23 Books for Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards
23. The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates
Publication Date: August 24, 2012
Official Description:
There’s a secret hidden in a mathematical nugget called Peano’s Axioms. Is Peano’s mystery the key to the cosmos?
The God Problem tackles the question of how a godless cosmos creates; of how a universe without a bearded and bathrobed god in the sky pulls off acts of genesis. And it pursues the riddles behind five mildly flabbergasting heresies:
- a does not equal a
- one plus one does not equal two
- entropy is wrong
- randomness is not as random as you think and
- information theory is way off base.
Says The God Problem:
God’s war crimes, Aristotle’s sneaky tricks, Galileo’s creationism, Newton’s intelligent design, entropy’s errors, Einstein’s pajamas, John Conway’s game of loneliness, Information Theory’s blind spot, Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you’re about to see.
In The God Problem you’ll take a scientific expedition into the secret heart of a cosmos you’ve never seen. An electrifyingly inventive cosmos. An obsessive-compulsive cosmos. A driven, ambitious cosmos. A cosmos of colossal shocks. A cosmos of screaming, stunning surprise. A cosmos that’s the biggest invention engine — the biggest breakthrough maker, the biggest creator — of all time.
One critic has suggested that The God Problem may be a great book on a par with Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
Why Counterculture Conservatives, Tea Party Occultists, and Capitalist Wizards Should Read It:
This book is the motherlode, bringing together everything discussed on this list in ways that I’m still trying to understand.
The God Problem took me off guard when I started it last year. Having plowed through Bloom’s four previous books (the three mentioned and also his mind-blowingly scary, yet-to-be-published manuscript on Islam) I expected a repeat of the pattern, that I’d be done in a few weeks. But The God Problem rises onto a whole other level of sophistication and complexity. It’s a year later and I’m still scaling the 575 page mountain of a book, Bloom’s biggest, most wide-ranging, and advanced. Is the book bad? Is that why it’s taken me so long? Not at all, it’s just much denser in its ideas than anything Bloom has ever done so the effect is I have to read the text more slowly — the more beautiful the scenery the more time one takes to explore.
Also Bloom spends significant time detailing the development of science and mathematics — my two weakest subjects in school. It’s a great joy to finally begin to start grasping these concepts at more fundamental levels when an entertaining teacher like Bloom can present them integrated within the context of human history and show how we can use them as tools within our own lives since the same universal patterns of creation and destruction that appear above also manifest in all of our hearts.
A more in-depth survey of The God Problem‘s scientific heresies coming soon…
*****
Have any other suggestions for books to add to this collection? Are you an author or publisher of a book that should be on this list? Like to share your story of being a Tea Party Occultist, Counterculture Conservative, or Capitalist Wizard? Please comment below, email me at DaveSwindlePJM{@}gmail.com, or say hi on Twitter @DaveSwindle.
Some of the authors who I hope to include on future editions of the list: Thomas Sowell, Robert Anton Wilson, Dennis Prager, Matthew Vadum, Phyllis Chesler, Leszek Kolakowski, Stanley Kurtz, Kay Redfield Jamison, Marshall McLuhan, Reinaldo Arenas, Whittaker Chambers, Israel Regardie, Ray Kurzweil, Daniel Pipes, Allan Bloom, Paul Johnson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, George Gilder, M. Scott Peck, Aleister Crowley, William F. Buckley Jr., Ben Shapiro, and Ayn Rand.
Also: J. Christian Adams, Barry Rubin, David P. Goldman, Ron Radosh, Roger Kimball, VDH and all the other PJ Columnists’ books offer important insights. And, of course, Instapundit Glenn Reynold’s An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths will need to find its proper spot on the list too.
And further subjects that I intend to explore more for inclusion in the future: Christianity, Judaism, Eastern Religions, Futurism and Technology, Marxism, Racism, Islam, Paganism, Ancient Cultures, Cults, Political Ideology, Sex and Marriage, War, the US Military, Feminism, Masculinity, Chivalry, Biographies, and Economics. Anything else I’m forgetting?
Oh, and one last thing, for those wondering why this series begins with a list of 23 books…
*****
Shutterstock image in logo courtesy Chris Modarelli
More at PJ Lifestyle from David Swindle on religion and counterculture:
My first reaction to the list is – wtf?
Depending on whatever it is that is supposed to be the unifying idea here, I might suggest anything from “Futureshock” (a bit dated by of the right genre, I think) to “Lord of the Rings”, and possibly other scifi/fantasy. Also, as object lessons rather than theoretic tomes, “The Music Man” and “Animal House”.
It doesn’t seem to be *quite* limited to purely occult plus political works, but I’ll be diddled what does connect the whole list.
It’s already probably the longest entry I’ve ever seen on PJM.
Here’s the unifying idea:
“My intent with this list is to compile an annotated bibliography of sorts — a collection of books on a variety of subjects and genres that when put side by side can manifest fresh connections and new ways of looking at the world so we as individuals can solve our problems and live happier, more fulfilling lives.”
All of them, or at least a nice chunk of them, also seem to be written by people who in the final analysis are uncomfortable with pure ideologies. This makes them “independent” books, too, which ties into your theme of improving one’s life and taking charge.
just a note: the angel and the demon on donald ducks shoulders? are from the Shepherd of Hermas. The Shepherd of Hermas is a non-canonical, but still recognized as Christian text from the early fathers of the church. They,too, are wrestling with truth, and the divine, in the same piece of real estate.
the shepherd of hermas, and most of the early church fathers are more well-known in the orthodox church. this would be greek orthodox, russian orthodox, and so on.
as well, the pre-nicene council churches- the syriac, and so on- would sound similar but not the same in their formulations. these churches suffered persecutions before rome even became a christian empire.
st anthony shows up mostly as reference for odd painters. his writings are still published. you might like. his writings and his biography- the biographer was trying to sweeten him up.
for pure oddness, really, you cannot go wrong with an orthodox church.
Like the concept, but this is incomprehensible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime
Dave,
You have made 2 of the first 5 comments. They are answers to comments to the effect that you have produced 19 pages of GodKnowsWhat.
Your first is, “Here is the unifying idea (delivered in gibberish).”
Your second, in answer to the word “incomprehensible,” is a link to a bizarre (is that your purpose?) Wikipedia page.
Are you attempting to communicate?
And succeeding with some of us. Dave is pointing to Korzybski’s notion that the state of being verb is a semantic trap: aclay1 says it “is” incomprehensible — but then someone else might come along who finds it perfectly comprehensible. So the assertion that it “is” incomprehensible is mistaken, but a statement like “I find this incomprehensible right now” would not be.
Correct. Many thanks, Charlie.
E’ is brilliant.
I am happy to read that Korzybski was an admirer of Wittgenstein’s. Their work appears to complements one another nicely.
RObert Heinlein, interestingly, was very involved with General Semantics, and at least ran in the same circles in LA as the OTO, Golden Dawn, and such.
It’s fun to see Crowley get his day here. So many of the occultists I know, and many of the liberals too, tend to think of his ideology as nothing but “yeah man, we can whatever we feel like.” In reality he had many conservative leanings, albeit coming to the same conclusions through alternative pathways.
And he was always a huge proponent of setting goals and working very hard to achieve them, not just waiting for someone else to take care of you. My favorite quote is another one from Magick Without Tears where Crowley was admonishing a student for being lazy and coming up with all sorts of excuses: “To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn’t matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue.”
Anyway, fascinating and eclectic mix of books, and I look forward to catching up on all of them, thought at the pace I’m going it’ll take me five years. Thanks for putting it together!
I may never finish this 19-paged article, but if nothing else I must note my thoughts on the statue of Disney & Mouse: a caption reading, “Someday, Mickey, all of this will be yours.”
Of related interest, there is a campaign to vote for Aleister Crowley for President going on this year:
“We realize that Aleister Crowley is dead. And British. And, moreover, not running for office. Nevertheless, we believe that the most effective vote you can cast in 2012 is one for Aleister Crowley.”
More at http://ac2012.com
Anyone who’s really interested in this stuff should read the Illuminatus trilogy. Bob Shea and Bob Wilson were both friends of mine, and they new amazing amounts of this stuff.
I believe Antti P. Balk’s latest, “Balderdash: A Treatise on Ethics” also covers many of these same topics (and people):
http://www.amazon.com/dp/9525700402/
I’m sorry, this is just silly.
Yeah, that was my thought, too.
But, don’t cede the field (don’t seed the feeled), because they’ve been writing in stone again, since the early 90s –and that one-world thingie is immune to negative results. Our world in terms of time is a light skiff running on the surface of a very deep pagan sea.
“They have failed to reveal one new truth, but have succeeded in repeating all the old errors,” so said William Blake, a countercultural icon, about the followers of another, Swedenborg.
Counter cultures come and they go, or as “firesign say” there’s a seeker born every minute.
As a veteren of the ashram industrial complex, I have learned there is an inherent contradiction in the “commoditization of cool,” or huckstering the Path.
Occultism is escapist obscurantism; flashlit faces in the pretend dark.
Everyone believes something but I believe you can learn more about “counter culture” from the Beatles and the Dead.
Or Orwell and Burgess.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
This was a thought-provoking and meaty article. I can see why it might be too much for some, but I enjoyed it.
Pushing people out of their comfort zone once in a while is a good thing. If I hadn’t been pushed a couple of times, I’d still be the kneejerk liberal my parents and teachers programmed me to be.
Good job, Mr. Swindle
Thank you very much. I look forward to more of your feedback as the series continues.
More drivel from Swindle. Get a life.
As an atheist and a fan of indie rock and Wes Anderson and Akira Kurosawa movies, along with being a video game and comic book nerd (most of my wardrobe is t-shirts advertising either superheroes or old 8-bit nintendo games), I think I classify as counterculture conservative. Although, mostly I’d just refer to myself as a skeptical nerdservative.
Yes, you qualify. Welcome. Perhaps in the future I’ll have to add books for Nerdservatives. Any suggestions?