On “Small Is Beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher *****

I have been waiting years to read this book but have never gotten around ot it. I first became familier with it through my father, when I was a child. He would talk about it quite often. In those younger days, I was enthused and amazed by technology and by anything big. My father, however, typically disagreed.

Years later, during my first quarter in college, I took a class called Engineering and Technology, which ended up being more about the intersection between environmentalism and science than about hard-core engineering. The textbook for that class was a collection of essays that had come out of a conference at which E. F. Schumacher was one of the speakers. His imprint was all over the book (along with others such as Barry Commoner and Jeremy Rifkin)--and I finally discovered what my dad had been talking about and why he believed what he believed and came to see much as he did.

My father died a few weeks ago, and one of the items I saved for myself was this book from his library. It has all his notes and highlighting in it—rather extensive for general nonfiction—so reading the book was also in some ways like reading my father's thoughts on the work, taking me back to what he was thinking when I was around eight or ten.

One thing that struck me about the work, written in the early 1970s as it was, is how economically “socialist” it is at the same time as being “Christian,” a combination that receives much less attention in the post-Reagan United States than perhaps existed before, and one that I see little of in the church I attend now, wherein free market capitalism as being identified with “God's proper way” has become rather expected. I think that sad, given that Christianity should not be politically left or right. (My dad was not one typically to link himself to one political persuasion, though in his later years, even he seemed to espouse much of the Republican right positioning, something he broke from again in the last months of his life.) Things, as far as the link between faith and politics or economics, were definitely different in the 1970s.

Schumacher is not writing a Christian book, however. He is an economist, who also happens to be a Christian and whose creed often becomes part of his reasoning—but he also draws on Eastern philosophy and Buddhism. These sort of ideas impact his thinking. The book, as a whole, is written for a lay audience, which makes it easy to read but which also makes it perhaps a bit less persuasive than it might have been with extensive graphs, charts, figures, tables, and data. As such, one comes away feeling as if one is getting the simplified version of his reasoning, which in turn makes it seem at times like perhaps his arguments lack actual substance behind them. But at about three hundred pages, that is to be expected; a hard economics book would hardly have appealed to the general audience for which Schumacher is writing.

The gist of the book is that technology should be appropriate to the purpose for which it is being created and proposed rather than being blindly pushed upon society. In this sense, Schumacher's work falls in line with lots of other technological critics (a book published where I work, Not So Fast, makes various similar arguments). Technology (and indeed economics), in other words, should serve the needs of real people rather than economic statistics. What good does a high GNP do if most people are unemployed? But if GNP is growing, most economists would classify that economy as doing well or improving. This, Schumacher says, is the wrong measure—especially for developing economies. There, technology to scale is actually going to be of more value in lifting people out of poverty. Farms don't need motorized combines that are going to do the labor of fifty workers if one hundred people need jobs; rather, the technology provided should be one that will give those people some sort of living. That is real improvement, more than the supposed gains to productivity and profit. And for a first-world power attempting to aid third-world communities, such “appropriate” technologies are often cheaper to provide.

Schumacher also spends time writing about the faux value of nuclear power, which he sees as more costly than just about any energy technology. Indeed, he sees the energy sector as a whole as being built around faux economics. The long-term cost of such technology is not taken into account when determining the profit taken. If there is no place to store nuclear waste, then it is not a technology that we want. Similarly, while oil and coal may be useful, they are not replaceable, which means that they should be used carefully and selectively. Schumacher, in other words, is making his argument from the point of view of scarcity rather than of discoverability or continuing technological advance. Conservatives, by contrast, would typically make the argument that while new oil will continue to be discovered. This latter view is the one that has, for now, been proven correct. We seem to always find more sources. The problem, however, is that at some point, we won't. At some point, it will be gone. That may be hundreds of years away, though.

Schumacher also makes the argument that small businesses are better than large ones. He sees businesses of more than 350 people as having lost their human face. Those that keep below this threshold are likely to be better citizens and better run. Larger companies are best divided into smaller divisions to take advantage of smaller size. Along with this argument is one that Schumacher makes with regard to profit—namely that the assumption that company profit is an inherent good. In this view, government (and its accompanying taxes) interfere with private enterprise, but those taxes go toward paying for capital that a company uses (such as roads). Instead, he argues, larger companies should in fact be nationalized so that the profit, gained in part of public capital, is shared with the public. This does not mean that government should run said companies but rather that there should be a kind of board that ensures such companies are fairly run for the general public good. It's an interesting argument, though one wonders how it would work in a multinational context. Schumacher's answer to that question is an unsatisfying single paragraph that equates to essentially “we'll figure it out.”

Still, Schumacher's ideas are enjoyable as being a bit out of the box. The work has had quite a bit of “influence” apparently on the world of economics, and yet I don't really see that its ideas have been widely applied. One wonders what would happen if they were.

On "The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce *****

At one time, I considered this my favorite book. When I look back at when that was so, I realize that I likely had lots of favorite books, rotating as I got to work after work--Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, various books by John Steinbeck (To a God Unknown, Tortilla Flat, and The Winter of Our Discontent come to mind), McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, Kerouac’s On the Road. Somehow, though, I put this Joyce novel at the top of the list for quite some time. Today I don’t know what book I’d put atop that list, let alone what novel at the top of the best novel list. (Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End may qualify as the best novel I’ve read in the past couple of decades, but how could I really say that it tops The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises or whatever other great novels are out there.) The issue is generally that no one book fits every occasion, mood, or use. Of great short story collections/books, I’d rank Jesus’ Son as one of my favorites, but I certainly am not always in the mood to read about heroin addicts. Sometimes one wants a good plot, sometimes lyrical language, sometimes deep thoughts, sometimes new techniques or a very particular technique. As a much more widely read reader at age fifty than at age twenty, I find fewer techniques seem truly novel and so am often less easily impressed. The fact that some classic books still stand out to me may be a sign of how great those books are or of how the “first” book I read that did X or Y or Z continues, because of its personal connection to me, to hold sway over more recently read work.

Coming to Portrait twenty-five years since its last reading, I can easily see what I found so impressive about it when I was younger. It features a lot of classy technical virtuosity. The stream-of-consciousness works here without seeming too difficult to understand, and as Stephen Dedalus grows up, so too does the language used. The technique and language are something hard for me not to enjoy, even on the third or fourth pass all the way through the book (and innumerable passes through various passages). The book also gets into a lot of aesthetic discussions about art (and its relation to religion) that I would have found intriguing at the time.

Reading it now at an older age, however, I found myself having a hard time taking young Stephan terribly seriously. He seems so earnest in his thinking. The idea that art could replace religion, outside of giving one something to do with one’s life, seems silly. I found myself thinking that any such work I’d write now would make such points ironically, would poke fun at such notions--or really at nearly any serious notion at all. And I wonder how much I should actually identify Dedalus’s views with Joyce’s--could Joyce really be serious? Such is the cynicism of age and of our age.

I was also surprised by the brevity of the chapter (3) on awfulness of hell that had once seemed very long to me and somewhat less enjoyable. And I was surprised by the manner in which, in some ways, the book is slow and slow to develop. It is high modernism to be sure, and something I liked when younger. I still enjoy these modernist manifestos, but as a novel, Portrait seemed to me to be a bit too intellectually focused to be truly enjoyable to most folks looking for a good read, including these days to an extent even myself.

On "California" by Kevin Starr ****

This fairly brief history of the state covers the beginnings of the land we have come to call California to the early 2000s. An interesting thing about reading a history of the state in which I grew up is the fact that I recognized far more history than I thought I knew. State history was covered in seventh grade; I have always wished that state history was covered again at a slightly later time when I would be prone to remember it better and when history could be discussed with slightly more nuance, so discovering that I knew the state better than I thought I did was in some ways a pleasant surprise.

Reading about the state's history also made me realize one other thing, given that I'm also reading a list of Chinese literature. It's much easier to get a grasp on new elements of history that one is already familiar with. With China, I largely feel lost in many cases. A basic history of the country, while useful and interesting, remains difficult to remember once the book is read. Here, because so much of the history was drilled into me over the years, I understand the outline of the events and can better figure out where new facts fit in.

Starr's book doesn't dwell much on the prehistory of the land--just a few pages on the geography and landscape and a few more on the Native cultures that preceded the arrival of Western settlers. In other words, Starr focuses his account on what we have written records for, and that worked well for my own interests.

Starr's overall point with the book is that California is in many ways a microcosm for the United States. The same political, cultural, and environmental issues that have so impacted the nation have played similar roles in this one state, which has come under the control of Spanish, Mexican, and American governments. One thing that I found interesting regarding the pre-American California was the degree to which the United States, as well as other powers, such as Britain and Russia, were scheming, from fairly early on, to take the area for themselves. It seemed rather inevitable, in Starr's telling, that once Mexico gained independence it would lose much of its North American territory. Such was the greed of the colonial powers.

Other passages of interest included Starr's exploration of the development of California's culture in the late 1800s. I was unaware of the extent of the bohemian movement in the state and would like to read more about that--what such people's views were and how they lived their lives during that period.

Also of interest to me was Starr's discussion of the rather contemporary development of California's politics. I was alive for much of this, and remember many of the events, but coming to them in a book, as an adult, was intriguing. I don't think I quite realized how nonidealogical many of the state's politicians were from about the 1950s to the early 1970s (even as Republicans dominated elections). Since then the state has moved toward the same sort of liberal/conservative division that has afflicted our nation, with rural areas much more conservative and urban areas, where most of the population is, more liberal.

On "The Christian Passover" by Fred Coulter *****

I pulled this book up online hoping to find out more about the origins of the Christian Eucharist and the history of how the Passover came to be transformed into it. Coulter's work, over five hundred pages, was mostly a disappointment in that regard. He refers readers to various anthropological and anti-Catholic polemics in that regard, which mostly focus not on the transformation but on the parallels between the Eucharist and various pagan rituals but never really explain how the latter became part of Christianity in a narrative sense.

The exploration of that theme is not Coulter's purpose, however. His focus is on how the Passover in the New Testament was celebrated and how the Jewish Passover transformed itself coming out of the Old Testament. In that sense, it is a fascinating read, because few other authors I've read have really explained, chronologically, how the Jewish Passover became a seder meal.

Coulter does a convincing job showing how the original Passover was celebrated on the night of Abib 14 in individual homes, throughout most of Jewish history. His contention is that the Passover was transformed into a Temple-priest-orchestrated sacrifice during the late first kingdom period of Judah, in an attempt to rid Judah of pagan traditions that had crept into the nation.

In this exploration, Coulter also shows how the at-home Passover continued into Jesus's day, even as the priestly Temple Passover had come to dominate the practice of some Jewish sects. At the same time, he shows how some Jews kept the Passover at the start of the fourteenth and some at the end, demonstrating how the biblical scriptures actually mandate the Passover at the beginning of the fourteenth. The move to the fifteenth, he contends, was caused by Hellenization and calendar/time changes, as the Jewish way of reckoning the day moved from sunset to sunset to, for a time, sunrise to sunrise, among other events.

Using this understanding, Coulter is able to document a timeline for Jesus's crucifixion and his own keeping of the Passover, at the start of the fourteenth. He also, surprisingly, shows how in the year that Jesus was killed, the Temple Passover was likely stopped before it could be completed, because of the earthquake that tore portions of the Temple apart.

One could say that the book really falls into three parts: a discussion of the Hebrew terms used with regard to the timing of the Passover; a discussion of the history and transformation of the Passover among the Jews; and a discussion of the meaning of the Passover. Appendixes go into even more detail with regard to mostly the first item.

The one thing I did not find sufficiently discussed in the book is Coulter's interpretation of Paul's term the "Lord's Supper." Coulter contends, but never really explains why he believes it to be so, that Paul was using the Lord's Supper in reference to the Jewish Old Testament Passover. Indeed, the meal Paul describes in the passage in First Corinthians could be just such a meal. However, at least in my research, I find that the term could be a reference to many different things, few of them definitive (other than a likely comparison on the part of Paul between the sacrifices pictured in such a supper). Although I'd agree with Coulter that "Lord's Supper" in reference to the Eucharist is a comparatively modern innovation--and quite likely a misinterpretation of Paul's usage--early uses of the term by later early Christian writers show it being a synonym for various fellowship meals; hence, the Old Testament Passover interpretation of the term isn't necessarily a given, the way that Coulter makes it seem. I needed more explanation for why Coulter believes that was Paul's intent with regard to the terminology.

Still, one would be hard pressed to find a more thorough book on the subject of the New Testament Passover. I much enjoyed it.

On "The Pearlkillers" by Rachel Ingalls *****

I read this book decades ago, when I was in the twenties, at the suggestion of the manager of a bookstore where I worked. Although the manager's taste in books was good, I always remained somewhat resistant to her suggestions. I think the reason is that she was an older white lady, which gave me the feeling that she would like tasteful English women's novels. It is not--and was not--a fair stereotype. The books she recommended that I actually got around to reading proved to be extraordinary--and nothing like the dainty works I imagined she would have been into. This is one of those.

All these years after that initial read, I've kept this book on my shelf. I knew I liked it--a lot. Strangely, however, I haven't read it in the ensuing decades, and that same old prejudice has stuck with me on this one. Do I really want to read this book again? What did I see in it? However, I was taking a trip and I needed a book to read, and in my systematic way of rereading, I was on the letter I. I chose Ingalls. What had I liked about it?

Wow. This book is killer--and that quite literally. The title suggests a theme that continues through the four long stories (or novellas) that make up the work. It comes from a passage in the third story in the collection, which is about a woman who goes to meet her deceased mother's family, whom she's barely ever met. One of her aunts tells of people who when they wear beautiful pearls literally kill them--somehow sucking the vitality and life, the sheen, out of the jewel. Such is the family itself, as we come to feel and see, as the story, which has a magical realism feel, winds its way to its end, wherein the family appears to have some sort of secret to immortality, one that involves sucking the life from others.

The central idea, then, conveyed in the collection, is one of killing the people you love in order to manage your own survival. In the first story, a twice-married young woman goes on her honeymoon with her third husband, scared that somehow she is cursed with an ability to kill off lovers but also aware that she doesn't really love the man she is with.

The second story is my favorite of the book--a thriller and an absolute brute of a piece. College friends accidentally kill/bully a young man in their dorm and hide their part in the death. Years later, one of them decides to come clean. What to do? That is the heart of the discussion among the other surviving friends.

The fourth story, the longest, is also quite brutal. It tells the tale of a explorer/sailor returned to his family after a decade missing, the lone survivor of the journey. Or so we are made to believe.