Garry Wills: What Jesus Meant (paperback, 2007, Penguin Books)

I have a lot of respect for Wills as a historian, but not for his more recent theological interests. Still, I thought this slim volume would be a cheap way to check on his take on Jesus, and as such gauge where Jesus might fit in the political spectrum. Wills went on to write What Paul Meant and What the Gospels Meant, two similar volumes, which I haven't pursued.

Some interesting quotes:

(p. 46):

Jesus was never afraid to speak truth to power. In fact, as we have seen, he addressed the most revered men of his day, the elders and chief priests of the Temple, this way: "In truth I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering God's reign before you" (Mt 21.31). The complement to that fact is what he told his followers: "In truth I tell you, unless your integrity surpasses that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, you may not enter into the heavens' reign" (Mt 5.20). [ . . . ]

Even when Jesus was not openly denouncing the powers of his day, many of his parables were aimed indirectly at undermining their pretensions -- as they realized: "When the high priests and Pharisees heard his parables, they recognized that he was describing them" (Mt 21.45). They knew what Jesus meant. He meant them.

(pp. 48-50):

The equality of men and women was a thing so shocking in the patriarchal society of Jesus' time that his own male followers could not understand it. "At this point his followers arrived, and were thunderstuck [ethaumazon] that he was speaking to a woman" -- and a Samaritan woman at that (Jn 4.27).

It was a source of scandal for women to travel openly with a rabbi; but "many" women followed Jesus through Galilee (Lk 8.2-3). [ . . . . ]

There was a crowd of women followers at the cross, when all but one of the male company had fled or stood far off (Mk 15.40-41). Three of these women who were at the cross were also the first to discover the empty tomb and to announce their finding to the male followers, becoming the first evangels of the Resurrection (Lk 24.1-11). One of these women was the first person to converse with the risen Jesus (jn 20.15-17).

Women continued to play a prominent role in the early gatherings.

(pp. 53-54):

Tremendous ingenuity has been expended to compromise these uncompromising words. Jesus is too much for us. The churches' later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from his "extremism." Jesus consistently opposed violence. He ordered Peter not to use the sword, even to protect his Lord (Mt 26.52) -- yet thousands, in the Crusades, would take up the sword to protect the site of that Lord's death. If one cannot use violence to protect the Lord, what can one justifiably use it for? When Pilate asks if Jesus is a king, he answers:

"My reign is not of this present order [kosmos]. If it were of this present order, my ministers would do battle to prevent my surrender to the Jews. But for now my reign is not of this present order." (Jn 18.36)

Many would like to make the reign of Jesus belong to this political order. If they want the state to be politically Christian, they are not following Jesus, who says that his reign is not of that order. If, on the other hand, they ask the state simply to profess religion f some sort (not specifically Christian), then some other religions may be conscripted for that purpose, but that of Jesus will not be among them. His reign is not of that order. If people want to do battle for God, they cannot claim that Jesus has called them to this task, since he told Pilate that his ministers would not do that.

Jesus, unlike other Jews of his time, renounced theocracy. That involves religion in state violence, and he never accepted violence as justified.

(p. 58):

What exactly does that mean? "Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me." It means that priests who sexually molest boys are molesting Jesus. Televangelists who cheat old women of their savings are cheating Jesus. Those killing members of other religions because of their religion are killing Jesus. Those who despise the poor are despising Jesus. Those neglecting the homeless are neglecting Jesus. Those persecuting gays are persecuting Jesus. And that judgment of his is being delivered now, at the moment when he is scorned, ignored, left hungry. He is outcast, and we welcome him not. He needs us, and we do not take up his cross with him, love with him, die with him. That is the awesome test of love that Jesus brings to bear on our lives. Admittedly, Jesus was an extremist, a radical, but can any but radicals justly claim his name?

(pp. 76-77):

At first one might think that Jesus would not recognize most of what calls itself religion today. But, on second thought, it would probably look all too familiar, perpetuating the very things he criticized in the cleanliness code, the Sabbath rules, the sacrifices, and the Temple. It was natural, therefore, for religion to kill him, since he was its foe.

His followers would be killed for the same reason. Stephen, the first martyr, is stoned for predicting the destruction of the Temple (Ac 6.14). Stephen tells his executioners what Jesus told the Samaritan woman: "The Most High does not live in houses constructed by human hand. Rather, as the prophet says, 'Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool'" (Ac 7.48-49).

What is the kind of religion Jesus opposed? Any religion that is proud of its virtue, like the boastful Pharisee. Any that is self-righteous, quick to judge and condemn, ready to impose burdens rather than share or lift them. Any that exalts its own officers, proud of its trappings, building expensive monuments to itself. Any that neglects the poor and cultivates the rich, any that scorns outcasts and flatters the rulers of this world. If that sounds like just about every form of religion we know, then we can see how far off from religion Jesus stood.

(pp. 81-82):

Yet Pope Benedict XVI, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Church, wrote in 1998 that it is an infallible teaching of the church that Anglican bishops and priests are fake bishops and priests, dispensing fake sacraments, because they are outside the apostolic succession. That is, they have not a lineage guaranteed by papal elections, supposedly guided by the Holy Spirit -- a line in which bribery, intimidation, and imperial interference were often the deciding factors. In this famous succession, the papacy was often bought, and once was sold for money (by Benedict X). Popes were for a long time appointed by various temporal rulers. Popes were heretical (Liberius, Honorius), they waved wars, they ran governments (with their full complement of armies, spies, and torturers), and they granted indulgences for those killing heretics (the Albigensians) or infidels. This succession is what excludes saintly Christians of non-Catholic gatherings as not "valid," not connected with the mythical chair of Peter as bishop of Rome.

Jesus said, "Where two or three are met together in my name, there am I in their midst" (mt 18.20). Why do Anglicans, met together in Jesus' name, need a bishop from Rome when they have Jesus in their midst?

Karen Armstrong: The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006; paperback, 2007, Anchor Books)

This is a history of the development of religion in the Axial Age, ranging from 1600 BCE to 220 BCE, with a bit on the subsequent founding of Christianity and Islam. The periods are cut into nine time slices, and each chapter has four sections, one each for China, India, Israel (or Judaism), and Greece (or logos, not exactly a religion).

(pp. xviii-xviv):

This meant that you had to be ready to change. The Axial sages were not interested in providing their disciples with a little edifying uplift, after which they could return with renewed vigor to their ordinary self-centered lives. Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being. All the sages preached a spirituality of empathy and compassion; they insisted that people must abandon their egotism and greed, their violence and unkindness. Not only was it wrong to kill another human being; you must not even speak a hostile word or make an irritable gesture. Further, nearly all the Axial sages realized that you could not confine your benevolence to your own people: your concern must somehow extend to the entire world. In fact, when people started to limit their horizons and sympathies, it was another sign that the Axial Age was coming to a close. Each tradition developed its own formulation of the Golden Rule: do not do to others what you would not have done to you. As far as the Axial sages were concerned, respect for the sacred rights of all beings -- not orthodox belief -- was religion. If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows, they could save the world.

We need to rediscover this Axial ethos. In our global village, we can no longer afford a parochial or exclusive vision. We must learn to live and behave as though people in countries remote from our own are as important as ourselves. The sages of the Axial Age did not create their compassionate ethic in idyllic circumstances. Each tradition developed in societies like our own that were torn apart by violence and warfare as never before; indeed, the first catalyst of religious change was usually a principled rejection of the aggression that the sages witnessed all around them. When they started to look for the causes of violence in the psyche, the Axial philosophers penetrated their interior world and began to explore a hitherto undiscovered realm of human experience.

The consensus of the Axial Age is an eloquent testimony to the unanimity of the spiritual quest of the human race. The Axial peoples all found that the compassionate ethic worked. All the great traditions that were created at this time are in agreement about the supreme importance of charity and benevolence, and this tells us something important about our humanity. To find that our own faith is so deeply in accord with others is an affirming experience. Without departing from our own tradition, therefore, we can learn from others how to enhance our particular pursuit of the empathic life.

(pp. 198-200):

The prophet Jeremiah was not deported, because he had consistently supported the Babylonians, realizing that rebellion was utter folly. Some prophets thought that because Yahweh dwelt in his temple, Jerusalem could not be destroyed, but Jeremiah told them that this was dangerous nonsense. It was useless to chant "This is the temple of Yahweh!" like a magic spell. If the people did not mend their ways, Yahweh would destroy the city. This was treason, and Jeremiah was almost executed, but after his acquittal he continued to wander through the streets, uttering his grim oracles. His name has become a byword for exaggerated pessimism, but Jeremiah was not being "negative." He was right. His unflinching and courageous stand expressed one of the essential principles of the Axial Age: people must see things as they really are. They could not function spiritually or practically if they buried their heads in the sand and refused to face the truth, however painful and frightening this might be.

(p. 208):

In his meditation on Yahweh Sham, Ezekiel expended a great deal of time on detailed discussion of sacrifice, vestments, and the measurements and proportions of the temple. In times of social uncertainty, anthropologists tell us, ritual acquirse a new importance. Among displaced people, in particular, there is pressure to maintain the boundaries that separate the group from others, and a new concern about purity, pollution, and mixed marriage, which help the community to resist the majority culture. Certainly Ezekiel's vision showed a fortress mentality. No foreigners were allowed in his imaginary city; there were walls and gates everywhere, barricading the holiness of Israel from the threatening outside world.

(pp. 242-243):

Like other philosophers of the Axial Age, Confucius felt profoundly alienated from his time. He was convinced that the root cause of the current disorder in China was neglect of the traditional rites that had governed the conduct of the principalities for so long. In the days of Yao and Shun and, later, under the early Zhou, he believed, the Way of Heaven had been practiced perfectly and human beings had lived together harmoniously. The li had encouraged a spirit o moderation and generosity. But these days, most princes never gave the dao a second thought. They were too busy chasing after luxury and pursuing their own selfish ambitions. The old world was crumbling, without anything of equal value emerging to take its place. In Confucius's view, the best solution was to return to the traditions that had worked so well in the past.

Confucius was horrified by the constant warfare that threatened to obliterate the small principalities. Yet, to his dismay, they did not seem fully alert to the danger. Lu could not compete militarily with a large state like Qi, but instead of marshaling all its resources to meet this external threat, the baronial families -- all motivated by greed and vainglory -- were fighting a self-destructive civil war. If the "three families" had observed the li correctly, this state of affairs could never have come to pass. In the past, the rites had helped to curb the danger of violence and vendetta, and had mitigated the horror of battle. They must do so again. As a ritualist, Confucius had spent far more time on the study of ceremony and the classics than on the princely arts of archery and chariot driving. He now refined the role of the junzi: the true gentleman should be a scholar, not a warrior. Instead of fighting for power, the junzi must study the rules of correct behavior, as prescribed by the traditional li of family, political, military, and social life.

(p. 247):

Confucius was one of the first people to make it crystal clear that holiness was inseparable from altruism. He used to say: "My Way has one thread that runs right through it." There were no abstruse metaphysics or complicated liturgical speculations; everything always came back to the importance of treating other people with absolute sacred respect. "Out Master's Way," said one of his disciples, "is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others [zhong] and consideration [shu]." The Way was nothing but a dedicated, ceaseless effort to nourish the holiness of others, who in return would bring out the sanctity inherent in you. "Is there any single saying that one can act upon all day and every day?" Zigong asked his master. "Perhaps the saying about consideration [shu]," said Confucius. "Never do to other what you would not like them to do to you." Shu should really be translated as "likening to oneself." Others have called it the Golden Rule; it was the essential religious practice and was far more difficult than it appeared. Zigong once claimed that he had mastered this virtue: "What I do not want others to do to me, I have no desire to do to others," he announced proudly. One can almost see Confucius's wry but affectionate smile, as he shook his head. "Oh! You have not quite got to that point yet."

(pp. 248-249):

If the prince behaved toward other rulers and states in this way there could be no brutal wars. The Golden Rule would make it impossible to invade or devastate somebody else's territory, because no prince would like this to happen to his own state. Rulers could not exploit the common pepole, because they would see themselves as copractitioners in a beautiful ceremony and, therefore, "like themselves." Opposition and hatred would melt away. Confucius could not explain what ren was, but he could tell people how to acquire it. Shu taught you to use your own feelings as a guide to your treatment of others.

(p. 255):

By contrast, the oracles of Second Isaiah had a harsh message for the nations who opposed Israel in any way. They would be "destroyed and brought to nothing," scattered like chaff on the wind. Even those foreign rulers who helped Israel would have to fall prostrate on the ground before the Israelites, licking the dust at their feet. In these passages, Israel's role was not to be a humble servant of humanity, but to demonstrate the mighty power of Yahweh, the warrior god. There seem to be two contending visions in this text, and perhaps there were two schools of thought in the exiled community at this point. The servant triumphed by nonviolence and self-effacement; he saw the sufferings of Israel as subjection of others. One ethos was profoundly in tune with the Axial Age; the other straining to break free from it. This tension would continue within Israel.

(p. 274):

But Athens was not learning the lessons of history. For all its fine talk of freedom, the city was resented throughout the Greek world as an oppressive power. The Delian League of free city-states had become in fact the Athenian empire; any polis that tried to break away was brutally subjugated and forced to pay tribute. In 438, the Parthenon, the magnificent temple of Athena on the Acropolis, had been completed, but it had been built by humaniliating and exploiting fellow Greeks. The new shrine, which dominated the city landscape, was an assertion of communal pride and supremacy, yet Pericles warned the citizens that they had embarked on a dangerous course. It would be impossible for Athens to quash a widespread revolt. Its empire had become a trap. It had probably been wrong to establish it, but it would be dangerous to let it go, because Athens was now hated by the people whose lives it controlled.

(pp. 321-322):

Mozi's message was utilitarian and pragmatic, yet he nurtured utopian dreams. He believed that it was possible to persuade human beings to love instead of hate. As with Confucius, the single thread that held his philosophy together was ren, but he believed that Confucius had distorted this compassionate ethic by limiting it to the family. In his view, the clan spirit of the aristocracy was at the root of many of the current problems: family chauvinism, competitions for prestige, vendettas, and sumptuary expenses. He wanted to replace the egotism of kinship with a generalized altruism. Everybody must feel toward all others exactly what he felt for his own people. "Others must be regarded like the self," he said; this love must be "all-embracing and exclude nobody." Reform must come from the rulers: the only way to stop the Chinese from killing one another in these appalling wars was to persuade them to practice jian ai.

(pp. 398-399):

Not only was Lord Shang unconcerned about the morality of the prince; he believed that a virtuous sage would make a disastrous king. "A state that uses good people to govern the wicked will be plagued by disorder and destroyed," he declared. "A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys order and becomes strong." The Confucians, who preached peace, were dangerous. If everybody practiced the li, they would become so moderate and restrained that a prince would never persuade anybody to fight. Lord Shang was openly contemptuous of the Golden Rule. A truly effective prince would inflict upon the enemy exactly what he would not wish to have done to his own troops. "If in war you perform what the enemy would not venture to perform, you will be strong," he told his officials. "If in enterprises you undertake what the enemy would be ashamed to do, you have the advantage."

(pp. 454-455):

Rabbi Akiba, who was killed by the Romans in 132 CE, taught that the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" was "the great principle of the Torah." To show disrespect to any human being who had been created in God's image was seen by the rabbis as a denial of God himself and tantamount to atheism. Murder was a sacrilege: "Scripture instructs us that whatsoever sheds human blood is regarded as if he had diminished the divine image." God had created only one man at the beginning of time to teach us that destroying only one human life was equivalent to annihilating the entire world, while to save a life redeemed the whole of humanity. To humiliate anybody -- even a slave or a non-Jew -- was equivalent to murder, a sacrilegious defacing of God's image. To spread a scandalous, lying story about another person was to deny the existence of God. Religion was inseparable from the practice of habitual respect to all other human beings. You could not worship God unless you practiced the Golden Rule and honored your fellow humans, whoever they were.

(p. 459):

The gospels, written between 70 and about 100 CE, follow Paul's line. They did not present Jesus teaching doctrines, such as the Trinity or original sin, which would later become de rigueur. Instead they showed him practicing what Mozi might have called jian ai, "concern for everybody." To the dismay of some of his contemporaries, Jesus regularly consorted with "sinners" -- prostitutes, lepers, epileptics, and those who were shunned for collecting the Roman taxes. His behavior often recalled the outreach of the Buddha's "immeasurables," because he seemed to exclude nobody from his radius of concern. He insisted that this followers should not judge others. The people who would be admitted to the kingdom would be those who practiced practical compassion, feeding the hungry and visiting people who were sick or in prison. His followers should give their wealth to the poor. They should not trumpet their good deeds, but live gentle, self-effacing lives.

(pp. 463-464):

During this dark time, some of the revelations of the Qur'an instructed Muslims about conduct on the battlefield. Islam was not a religion of ahimsa, but the Qur'an permitted only defensive warfare. It condemned war as "an awesome evil," and forbade Muslims to initiate hostilities. Aggression was strictly prohibited; there must be no preemptive strikes. But sometimes it was regrettably necessary to fight in order to preserve decent values. It was permissible to defend yourself if you were attacked, and while the war lasted, Muslims must fight wholeheartedly, pursuing the enemy vigorously in order to bring things back to normal. But the second the enemy sued for peace, hostilities must cease, and Muslims must accept any terms that were offered. War was not the best way of dealing with conflict. It was better to sit down and reason with the enemy, as long as arguments were conducted "in the most kindly manner." It was much better to forgive, and be forbearing, "sine God is with those who are patient in adversity."

The word jihad did not mean "holy war." Its primary meaning was "struggle." It was difficult to put God's will into practice in a cruel, dangerous world, and Muslims were commanded to make an effort on all fronts: social, economic, intellectual, and spiritual. Sometimes it might be necessary to fight, but an important and highly influential tradition puts warfare in a subordinate position. It is said that on returning from a battle, Muhammad told his followers: "We are leaving the Lesser Jihad [the war] and returning to the Greater Jihad," the infinitely more momentous and urgent challenge to reform our own societies and our own hearts. Later Muslim law elaborated on these Qur'anic directives. Muslims were forbidden to fight except in self-defense; retaliation must be strictly proportionate; it was not permitted to make war on a country where Muslims were able to rpactice their religion freely; civilian deaths must be avoided; no trees could be cut down; and buildings must not be burned.

Chris Hedges: I Don't Believe in Atheists (2008, Free Press)

Hedges book grew out of a couple of debates he had with Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and probably also takes account of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) -- a trio of recent bestsellers he collectively refers to as New Atheists. John Allen Paulos' Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up may have come out too late to make the group, but it also may not fit as well.

An atheist myself, I was rather excited when I first picked up Harris' book, hoping for something that could explain what I felt. Didn't take long before I put the book down in disgust, mostly due to its simplistic and bigotted muslim bashing. I've never been a fan of Hitchens even when he was allegedly on the left, and have been in no mood to entertain him since he joined Bush and Blair in Iraq. Dawkins is a more convoluted case, but also suspect.

I haven't rushed out to get Hedges book, and probably wouldn't bother at all except that I've read three of his other books, with even the distinctly religious Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America making a strong impression. In the meantime, here are a few quotes from an interview in Salon, where he starts by saying:

After reading what they [Harris and Hitchens] had written and walking away from these debates, I was appalled at how what they had done for the secular left was to embrace the same kind of bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance that marks the radical Christian right. I found that in many ways they were little more than secular fundamentalists.

By "fundamentalists" he presumably just means that they were fanatically close-minded -- "dogmatic" was the first word I thought of there, but for that you need dogma, which is scarce in anything primarily defined by negation, as atheism is. The original meaning of fundamentalists was those who believe in a rigid and unchanging set of fundamental tenets -- specifically of Christianity, but the word has been awkwardly analogized to other religions and ideologies. Still, "secular" is an especially awkward adjective, since secularism is not a belief in itself but a protocol for the peaceful coexistence of many personal belief systems, no matter how contrary. That Hedges uses the term suggests that he, like many Christians (especially on the right) thinks of secularism as a distinct religion. Indeed, his book title imputes that atheism is just another religion.

I'm also unclear as to what appeal Harris and Hitchens have for "the secular left": given that secularism it broadly tolerant of virtually all religions, and that the left in general goes further still to combat "bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance," why would the secular left find any appeal or comfort in these books? An even deeper problem is that in picking these terms up in this way Hedges adopts the notion that somehow the left is a mirror image of the right -- that the same aberrations that appear on the right must also appear on the left. (Hitler-Stalin is the usual standard; most leftists find their similarities to be characteristic of the right.)

But these are nitpicks: Hedges is saying that Harris and Hitchens are little if any better than the fundamentalists he reported on in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. At least I appreciate the next thing he said:

I certainly understand that there is nothing intrinsically moral about being a believer or a nonbeliever, that many people of great moral probity and courage define themselves outside of religious structures, do not engage in religious ritual or use religious language, in the same way that many people who advocate intolerance, bigotry and even violence cloak themselves in the garb of religion and oftentimes have prominent positions within religious institutions. Unlike the religious fundamentalists or the New Atheists, I'm not willing to draw these kind of clean, institutional lines.

Hedges pretty much dismisses Harris, while disparaing Hitchens:

Harris is just intellectually shallow. Harris doesn't know anything about religion or the Middle East. For Hitchens, it's about a performance, and that was true when he was on the left. He hasn't changed. It's all about him. It's all about being a contrarian. He reminds me of Ann Coulter, he's that kind of a figure. He's witty, and he's funny and insulting. You know I debated him, and in the middle of the debate he starts shouting, "Shame on you for defending suicide bombers!" [ . . . ] I think he's completely amoral. I think he doesn't have a moral core. I think he doesn't believe anything. What's good for Christopher Hitchens is about as moral as he gets.

Alan Weisman: The World Without Us (2007, Thomas Dunne Books)

The basic concept here is to explore what would happen to the world if by some unspecified happenstance human beings suddenly vanished, leaving all of our artifacts and effects intact. The concept allows for extensive exploration of those artifacts and effects, a mirror image of how we have change nature, an unorthodox view of how the world works.

Much of this is fascinating. The few quotes are rather scattered.

(pp. 39-40):

The last glacier left New York 11,000 years ago. Under normal conditions, the next to flatten Manhattan would be due any day now, though there's growing doubt that it will arrive on schedule. Many scientists now guess that the current intermission before the next frigid act will last a lot longer, because we've managed to postpone the inevitable by stuffing our atmospheric quilt with extra insulation. Comparisons to ancient bubbles in Antarctic ice cores reveal there's more CO₂ floating around today than at any time in the past 650,000 years. If people cease to exist tomorrow and whenever send another carbon-bearing molecule skyward, what we've already set in motion must still play itself out.

That won't happen quickly by our standards, although our standards are changing, because we Homo sapiens didn't bother to wait until fossilization to enter geologic time. By becoming a veritable force of nature, we've already done so. Among the human-crafted artifacts that will last the longest after we're gone is our redesigned atmosphere. Thus, Tyler Volk finds nothing strange about being an architect teaching atmospheric physics and marine chemistry on the New York University biology faculty. He finds he must draw on all those disciplines to describe how humans have turned the atmosphere, biosphere, and the briny deep into something that, until now, only volcanoes and colliding continental plates have been able to achieve.

Volk is a lanky man with wavy dark hair and eyes that scrunch into crescents when he ponders. Leaning back in his chair, he studies a poster as a single fluid with layers of deepening density. Until about 200 years ago, carbon dioxide from the gaseous part above dissolved into the liquid part below at a steady rate that kept the world at equilibrium. Now, with atmospheric CO₂ levels so high, the ocean needs to readjust. But because it's so big, he says, that takes time.

"Say there are no more people buring fuel. At first, the ocean's surface will absorb CO₂ rapidly. As it saturates, that slows, It loses some CO₂ to photosynthesizing organisms. Slowly, as the seas mix, it sinks, and ancient, unsaturated water rises from the depths to replace it."

It takes 1,000 years for the ocean to completely turn over, but that doesn't bring the Earth back to pre-industrial purity. Ocean and atmosphere are more in balance with each other, but both are still supercharged with CO₂. So is the land, where excess carbon will cycle through soil and life-forms that absorb but eventually release it. So where can it go? "Normally," says Volk, "the biosphere is like an upside-down glass jar: On top, it's basically closed to any extra matter, except for letting in a few meteors. At the bottom, the lid is slightly open -- to volcanoes."

The problem is, by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we've become a volcano that hasn't stopped erupting since the 1700s.

Varosha, in Cyprus, appears in the book as a town that has been abandoned due to civil war, its luxury tourist hotels left to decay as would a world without us (pp. 92-93):

After World War I finished off the Ottomans, Cyprus ended up as a British colony. The island's Greeks, Orthodox Christians who had periodically revolted against the Ottoman Turks, weren't thrilled to have British rulers instead, and clamored for unification with Greece. The Turkish Cypriot Muslim minority protested. Tensions boiled for decades and erupted viciously several times during the 1950s. A 1960 compromise resulted in the independent Republic of Cyprus, with power shared between Greeks and Turks.

Ethnic hatred, however, had by then become a habit: Greeks massacred entire Turkish families, and Turks ferociously avenged them. A military takeover in Greece detonated a coup on the island, midwifed by the American CIA in honor of Greece's new anticommunist rulers. That prompted Turkey in July 1974 to send troops to protect Turkish Cypriots from being annexed by Greece. During the ensuing brief war, each side was accused of inflicting atrocities on the other's civilians. When the Greeks placed anti-aircraft guns atop a high-rise in the seaside resort of Varosha, Turkish bombers attacked in American-made jets, and Varosh'a Greeks ran for their lives.

(p. 103):

Dr. Sözen sees this difference through an engineer's eyes. Whereas all the previous conquering cultures erected fabulous monuments to themselves like the Hagia Sophia and the nearby ethereal Blue Mosque, the architectural expression of today's hordes is manifest in more than 1 million multi-story buildings jammed into Istanbul's narrow streets -- buildings that he says are doomed to abbreviated life spans. In 2005, Sözen and a team he assembled of international architectural and seismic experts warned the Turkish government that within 30 years, the North Anatolian Fault that runs just east of the city will slip again. When it does, at least 50,000 apartment buildings will fall.

He's still awaiting a response, although he doubts that anyone can imagine where to begin to stave off what his expertise deems inevitable. In September 1985, the U.S. government rushed Sözen to Mexico City to analyze how its embassy had weathered an 8.1-magnitude earthquake that collapsed nearly 1,000 buildings. The highly reinforced embassy, which he had examined a year earlier, was intact. Up and down Avenida Reforma and adjacent streets, however, many high-rise offices, apartments, and hotels had disintegrated.

It was one of the worst quakes in Latin American history. "But it was mostly confined to downtown. What occurred in Mexico City is a flake of what will happen to Istanbul."

Polymers Are Forever (p. 123):

During his first 1,000-mile crossing of the [North Pacific] gyre, Moore calculated half a pound for every 100 square meters of debris on the surface, and arrived at 3 million tons of plastic. His estimate, it turned out, was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations. It was the first of many staggering figures he would encounter. And it only represented visible plastic: an indeterminate amount of larger fragments get fouled by enough algae and barnacles to sink. In 1998, More returned with a trawling device, such as Sir Alistair Hardy had employed to sample krill, and found, incredibly, more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean's surface.

In fact, it wasn't even close: six times as much.

(p. 136):

When something malfunctions, the results, unfortunately, can be spectacular. In 1998, Sterling Chemical expelled a cloud of various benzene isomers and hydrochloric acid that hospitalized hundreds. That followed a leak of 3,000 pounds of ammonia four years earlier that prompted 9,000 personal injury suits. In March 2005, a geyser of liquid hydrocarbons erupted from one of BP's isomerization stacks. When it hit the air, it ignited and killed 15 people. That July, at the same plant, a hydrogen pipe exploded; in August, a gas leak reeking of rotten eggs, which signals toxic hydrogen sulfide, shut much of BP down for a while. Days later, at a BP plastics-manufacturing subsidiary 15 miles south at Chocolate Bayou, flames exploded 50 feet in the air. The blaze had to be left to burn itself out. It took three days.

(p. 199):

As a professional birding guide, Hilty has watched the decline of songbirds tilt into a plunge that has even nonbirders noticing the deepening silence. Among the missing in his native Missouri is our only blue-backed, white-throated warbler. Cerulean warblers used to depart the Ozarks each fall for mid-elevation Andean forests in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. With more of those being cut each year for coffee -- or coca -- hundreds of thousands of arriving birds must funnel into an ever-shrinking wintering ground, where there isn't enough to feed them all.

(p. 200):

The birds that manage to survive on islands, as Charles Darwin momentously observed among finches in the Galápagos, can adapt so tightly to local conditions that they become species unto themselves, found nowhere else. Those conditions explode, however, once humans arrive with their pigs, goats, dogs, cats, and rats.

In Hawaii, all the roast feral pig devoured in luaus can't keep up with the mayhem their rooting wreaks on forests and bogs. To protect exotic sugarcane from being eaten by exotic rats, in 1883 Hawaiian growers imported the exotic mongoose. Today, rats are still around: the favorite food of both the rat and the mongoose is the eggs of the few native geese and nesting albatrosses left on Hawaii's main islands. In Guam, just after World War II, a U.S. transport plane landed bearing stowaway Australian brown tree snakes in its wheel-wells. Within three decades, along with several native lizards, more than half the island's bird species were extinct, and the rest designated uncommon or rare.

When we humans become extinct ourselves, part of our legacy will live on in the predators we introduced. For most, the only constraints on their rampant proliferation have been the eradication programs with which we've tried to undo our damage. When we go, those efforts go with us, and rodents and mongooses will inherit most of the South Pacific's lovely isles.

(pp. 201-202):

As befits a chain reaction, it happened very fast. In 1938, a physicist named Enrico Fermi went from Fascist Italy to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for his work with neutrons and atomic nuclei -- and kept going, defecting with his Jewish wife to the United States.

That same year, word leaked that two German chemists had split uranium atoms by bombarding them with neutrons. Their work confirmed Fermi's own experiments. He had guessed correctly that when neutrons cracked an atomic nucleus, they would set more neutrons free. Each would scatter like a subatomic shotgun pellet, and with enough uranium handy, they would find more nuclei to destroy. The process would cascade, and a lot of energy would be released. He suspected Nazi Germany would be interested in that.

On December 2, 1942, in a squash court beneath the stadium at the University of Chicago, Fermi and his new American colleagues produced a controlled nuclear chain reaction. Their primitive reactor was a beehive-shaped pile of graphite bricks laced with uranium. By inserting rods coated with cadmium, which absorbs neutrons, they could moderate the exponential shattering of uranium atoms to keep it from getting out of hand.

Less than three years later, in the New Mexico desert, they did just the opposite. The nuclearn reaction this time was intended to go completely out of control. Immense energy was released, and within a month the act was repeated twice, over two Japanese cities. More than 100,000 people died instantly, and the dying continued long after the initial blast. Ever since, the human race has been simultaneously terrified and fascinated by the double deadliness of nuclear fission: fantastic destruction followed by slow torture.

(p. 207):

The first site to begin shipping to WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico] was Rocky flats, a defense facility on a foothills plateau 16 miles northwest of Denver. Until 1989, the United States made plutonium detonators for atomic weapons at Rocky Flats with somewhat less than a lawful regard for safety. For years, thousands of drums of cutting oil saturated with plutonium and uranium were stacked outside on bare ground. When someone finally noticed they were leaking, asphalt was poured over the evidence. Radioactive runoff at Rocky Flats frequently reached local streams; cement was swirled into radioactive sludge in absurd attempts to try to slow seepage from cracked evaporation ponds; and radiation periodically escaped into the air. A 1989 FBI raid finally closed the place. In the new millennium, after several billion dollars' worth of intensive cleanup and public relations, Rocky Flats was transmutted into a National Wildlife Refuge.

Simultaneously, similar alchemy was recasting the old Rocky Mountain Arsenal next to Denver International Airport. RMA was a chemical-weapons plant that made mustard and nerve gas, incendiary bombs, napalm -- and during peacetime, insecticides; its core was once called the most contaminated square mile on Earth. After dozens of wintering bald eagles were found in its security buffer, feasting on the prodigious prairie dog population, it, too, became a National Wildlife Refuge. That required draining and sealing an Arsenal lake where ducks once died moments after landing, and where the bottoms of aluminum boats sent to fetch their carcasses rotted within a month. Although the plan is to treat and monitor toxic groundwater plumes for another century until they're considered safely diluted, today mule deer big as elk find asylum where humans once feared to tread.

(p. 266):

Within recent historic times, reefs swarmed with 800-pound groupers, codfish could be dipped from the sea by lowering baskets, and oysters filtered all the water in Chesapeake Bay every three days. The planet's shores teemed with millions of manatees, seals, and walruses. Then, within a pair of centuries, coral reefs were flattened and sea-grass beds were scraped bare, the New Jersey-sized dead zone appeared off the mouth of the Mississippi, and the world's cod collapsed.

Yet despite mechanized overharvesting, satellite fish-trackers, nitrate flooding, and prolonged butchery of sea mammals, the ocean is still bigger than we are. Sine prehistoric man had no way to pursue them, it's the one place on Earth besides Africa where big creatures eluded the intercontinental megafaunal extinction. "The great majority of sea species are badly depleted," says Jeremy Jackson, "but they still exist. If people actually went away, most could recover."

I'm working rather frantically trying to catch up with notes on the many books I've read more/less recently. The main chunk of work is to type up various quotes that I flagged. Sometimes I introduce them and/or comment on them. The more of either I do the slower the process gets, so while I'm trying to play catch up I'm inclined to do as little of that as possible. The resulting pages are less like reviews, but as much as anything else they are intended to bolster my own flagging memory, and for that they are functional.

In some cases, the book notes are based on secondhand reviews rather than on the original books. Either the book or the review seemed to be worth noting, and it helps broaden my coverage. The following one is like that. The book notes are also collected in the Books section, which despite my tardiness is growing into a substantial section of this website.

Alex Abella: Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (2008, Harcourt)

The following are quotes from Chalmers Johnson's TomDispatch review of Abella's book:

Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to uncover RAND's internal struggles -- not least of which involved the decision of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defense's top secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers to Congress and the press. But Abella's book is profoundly schizophrenic. On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND's fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable; on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.

We need a study that really lives up to Abella's subtitle and takes a more jaundiced view of RAND's geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power.

The RAND Corporation was incorporated in 1948, a spinoff from Douglas Aircraft sponsored by the Air Force. Its CEO until 1966 was Douglas Collbohm, formerly a Douglas engineer.

RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.

For example, RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support "military modernization" in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

RAND had a strong bias towards economic modelling, in fact employing a long list of prominent economists:

Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C.B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of "escalated" bombing of military and civilian targets.

Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms, leading them to oppose the détente that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to overestimate the Soviet threat. Abella observes, "For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it.

RAND's best-known employee was atomic warfare theorist Albert Wohlstetter. Chalmers has a story:

Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years -- my records are imprecise on this point -- a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would be in force from 1970. There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an atom bomb." As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974.