Peter, What Are You Reading № 9
An occasional series featuring the books I'm either reading or have just finished
While the Peter, What Are You Reading series is normally available only to paid subscribers, I am sending this one out to all my readers, with the reminder that there is a special discount available to all new paid subscribers for the month of August.
This edition contains four books, all with varying subjects. First up is a book, translated from the French, on the bloody history of the Montreal mafia. The book describes the rise and fall of the Sicilian family sometimes said to be The Sixth Family, the Rizzutos, who were in reality a part of the more well-known New York Bonnano family. Second is a book on the biological and neuroscientific foundations of philosophy, a book which traces the role of the sciences in the development of our rational faculties. Third, is a book that might better belong in my Sunlight Is The Best Disinfectant series, a call-to-arms from the right-wing intelligentsia. Finally this edition closes with a book written by two transgender people that asks us to put aside our traditional conceptions of gender and instead think through the possibility that gender just might be more about ‘feels’ than biology.
Mafia Inc - André Cedilot & Andre Noel
I've been on an organized crime kick lately, and the Sicilian Mafia is always good for a story or two. Mafia, Inc is the tale of how the famed mobster Vito Rizzuto captured the city of Montreal in a choke-hold that lasted well into the 21st century. Chapter 5, ‘Assassinations’ begins with what I think is the most ironic hit job I've ever heard about:
On Valentine's Day, 1976, Pietro Sciara took his wife out to the movies—to see the Italian-dubbed version of The Godfather: Part II, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. It was screening at the Riviera, a depressing brick structure in an equally depressing industrial no man’s land in north-end Montreal. The movie house belonged to Palmina Puliafito, Vic Cotroni’s sister.
Three months earlier, Sciara had testified before the CECO. Sporting a polka-dotted tie under a pinstripe suit, he tried to appear laid-back, but tensed up once the commissioners asked him if he was familiar with the word “Mafia.” “ ‘The Mafia?’ I don’t know,” he answered aggressively. “What’s that, ‘the Mafia’?” (Indeed, the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” were never spoken in the original Godfather film: Paramount Pictures, bowing to cries of racism from the head of one of the Five Families, Joe Colombo, had deemed it more prudent to have the characters refer to their organization by the less inflammatory terms “family” and “syndicate.”) Sciara answered the CECO commissioners’ questions solely in Italian and would only admit that he was acquainted with Paolo Violi and had met with him often at the Reggio Bar. …
On the way out of the Riviera cinema, Sciara affectionately took his wife’s arm. As they walked toward their car, three armed men appeared out of the shadows. The sixty-year-old consigliere was felled by a blast to the head from a .12 gauge shotgun. His wife was wounded in the arm. Nearby, a fourth man waited at the wheel of a van with its engine running, in which the murdering trio rapidly made their escape. The police found the van, but not the killers.
Payback was not long in coming. Less than a month later, on March 10, 1976, a high-ranking adviser to the Rizzuto clan, Sebastiano Messina, was shot dead by an unknown assailant as he sat in his café-bar on Tillemont Street. Violi suspected that Messina was one of Pietro Sciara’s killers.
The opening salvoes had been fired in what would prove to be a war of attrition between the clans.
The book, translated from the French, is a very engaging and thorough look at the Montreal underworld. If organized crime and mafia stories are your thing, then this book is for you.
Biological and Neuroscientific Foundations of Philosophy - Franco Fabbro
I grew up believing that evolution was false, that it was a lie perpetrated by Satan in order to lead us astray from the holy and unchanged word of God, which talked about a literal 6-day creation that happened about 6,000 years ago. While I discarded my belief in young earth creationism a good 20 years ago, I have only recently begun living my life with the assumption that, based on a preponderance of evidence, there is likely no God. So, for the very first time, I have been able to entertain narratives about the beginning of the universe, the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, and the evolution of life and of human beings that do not save any space, nor are they required to save any space, for supernatural beings or actions.
Fabbro’s book is the first place I've ever found that has been able to explain the basics of physics, chemistry, and biology, along with the evolution of life forms culminating in Homo Sapiens, in ways that a reasonably smart layperson could understand. He uses this background to argue for the
proposal to reorient philosophical reflection, starting from the biological and neuroscientific paradigm, which has to do with complexity, concreteness, existence (irreversibility of time), symbolic - informational uncertainty and dimension that characterizes the living being at the biological, psychic and linguistic levels.
While his thesis is interesting, I have found that the general accessibility of the text, especially in the way that it describes complicated scientific phenomena, is the most exciting part about this book.
Regime Change - Patrick Deneen
Reading the work of the 'other side' is always anxiety-inducing, but it's especially challenging when you know the call to action is being taken seriously. Reading people like Patrick Deneen, who is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, convinces me that far-right violence will increase exponentially over the coming years. From the book description at Penguin House,
In Regime Change, Patrick Deneen proposes a bold plan for replacing the liberal elite and the ideology that created and empowered them. Grass-roots populist efforts to destroy the ruling class altogether are naive; what’s needed is the strategic formation of a new elite devoted to a “pre-postmodern conservatism” and aligned with the interest of the “many.” Their top-down efforts to form a new governing philosophy, ethos, and class could transform our broken regime from one that serves only the so-called meritocrats.
In the 20th century we had a left-wing revolution that created the Soviet Union, and a right-wing revolution that created Nazi Germany. Both were oppressive and violent, directly causing the death of tens of millions of people.
But before wed get to the replacing of the elites from the top down, we need to understand who Deneen thinks those elites are. He says that today’s Elite is an Elite “altogether new in human history.”
While in every known human society there has always been a ruling element, the nature of the contemporary elite arises from altogether new circumstances: the culminating realization of liberalism. In particular, four aspects distinguish this new ruling class from other aspirants that preceded its rise.
First, this elite is “managerial,” possessing a certain set of fungible skills in preference to other forms of status demarcation, such as inherited rank, property, or wealth. It combines especially the classical liberal emphasis upon economic productivity with progressive liberal valorization of technocracy. …
Second, because this class arose specifically in opposition to the inherited status that marked the old aristocracy, it is fiercely opposed both to the principle of hierarchy and the inheritance of status. Yet, while this elite comes into being through a different set of characteristics—managerial technocracy—its status has quickly become reified in the form of inherited hierarchy. … The self-deception or outright misrepresentation is achieved especially through an emphasis upon its egalitarianism through the pursuit of “identity politics,” most vocally articulated at the elite institutions in which this class is formed and credentialed.
Third, especially through its invocation of “identity politics,” the contemporary ruling class uses power not in a traditionally forthright manner, but through a recourse to a weaponized form of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” in which perceived slights to identity are used as aggressive tools of control and domination. Particularly through claims of victimization by those occupying (or preparing to occupy) positions of power and influence, the ruling elite seeks to limit and even oppress or extirpate remnants of traditional belief and practice—those especially informing the worldview of the working class—while claiming that these views are those of the oppressors. …
Lastly, the main locus through which today’s elite exercises control is not primarily through the exercise of governmental and public power, but “private” or semiprivate entities such as universities, corporations, media, and artistic centers of power such as Hollywood. Its political power is largely embedded within bureaucracies and quasi-public institutions, making it less accessible to electoral or popular control—that is, largely free of open and public constraint—and thus more easily imposed by those private and semiprivate entities.
Needless to say this book feels like it’s supposed to be a thinking conservative’s call-to-arms. Quite frankly, when the intelligentsia start calling for heads, that when we should become worried.
What Even Is Gender - R.A. Briggs and B.R George
This is a fascinating book (available as a FREE download from the publisher) written by two transgender philosophers that explores the idea of gender from the perspective of ‘feels.’ I know that categorizing gender by feels sounds like it’s a little out there, especially because we were taught such a simplified biological version of what sex and gender actually is, a version that has ‘stuck’ to many of us in such a fashion that it’s hard to conceive of sex or gender in any other fashion. Certainly folks who don’t think transgender people exist will trip over themselves, saying that “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings,” but of course things are never as simple as a quick slogan makes them seem.
In the introduction, the authors describe several ‘problematic slogans’ about sex and gender, slogans they look to address throughout the book:
Debates in feminism and trans politics are often framed in terms of a background assumption that “gender” names some particu- lar thing and that the important questions and disagreements are concerned with what it truly is, where it comes from, or whether it is good or bad. In this book, we’ll argue that questions posed in these terms are usually confused. “Gender” doesn’t pick out any one thing; it equivocates among many. We’ll develop a new framework with greater resources to distinguish among the candidate meanings of “gender”.
To illustrate the problem better, let’s consider some oft-repeated claims about what “gender” is:
Problematic Slogan 1: Gender is the social interpretation of sex.
Problematic Slogan 2: Gender is an oppressive system that ties certain behaviors and characteristics to sex.
Problematic Slogan 3: Gender is a performance of the role prescribed for one’s sex.
Problematic Slogan 4: Sex is female, male, etc.; gender is feminine, masculine, etc.
Problematic Slogan 5: Sex is female, male, etc.; gender is woman, man, etc.
Alongside these claims about what “gender” is, in debates about trans life and trans experience we often encounter claims about what “gender” is like:
Problematic Slogan 6: Gender is between your ears, not between your legs.
Problematic Slogan 7: In transsexualism, biological sex con- ficts with psychological gender.
Problematic Slogan 8: A person is cisgender if and only if they identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Problematic Slogan 9: Gender is an important, deeply felt aspect of the self, which deserves our respect.
We plan to argue that serious problems arise when we understand all these slogans as claims about one and the same thing, but, to start, let’s note that each of them is getting at something worth talking about. Some of them are unnervingly vague, some of them incorporate debatable assumptions or political positions, and some use dated or offensive language, but, in their various more or less clumsy ways, they are all gesturing at important phenomena that deserve our attention.
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