HUMAN ANIMALS' RELATIONSHIP TO NONHUMAN ANIMALS . . . AND TO THEMSELVES

Bekoff, Marc, Animals at Play: Rules of the Game illustrated by Michael J. DiMotta (Philadelphia: Temple U. Press, 2008).

Bekoff, Marc, The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons for Expanding Our Compassion Footprint (Novato, California: New World Library, 2010) ("More to the point, if animals can think and feel, what do they think and feel about the ways humans treat them? What would they say to us, and what would they ask of us, if they could speak a human language? Here is what I believe their manifesto would consist of: 1. All animals share the Earth and we must coexists. 2. Animals think and feel. 3. Animals have and deserve compassion. 4. Connection breeds caring, alienation breeds disrespect. 5. Our world is not compassionate to animals. 6. Acting compassionately helps all beings and our world." Id. at 8-9.).

Bekoff, Marc & Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009) ("We define morality as a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups. These behaviors relate to well-being and harm, and norms of right and wrong attach to many of them. Morality is an essentially social phenomenon, arising in the interactions between and among individual animals, and it exists as a tangle of threads that holds together a complicated and shifting tapestry of social relationships. Morality in this way acts as social glue." Id. at 7. "In Wild Justice we argue that animals have a broad repertoire of moral behavior and that their lives together are shaped by these behavior patterns. Ought and shouldregarding what's right and what's wrong play an important role in their social interactions, just as they do in ours. . . ." Id. at x. "For readers familiar with evolutionary biology, what we're saying is that arguments for evolutionary continuity--the idea that the differences between species are differences in degree rather than differences kind--are being supported for a wide variety of cognitive and emotional capacities in diverse species. We believe that there isn't a moral gap between humans and other animals, and that saying things like 'the behavior patterns that wolves or chimpanzees display are merely building blocks for human morality' doesn't really get us anywhere. At some point differences in degree aren't meaningful differences at all and each species is capable of 'the real thing.' Good biology leads to this conclusion. Morality is an evolved trait and 'they (other animals) have it just like we have it."Id. at xi.).

Ash, Timothy Garton, Facts Are Subversive: Political Writings from a Decade Without a Name (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2010) (From the essay "Decivilization": "Before our attention wanders on to the next headline story, let's learn the big lesson of Hurricane Katrina. . . . Katrina's big lesson is that the crust of civilization on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you've fallen through, scratching and gouging for you life like a wild dog." "You think the looting, rape and armed terror that emerged within hours in New Orleans would never happen in nice, civilized Europe? Think again. It happened here, all over our continent only sixty years ago. Read the memoirs of Holocaust and Gulag survivors, Norman Lewis's account of Naples in 1944, or the recently republished anonymous diary of a German woman in Berlin in 1945. It happened again in Bosnia just ten years ago. And that wasn't even the force majeure of a natural disaster. Europe's were man-made hurricanes." "The basic point is the same" remove the elementary staples of organized civilized life--food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security--and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes." "The word civilization, in one of its earliest senses, referred to the process of human animals being civilized--by which we mean, I suppose, achieving a mutual recognition of human dignity, or at least accepting in principle the desirability of such recognition. . . . Reading Jack London the other day, I came across an unusual word: decivilization. The opposite process, that is, the one by which people cease to be civilized and become barbaric. Katrina tells us about the ever-present possibility of decivilization." Id. at 407, 407-408. From the essay "Beauty and the Beast in Burma": "'I'm a vegetarian,' says U-5. 'I became a vegetarian after being in prison. You see--I'm sorry to have to tell you this--we ate rats.' But how did they cook the? 'We couldn't. We just dried then in the sun and ate them raw.' From the balcony of a good Chinese restaurant we look across to the great royal fort of Mandalay, its broad moat shimmering in the twilight. A tourist's delight. U-5 tells me that the embankment of the moat was recently rebuilt by forced labour. His own family was compelled to work on it. Earlier, from the top of Mandalay Hill, he pointed first to a landmark that the tourist guides never mention: the large, semicircular prison where he, like many others, spent years in solitary confinement for his part in the pro-democracy protest of 1988. The rat house." Id. at 259, 259-260. Also, see generally George Packer, "Spheres of Influence," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/14/2010.)

BOOK OF THE WEEK: WEEK ONE, 2011

McCloskey, Robert G., The American Supreme Court, 5th edition, revised by Sanford Levinson (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2010) (America has thus had two sovereigns, but this somewhat outlandish arrangement has been maintained only because each of the partners has known the meaning of self-restraint. In the critical literature of the past generation or two, one has read much about judicial tyranny, and the vision of a populace bent on social reform but shackled by an unfeeling Court's deposition seems to have beguiled more one observer. In truth the Supreme Court has seldom, if ever, flatly and for very long resisted a really unmistakable wave of public sentiment, It has worked with the premise that constitutional law, like politics itself, is a science of the possible." Id. at 1. From the CODA: "It is a notorious truth that more Americans can name the Three Stooges than can name three members of the Supreme Court. Perhaps this is an irrelevant factoid. One does not have to know the name of one's airline pilot in order to feel confidence that one will be transported safely, at least if one has confidence in the 'brand name' of the airline one is flying. Perhaps if we really believe that law--especially 'constitutional law'--were the equivalent of rocket science and that, concomitantly, we could truly identify the very best rocket scientists/justice whom we could count on to reach the moon (and return), we would be as indifferent as to actual identity as we are with regard to airline pilots and rocket designers. But, as already suggested through he use of he subjunctive, no one really really believes in 'legal science,' and everyone recognizes that the identity of the justices really does matter." Id. at 283.).

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Wishing you good health and, of course, good readings in 2011.

REFLECTIONS FROM A DECADE FORGOTTEN . . . BUT STILL DEEPLY FELT

Ferguson, Niall, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, & Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2010) ("Yet if the seventies appear to have launched a 'second wind' for the United States in it career as global superpower, as historian Charles Maier proposes, we ought to recall that the republic has paid for its reinvigorated primacy with new kinds of vulnerability. Globalization has eroded public authority over the economy and has encouraged the outsourcing of industrial labor, devastating the manufacturing heartland; it has subjected U.S. actions at home and abroad to the oversight of global opinion (Abu Ghraib being an exception that demonstrates the rule); and it has facilitated the violence of transnational terrorists, as we learned on 9/11. Historically, to return to the question of agency, globalization has been anything but an imperial project imposed on weak nations by the United States. As the experience of the 1970s implies, the United States has been an object as much as an agent of globalization. Its autonomy in an integrating world has been diminished, while its leadership role, the nature of its power among nations, and the character of its influence in the world have been transformed." From Chapter 3, Daniel J. Sargent, "The United States and the Globalization in the 1970s," at 49, 63-64.).

TONY JUDT, 1948-2010

Judt, Tony, The Memory Chalet (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010)."Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has it ethics. . . ." Id. at 31. "The opposite of austerity is not prosperity but luxe et volupe. We have substituted endless commerce for public purpose, and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders. Sixty years after Churchill could offer only 'blood, toil, tears and sweat,' our very own war president--notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric-cold think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community--the 'togetherness' of consumption00is all we deserve from those who govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be in order." Id. at 32. "The 'professionalization' of academic writing--and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for security of 'theory' and 'methodology' favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib 'popular' articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the 'television don,' whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But whereas as an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today's 'accessible' writers protrude uncomfortably into the audience's consciousness. It is the performer, rather than the subject, to whom the audience's attention is drawn." Id. at 152.).

DID BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION FAIL US? OR, DID WE (MEANING THE COLLECTIVE AMERICANS 'WE') FAIL BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION?

Minow, Martha, In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2010) ("Efforts to end racial segregation in schools could fail in two quite different ways. They could fail, in fact, to bring about racial mixing. Or they could bring about racial mixing that turns out to replicate the racial hierarchy and subordination expressed in the segregated system. Evasion is the first problem; perpetuation is the second. The racial desegregation effort following Brown has suffered both fates. Decades of resistance preceded new patterns of public and private actions, producing racially identifiable schools that in turn mirror the economic and social disparities between whites and members of other races, even as the nation grows more diverse. Courts and communities have failed to sustain desegregation efforts that worked. Strikingly, the racial achievement gap persists in racially mixed middle-class schools-- even among African Americans and Hispanics who are themselves middle-class, and among academically motivated and focused students of color. Whether in the same school or in substantially separate schools, students across the country, with notable exceptions, continue to register a racial gap in school achievement (measured by test scores) that mirror the gap between whites and African Americans and Latinos in home ownership, occupation, education, and wealth, Disparities in access to educational resources also persist when the experience of white students are compared with those of black and Hispanic students." "Meanwhile the ideal of integration no longer motivates people of any race. . . ." Id. at 26-27. That said, from the bookjacket: "What is the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education? While it is well known for establishing racial equality as a central commitment of American schools, the case also inspired social movements for equality in education across all lines of difference, including language, gender, disability, immigration status, socio-economic status, religion, and sexual orientation. Yet more than a half century after Brown, American schools are more racially separated than before, and educators, parents, and policy maker still debate whether the ruling requires all-inclusive classrooms in terms of race, gender, disability and other differences." "In Brown's Wake examines the reverberations of Brown in American schools, including efforts to promote equal opportunities for all kinds of students. School choice, once a strategy for avoiding Brown, has emerged as a tool to promote integration and opportunities, even as charter schools and private school voucher programs enable new forms of self-separation by language, gender, disability, and ethnicity.").

SOCIOLOGY AND LAW: THE POLITICS OF DEFINING WHAT IS CRIMINAL

Hagan, Who Are the Criminals?: The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2010) (From the bookjacket: "How did the United Stated go from being a country that tries to rehabilitate street criminals and prevent white-collar crime to one that harshly punishes common lawbreakers while at the same time encouraging corporate crime through a massive deregulation of business? Why do street criminals get stiff prison sentences, a practice that has led to the disaster of mass incarceration, while white-collar criminals, who arguably harm more people, get slaps on the wrist--if they are prosecuted at all? . . ." ""John Hagan argues that the recent history of American criminal justice can be divided into two eras--the age of Roosevelt (roughly 1933-1973) and the age of Reagan (1974 to 2008). A focus on rehabilitation, corporate regulation, and the social roots of crime in the earlier period was dramatically reversed in the later era. In the age of Reagan the focus shifted to the harsh treatment of street crimes, especially drug offenses, which disproportionally affected minorities and the poor and resulted in wholesale imprisonment. And the same time, a massive deregulation of business provided new opportunities, incentives, and even rationalization for white-collar crime. . . ." "The time for moving beyond Reagan-era crime policies is long overdue, Hagan argues. The understanding of crime must be reshaped and we must reconsider the relative harms and punishments of street and corporate crimes." Americans, though acknowledging the super rich and (begrudgingly) the super poor, love to think of themselves as living in a essentially classless society. Any meaningful discussion of America's crime policy gives the lie to that thought. The American criminal justice system, during what Hagan refers to as the "age of Reagan,' became increasing harsh toward one class (minorities and the poor), while becoming increasingly lenient toward another class (mainly white middle-class, and business.).

THE MOST DANGEROUS BRANCH: THE RUNAWAY, OR EXTREMIST, PRESIDENCY

Ackerman, Bruce, The Decline and Fall of The American Republic (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2010) ("I predict that: (1) the evolving system of presidential nominations will lead to the election of an increasing number of charismatic outsider types who gain office by mobilizing activist support for extremist programs of the left or the right; (2) all presidents, whether extremist or mainstream, will rely on media consultants to design streams of sound bites aimed at narrowly segmented micropublics, generating a politics of unreason that will often dominate public debate; (3) they will increasingly govern through their White House staff of superloyalists, issuing executive orders that their staffers will impose on the federal bureaucracy even when they conflict with congressional mandates; (4) they will engage with an increasingly politicized military in ways that may greatly expand their effective power to put their executive orders into force throughout the nation; (5) they will legitimate their unilateral actions through an expansive use of emergency powers, and (6) assert 'mandates from the People' to evade or ignore congressional statutes when public opinion polls support decisive action; (7) they will rely on elite lawyers in the executive branch to write up learned opinions that vindicate the constitutionality of their most blatant power grabs. These opinions will rubber-stamp presidential actions months or years before the Supreme Court gets into the act--and they will generate heated debate amongst the broader legal community. With the profession divided, and the president's media machine generating a groundswell of support for his power grab, the Supreme Court may find it prudent to stage a strategic retreat, allowing the president to displace Congress and use his bureaucracy and military authority to establish a new regime of law and order." "These are the dynamics of decline and fall for the American Republic . . . . Id. at 9-10. A thoughtful and provocative lecture. It provides several dire warnings. Will we take note? Probably not.).

STARTING NEXT SUNDAY, I WILL POST A 'BOOK OF THE WEEK.' AS A SORT OF PREVIEW, CONSIDER . . .

Levmore, Saul, & Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2010) (An Understatement: "With so many ideas in play, and human relationships at stake, it is no wonder that these essays are both informative and provocative." Id. at 11.).

FICTION SUGGESTIONS

Auster, Paul, Sunset Park: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2010) ("Bit by bit, he has pared down his desires to what is now approaching a bare minimum. He has cut out smoking and drinking, he no longer eats in restaurants, he does not own a television, a radio, or a computer. He would like to trade in his car for a bicycle, but he can't get rid of the car, since the distances he must travel for work are too great. The same applies to the cellphone he carries around in his pocket, which he would dearly love to toss in the garbage, but he needs it for work as well and therefore can't do without it. . . . His rent is low, since he lives in a small apartment in a poor neighborhood, and beyond spending money on bedrock necessities, the only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American, novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of." Id. at 6-7. See Joyce Carol Oates, "My Son, My Son!", NYRB, December 23, 2010, at 49.).

Booth, Martin, A Very Private Gentleman: A Novel (New York: Picador, 2004) ("Along one wall is a row of windows: like the fireplace, they are a modern addition. Opposite them are the bookshelves." "I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books. They contain the condensed experiences of humanity. To live fully, one has to read widely. I do not intend to face a man-eating lion in the African veldt, fall from an aircraft into the Arabian Sea, soar through outer space or march with the legions of Rome against Gaul or Carthage, yet books can take me to these places, to these predicaments. In a book, Salome can seduce me, I can fall in love with Marie Dupleissis, have my own Lady of the Camellias, a private Monroe or exclusive Cleopatra. In a book I can rob a bank, spy on the enemy, kill a man. Kill any number of men. No, not that. One man at a time is enough for me. It aways was. And I do not always seek experience second-hand." Id. at 20-21.).

Byatt, A. S., The Children's Book: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2009) (See Jennifer Schuessler, "Dangerous Fancies," NYT, 10/11/2009.).

Citkowitz, Evgenia, Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) (See Ligaya Mishan, "Fumblers and Dreamers, NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/30/2010.).

Donoghue, Emma, Room: A Novel (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2010) (See Aimee Bender, Separation Anxiety," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/19/2010).

Eisenberg, Deborah, The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) (See Jean Thompson, "Don't Have a Nice Day," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/18/2010.).

Goldberg, Myla, The False Friend: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2010) (See Marilyn Stasio, "Childhood Attachments," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/24/2010.).

Gombrowicz, Witold, Pornografia: A Novel translated from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt, with a foreword by Sam Lipsyte (New York: Grove Press, 2009) .

Goncharov, Ivan, Oblomov: A Novel translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, with an afterword by Mikhail Shishkin (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008) (From the book jacket: "In this first translation taken from the definitive L. S. Geiro edition, translator Marian Schwartz captures the wry humor and all-embracing humanity of Ivan Goncharov's classic nineteenth-century satire of quiet resistance to bourgeois life. Ilya Ilich Oblomov is a young, serf-owning nobleman largely incapable of overcoming his apathy. 'Forced to choose between an unworthy life and sleeping,' writes Mikhail Shishkin in the afterword, 'Oblomov chooses sleep. Suicide by sofa.' ".

Goodman, Allegra, The Cookbook Collector: A Novel (New York: The Dial Press, 2010) ( "'You should have warned me earlier, ' Orion said. 'I would have lowered my expectations.' Lou grinned. 'True story. A woman and her lovely young daughter are sitting on the beach. An enormous wave comes crashing down and sweeps the daughter away. 'The mother is hysterical. Weeping, she stands at the water's edge. If there's a God in heaven, she screams, please bring back my child! 'Lo and behold the wave returns and washes up the lovely daughter, alive and well. 'Thank you, merciful God! the mother cries. Then she looks around her. She looks all around, and at last she calls up to heaven once more. She cries out, There was also a hat?'" Id. at 346-347. See Dominique Browning, "The Insatiable Years," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/25/2010.).

Grass, Gunter, The Box: Tales from the Darkroom translated from the German by Krishna Winston (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) (See Tim Mohr, "Cat and Mouse," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/14/2010.).

Grossman, David, To the End of the Land: A Novel translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen (New York: Knopf, 2010) ("'One thing I know, which I never imagined,' he said during one of those hours, with her head resting on his chest.' [] 'You can live an entire life without purpose.' [] 'Once, when I was still the dearly departed me, if you'd told me this was what I could expect, a whole life of this, I'd have dome myself in on the sport. Today I know it's not that terrible. That you certainly can. I'm living proof.' 'But what does that mean? Explain it to me. What do mean, a life without purpose?' He pondered. 'I mean that nothing really hurts you and nothing really makes you happy. You live because you live. Because you happen not to be dead'" Id. at 559. See Colm Toibin, "Losing Battles," NYT Book Review, Sunday 9/26/2010; and "Petals of Blood," The Economist, September 18th 2010, at 103).

Hamilton, Patrick, Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl’s Court (New York: Europa Edition, 2006).

Jacobson, Howard, The Act of Love: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

Jacobson, Howard, The Finkler Question (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010) (See Janet Maslin, "Jewish Funhouse Mirror Is Alive and Not So Well," NYT, Thursday, 10/21/10.).

Jen, Gish, World and Town: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2010) (See Donna Rifkind, "Neighborhood Watch," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/7/2010).

Jose, F. Sionil, Don Vicente: Two Novels: Tree and My Brother (New York: Modern Library, 1999) ("A man's suicide is the ultimate violence he can fling against the granite circumstances he could not vanquish. It is a lonely and desperate act of supreme courage, not weakness. But it is also an admission of total failure; the destruction of the self is the end of one person's struggle, an end wherefrom there will be no rebirth or resurrection--nothing but the blackness, the impenetrable muck that hides everything, sometimes even the reason for death itself." Id. at 89. "He dug out his gold watch from his waist pocket. 'You have plenty of time,' he said. 'Now listen. You are young and you don't know many things, but do remember this: you are alone on this earth. Alone. You must act for yourself and no other. Kindness is not appreciated anymore, nor is friendship. Think of yourself before you think of others. It's a cruel world, and you have to be hard and cruel, too. They will strangle you if you don't strangle them first. Trust no one but your judgment--and even then don't trust too much.' " Id. at 154-155. "When he sank into his bed a thought coursed through him like ice: all these years he had always felt himself superior to his brother, maybe because he had more education and had seen more of that broader landscape extending beyond Sipnget, and what he had seen and experienced had imbued him with more knowledge, more sensibility. He was, after all, a poet, and he could be really capable of love that was not love of self but love of life--and therefore of death--so that he should be able to give himself to death's embrace and mock that which is also the end. Hew knew now, however, that this was not so, that this was self-deception instead, and that, as his brother had said, he was incapable of sacrifice. And the poetry that he had written--which could hardy be understood even by those with facility in English--of what use was it? Of what use was life? He believed that he had simplicity, but now he knew that he was obscure instead, not because he did not know what he was saying but because his own feelings were inchoate and therefore devoid of real passion. What, then, was in his arteries?" Id. at 390-391.).

Jose, F. Sionil, Dusk: A Novel (New York: Modern Library, 1992) ("There were always excuses, there was no escaping them, for the power to disagree was not with the Indios, just as it would never be with him. So the Church, then, was Castilian. The Church was not interested in justice, or in the abolition of inequality. The temple, then, was just another pit, and the rosary he held offered no salvation. No God can haul men like him up from the abyss of perdition." Id. at 142. " 'Don't ever be a patriot, Eustaquio. Those who think they are or will be delude themselves. Patriotism is selfless. And it is not the generals who are the bravest--they usually have the means to stay away from the battle and thereby lengthen their lives. The bravest are usually those whom we do not know or hear about, those anonymous men who dig trenches, who produce the food. They are the corpus--you understand that word--the body and also the soul of a nation. Eustaquio, my words are just words, but all through history--and you have studied it--it has always been the many faceless men, those foot soldiers, who have suffered most, who have died, It is they who make a nation.' " Id. at 236. "The Cripple was right; the Americans were no different from the Spaniards--they were here to humiliate, to deny life. The three insurrectos who hanged in the plaza in Bauang--they had been dead for ore than a day and still were not cut down and buried decently, The people must see the fearsome handiwork and be coerced into betraying Aguinaldo." Id. at 284.).

Jose, F. Sionil, The Samsons: Two Novels in the Rosales Saga: The Pretenders and Mass (New York: Modern Library, 2000) (I always remember what Mother told me when I was about nine or ten: all those we love we will eventually lose, all those we hate we will eventually face. This is the inevitable sequence, the deafening roll that follows the lightning flash, the drab brown of the fields after the living green of the rainy season." Id. at 332. "Chicken looked at me, his small sad eyes crinkling in a smile. 'Who is innocent and who is guilty?' He shook his head. 'The poor are always guilty and the rich are always innocent. Get some lawyer to stand for you. But while you are here, you must follow the rules--theirs and ours.' 'But the law---' 'The police, what do you think they care for? Their pay, first of all--and the more they can get, through foul means if necessary, the more they will get it. They are not here to help us; they are here to maintain order so that we will continue being what we are--poor.' '" Id. at 488-489.).

Krauss, Nicole, Great House: A Novel (New York: Norton: 2010) (See Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "Hearts Full of Sorrow," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/17/2010.).

Levin, Adam, The Instructions (San Francisco: McSweeney's Rectangulars, 2010) ("'Here's another idea that I'm sure you're familiar with: The world at large is like a gage. The world is bounded and governed, and those who violate its boundaries or defy its governance meet with negative consequences. And, yes, even those who stay within their cage's boundaries and allow themselves to be governed meet with negative consequences, and indeed that happens far more often than should be the case, you'll hear no argument from me on that--I do not deny the world contains its share of injustice, but . . . Most people, Gurion--most people do not violate boundaries, do not defy governance, and most of them come out intact, whereas very few of those who act lawlessly do. And that is why school is so much about following rules. You are here, above all else, to learn to live lawfully for the rest of your life. You are here to learn how to exist in cages without acting as if they are cages, to live like mensches despite being locked in cages. You are here to learn to survive in the world. That is the most basic purpose of our educational system, and it is a high purpose. It is good. I stand behind it. I want you and your fellow students to leave Aptakisic more capable of survival than you were when you entered.'" Id. at 803-804. See Joshua Cohen, "Holy Warrior," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/7/2010).

Levy, Andrea, The Long Song: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) (See Fernanda Eberstadt, "When Jamaica Lost Its Chains," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/9.2919.).

Machart, Bruce, The Wake of Forgiveness: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) (See Philip Caputo, "Tough Love," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/31/2010.).

Mankell, Henning, Daniel: A Novel translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray (New York: The New Press, 2010).

Mankell, Henning, Italian Shoes: A Novel translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson (New York: Vintage Books, 2009, 2010) (" 'We're always being made promises,' she said. 'You make them yourself and you listen to others giving theirs. Politicians are always going on about providing a better quality of life for people as they get older, and a health service in which nobody ever gets bedsores. Banks promise you high interest rates, some food promises to make you lose weight if you eat it, and body creams guarantee old age with fewer wrinkles. Life is quite simply a matter of cruising along in your own little boat through a constantly changing but never-ending stream of promises, And how many do we remember? We forget the one we would like to remember, and we remember the ones we'd prefer to forget. Broken promises are like shadows dancing around in the twilight. The older I become, the more clearly I see them. . . .' " Id. at 33.).

Mitchell, David, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2010) (" 'Stop deserters,' answers another, and Wren calls out: 'Hear the Chaplain!' But Wily closes his Bible. 'Aye, with the tempest howling, with death a near certainty, Paul says, 'Abandon ship and you'll drown; stay aboard with me and you'll survive.' Would you believe him? Would I?' The chaplain shrugs and puffs. 'This was a prisoner in chains, a heretic from a backward ditch of Rome's empire. Yet he persuaded the guards to cut away the boats, and the Book of Acts tells that two hundred and seventy-six were saved by God's mercy. Why did that raggle-taggle crew of Cypriots, Lebanese, and Palestinians heed Paul? Was it his voice, or his face, or . . . something else? Ah, with that secret, I'd be Archbishop Wily by now! Instead, I'm stuck here, with you.' Some of the men laugh. 'I shan't claim, men, that faith always saves a man from drowning--enough devout Christians have died at sea to make a lair of me. But this I do swear: faith shall save your soul from death, Without faith, death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with faith, death is nothing worse than the end of this voyage we all life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our loved ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out and under the captaincy of our Creator . . .'" Id. at 392-393,).

Moore, Lisa, February (New York: Black Cats. 2009) (See Sylvia Brownrigg, "The Widow in Winter," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/21/2010.).

Murray, Paul, Skippy Dies: A Novel (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010) (" 'I suppose we can't really conceive of our way of life ever changing,' she says, ignoring his clunky flattery. 'Let alone coming to an end. It's just like the boys here doing stupid things--you know, climbing electricity pylons, jumping their skateboard off ten-foot walls--because they can't imagine getting hurt, They think they'll go on for ever, So do we. But nothing goes on for ever. Civilizations ends, everything ends, that's what you teach them in History class, isn't it?' " Id. at 206. " 'A life, you see--a life, [Robert] Frost is saying, is something that must be chosen, just like a path through the wood. The tricky thing for us is that we live in an age that seems to present us with a whole raft of choices, a maze of ready-made paths. But if you look more closely, many of them turn out to be simply different versions of the same thing, to buy products, for example, or to believe whatever fabricated narrative we are offered to believe in, a religion, a country, a football team, a war. The idea of making one's own choices, of for example not not believing, not consuming, remain as less travelled as ever . . .' " Id. at 349-350. " 'See, that's exactly the kind of thing I mean,' Farley ripostes, the whole room looking at him now, 'we spend all our time congratulating ourselves on what a great school we are, we go into class every day and fill the kids' heads up with crap, but you try to say anything about what the world's actually genuinely like and someone'll tell you to keep your mouth shut and show some respect --' " Id. at 472. " 'It's a good example of how history works,' Howard says. 'We tend to think of it as something solid and unchanging, appearing out of nowhere etched in stone like the Ten Commandments. But history in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot.' " Id. at 556. See Dan Kois, "Ghost, Come Back Again," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/5/2010.).

Naslund, Sena Jeter, Adam and Eve: A Novel (New York: Morrow, 2010) ("For an instant the intruders appeared only as impressions or shapes--one, a long dark rabbinical shape with a beard; two, a business suit with a face like an eagle; three, a tweedy British form. . . . 'The demons of literalism,' I murmured so that Arielle would have some notion of what was at stake." Id. at 309. See Louise Thomas, "In the Beginning," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/31/2010.).

Ogawa, Yoko, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (New York” Picador, 2008).

Ozick, Cynthia, Foreign Bodies: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) (See Thomas Mallon, "Cynthia Ozick's Homage to Henry James," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/21/2010.).

Paine, Tom, Scar Vegas and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, 2000) (From the story, "A Predictable Nightmare on the Eve of the Stock Market First Breaking 6,000": "She stood in the empty lot, swaying slightly, and smoothed her skirt over and over, Melanie Applebee walked in the pink glow of the late afternoon, repeating Stanford Business School Professor Steven Galamudi's axiom: every macroproblem is solvable by a multitude of microdecisions. Bats flitted past her face. A black child biked past her and spit a wad of bubblegum at her." Id. at 171, 181.).

Roth, Philip, Nemesis (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) (See Leah Hager Cohen, "Summer of '44," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/10/2010.).

Rushdie, Salman, Luka and the Fire of Life: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2010) (See Mark Athitakis, "Spellbound," NYT Book Review, Children Books, Sunday, 11/7/2010.).

Schlink, Bernhard, The Weekend translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010) (" 'Enough of your cheap sarcasm. You have no idea what Jorg's talking about. Have the cops ever beaten you up? Have they shackled you by your hands and feet in a jail cell and left you lying in your shit and piss for two days? Have they forced food down your throat, down your windpipes and your bronchial tubes until your lung collapsed? Have they deprived you of sleep night after night for years? And then left you for years without a sound?' Marko bent over the table and yelled at Ulrich. 'It really was war--Jorg hasn't worked that out. Back then you knew it too--everyone knew. How many leftists have I met who have told me they neatly ended up in the armed struggle back then! They didn't, they preferred to have other people fighting and failing for them--vicariously. I understand that people are afraid of the struggle and stay out if it. The fact that you act as if there hadn't been a war leaves me speechless.' " Id. at 95.) Also, see Ian Buruma, "Living Down the Past," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/17/2010)..

Spencer, Scott, Man in the Woods: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2010) (See Ron Carlson, "What the Dog Saw," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/10/2010).

Spencer, Scott, A Ship Made of Paper: A Novel (New York; Ecco, 2003).

Tremain, Rose, Trespass: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2010) (See David Leavitt, "Place of Last Resort," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/24/2010.).

Turow, Scott, Innocent (New York & Boston: Grand Central, 2010) (see Michiko Kakutani, "A Man With a Dead Wife on His Hands," NYT, Friday, 4/30/2010; and Terrence Rafferty, "Twice Accused," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/16/2010.).

Vasquez, Juan Gabriel, The Informers: A Novel translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (New York: Riverhead Books, , 2004, 2008) (See Larry Rohter, "In 1940s Colombia Blacklists and 'Enemy Aliens'," NYT, Monday, 8/3/2009: “'The system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are the majority,' one character in The Informer muses bitterly. 'That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment,' in which there were thousands 'who accused, who denounced, who informed'." "Nearly 7,000 Axis nationals even ended up in internment camps in the United States, held in escrow for bargaining purposes and in some cases detained well after the end of the war. Mr. Vásquez, however, focuses on a much smaller group and topic: German immigrants to Colombia and the corrosive effect their plight had on their native-born children." Id.).

* * * * *

Pamuk, Orhan, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist (The Charles Eliot Nortn Lestures, 2009) translated from the Turkish by Nazim Dikbas (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2010) ("Novels are second lives. Like dreams . . . , novels reveal the colors and complexities of our lives and are full of people, faces, and objects we feel we recognize. Just as in dreams, when we read novels we are sometimes so powerfully struck by the extraordinary nature of the things we encounter that we forget where we are and envision ourselves in the midst of the imaginary events and people we are witnessing, At such times, we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself. That these second lives can appear more real to us than reality often means that we substitute novels for reality, or at least that we confuse them with real life. But re ever complain of this illusion, this naivete. On the contrary, just as in some dreams, we want the novel we are reading to continue and hope that this second life will keep evoking in us a consistent sense of reality and authenticity. In spite of what we know about fiction, we are annoyed and bothered if a novel fails to sustain the illusion that it is actually real life." Id. at 3.).

DYLAN

Wilentz, Sean, Bob Dylan in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010) (A faculty member, of the school paying my mortgage, wanted to make a compilation of the faculty's 'favorite' songs. I do not know whether the project went forward, but my contribution/suggestion was then, and would remain now, Bob Dylan's "Gates of Eden." Here is Wilentz writing about the song. "'The Gates of Eden,' as [Dylan] called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic ad reason. Like 'It's Alright, Ma,' the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake's disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy's War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery." "After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan's listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to 'Gates of Eden,' it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the 'utopian hermit monks' riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desires; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by the 'gray flannel dwarf'); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much in the final verse or even exist inside the gates of Eden." "The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation--and at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It's a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn't saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? ('All Cretans are liars,' says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don't try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, 'really' means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan's song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the 'New Vision,' two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who go it." Id. at 99-100. Few get it, even now.).

SAMUEL PUFENDORF, 1632-1694

Pufendorf, Samuel, The Divine Feudal Law: Or, Covenants with Mankind, Represented (The Works of Samuel Pufendorf; Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), Edited and with an Introduction by Simone Zurbuchen; Translated from the German by Theophilus Dorrington, 1703 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002) (From the book jacket: "In The Divine Feudal Law Pugendorf attempts to demonstrate that a union of Lutherans and Calvinists is possible. The aim is not to eliminate disagreements in religion but to take away the evils that arise from those disagreements, and Pufendorf advises that the proper means of securing the peaceful coexistence of different confessions should occur via mutual agreement rather than enforcement by law. It is important to note that Pufendorf did not propose to unite the Protestants with the Roman Catholic Church, in part because Protestants would never accept the infallibility of the pope, the principle on which the Church of Rome is founded. . . .").

Pufendorf, Samuel, Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society (The Works of Samuel Pufendorf; Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), Edited and with an Introduction by Simone Zurbuchen; Translated from the German by Jodocus Crull, 1698 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002) (From the Zurbuchen's Introduction: "John's Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration . . . is widely known as a founding text in the history of toleration. It is usually claimed that Locke was among the first who defended a 'modern' concept of toleration. This interpretation rests on the basic distinction between a 'traditional' and a 'modern' doctrine of toleration. The former sees toleration as a grant or privilege bestowed on individuals or groups by the ruler. Toleration is conceived not as a good in itself but rather as a temporary means to overcome religious dissent. The ultimate goal remains the reunification of different religions or religious denominations. The 'modern' doctrine of toleration is marked by a shift to a religious liberty or freedom of conscience. In this view, liberty is an entitlement that does not depend on an agency that grants privileges. The liberty-based approach to toleration amounts to a principled defense of religious dissent and implies the permanence and ineradicability of religious diversity." Id. at ix. The 'modern' notion of tolerance is implicit in the American Constitution's "exercise" and "establishment" clauses. However, it seems that more than a few religious Americans believe in such tolerance for themselves and their co-religiousists but not for others. With respect to those others, at best they seem to have adopted the 'traditional' notion of tolerance. That is, that those others have been granted some temporary tolerance until such time as they can be made to see the light. Religious intolerance is an increasing source of tension in America, and will be the unmaking of America.).

Pufendorf, Samuel, The Present State of Germany (The Works of Samuel Pufendorf; Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), Edited and with an Introduction by Michael J. Seidler; Translated from the German by Edmund Bohun, 1696 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007) (From the book jacket: "The Present State of Germany, one of Samuel Pufendorf's earliest and most important works, was first published in 1667 under the pseudonym Severinus de Monambano. Its blunt, colorful, and unapologetic challenge to mainstream German constitutional law made it enormously controversial as soon as it appeared, and its author was both vilified and exalted in the acrimonious debate that followed. It became one of the most reprinted books of the late seventeenth century.).

Pufendorf, Samuel, Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence (The Works of Samuel Pufendorf; Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), Edited and with an Introduction by Thomas Behme; Translated from the German by William Abbott Oldfather, 1931 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009) (From the book jacket: "The appearance of Samuel Pufendorf's earliest work, Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, inaugurated the modern natural-law movement in the German-speaking world. It also established Pufendorf as a major figure in natural law and laid the foundation for his later works, which were to sweep across Europe and North America.").

Pufendorf, Samuel, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature (The Works of Samuel Pufendorf; Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), Edited and with an Introduction by Ian Hunter & David Saunders; Two Discourse and a Commentary by Jean Barbeyrac; Translated from the German by David Saunders, 1691 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007) ("Man is a Creature not only most sollicitious for the Preservation of Himself; but has Himself also so nice an Estimation and Value, that to diminish any thing thereof does frequently move him as great Indignation, as if a Mischief were done to his Body or Estate, Nay, there seems to him to be somewhat of Dignity in the Appellation of Man: so that the last and most efficacious Argument to curb the Arrogance of insulting Men, is usually, I am not a Dog, but a Man as well as your self. Since then Human Nature is the same in us all, and since no Man will or can cheerfully join a Society with any, by whom he is not at least to be esteemed equally as a Man and as a Partaker of the same Common Nature: It follows that, among those Duties which Men owe to each other, this obtains the second Place, That every man esteem and treat another as naturally equal to himself, or as one who is a Man as well as he." Id. at 100.).

QUESTIONS REGARDING MORALS

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: Norton, 2010) ("It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect. Someone who just wants to be respected won't care whether he is really living up to the code; he will just want to be thought to be living up to it. He will be managing his reputation, not maintaining his honor. To be honorable you have both to understand the honor code and to be attached to it: these are the conditions that the anthropologist Frank Henderson Stewart takes to define a sense of honor. For the honorable person, honor itself is the thing that matters, not honor's rewards. You feel shame when you have not met the standard of the honor code, and you feel it . . . whether or not anyone else knows you have failed." "Shame is the feeling appropriate to one's own dishonorable behavior. (Because of this connection between honor and shame, one way of speaking of those who are especially dishonorable is to say that they are shameless.) The appropriate response from others if you breach the code is, first, to cease to respect you and, then, actively to treat you with disrespect. The feeling we have for those who have done what is shameful is contempt. . . ." Id. at 16-17. "What is democratic about our current culture, then, is that we now presuppose all normal human beings, not just those who are especially elevated, to be entitled to respect. But granting everyone recognition respect is perfectly consistent with granting greater appraisal respect to some that to others, because these are different forms of respect. From now, I'll reserve the term dignity for one species of honor, namely, the right to recognition respect. So now we can say: Honoring some especially is consistent with recognizing the dignity of everyone else. Such dignity does not require the comparative forms of appraisal that go with more competitive forms of honor. It;s not something you earn and the appropriate response to you dignity is not pride so much as self-respect; after all, if your humanity entitles you to respect, then it entitles you to respect even from yourself! Id. at 130. "[R]ecognition respect of a basic sort is now something we believe everyone is entitled to, in the form of human dignity. But that doesn't mean that wee won't grant different forms of respect to people of particular identities. We grant just particular rights to respect to priest during services, mangers at work, policemen in uniform, judges on the bench, and many other public officials in the conduct of their duties. Often in these cases our respect takes the form of a kind of context-bound deference: in the courtroom, we call the judge 'Your Honor,' and we don't criticize her with the same frankness we might display if she made a legal error in a dinner party conversation." "One of the consequences of the democratization of our culture is that we don't expect people to show deference of this sort to their fellow citizens outside of the contexts of their special roles . . . ." Id. at 190-191. (1) Professor Appiah has provided a thoughtful discourse on the nature, sources, and meanings of honor. The deficiency of The Honor Code, if it is a deficiency, in that it does not say enough about why we ought to show respect (that is, why we should honor) certain individuals and about why we ought not show respect (that is, why we should hold in contempt) certain other individuals. For instance, why we ought to respect the Office of the President of the United States, and by extension the person occupying that office; yet why we perhaps not respect Richard Nixon the man. There is a tension there, a tension which is not adequately resolved by drawing contextual lines. (2) The book contains a very brief discussion, a mere reference really, of professional ethics and esteem. Though it is certainly far beyond the scope of The Honor Code, I could not help but think about the status of honor within my own professions: law and law teaching. Not knowing of any empirical study addressing the question, I cannot support the following proposition with hard evidence. Yet, it does seem to me that both professions are highly populated by individuals who want to be thought as honorable and want to be thought of deserving of respect, but who are not all that interested in being honorable or being worthy of respect. In professional ethics/responsibility courses for lawyers the focus seems to be on what actions will get a lawyer disbarred, or disciplined, or the subject of a malpractice suit. Virtually no time is devoted to what is required of the lawyer to be affirmatively worthy of professional respect. All sorts of pieces are written about 'super lawyers,' meaning the lawyers you should hire to represent you (assuming you can afford to do so). Very little print space is devoted to identifying lawyers who are worthy of our respect by virtue of the way they conduct themselves and the values that exhibit. As to the profession of law teaching . . . . Some things are better left unsaid. (3) In reading The Honor Code I was reminded of something V.S. Naipaul had written. "When men knew in their bones that governments are malign, and that there are no laws or institutions they can trust, the idea of honor becomes vital. Without that idea men who have no voice or representation in the world can become nothing. The poor, especially, need the idea." V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excisions Among the Converted People (New York: Random House, 1998), at 322. "[W]he there was no law, no constitution that men could trust, the code and the idea of honor protected men. But it also worked the other way. Where the code was strong there could be no rule of law." Id. at 328. One might wonder whether a renewed interest in honor codes indicates a sense that the law is failing, that the law does not inspire trust, that the law itself is deemed unworthy of respect? When the law is viewed as so broken as to be worthy of disrespect, people search for an alternatively to law.).

Bok, Sissela, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2010) ("My second aim was to consider . . . perennial moral issues about how we should lead our lives and how we should treat another. What are the wisest steps to take in the pursuit of happiness? What moral considerations should set limits to such pursuits? What else should matter in human life aside from happiness? How should we weigh our own happiness against that of others in a world where we are aware, as never before, of extremes of misery and opulence? How might we best take into account what we are learning about the effects of our individual and collective choices on the prospects for the well-being of future generation? And how should we respond to individuals and groups advocating intolerant or outright inhumane conceptions of happiness or well0being?" "Bypassing such moral issues makes it easier to give short shrift to assumptions that form the subtext to even the most innocuous-seeming views of happiness. These assumptions concern power--power exerted or defended against, whether in families, communities, or political and religious institutions. Often unspoken, these assumptions are about who has the right to pursue happiness, who does or does not deserve happiness, and whether the happiness of some requires the exclusion or exploitation of others, Today, conflicts over them are playing out on a far larger stage than ever before, reaching billions of individuals across the globe, their fortunes affected by global economics shifts beyond their control, their hopes fanned by mass media promotion of methods for achieving happiness in daily life or for finding the path to eternal bliss." Id. at 4. This is a thought-provoking read. However, in this age of the narcissist, the book will go pretty much unread because it requires one to think about the impact of one's choices on others..).

Coles, Robert, Handling One Another Along: Literature and Social Reflection, edited by Trevor Hall & Vicki Kennedy (New York: Random House, 2010) (From the book jacket: "In this book on shaping a meaningful and ethical life, . . . Robert Coles explores how character, courage, and human and moral understanding can be fostered by reflecting on the lives of others, through great literature and art. . . .").

Harris, Sam, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: The Free Pres, 2010) ("I will argue . . . that questions about values--about meaning, morality, and life's larger purpose--are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc. The most important of these facts are bound to transcend culture--just as facts about physical and mental health do. Cancer in the highlands of New Guinea is still cancer; cholera is still cholera; schizophrenia is still schizophrenia; and so, too, I will argue, compassion is still compassion, and well-being is still well-being. And if there are important cultural differences in how people flourish--if, for instance, there are incompatible but equivalent ways to raise happy, intelligent, and creative children--these difference are also facts that must depend upon the organization of the human brain. In principle, therefore, we can account for the ways in which culture defines us within the content of neuroscience and psychology. The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values." Id. at 1-2.).