, little flashes of insight when someone with a brain shines a light into the dark corners of our minds, illuminating the things we would have known all along, had we just stopped for a moment to think for ourselves.

the nation-state of war and peace

I've been thinking a lot about an idea from Hannah Arendt's Thinking Without a Bannister - the system of nation-states operates with an understanding that war is the last resort. It's an easy idea to understand if you consider how a country would respond if it became unable to trade for a necessary good, like food. What I'm wondering about is what pacifists think about this idea in the context of nonviolent beliefs, as they might contradict with the above if they retain some commitment to a nation-state system.

The end of war is perhaps too lofty of an ambition in the present day, where the most powerful nation on Earth can make a national goal of putting people on the moon yet can't ensure the equality of any two randomly selected members of its citizenry, but I do think someday the human race will turn its attention to this vital task. Those of us who claim to be ahead of the times must commit in the small ways available today - championing open borders, rejecting the free market as a tool for allocating basic necessities, and reserving the use of nationality only for situations where there is no other alternative.