Self-hatred in the West is a strange and indeed puzzling thing. It seems to happen when loyalty to one’s own cultural heritage is transferred to an ideal location. A common explanation offers guilt as the psychological dynamic of cultural self-alienation, but it is not at all clear what the average European should feel guilty for, and who should be guilty for whatever it might turn out to be. Guilt in this context is seldom defined, but we may suggest, in brief, that feeling guilty is a learned emotion derived from a consciousness, real or imagined, that one has betrayed a moral principle constituting one’s identity. It might be possible, for example, that some people have so internalized equality of social and economic conditions as a moral principle that they experience the disabling emotion of guilt merely from the contrast between their own wealth, on the one hand, and the poverty of some reference group on the other. If so, the therapy is clear enough: Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor. Some individuals have in fact done this, but it is rare. If guilt does lie behind the passionate self-hatred of some Westerners, then they seem to have gritted their teeth and with great fortitude learned to enjoy its benefits.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)

A democratic assembly tends to understand legislation as a command addressed to the people. This accords, no doubt, with our common talk about “obeying the law”. We talk of laws “forbidding” certain kinds of conduct and “encouraging” others. Sometimes, indeed, laws are thought to be a signaling system, entities that “send a message.” Strictly speaking, however, these ways of thinking constitute a simpleminded misunderstanding of the rule of law. A command means an imperative addressed directly from a commander to an addressee, and the point of the command is extinguished with that situation or with that type of situation. A master of slaves commands his slaves. An employer can command an employee, within the limits of an agreed relationship of employment. ..

A law is something quite different. It is a hypothetical imperative, specifying a form of conduct that attracts certain sanctions should any particular instance of the conduct be defined as an offense by a court. The law does not “forbid” murder; it simply specifies a variety of penalties for a vriety of different kinds of killing. This view of law provides the formal sense in which living under law is what we in the West understand as freedom, and the point is thus very far from being a piece of legal pedantry. The creativity of Western societies in part results from pursuing one’s interests by finding lines of conduct that do not incur the sanctions of law. From a hostile point of view, freedom consists in the search for “loopholes”.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)

Henrik Berggren – Underbara dagar framför oss, En biografi över Olof Palme (2010)

The social democrat Olof Palme represented a strain of American post-war liberalism, imported into Swedish politics in the shape of an upper-class golden boy.  His sharp mind and sharper tongue got him hand-picked into the political elite at a young age, happily timed so that he came to be in sync with the new spirit of the age.

Recommended: Yes.

Kenneth Minogue – The Servile Mind, How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (2010)

Cultural conservatism is irrelevant to me as an overall worldview, but relevant as a correction to liberal and democratic excesses.  Minogue picks the (social) democratic worldview apart, analyzing its paradoxes and illusions, and argues that traditional individualism, which saw freedom and responsibility as fused together, has been replaced by a new form that uses the state to separate the two.

Recommended: Yes.

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen – Den gode krig? Danmark i Afghanistan 2006-2010 (2011)

Denmark has played an active role in the war in Afghanistan, losing 40 lives in the process, but Rasmussen argues it’s not clear that they’ve achieved anything, beyond proving their military worth to themselves and to NATO.

Recommended: Yes.

In responding to the blizzard of regulation to which we are subjected, we are sometimes lulled into thinking that all human beings seek freedom by nature, and that our liberal ways are merely an expression of this natural human passion that has at last been liberated from oppressors. No glance at history, and especially at the history of the last century, would sustain such an idea. Even where the real oppressions of communisms have been overthrown, there remain many who yearn for the security that is lost when freedom comes. No doubt there is one kind of freedom that everybody does desire – the freedom to do what one wants without interference. But this is merely the slave’s dream of escape from a master; it is quite distinct from the freedom on which the greatness of European societies has been constructed.  Freedom as a moral condition is only possible when combined with responsibility. To be free in this sense is, of course, to live in terms of the rules of law, but more importantly it is to be guided by one’s own sense of virtues and commitments.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)

Joe Abercrombie – The Heroes (2011)

Abercrombie has a nice setup portraying the foultasting underside of fantasy conventions, from epic quests in the First Law trilogy to vengeance in Best Served Cold, and now warfare in The Heroes.  It’s brutal, but there’s a humaneness at bottom that keeps this from being just 500 pages of blood&gore.  Abercrombie is a cynic, but in an older sense of someone who skewers pretension while still having the courage to believe in something himself.  The depressingly ugly events of his world play out against a sense that goodness is possible, if you choose it.

Recommended: Yes.

Henrik Jensen – Ofrets århundrede (1998)

The break-up of social order and tradition has resulted in a society where individuals find meaning by identifying themselves with the victims of 20th century catastrophies.

Read: 50 pages

Recommended: No. Partly because I don’t find his cultural conservatism a relevant approach to victimology, and partly because he bases an entire chapter on the social theories of Johan Galtung.

Jerome K. Jerome – Idle Ideas in 1905 (1905)

The amused thoughts of a useless person, balancing on the edge of being interesting because they’re old, but I pity his contemporaries.

Read: Five chapters.

Recommended: No.

David Eberhard – I trygghetsnarkomanernas land (2006)

Secular fear of death combined with the modern world’s unprecedented ability to make us safer has made us addicted to safety.  We’re unable to properly evaluate risks, and will sacrifice anything for another fix of feeling safe, slaves to our addiction.  Eberhard insists that there is nothing partisan in his attack, and he’s right that safety addicts are found in all prosperous societies, but given how strongly the Scandinavian form of this phenomenon is connected with the social democratic welfare state, this book is basically a manifesto for the Right.

Recommended: Yes.  Almost obligatory.  This is the sort of book non-paternalists ought to slam down on the table and say “This. This what we believe.”

Sharon Begley – Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (2007)

Not the proper book on neuroplasticity I’m looking for, but smarter than the self-helpish title implies. Foreword by the Dalai Lama, but at least it’s not Gladwell, and it is actually appropriate: Begley investigates how neurological research and cognitive behavioral therapy plausifies the Buddhist belief that the mind can use meditation to change itself.  It has the usual popsci anecdotes, (complete with evil old guard defending dogma against Frightening New Ideas), but what it also does is illuminate my personal experience with meditation, introspection and attention.  I know there’s something happening here, in a nexus science, religion and philosophy arrive at from different angles, and I want to know what it is.

Recommended: I suppose.  For now.  Caution: These ideas leave you with fewer excuses.