Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

I recently finished reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which, after only a month at the top, has probably already knocked Nineteen Eighty-Four off the top spot of my favourite novels list.

Brave New World presents a dystopian future in which the idea of family has been completely removed. New humans are not born but are grown in bottles in giant hatcheries, before finally being decanted. Everyone is conditioned through gestation and childhood to be a certain class, and to be happy with that class. And if anyone ever is unhappy there is always soma – the happiness drug.

To be honest, though, I didn’t see what was so bad with the this future 😀 .

Throughout the book, I expressed to a few people this thought and they all responded with “wait until you get to the end – then you will see what a horrific vision of the future it is.” Well, I’m there now, and it still looks pretty good lol.

Ultimately, it probably isn’t a world in which we would choose. The characters in the novel have no freedom – they are born into a predefined class from which there is no escape and there happiness is shallow and superficial.

But then, if you were born into that world, you would actually be perfectly happy with it. It sounds horrible to be preconditioned from before birth to be a certain class, but imagine being truly satisfied with their job. I mean, I love my job, really love it, but I wouldn’t choose to do it if I didn’t have to, nor do I feel like I’m an important part of society – there are many other software developers out there that could do my job just as well. But what if I was conditioned to think I genuinely was an important cog? That might genuinely be nicer.

Furthermore, what exactly is superficial happiness? Isn’t that what we tell ourselves when we see someone who just seems too happy because they have money and fame and it’s all the stuff we want but can’t have so we tell ourselves that they aren’t really happy on the inside even though deep down we know that they actually are probably deeply contented 😉 .

And finally, there is soma. Some of the characters in the novel rebuked its use, but then, what is really wrong with it? Imagine we had a drug which could make us feel fantastic so that whenever we wanted to escape reality, we could just take it and all would be well.

Well, we do, and it’s call alcohol. There really isn’t an argument to be made for claiming that having soma in our society would be undesirable because it’s basically the same as alcohol but better, and side-effect free – and ultimately, most of us choose to go out and get wrecked, despite the very significant side effects.

All this is slightly tongue in cheek of course – no democracy, a class system, a religious cult-like worship of solidarity, none of this is desirable. But soma, sexual freedom and a focus on happiness are three things I’m very much down with.

The second book on my list was Terry Pratchett’s Nation. As I’m sure most of you are ware, Pratchett is an amazing writer, though I haven’t actually read one of his books since my childhood.

The novel follows the story of Mau, a child currently going through the initiation ceremony of his culture into becoming a man, only to find out that a great wave has wiped out his civilization. It is therefore placed on his shoulders to re-build The Nation.

Recently, Pratchett has made more of his status as a humanist, in no small part due to the number of religious scumbags who fight against the use of stem cell research in medical research to cure debilitating illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, of which Pratchett is suffering from. This is very evident in the novel – it’s not anti-religious, but it makes the point, very elegantly, that religion is a human creation.

I found it a bit low level, though I think it’s technically a children’s novel, but very enjoyable none the less.

Since getting my iPad last month, and installing Kindle on it, I’ve gone back to reading some fiction. Not actually on the iPad, but it never the less seems to have inspired me.

Given the number of references I seemed to keep missing, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed a good choice to start with and I found myself soon engrossed in the book. The plot, for those not familiar with it, looks at a dystopian totalitarian future in which The Party maintains total controls, not only over their subject’s actions, but also their thoughts.

It’s often used as the yardstick against which real-world regimes are measured, especially in today’s surveillance society which seems ever more encroaching and yet it definitely still a long distance away from the telescreens installed in every party member’s home, allowing the Thought Police to listen in to your home at any time, as presented in Orwell’s novel.

The book has quickly risen to one of my favourite novels of all time. For some reason, it seems to invoke a sense that despite malevolent efforts, true love can survive, even though in the novel itself, it actually doesn’t. Still, life would be boring if everything had a happy ending ;).

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a book co-written by Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It explores quirks of society and challenge some commonly held ideas about how the world works, providing better explanations.

For example, why do drug dealers most drug dealers live with their mothers? The answer is that they are earning less than they could make at McDonald’s. Drug dealing is a pyramid scheme at the people at the bottom are on less than minimum wage.

The most controversial chapter of the book looks at falling crime rates in New York. This is the shining example of broken window theory, as Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point. Dubner and Levitt show this is nonsense. Other cities in America that did not implement zero-tolerance also experienced this drop in crime. What fits the actual data far better is that it was a result of legalising abortion, which leads to would-be-criminals simply never being born.

Having recently read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion I followed it up by reading one of Alister McGrath’s responses to the book, The Dawkins Delusion. McGrath opens the book saying he mainly intended it to be read by Christians wanting to be able to respond to the questions of friends who had recently read The God Delusion though also hoped that the odd open minded atheist would read it too.

After reading the critical response though I can’t help questioning whether McGrath actually read The God Delusion. For example he claims that Dawkins suggests that removing religion would end all violence. An idea Dawkins of course dismisses. He also seems to suggest Dawkins believes natural selection by evolution happens by chance. While most of The God Delusion is about God and religion, a hefty sum of it is Dawkins explaining how people misunderstand that evolution works by chance and indeed in reality, is the complete opposite of chance.

Also his critism of Dawkins’ discussion of the meme is interesting because he almost seems to go beyond the idea that the meme cannot be applied like this (which is perhaps a fair critism) to suggest the meme simply doesn’t exst. He seems to think of it as a hypothesis rather than a phenomenon that has simply been named. Perhaps he has never experianced a catchy tune, but if I was to take a while guess I would probably bet against that.

In the end, the book is simply a character attack. The criticisms that Dawkins insists rather than suggests things is far more overpowered by McGrath’s own convictions, insisting Dawkins is unquestionably a fundamentalist without any real argument to back up the claim while acusing Dawkins of doing the same thing. He goes to great lengths to call Dawkins a variety of names and insist his writing is unscientific without let up or discussion of anything else.

The book fails to provide any kind of counter arguments as McGrath set out to do. His constant repetition of the idea that Dawkins is a dogmatist doesn’t leave much room for answering the questions raised in The God Delusion or provide answers provide the generic theist argument of “because I know you’re wrong.” The unscientific methods of Dawkins are not disected, simply asserted as being wrong.

There is a constant repetition of the idea of Atheist fundamentalism, an idea that can’t really exist because there isn’t really such a thing as Atheism as that implies it is a belief and it isn’t, it is simply a lack of a belief. Therefore how you can be fundamental about not believing in God or gods is beyond me. Secondly, McGrath does what most moderates do in demonising fundamentalism. Even if this was an example of fundamentalism (which it isn’t) why is this obviously a bad thing? Fundamentalism means following one’s beliefs strictly, surely if you have a holy book written or inspired by God you should follow it? That is fundamentalism. It is obviously not a corruption of religion, the corruption is religious moderation, the picking and choosing (or as it could be described, secularising) of God’s holy word. This apparent attack on Dawkins actually turns out to be a complement (albeit unintentionally) that Dawkins has the convictions to stick by his beliefs (or lack of them) when analysed for what it really is.

Anyone who has read Dawkins writing I believe will see he is not as anti-religion as theists would have us belief. He isn’t interested in politics, in making people feel better or worse, in what impact things have on society – he is only interested in one thing, the truth. All other concerns are irrelevant, you only have to read one or two of his books to realise this is what he thinks and this surely shows he is the heart of a true scientist. He has no interest in being anti-religious, he is simply a scientist.

Which begs the question, what is going to happen when someone who is actually anti-religious moves against the lumbering giant of religion?