A better bio of Luther than Metaxas

It's actually Michael Massing's new parallel biography of Luther and Erasmus.

Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind by Michael Massing
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's not a lot of new stuff here for me, especially on the Luther side, but the dual biography concept, when done well, can stimulate some 'aha' and Massing generally does well.

The two biggies on differences are first, one of personality and temperament. Erasmus' irenic style never could have led a Reformation and Luther never could have calmed his down enough even to be the best of organizers of what a Reformation needed in terms of management.

As a result, Erasmus in general was more kindly disposed to human fraility and at least occasionally meeting people halfway. Had he been in Luther's shoes, he never would have treated Melanchthon as shoddily as Luther sometimes did.

As an aside, Massing also gives a good base-level explanation of how differences between Luther and Zwingli, in terms of how they developed their reformations differently, were sociological as much as theological.

I did learn a few tidbits, one of which I could have learned in Lutheran seminary, had it been taught there. And that is that Luther's polemics against the Jews weren't just a late-life, poor-health issue. They started with his lectures on the Psalms years before the 95 Theses. He later tamped them down, after the Reformation took off, in hopes of converting Jews. Until they didn't.

And, it was Karlstadt, not Zwingli, who first questioned the "Real Presence" in the Eucharist, and he did so on the basis of Greek grammer and not metaphoric speech common to Greek, German and English. Karlstadt pointed out that the "this" in "This is my body," can NOT refer backward to "bread" because it's a different gender in Greek. That, too was never mentioned in Lutheran seminary, probably because, although Luther railed against Karlstadt for this, he never refuted it — because, of course, he couldn't.

There is one notable error here that doesn't affect the flow, and a matter of framing that kind of does.

Given that the second big difference between Luther and Erasmus was on free will, and that BOTH had an Augustinian background, it would have been nice for Massing to include a little bit more about just how "minor" of a saint Augustine is seen as being in the East. He does talk a small bit about Orthodoxy's take on Augustine, but not a lot.

The outright error? Paul never claimed to be a Roman citizen, contra Massing. The unknown author of Acts claimed it for him.


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In case you're not a regular reader here, this is my review of Eric Metaxas' horrible take on Luther.

Saplosky's 'Behave' doesn't fully do so

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A 3.5 star "magnum opus" needs some philosophy in general and Hume in particular

The book is not horrible, but it's not all that it could be or that some reviewers crack it up to be. Content, lack of content, and lack of editorial connectivity are all problems.

One biggie on the good side is about dopamine. Sapolsky, with all the latest on that, shows just how much dopamine can NOT be the "addiction neurotransmitter." (There are still plenty of the uninformed who think it is.)

1. On dopamine, at one point it becomes about rewarding anticipation of an actuality, not the actuality
2. Neurons have at least 5 dopamine receptors. D4 is the most studied … the DRD4 gene controlling for it has at least 10 different variants. The 7R form, with seven repeats of one stretch of the gene, is associated w/novelty seeking, addiction, promiscuity, risk taking etc. BUT the risk taking can be for good causes.
3. A particular variant has at most 3-4 percent effect on novelty seeking.
4. What constitutes ‘novelty seeking’ still varies from person to person.
5. In addition, the DAT (dopamine reuptake) gene also comes in different varieties.
6. Even an anticipation of a lessening of an electric shock of a Pavlovian operant conditioning type will raise dopamine

Then, I love this footnote:

Footnote, page 66: Dopaminergic responses to sexually arousing visual stimuli are greater in men than in women. Remarkably, this difference isn’t specific to humans. Male rhesus monkeys will forgo the chance to drink water when thirsty in order to see pictures of — I’m not quite sure how else to say this — crotch shots of female rhesus monkeys (while not being interested in other rhesus-y pictures).

Sapolsky has a fair amount to say about cultural evolution. No blinding light info, but generally solid.

He pretty much crushes Steve Pinker's "Better Angels" claims about our mega-violent past. (Pinker isn't totally alone in such claims, and he and fellow travelers like creating straw people out of anthropologists.) The reality, Sapolsky notes, and with which many anthropologists agree, is that primitive hunter-gatherers weren't violence-free, but they weren't totally Hobbsian. That said, Sapolsky only briefly references controversy over whether or not Pinker et al cheat by not counting internal violence by the modern state against its own citizens.

Surprisingly, after that kicking of Pinker, Sapolsky is generally accepting of sociobiology and its offspring, ev psych. He's also surprisingly at least halfway accepting of D.S. Wilson's neo-version of group selection. And, with that, for now, the book goes back to 4 stars.

Chapter on morals gets dicey. Gets close to scientism. Says he’ll talk more about virtue ethics later, but doesn’t, not in that chapter. Doesn’t recognize that many serious philosophers don’t consider the trolley problem to be serious philosophy.

And, speaking of, his last chapter, on the justice system, could use a lot of philosophy. And has none. Philosophy is missing elsewhere, too.

He uses Hume to introduce Damasio's idea of "emotional reasoning," which includes modeling hypothetical situations to feel potential emotional affect. But, he doesn't reference Damasio that much after that and doesn't mention Hume at all. Of course, Hume's famous "Is ≠ ought" is VERY pertinent in the justice system chapter, if no place else. The whole emphasis on "neuro-" in this last chapter comes close to scientism, and Sapolsky could use some help on matters of volition, which, rather than "free will," is the preferred terminology among many philosophers.

Then there's an occasional WTF. Here's the biggest, on 486:

In one such study, Michael Tomasello (a frequent critic of de Waal — stay tuned) ....

Stay tuned for WHAT? Per the index, and my reading, that's the only reference to Tomasello (who IS an insightful person) in the whole book.

Similarly, after promising, in the first few pages after that Hume reference, to talk more about Damasio later on, he really doesn't. There's only two brief references to him after the first 100 pages.

In short, although it's been several years since Sapolsky has had a tome, and I've liked his previous work this baby came off in some ways as looking like a rush job which needed a better editor as well as a philosopher to be among its readers.

I'd heard good stuff about it, but, because it's at 4.5 stars, my 3.5 star rating and the non-allowance of half-stars mean I bump it downward.


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The biggest lies ...

Are the ones we tell ourselves.

And, with the occasional Hitlerian sub-humanizing lies, these are lies that primarily affect ourselves, and they're primarily internal.

No, they're not Dunning-Krueger effect lies about how wonderfully skilled and intelligent we are in cases where we're not Lake Wobegon above-average geniuses. (That said, they would come in second place.)

No, I see what I call motivational lies as the biggest lies. And, they are?

They're kind of the reverse of Aesop sour grapes lies.

We instead tell ourselves "I really want to do X" before venturing out to do X, or a larger task that in part includes doing X. Variants could be "I'll do X better this time" if we've had problems with X before and similar.

These are the type of internal lies that easily can be flipped to sour grapes lies at some point in the future, of course.

Example: "I really didn't want Y so badly as to work that hard on X," or "Y wasn't worth that much work on X," or similar.

But, we tell ourselves these original motivational lies when we're in a place of partial ambivalence. And, often, the ambivalence is more emotional than intellectual. We can't, or don't want to, commit fully to the work to do Y because something just doesn't feel right about Y. Per the likes of Antonio Damasio, we need to unpack those feelings first, before we go down the road of motivational lies to ourselves.