UKH

Social Media is often described as a bit of an echo chamber, and with modern debate often descending into a shouting match between oppositely polarized points of view, sometimes it's useful to see things from the other side. In that spirit - 

What's the last book you read on a subject with which you largely disagreed, and did you learn anything from it?

I can't think of any books I've read that I didn't agree with - shameful. Well, there was Capital, but I only disagree in the sense that I'm centre-left rather than properly left, and in the sense that it's outdated. But I suspect one of the reasons there will be few answers to this question is that the set of 'books it's possible to disagree with' is a tiny, tiny sub-set of books. Most of us read novels, history (I suppose you can disagree with a history book but you'd want to be an academic), textbooks, autobiographies/real life stories (eg climbing stories). There's not much you can disagree with there.

A book is also a very high bar. Plenty of people read different newspapers etc, but as open-minded as I'd like to be, I'm not going to read Atlas Shrugged given that it's going to mean spending 80-odd hours in a state of frustration. I will however read the Spectator as well as the New Statesman, and the FT as well as the Guardian.

If I'm really making an effort I will very occasionally try and read the Mail or Breitbart, and to be honest, yes I have learned things from that, namely how real the sense of victimisation is on the far right. White nationalists genuinely feel under attack from liberals, and it has made me realise that poking holes in far-right arguments only pushes people further right. Also seeing how tribal allegiance obscures rationality on the opposite side of the debate makes it easier to spot that same irrational tribalism on your own side. There will be smaller, factual things I would have learned from these sources, too, but those are the big takeaways for me.

Strangely enough, when I was younger I did read Atlas Shrugged, just as a novel and without any prior knowledge of the author's politics. I enjoyed it as a parable about human selfishness.

I was chatting with my dad in my early twenties and asked him what he was reading. He replied that he was half way through Atlas Shrugged. "Oh that's great, good for you - I should read more of the other side too", I said. A pregnant pause ensued. "Son, I'm not sure what you think my politics are, but I'm not reading it to get the 'other side'."

It's amazing how often we assume, without any evidence, that the people we like share our politics! Andy K is probably a good example in that regard...

Half way through Fountainhead and struggling with it a bit. Her 'heros' seem weird and often unlikeable and  the 'villans' and 'anti heros' rather telegraphed and the world of the novel rather like purgatory but it's well enough written. It's hard to accept her apparent thesis that the drive for real quality has to involve exclusively her form of philosophy. You could shift the poliical slant from right, through centre to left and play exactly the same game. I think people involved in an obsession with real quality in life are richer, more complex and not always so capable of neat political pigeon holes.

Not the last book/subjects that I read & disagree vehemently with but one of many would be the Koran (sp) for way too many obvious reasons . I did glean quite a lot from it though it has to said .

Also the Talmud ( translation ) . 

And the majority of the Black's Law Dictonaries , oh what a hoot & complete ruse they happen to be .

I may have to get back to & update this list when I get more time .

Interesting M'Lud . . .   

I've just finished reading The Fountainhead. It was a long slog. I read it on Kindle so I'm not sure if it's a really long book, or if it just feels like it.

It's not badly written, but it's not a great book by any stretch. All the characters are extreme caricatures, with no subtlety or depth. No one who opposes Rand's philosophy has a positive but misguided motivation, everyone in the book is motivated by personal greed. It's like Rand is incapable of grasping that people can genuinely care about others.

One thing that I did get out of it is from the philosophical discussion near the end. That if you create, you must work purely to your own ideas and for your own ends. If you try and copy or create for others, your work will fail. I agree with this, but then she leaps to declaring altruism as evil, with no clue as to how she got there.

I originally read the book in order to understand the people that believe in Rand's philosophy. I have to say that now I've read it I have even less respect for them. If they could read her work and not see the huge holes in her reasoning, then they are clearly just fundamentally self-centred and were looking for some post-hoc justification.

Lancashire Rock, everything needs upgrading by one grade. Before that I thought one or two chapters of the bible stretched credibility.

I read David Benatar's 'Better Never to Have Been' last year, which is one of the seminal works on philosophical pessimism/anti-natalism (and apparently one of the main influences for Rust Cohle's character in True Detective S1). 

I didn't agree with Benatar's conclusions going in, and I wasn't entirely convinced by his arguments by the end, but it was rewarding to read something that took such a mature approach to what is a difficult and sensitive topic. Irrespective of the fact that I was unconvinced by his arguments, the book taught me a lot about philosophical pessimism and I regularly think back to it, months down the line. It's not often you get to read something that attempts so methodically to rock the foundations of human existence without resorting to rhetoric. 

Would highly recommend -- both the book and the experience. 

I don't even agree with that point. Huge numbers would be destroyed on the rack of reality if everyone tried it. It's fair enough to try hard to follow your own ideas for you own ends but to exclusively do that isn't wise, nor the odd compromise completely selling out. I guess why some like this in politics is their ideas and ends don't match the bulk of evidenced research  and being factually correct isn't so important, and the more nebulous attachments to things like avoiding altruism suit their natural selfishness. I can also see others who are more honest but battered by a corrupt system or a totalitarian system being tempted by such quality views, but not the avoiding altruism bit. It's odd that her male hero modernist functional architect only progresses by altruistic impulses  from the rare clients prepared to push back in the face of stultifying conservatism.

Putting quality first seems to me detached from any political wing (if anything more of a centrist attitude, as the unquestionable ideologies of the far right and far left seems to me another form of small c conservative behavior that would block single minded approaches to real quality).

Peter Pan. Complete work of fiction in my opinion.

Sorry, but that just won't fly.

Isn't the issue of echo chamber that everybody agrees and you don't encounter opposing ideas? UKC bickering may be the best there is  

Last book I disagreed with would be something by Richard Dawkins. The science was really interesting but I wish he would stop banging on about religion as that was just so tedious.

I don't read books I disagree with but I do make sure I look at "the enemy's" newspapers.

It's a fair point, and claiming that you are the lone voice of reason in a room full of lunatics is a common debating tactic. It's not difficult to find a few examples of 'opinion martyrs' in these forums.

I'm currently reading "The lslamic Enlightenment". I don't disagree with it as such - it's hard to disagree with what is essentially a history book - but it certainly challenges the idea of a religion that is often perceived as backward and unyielding.

For example, there is a chapter about how the Islamic ban on dissection of corpses held medicine back for decades, until it was seen how far Western medicine had come and the ban was gradually rolled back.

Putting quality first is indeed a noble apolitical desire. But despite what Pirsig says, quality in art is not an objective quantity. Roark might be a great original architect, but all art is a matter of taste and so the appeal of his work would not be universal in the real world. Rand complexly ignores this. As far as she's concerned architecture is the highest form of man's endeavour ( I snorted with laughter reading that) and it appears that artistic quality is an objective quality in her eyes - so Roark is a great architect, and everyone can see this, and the only people who deny it are lying for their own greedy purpose. The idea that art is subjective, and that some people might genuinely just not like Roark's work, doesn't seem to have crossed her mind.

?I also thought it odd that she let Roark rely on altruism, but this was a minor oddity in a completely ridiculous work. In the world of the Fountainhead, no one had come up with an original idea in architecture for over a thousand years, until Cameron came along, and tben everyone rejected him. Despite the incredible advances in other fields, architecture was stuck copying classic ideas.

And then there's the rape...

Go back to your Wendy House then

I'm not sure Pirsig postulated objective quality, just not the gulf that some on both sides of the two cultures would portray: there is often explicitly art in science and vice versa but the quality endeavor has a deeper bridge. Even if imperfect it was a lovely idea based on broken but compelling characters in a human narrative. Rand just seems bitter and trite (so far) in a frozen world. Still its an interesting novel like nothing I've ever read before. Reading outside a comfort zone can be rewarding.