Recently in Reviews - Books Category

Notes for myself on what I am reading. Oddly enough, they all seem to be science related, and many of them dealing with ideas from evolutionary psychology / sociobiology.

Terrence W. Deacon, 1997, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. W. W. Norton & Company.

Deacon believes that language is not just communication. Bees and dogs communicate but they do not use language. The argument is large but can be reduced to this: symbolic reference, where a "word" represents something other than the concrete thing there, is only a human thing. You can teach some primates simple language with a great deal of effort and not a lot of success. You do not see it arising naturally in primates in the wild.

Simple animal communication is different. Animals have developed very complex communication schemes but none of them, except for humans, have developed language.

Humans developed (evolved, really) language because of a simple thing: reproduction. And it has to do with needing to have humans live in tight social group where males and females pair in such a way to provide them with assurance that the children are theirs (for males) and that they will be supported (for females). "Marriage" arose, which is a symbolic thing. It is different from mating, some type of commitment. While other species have permanent pair bonding, humans have it when it is difficult to keep males and females on the porch, so to speak. Because they had to hunt for meat (and meat is a major part of the human evolution, my vegetarian friends) they had to do it packs. Which required groups. Groups make it more difficult for a male to know that the child is his. Males need this knowledge to put in the reproductively costly time and effort to support it. Chimps males don't have this paternity assurance, for example, and the males aren't all that supportive of particular chimp babies.

As I try to get things going at this new company, Yule, I've been reading some material that the boss has been consuming on the software industry. He found Yourdon's Death March to be incredibly discouraging — if the industry is this bad, how can we be of any help to them? — but that's what that book is all about. If you have been sent on a software "death march" (the term is one I wouldn't have used, in deference to the souls left at Bataan) you recognize what he is saying, and indeed the only thing to do is quit. I've found that the manager almost always comes out okay in these: his or her workers are always blamed and the stain stays with them.

Sometimes you can accomplish the incredible even when on these. Jim did. He got fired. The boss is now the CTO of a large investment bank.

A long time ago, I read John J. Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) and was greatly influenced by it. Strangely, I never noted it: he only appears as a note in my discussions of a book about Ulysses S. Grant.

Mearsheimer is a West Point graduate who currently teaches at the University of Chicago. He expands the realist tradition by adding a testable (read: can use history of foreign affairs to prove) element. His argument is really that states are interested in survival, you can never be sure about other states' intentions, and therefore a state must constantly be accumulating power. You can't become a non-warring state because it doesn't make sense for survival.

There are two interesting interviews with Mearsheimers I've passed through recently:

• International Relations interviewed him on 2004 Oct 14. Part One (PDF) | Part Two (PDF)
• Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies at University of California - Berkeley interviewed Mearsheimer on 2002 April 8. There is also a video stream, apparently.

Put Mearsheimer's ideas with Julian Fairfield's ideas (in a forthcoming book) using holonic theory to explain human conflict and you have a nice reason for Balkanization and why what's-his-name said in his book on Jesus that many of the ruling Jews didn't have a problem with being ruled by Rome: in the end, the external balancer forces opposing sides to play with each other rather than go at each other's throats.

Mearsheimer's sound bite is that in international relations, if someone doesn't do what they said they would do, there isn't any one at the other end of your "911" call.

Interesting is Mearsheimer's discussion of the Realists' opinion of the invasion of Iraq.

Central problem in philosophy. Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind. Thingness . . . sense of substance. An illusion. Word is more real than the object it represents.

Word doesn't represent reality. Word is reality. For us, anyhow. Maybe God gets to objects. Not us, though.

[From Philip K. Dick, 1960, Time Out Of Joint, pp. 60.]

The concepts are fascinating but the end of the book is a let-down. You go through a wild ride and it turns out, well, like a 1950s SF novel. Only partly written on speed.

But the idea that there is nothing but our language for it and how he makes happen is interesting.

Dr. Ben Witherington, III has written a new book, The Problem with Evangelical Theology. In it, he complains that the four major strands of western Protestantism have serious exegetical problems in the areas of doctrine that are their particulars, where they differ from everyone else.

["Exegesis: Scholarly explanation or interpretation of a word, phrase, sentence, or passage in a written work, based on close study and critical analysis of the text, especially to clarify an obscure point in the Bible or some other sacred work." (from the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science]

He's pretty clear on the point that Evangelicals are all wrong:

Popular Evangelicalism has three main theological tributaries. Each of these three tributaries ultimately goes back to the Bible in one way or another and each has made serious and lasting contributions — the Augustinian-Lutheran-Calvinist juggernaut kept Evangelicalism focused on soteriology or the way of salvation. Dispensationalism renewed our focus on and thinking about the future in eschatological ways. Wesleyanism/Pentecostalism stressed the experiential dimensions of Christian thought and life and the need for holiness of heart and life. However, each of these contributions came at a priceâ??individualism and determinism in the case of the Augustinian heritage; systematic ahistoricism in the case of Dispensational reading of prophecy; and the raising of experience to a norm, sometimes even above the Bible, in the case of Wesleyanism/Pentecostalism. My concern is not just to point out the problems with each of these theological streams, but rather to clean up the streams by passing these theological tributaries through a more purifying and rectifying biblical filter.

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My interest is in the big ideas that serve as building blocks for looking at the biblical text in a certain kind of way and that undergird Evangelical theology in this tradition. My concern is that various of these seminal and interesting ideas are simply not biblical.

Personally, I know my beliefs should pass "through a more purifying and rectifying biblical filter" on a more regular basis. The rigor of the process that he's advocating seems reasonable. Of course, we all think that the purifying process should bring everyone closer to our own beliefs and I wonder if Witherington feels the same way.

Some links:

• There's an excerpt from the book online from Baylor University press, so you can see for yourself if it's worth reading.
• Christianity Today interviewed Dr. Witherington about his new book
• A Reformed blogger has commented on the review, although he did not buy the book to read Witherington's longer argument. (Thanks to Michael Spencer of the Boar's Head Tavern for the link.) The blogger points out that Witherington is prolific: from his website, this looked like book number 28, which is a fair amount even by Juan's standards, he of the 28-page CV.

I'm not very well-read in these circles, and I'll admit that I found the first chapter pretty daunting. I blanked out in a couple of places, eyes glazing over, mostly because I just lack the background in order to understand the things that Witherington takes for granted that his readers will know. I still found it interesting. I enjoy these "let's return to the what the author was really saying" types of books, having gotten the bug from reading Meeks's series at a younger age. I'm intrigued enough to read

I will comment that I don't see how this is all that threatening (surely a good, rigorous examination of the roots is a good thing, and certainly we all have made mistakes somewhere). I can't follow everything he's saying but it seems worth a spin through. I'll probably wait until the local library has it — surely Valpo will get it in if the VPL doesn't — but that's more a function of my current book budget rather than not thinking it worth buying. Of course, I don't know Witherington so maybe he's a wicked, evil heretic. In which case he'll be even more entertaining to read.

I will point out that Witherington desperately needs better editors than he currently has. Maybe he sells well enough that they let it fly by, or perhaps he's difficult to deal with as an author. Many of us are and sometimes successful academic authors become impossible to edit properly, thinking that they can do a better job. But any press that allows the word "sound-bite" written as "soundbyte" is just plain sloppy. The various misspellings and typos are embarassing.

Plus, it seems to me that he could have gotten a more solid argument in these first pages with an editor. He kind of just sends things falling from on-high in a way. That's pretty consistent with the various other academics whom I've edited in the past. It's a function of really knowing your material, it seems.

So perhaps someone from the other traditions would like to read it with me and give me their take.

And let's be honest here: what will end up happening is that the Reformed folks will quote him about the shortcomings of the Dispensationalists and Wesleyans/Pentecostals; the Dispensationalists will quote him on the Reformeds; and the Pentecostals will quote him againsts the Reformed and Dispensationalists.

Nisbet, Robert. Social Change and History.

Under the heading "Change proceeds from uniform causes", Nisbet discusses how the idea of uniformity came to dominate the thinking of the Victorian social theorists, just as it dominated their peers in natural history. Uniformitarism says that the changes we see in the world are the result of uniform or common causes "working through infinitesimally small, gradual, and continuous variations, also to be seen now working in the world." [184] The idea is, of course, not correct; but Christians helped keep it in the forefront by attacking it so effectively.

I mean by this [uniformity], not any uniformity of evolutionary change from area to area, but rather the uniformity of fundamental causes of change involved in evolution. This is the meaning of the word that reigned in the late eighteenth century and throughout most of the nineteenth century. [182]

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Even [the great natual historian Charles] Lyell saw fundamental difficulties iwth the theory of uniformitarianism; the evidences of catastrophic events in teh geological past were too pressing to disregarded by a mind as fine as his. It is entirely possible that thoroughgoing uniformitarianism would have lost its monopolistic position in the physical sciences before it did in fact had it not been for two conditions. The first was the great attack that nineteenth-century agnosticism mounted against Christian fundamentalism; the second was the publication of Darwin's The Origin of the Species. Christian creationism was, in a manner of speaking, a "catastrophic" theory of the terrestrial past; and the principles of uniformitarianism laid down by [Scottish philosopher of natural history James] Hutton and Playfair were admirably designed to cast doubt on castatrophism not merely of the Cuvier variety but also of the fundamentalist variety and, with it, the whole edifice of Christian dogma. Once the war on Christian fundamentalism began in earnest, and once the fundamentalists began to counter-attack the theory of uniformitarianism, it was inevitable no doubt that rationalists and secularists would rally for polemical reasons alone to advancement of a theory that, as Lyell realized, presented great difficulties. [183]