Matt Zeitlin

This meme has been going around the blogosphere, and since I spend a lot of my free time reading books, I thought I would chime in. There is, of course, something fairly absurd about a 20 year old saying which books have influenced his thought. There are lots of books for me to read, and because I’m in college and reading a lot of books, there are surely works I’ve read recently that will probably have a profound influence on 25, 30, 40 and 60 year old me. More generally, there is an a priori question about why anyone would care about what a 20-year-old thinks or how he thinks or what has influenced how he thinks. But what’s a blog for if not overly intellectualized navel-gazing?

What’s interesting about my list is how much it’s weighted towards non-fiction. I don’t much like reading non-fiction books – they tend to be too long and can usually just be long magazine or journal articles. My true passion is for fiction. If this were a list of my favorite books, you would see nearly exclusively novels.

Orientalism/How Natives Think – Edward Said and Marshall Sahlins

There is no way around the central fact that these books are opposed. Orientalism is Said’s scathing attack on centuries of interaction between scholars and imperialists where soi-disant scholarly work on the Middle East justified European imperialism and where European imperialism justified certain scholarly practices. It’s a story of how the assumption that those in the East were the opposite of those in the west – irrational where we are  rational, sensuous where we are puritanical, hierarchical where we are egalitarian – lead to lazy scholarship and horrendous politics. Now, Said went a bit overboard, overgeneralized and, more generally, has a politics and scholarly project that I object to. I don’t think Israel is as bad as he does and I don’t think that all of 19^th century British literature was yet another pillar in the edifice of Empire.

But when you see people like Marc Thiessen justifying torture because it allows Muslims to more effectively serve Allah, when people say that Arabs only understand force and so the best way to effect political change in the Arab world is through violence or when we’re told that throwing your shoes at someone is something uniquely disrespectful among Arabs, Said is vindicated. More generally, the book told me just how easily it was for supposedly neutral descriptions of people and societies can be so thoroughly corrupted by certain ideological and political commitments.

How Natives Think, on the other hand, is a firm defense that “natives” and non-westerners have a different way of thinking. The book is part of a long and fierce debate between two anthropologists: Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. Sahlins,  an expert on Polynesian society and history, argued that Hawaiians really did think that Captain Cook was their god Lono. He gives a detailed description of how Cook’s actions and route around the islands corresponded to how Hawaiians’ belief about Lono.

Obeyesekere, on the other hand, is an expert on South Asia and Buddhism. Unlike Sahlins, he hadn’t field work in Hawaii. He argued, however, that Sahlins narrative was absurd. To think that Hawaiians believed that Capitain Cook was their God Lono was to traffic in the worst imperialist stereotypes of natives as irrational children who assumed that the first white person they saw was a God. To put it uncharitably, Obeyesekere relies on his own identity as a non-white, non European to say with confidence what exactly Hawaiians thought.

Sahlins makes a detailed and convincing argument that Hawaiians really did think this way and points to the actual historical record and to the structure of Hawaiin religious belief. Obeyesekere, on the other hand, is the bizarre mirror image of the Orientalists Said ruthlessly critiques: he has a political commitment to seeing indigenous peoples as “equal” – and equivalent – to Westerners, he does not want to accept that the indigenous could be truly and deeply different because his ideology won’t allow it.

Both works have a commitment to seeing the world as it is, and more importantly, taking seriously the claims of those people in the world. This is a commitment that is always good to take seriously and uphold politically.

The Worldly Philosophers – Robert Heilbroner

I probably read this book 3 times, cover to cover, between the ages of 13 and 15. A wonderfully written group biography of economic thinkers from Smith to Keynes, this book is responsible for my interest in economic thought and in seeing the tradition as much broader than what is usually discussed today.

Achieving Our Country – Richard Rorty

I have a deracinated, removed technocratic and cosmopolitan temperament when it comes to politics. I have a visceral distaste for populism, particularism and many instantiations of patriotism. What Rorty’s book does is show just how important a pragmatic, localized,  populist, patriotic and proud spirit is to real progressive social change. Although I still have a fondness for academics, dry abstractions and techoncrats – thus my constant apologias for Tim Geithner – Rorty has balanced this out with some appreciation for how good policies have actually come into existence.

Catch-22/Slaughterhouse 5 – Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut

It’s easy to say that much of war is absurd, perverse, nonsensical and counter-productive. For as long as there have been wars, there have been criticisms of them along basically those lines. But the real bravery of Heller and Vonnegut is to say the Good War, the War that liberated Europe and ended the Holocaust, the war that, above all other wars, can make a real claim to moral legitimacy and justice was still a war, with all the attendant absurdities and atrocities. If the Good War could still be so banal and horrendous, then most other wars probably don’t pass moral muster. These books are also incredibly funny.

War and Peace/Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

Quite simply the two best novels ever written. They come the closest to representing the whole spectrum of human experience. Isaac Babel once wrote that “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy,” and he was basically right. But since this is a list of influential books, not my favorite books, I should say that the main influence these books have had on my thinking is in how I’ve approached literary criticism. Whenever I hear an author go on and on about how Philip Roth can’t portray women or how Alice Munro can’t represent men or how Joseph Conrad reduces black people to stereotypes, my instinctual response is to say “cut Roth/Munro/Conrad/whomever slack, they’re not Tolstoy.”

A Theory of Justice – John Rawls

For as long as I could be interested in such things, I’ve loved politics. When I got into high school, I became interested in philosophy. And it seemed like whenever anyone talked about political philosophy, they talked about Rawls. So, when I was 16, I bought the book and during a vacation in a Mexican beach town, I read the entire thing. There are stiff, dried out pages and even sand in my copy. I didn’t quite get everything (I had to read Samuel Freeman’s invaluable guide to Rawls’ thought). Although I’m not sure if I’m a Rawlsian, his core ideas about fairness and about how we’re not responsible for our own successes have helped make the committed egalitarian I am today.

Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell

First of all, it is a wonderfully vivid and affecting piece of journalism – his descriptions of the squalor, misery and boredom of war are unshakable. Politically speaking, the way Orwell is able to, at the same time, hate fascism, support democratic socialism and recognize the brutality and dishonesty at the core of Stalinist communism is an inspiring example of how one can maintain their moral commitments amidst a confusing political situation. Many of Orwell’s contemporaries thought that opposition to fascism meant that they had to support the Soviet Union. And even though this was true in World War II, there were way too many who became enchanted by the Soviet Union and blind to its essential horrors and lies. Orwell wasn’t blind and figured this out in the 30s, when fellow-traveling was at its peak.

When, for instance, people opposed to colonialism became blind and enthusiastic supporters of vicious third-world revolutionary regimes, they were making the same error Orwell diagnoses in Homage. When those opposed to terrorism became blind supporters of imperialistic war and the rolling back of the rule of law, they are becoming the moral simpletons Orwell so effectively dismembers.

The Accidental Theorist – Paul Krugman

I’m somewhat cheating by including this book. That’s because it’s a unified work; it’s a collection of articles and essays. But there’s a unified method and approach. Krugman does what Orwell, Said and Sahlins do. Whether it’s absurd right-wing claims that inequality wasn’t increasing or that balanced budgets could be achieved through spending cuts alone or lefties who didn’t recognize that low-wage “sweatshop” labor is often the best opportunity for the world’s most poor, Krugman goes after those who think there are no tradeoffs or who erect ideological castles in the sky in denial of basic economic laws and realities.

As Brad Delong put it in a review of the book, “[The Accidental Theorist] has a single method: think clearly, look at the facts, and remember that people respond to incentives, that supply balances demand, and that there are a lot of politically-motivated ideologues making shabby arguments out there.”

Hamlet – William Shakespeare

My junior year, for English, I had a brilliant, Yale PhD teacher. Among a number of canonical works, we read Hamlet. What Dr. Enelow showed me was just how deep and rich great literature could be. Every sentence was full of references, allusions, puns, ironies, poetry and a variety of meanings. Now, not every work can withstand intensive, analytic scrutiny like Hamlet, but Dr. Enelow demonstrated that one might be able to spend a lifetime reading and studying those works that can.