Many people start the new year with a resolution to read more books to improve their understanding of the world around them. I'm often asked for book recommendations, so I've made it a habit to compile and share the most thought-provoking books I've come across over the past year. These are not his 2023 books. In fact, many of the books are quite old. These are just the books I read during his year that I found insightful. I hope you do too.
“Skin in the Game” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Skin in the Game is a book about many things, but primarily about what happens when you separate the costs of making decisions from the people who actually make them.
How would shifting the costs of decision-making to other groups of people affect the incentive structure of your society? This is an important question because it tells us what happens when we expand our civilization when we start to defer to institutions and bureaucracies. Those institutions may be specialized and specialized, but they are far removed from the concerns of the communities they are supposed to serve.
The bureaucrats who run such institutions can no longer play the game. They are encouraged to do what is best for their own careers rather than what is best for the communities they serve because their lives will not be affected. Taleb also explains why an intolerant minority trumps a more accepting majority. This is counterintuitive to many who believe that a big tent strategy is the key to winning political battles.
Taleb is a great writer who writes in a very entertaining style, making it a quick read.
RR Reno's “Return of the Strong God”
This book does a good job of explaining why forces like nationalism and populism are so entrenched in today's world. Reno argues that the shortcomings of Enlightenment liberalism and its attempts to distance people from many important aspects of human identity resulted in significant problems and undermined the search for social cohesion and meaning. Point out the reason.
Reno discusses the emergence of a postwar consensus beginning in 1945 that emphasized the need to prevent all forms of authoritarianism. Many leaders believed that the core of authoritarianism was a connection to a larger force of identity—a connection to meaning, purpose, and the transcendent. For these new modern states, it became extremely important to limit the access of their citizens to these powers.
Lino is honest about the difficulty of breaking with certain liberal precepts, but he also recognizes that the realities of identity, nationalism, and populism are not going away.
Our ruling class can wring its hands in concern if it wants to, but it won't change what's going on. We are moving out of an era of liberal ideology and returning to what has long been true about social organization. Reno understands that our elites have failed to contain these changes, and knows that he cannot prevent the return of the strong gods. Therefore, instead of provoking ugly backlash, we must channel those forces into positive directions that are healthy for society.
“The Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel Huntington was a leading international relations expert and professor. Writer and scholar Francis Fukuyama was one of his students. Fukuyama famously developed the “end of history'' model in response to Huntington's “clash of civilizations''.
The book was written in the early 1990s, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Huntington tried to imagine what the post-Cold War world would be like. This shift away from a bipolar world was very important because many countries and alliances came together simply because two major powers were determining international relations.
Mr. Fukuyama's model predicted a unipolar Western hegemony that would produce a universal culture and form of government, and although it appeared to be an early winner, we see that things are starting to tilt in Mr. Huntington's favor. I'm starting to see it.
Huntington predicted that various civilizations would attempt to de-Westernize and modernize at the same time, attempting to separate two phenomena that had previously been thought to be interconnected. It will be interesting to see what Huntington got wrong and what he got right from his chronologically favorable perch in 2024. Some of his predictions are certainly off. But his most important prediction is a phenomenon that Reno observed decades later in “The Return of the Strong God.” Huntington believed that the era of the long-dominant secular economic ideology would come to an end, and that a more traditional cultural identity with strong ties to religion would be revived.
“Ancient Cities” by Numa Denis Fuster de Coulanges
This was my favorite book of last year. Because Coulanges does not just review the events of ancient Greek and Roman history, but rather takes the reader to the beginnings of those cultures and treats them as if they were completely alien civilizations. .
Coulange focuses on religion as the core of ancient identity, creating a way of life that is completely alien to modern secularized individuals. Religion was the water in which ancient peoples swam, the way they sought to understand every aspect of life, and the doctrine that prescribed everything from laws to family formation.
When Coulanges discusses the religion of ancient Greece and Rome, he is not actually discussing the pantheon of Zeus and Jupiter that we think of. Rather, he refers to the even more ancient religion of ancestor worship and the sacred hearth.
Coulanges also considers how the power of religion and family limited state power. Genes, that is, each of the aristocratic families, had a religion specific to their household customs, without some kind of overarching belief that united them. The peculiarity of this cult gives families incredible power over all patrons, freemen and slaves associated with them, allowing them to be controlled by the government without risking a backlash from one of their genes. The requests that can be made have been restricted.
The author documents the need for states to change religion and create belief systems that bind families together before they are stripped of power. Tribes formed city-states, and city-states grew into empires. However, at each stage the family became weaker and religion had to change. “The Ancient City” is a fascinating read, but I can't recommend it enough.
On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroes of History by Thomas Carlyle
The book began as a series of lectures for university students and has remained that way. Carlyle believed that hero worship is the foundation of society, which is why it is one of the most recurring themes throughout human civilization.
In each lecture, Carlyle discusses a different archetype of the hero: god, prophet, poet, priest, man of letters, and king. Each archetype also comes with several examples such as Odin, Napoleon, and Muhammad.
Although many people would recommend this book as an introduction to Carlyle, I do not think it is the best starting point. However, this is an important book that contributed to the introduction of the “great man” theory in history. Carlyle is always difficult to read because of his style, but always rewarding. I fully support this book.
“Clash of Visions” by Thomas Sowell
For those who have never read Sowell, this is a great introduction to his work. Sowell explores his two basic moral visions of the world: the unconstrained or utopian vision and the constrained or tragic vision. Those with an open-ended perspective see humans as lumps of clay that can be molded and shaped until the perfect society is achieved. People with limited vision understand that human beings have an imperfect nature and social he cannot be removed by engineering.
When you have two groups that approach politics from such fundamentally different directions, there will be conflict over how to try to solve political problems.
“The Problem of Pain” by CS Lewis
I love rereading Lewis's work every year. Because different insights always jump out at me. The book does what you might expect from its title, dealing with theological issues: why bad things happen when there is an all-good, all-powerful God. This issue is still important because there are still a lot of New Atheists on Reddit running around pretending that no theologian has ever addressed this issue.
To be clear, this is not a definitive theological work. Lewis's books have always been introductory texts, introductions to complex problems and the higher-level thinking that revolves around them. But “Pain Problems” is a great place to start.
“The Emergency” by Patrick J. Buchanan
With the exception of Ron Paul, perhaps no figure in modern politics deserves a bigger apology than Buchanan.
Buchanan was an unwelcome prophet in his town and was expelled from the mainstream conservative movement for predicting everything so accurately. His platform is basically a playbook copied for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.
In his “State of Emergency,” Buchanan warned of an invasion already underway on the southern border in 2006. The great thing about Buchanan is that he's not afraid to tackle difficult problems. He covers not only the economic or criminal issues associated with immigration, but also the cultural impact, how immigration changes American identity, and how it changes participation in democracy. Masu.
Buchanan also addresses issues of legal immigration as well as criminal diversity to explain why Republicans are willing to join forces with changes that undermine their voting base.
“American Cultural Revolution” by Christopher Rufo
Rufo is one of the most effective conservative political activists, so when he writes a book it's worth paying attention to.
“America’s Cultural Revolution” is a story about the ideological roots of the Awakening, tracing the movement from the 1960s to today. Rufo pauses to look at key parts of the ideology advocated by thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Derrick Bell.
The most powerful and informative part of this book is the way it shows the reader how everything existed in the 1960s. Rufo does not hesitate to explain the vile and violent ideology advanced by a movement willing to use bombings and rape to achieve its goals. Anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-white hatred were all baked in from the beginning.
I disagree with Rufo's characterization of civil rights law, and we need to return to civil rights law when it is clear that it worked exactly as intended. Purging the DEI system and returning to CRA seem like contradictory goals. But all objections aside, this book is a valuable read and I highly recommend it.
