My first scathing book review

I just found a cache of my high school papers, and here's one gem (written for a US History course in my junior year):

The Metaphysical Club: A Herculean Feat of, Well, Research

In the middle to late nineteenth century, four great men were born. They came of age during the Civil War, and in their adulthood, they contributed to a great transition of ideas. These four men were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand follows the threads of these men's lives, in the process revealing the growth of a new way of thinking: pragmatism. Menand's book is a magnificent specimen of research, describing not only the ideas but also the denizens and characteristics of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century; however, the book offers little beyond simple information.

The central focus of the book is the progress of philosophy. The great transition of belief that was made was essentially from the idea that truth was something hidden and discoverable to the idea that all accessible truth was defined by our beliefs. Advances in science and mathematics helped trigger this transition, especially Darwinian evolution and probability theory. Darwinism provoked philosophers to ask whether the world was evolving toward a particular planned state, or whether the progress was random. Probability theory and its bell-curvian statistics led to two thoughts: first, just as more scientific trials lead to a more accurate measurement, more people thinking might lead the collective consciousness closer to the truth; and second, society has certain habits at any given time: murder rates stay relatively constant, for example.

Charles Peirce believed that society forms similar habits in its philosophy when the collective consciousness strikes truthful concepts, concepts that in a Darwinian sense help the species survive. Over time, society will gain better and better habits until it has achieved a final state--a state of predetermined divine conception. Other parts of the universe, such as planets, get into similar good habits, which we call natural laws, such as the law of gravitation.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. also believed that society when taken as a whole produced a certain standard of truth. In court, he trusted in the jury to provide and rule on the basis of this truth, or "experience." As a judge, he believed that rulings should be based on this same "experience," with logical reasoning for the ruling worked out after the decision is made.

William James took this trust in a personal sense of truth a step further-- what he christened "pragmatism" was the idea that our personal beliefs define truth. We believe whatever philosophy leads us to live most successfully. Whether or not there is other truth in the universe is irrelevant--it is beyond our grasp and irrelevant to our success. We need concern ourselves only with whatever "truth" will provide for us the most workable system. We believe we have free will because that belief allows us to act freely. Whether or not we do have free will is irrelevant.

John Dewey agreed with James about the unimportance of worrying about the discrepancy between truth and our conception of it. In fact, he did not like to worry about discrepancies in general: "Dewey would criticize... the distinctions between mind and reality, means and ends, nature and culture" (330). He also criticized the distinction between knowing and doing: in his revolutionary Chicago elementary school, he set up a curriculum of practical hands-on experience that would replace rote teaching and demonstrate immediately to students the practical relevance of the knowledge they were acquiring--that would make knowledge and practical relevance one and the same.

All of these men's ideas, as well as the ideas of their contemporaries, resulted in a new era that rejected worries about unanswerable philosophical questions in favor of practical philosophy, such as social science--philosophy that, in Dewey's words "ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men" (362).

But there is more to The Metaphysical Club than philosophy. It follows every aspect of each of these men's professional lives, exploring every tangent to the full. Many other ideas besides pragmatism are examined and explained. The book is full of quotes and anecdotes. The personalities of all the figures are well delineated. Nineteenth century politics--race issues, immigration, labor v. capital; law, psychology, education, social work, science, college teaching are all examined. In short, reading the book is somewhat like being transported back to the nineteenth century or early twentieth century for a day of being very alert on all fronts.

So what is the success of this book? It is an incredible feat of research. Not only has Louis Menand discovered untold bits of information and quotes and anecdotes and ideas; he manages to unify them into some sort of readable, linear assembly. His writing is even engaging. He traces hundreds of lines of thought and, as far as I can tell, does not abandon any one of them. He seems to give an exceedingly complete picture of the evolution of pragmatism, perhaps afraid to miss any relevant detail--he certainly includes them all. I must express a deep respect for anyone with the patience and the skill to weave such an incredible amount of knowledge together into such a dense book.

However, the magnitude of the research is the only feat accomplished. The book is highly inscrutable. To sort through the hundreds of lines of reasoning and find any semblance of a thesis would require the reader to take explicit notes and then sort them many times to expurgate the irrelevant information--a research project perhaps comparable to writing one's own book. Menand's description of Peirce's writing could be applied equally well to his own: "Every relevant idea seemed equally important to him, and while he was composing he rarely glimpsed a path down which he was not tempted to wander" (275). No reasoning is done for the reader by Menand. He explains everything clearly, but he does not piece anything together. In the introduction and the conclusion, he deigns to make some assertions about the importance and the effects of pragmatism, and the reasons why it appealed to the American public when it did. But if these assertions are supported anywhere in the book, Menand certainly does not trouble to point out his lines of reasoning. I suspect that his topic was too broad. If he had chosen only one of these men, or one of these ideas, and traced its evolution in the kind of depth in which he is capable of tracing things, he might have had pages left over to do some analysis and help the reader along a little. But as it is, his book is a an incredible stockpile of information, without being a scholarly pursuit, in the sense that a scholarly pursuit involves research as well as the creation and support of a personal, original assertion.

The Metaphysical Club, then, has only a certain set of merits. I enjoyed the information in it: it gave me an opportunity to contemplate some of the ideas he discusses as well as to be amazed by imagining the world before people thought in terms of statistics and evolution and science as a process of investigation, for all intents and purposes separated from philosophy and religion. It also gave me an opportunity to find personal truth in some of the ideas; in James's pragmatism and Jane Addams's claim that all antagonism is unnecessary, for example. But I must admit that I felt somewhat cheated when, after trudging through 443 pages, I was not rewarded with any unifying comprehension or any sense of Menand's logical progression.