Developing_Intellect's "Books that influenced me most"

Once upon a time, I was born. I must have been, because, that is apperently how people get into the world. At the time that I was born though, my dad was still taking science and math classes at night school. I think this is very important, because he must have enjoyed it and considered it important stuff. I think he may have thought of himself as something of an intellectual too. So he gravitated towards scientific things. Which leads to the fact that shortly after I was born, when I was about 5 we were watching Cosmos, written and narrated by Carl Sagan and associates on PBS. It was beautifully presented and gave my developing mind a good context for understanding the universe I had been born into, such as the notion that science was the way to learn more about it. It also supplied me with some interesting notions and questions.

I also sought out the book in my high-school years and read it very closely. There was enough in it that still evoked wonder ten years later.

Along with this book in importance I might place several books for young children about dinosaurs and simple household experiments.

I was turned on to reading novels for pleasure in my pre-adolescence by a younger boy who was well supplied with science fiction and fantasy books. He first lent me the Hitchhiker’s guide series. Books still seemed to be being added to the series back then. This was the early to mid 80’s. I also thoroughly enjoyed Adams’ Dirk Gently books in later years. I didn’t really grasp all that was in the Hitchhiker’s guide books, and may fail to understand allusions in it still. But it introduced me to a great number of fascinating and useful concepts as well as gave me a common experience with many intellectuals of our time.

My young friend also introduced me to Asimov, particularly the Foundation stories and the robot stories, and to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern.

The Blind Watchmaker, as well as another Dawkins book promised fascinating summer reading for me during my early highschool years. The logical nature of his thought and the methods for proving his case really spoke to me. He also gave me corage to speak my opinions about religion.

I had seen A Wrinkle in Time presented years ago, in elementary school as a film strip (more like a slide show) and dimly remembered it as a fascinating concept. So when I found it in the school library I picked it up again and studied it. I really loved it and found much about it to be believable. This was also the time when I checked out Cosmos as a book. I had quite an enjoyable time speculating on what I thought tesseracts might be like based on the information I gained from both of these books.

I am not quite sure that I entirely remember when I read Have Space Suit… Though I think it really was later. One reason that I put it in this part of the list is that it seems to have a lot of story elements, devices and themes in common with L’Engle’s book. I think that you can find similarities to some of C. S. Lewis ideas in them as well, though mostly in L’Engle’s.

N Space is a collection, mostly of short stories and excerpts along with a few essays. It does not present a very cohesive, nor too modern set of writings, but it does have a lot of interesting ideas.
What was particularly influential in this book, (assuming that I haven’t actually got it confused with Niven’s “Playgrounds of the Mind” which has the same format and covers a lot of similar ground.) was the essay entitled “Staying Rich” in which Niven gives several reasons for supporting the exploitation of space. This is one of the places where I begin to learn the notion that from a nasty, brutish and short primitive existence mankind has been able to bootstrap itself up to a relative wealth and luxury primarily through the application of science and the working of a relatively free market.

My readings about quantum physics and some things offhandedly mentioned in Stephen King novels like “The Stand” began to make me curious about the paranormal and ESP. So I did a little research. Stepen King mentions this guy, Edgar Cayce as a researcher into strange phenomena who had made some startling discoveries before going on to making predictions. The truth of the matter, whatever research he was supposed to have done, turns out that this guy appears to have put himself in a trance and made predictions, a very long time ago about things that should have happened already. Having been disappointed by one touted as such a shining star of the paranormal I was ready to look into other areas.

I started buying books through book clubs when I was 18 or 19. I was working, and could afford it. So I went for a lot of Sagan’s Writings. He made some really good points in “The Demon Haunted World” the most important may have been from one of the end of chapter quotes which told a story of a man who owned a ship centuries ago which was rickety and ought to have been overhauled if it was to continue sailing at all. The man squelched his doubts though, and rationalized away his fears and decided to trust in luck and gods protection for the passengers leaving for new beginnings overseas. It concludes by judging that he had convinced himself the ship was safe, but that it didn’t help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as he was given. Thus we see that even a person’s beliefs can be ethically or unethically held.

I have read many other books by Carl Sagan. At the time I was reading I often considered them to be utterly authoritative, however I find it hard to read any of them today without becoming angry, for I see so much that can’t be supported, or which follows from a decidedly more socialistic or collectivist mindset than I can now bear. Though I think the books of his I have listed here are very worthy on the whole.

Made in America by Bill Bryson taught me a fair bit about history. One reason that I consider it an influential book though is that it describes the deprivation of people who lived in such a primitive state as New York in 1910. The Chapter on food is particularly illuminating. Modern standards of hygene and nutrition are indeed very recent inventions. I am surprised that he neglects to mention the late coinage of the word vitamin. This is yet another book that has helped to persuade me that the chief engines of upward progress from a condition of disease and deprivation are the scientific method and the free market.

I have two small beefs with the authors comments on a couple of words though. He thinks, (as I once thought even before I read his book and did not know better until long afterwards,) that the word hacker derives from the image of someone breaking in to something as with an axe. I have read elsewhere that hacker, in the sense of someone who defeats computer security systems, derives from the idea of a hack writer. The idea is that a hack is someone who is always at it, always plugging away, pounding on the keyboard and keeps trying things until they work. The connotation though seems to have lost the notion that a hack is someone who isn’t very good.

The other is about his casually dismissing the second amendment by saying that it clearly refers to participation in a militia. Yet J. Neil Schulman has done the most difinitive research that seems possible on this issue and has discovered by having professional grammarians analyse the sentence that the clauses are independent. He also cites information from history that many amendments (such as the first, and amendments of other kinds to state constitutions) that it was simply a common practice of writing style to include a purpose clause but that such clause was frequently neither the only nor arguably the most significant purpose for the amendment.

It was actually several years after I had already been acqainted with some of Dawkins’ other books that I got around to reading the one that started it all. I was about 18 when I read it. And so at the age of majority I studied a book that was published in the year of my birth. (I note that we now have a 30th anniversary edition!) This then seems to me a significant book, because it makes me a contemporary with these fascinating and powerful neo-Darwinist ideas.

Stranger in a Strange Land was not the first Heinlein book I read, nor the last by a long shot, but in many ways it was for me the most powerful. The blurb on the copy I had calls it the bible of the love generation. I note that people tend to either fall for this one, or for Starship Troopers, which is all about duty to country and is frequently called fascist. Well maybe it just goes to show how much a hippie I am that I fell instead for the one written right after it that instead deals with skepticism to authority wild love situations strange mental powers and some ridiculous perspectives on religion.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a fantastic overview of philosophy well written and with a gripping mystery that resolved itself into a fantastic new perspective on the world. This was one of the most influential books I have ever read. I have read it several times and dog-eared the first copy I had. There is far too much in it to summarize what I got out of this, but a couple of things I can say are that it introduced me to a profound skepticism of schools and particularly of grades and that this is yet another source that has affirmed that it is reason and technology that have enabled mankind not only to survive but to prosper. I should probably also say that this is one of the cases where even if the author didn’t intend to steer people onto the political path I have taken he presents ideas here that seem to lean strongly towards individual sufficiency and judgement. His story is all about forces in academia that seem meant condition people into liking and wanting things for their own good. Its right there in the opening quote.

The Diamond Age- This book presents a view of the future that while it isn’t pleasant in all respects certainly looks plausible. One of the central themes of the book that I find most fascinating though is the idea that technological forces could lead to the breakdown of the nation state. I have recently become aware that the author was following the course of trends he had begun writing about earlier in short stories, and I am curious about those. This story has caused me to do a great deal of thinking about the benefits of people organizing into new, primarily non-geographically defined nations which we may call phyles or tribes as these science fiction writers do. I think that affiliating with a distributed group who have similar values and also watch each others backs as the tribes in this book do would be a very good thing. And I can’t help but see it as an improvement to geographic slavery to a distant government that tortures and makes unjust war in my name.

The Death of Common Sense : How Law is Suffocating America by Phillip K. Howard
The interesting thing is that this book is probably one of the most central books of any in directing me towards my current political convictions.

Anthem by Ayn Rand
Within a relatively short space of hearing about Rand I was able to find this book for free online. I would consider this as fine a novel as Orwell’s 1984 or as H. G. Wells “The Time Machine” And like those other books it illustrates a political, rather than science idea taken to its extreme. This is much better written than Rand’s novels for the most part. I don’t want to say that her novels are poorly written, they definately have their fine points, but they can drag a bit, particulary “Atlas Shrugged” in places. This short story gets the message across. Hint: The last line is meant to be Latin, not psychobabble.

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
I was shocked by this book. It packs a wallop. Though I’ll note that after much thinking about it there are some lines from Sagan that I could put down next to the reforms that Lewis asks of science. It is worth noting that some of what is referred to indirectly in this book is Lewis’ well known strong opposition to vivisection, a practice that appears to remain common today and though less talked about seems no less problematic. Lewis wrote a work of fiction dealing with these issues which was the third book of his space trilogy. The title of this book is “That Hideous Strength” which title remains enigmatic for me after having read the book. It follows “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra” The first of this set seems equal to any other space adventure of the period but the second is probably the most overtly religious alegory but mostly because the third, deals with things that are more philosophical in nature.

One of the largest criticisms I have to offer of this book is that I believe Lewis has vastly oversimplified the degree to which moralities differ throughout the world and across civilizations. Also, his idea that Christian values offer an actual improvement over similarly articulated values in other cultures seems like a mere cultural chauvinism.
Today I can offer people an alternative view of a science-based natural law in Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” For more information on Natural Law in a philosophical or political sense see Wendy McElroy’s essay “On the Non-Absurdity of Natural Law.”

Bastiat:
That Which is seen and that Which is not seen is one of the first economics books I read that advocated a Lazziez-Faire approach to economics. The Law followed it closely. Several books by Hakek and others came after that. This is part of the turning point where I examined libertarian ideas and decided to consider myself one of them. Some points seemed self-evident morality, others required study. The more I studied the more I agreed.

101 things to do til the revolution
In learning the nuances of property and the details about the history of the founding of the US that they seem to gloss over in schools it was natural that I would regard the current government as operating illegally, violating basic laws and principles upon which the United States was based. Even more surprising though was when I discovered that some old liberals knew all about those violations but didn’t care or explained them away in one way or another. I simply believed that these ruinous policies could not go on for long. Waco and the horror of Ruby Ridge were not far behind us, and asset forfeiture due to the drug war and Hillary’s socialized mecal system all looked like bad signs.
But now that we have Gitmo, black bag searches thanks to the Patriot Act and a president who thinks its clever to call illegal wiretapping doing what he needs to within the scope of the law and free speech zones maybe its time to dust off this book and start preparing again.

Beyond Civilization
I’ve never read Quinn’s longer books on the subject but he makes some interesting points in this one. I’m not so sure that he has the answer to where to go now that our current social organizations have failed us. I expect that we are going to have companies for making money around for some time yet but I’d rather the kind of tribes that Neil Stephenson talks about in “The Diamond Age” for watching each others backs.

Summerhill
Maybe we don’t even need to be coerced as children. Maybe we would all be much nicer if we could live completely without it.
Neill’s child mentioned in the text at a couple of points is the current headmaster. About 7 years ago there was a challenge to the continued existence of the school by some oversight board. Largely due to a fantastic show of support they were allowed to continue operation according to their historical methods. Rumors of the death of free schools have been greatly exaggerated. There is a similar school in the US called the Sudbury Valley school which as been widely immitated.
This is the second major place that I learned to distrust modern schools. The first was “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and the third was from various essays of John Taylor Gatto.

The Future and Its Enemies
Progress requires risk, which is inevitable and best borne by those who can choose for themselves and stand to reap the benefits or suffer the consequences. There is no one best way. Organization spontaneously emerges from chaos. Rules are always necessary, but for all but the most basic they should be flexible, and the smaller the scale or the shorter the duration the less likely it should be binding.

It is kind of fascinating that you tend to find two kinds of people, those who deny that order can spontanously emerge from chaos in the development of more complex living creatures and those who deny that order can spontaneously emerge from an unregulated market and lead to a vastly more efficient and fair distribution of resources by the simple feedback mechanism of price. Thank goodness that Postrel doesn’t fall into either of these categories.

The Fatal Conceit
Not only did humans evolve, but they are also in the process of cultural evolution. Institutions and customs may not be easy to explain with logic or to understand but they may be there for a purpose anyway, and to alter or abolish them could have disasterous consequences. This can be a hard lesson to accept for the intellectual, that independent-minded person who wants to know why and to re-shape the world when he sees no purpose in its current configuration.
I still chafe at the lesson this book strives to teach. It is an insult to human intelligence. How much worse must it be for those utopians who want to make changes at a very great scale.
Hayek’s short essay “Why I am not a conservative” is also excellent and much more informative about the true topography of the political landscape than many other things I have read.

Lefevre
I have not actually read this book by Robert Lafevre but I was educated a great deal about how to think about freedom by listening to a set of lectures that the Mises Institute made available on MP3.

The Blank Slate
This book has a lot in it that is very difficult to take. It may largely be that the author was trying a bit too hard to avoid saying that science could give us clear goals. His point is taken only so far as that I agree that goals are determined by your values, which science may then help you to reach but it does not create them. This book had me clutching victory for some convictions of mine that appear to have been bourne-out but it had me upset in other places. All in all I have not fully digested it yet. This book is very useful though for debunking the shaky pseudo-scientific scaffolding that a lot of current nonsense invokes to justify itself. This book is very challenging to a lot of mainstream notions today. It is an early warning that the pendulum will be swinging the other way.

Another thing about this book is that unlike any other book on science that I can recall reading the cultural references and public figures that this author refers to are ones that I am already familiar with from popular culture. What I mean to say is that Stephen Pinker writes as though he is a contemporary.