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James Long, Ph.D., P.E. Retired Analog and RF Consulting Engineer
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Human nature never changes and those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. C. S. Lewis recommended reading old books to correct "The errors of the age" we live in. The following books, grouped by time periods, speak to us today. These books are easy for an adult to understand, even for those who have memories of agony or boredom reading them as school children. (What a difference a decade or two makes.)
Aristotle, B.C. 350
Aristotle lived when people lived multiple generations in the same town and interacted directly with each other instead of in isolation as we now do. He was able to see at first hand the various aspects of human nature unlike ourselves who live in an artificial fairy land created by advertisers and journalists showing us only hype and jive and artificial, unrealistic societies presented by television and movies. Even documentaries are not free of intentional falsehoods these days.
The euphemism "reinventing yourself" really means to trade one false front for another false front. This could not be done in Chaucer's time. It is only journalists that can allow this moral and ethical degeneracy to happen today by being part of it.
Aristotle for Everybody by Moritmer J. Adler, Touchstone press (Simon & Schuster). This is an overview of the works of Aristotle and is very good at explaining words that had different meanings to the Greeks, such as "happiness" which are poorly translated into English and change the meaning of Aristotle's works for the ordinary reader.
Ethics by Aristotle, Penguin Classics. This should be read in conjunction with Cliff's Notes study guide and commentary which make a huge difference in following the arguments. Aristotle takes us through a carefully organized and thought out system of ethics that closely parallels those of the world's great religions and religious teachers. Believers of Judaism and Christianity will feel like this book is a good summary and refresher of the teachings in the Bible.
Geoffery Chaucer, 1350
Chaucer lived when people lived multiple generations in the same town and interacted directly with each other instead of in isolation as we now do. He was able to see at first hand the various aspects of human nature unlike ourselves who live in an artificial fairy land created by advertisers and journalists showing us only hype and jive and artificial, unrealistic societies presented by television and movies. Even documentaries are not free of intentional falsehoods these days. He wrote other books as well.
The Canterbury Tales is a series of stories illustrating different types of people. It will remind you of Monty Python's Flying Circus and National Lampoon's Animal House movie. Make sure you get a printing that includes The Parson's Tale. It is an example of modern day censorism that the Parson's Tale is not in many printings. Read this book along with Cliff's Notes and MAX Notes study guides and commentaries in order to fully appreciate the way the people interact and how their tales are related to their job functions.
The best part is The Parson's Tale which is a sermon illustrating the religious beliefs in England at that time. It is a good data point for seeing how many modern Christian churches have a different theology from those in the past. One example is gluttony. What would happen to a pastor these days who condemned the overweight people in the audience as prolific gluttons under God's judgment? [In Dante's Inferno gluttons are put pretty far down in the hotter parts of Hell. Dorothy L. Sayers was considering writing a sequel to Inferno in which the bottom part of Hell was drastically enlarged to hold journalist and advertisers.]
Thomas A Kempis, 1400
Kempis was a monk who had keen insight into human nature.
Imitation Of Christ is a collection of his notes written during his lifetime. Don't let this title put you off. This fellow has a lot to say about human nature and its foibles in the first part of the book. People who do not share the details of his religious beliefs will find reading about the foibles rewarding. Later in the book he gets a bit verbose and mystical.
Martin Luther, 1525
Martin Luther was a very down to earth person with keen insight into the foibles of humans.
Faith Alone 365 Devotional Readings Updated in Today's Language edited by James Galvin is a good selection of Luther's observations of human nature. People who do not believe in all of the Lutheran doctrine will not be offended by this book.
Day by Day We Magnify Thee is more oriented toward Lutheran doctrine, but not enough to offend Christians of other belief systems. The version of English is about 150 years old.
History of English Common Law
English common law is a reflection of the society and its interactions around the time of Chaucer. Our country's laws, until recently, were based on the common sense of English common law. Now, they are based on the moral vices of greed, hate, and cowardice.
Origins of the Common Law by Arthur R. Hague, published by Liberty Fund, Inc.. This book is well written and explains how the English common law evolved by the interaction of the people and the monarch.
Adam Smith, 1750
Adam Smith was a prolific writer on many subjects. His most famous book is about the economic history of England and contains many observations on how ivory tower theorists were out of touch with reality and caused harm to the public when their economic and social ideas were put into law. Human nature has not changed and society is still plagued by people who are ignorant of history advocating the same foolish restrictive government policies and laws to the determent of society.
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is published in a cheap, reasonable quality two volume paperback edition by Liberty Fund, Inc. along with his five other major works.
T. R. Malthus, 1800
An almost contemporary of Smith was T. R. Malthus who wrote fifty years later. His work was misunderstood by many people of his time and he had to include an appendix refuting all of the false claims about the content of the book, including purely factual ones about what he said and did not say in the book. Despite the appendix that has been in the book for over two hundred years, the same false statements refuted in the appendix are made today. So much for the intellectual Pygmies that become university professors these days. {The sets of Pygmies and professors only partially overlap. Some Pygmies are in journalism and politics and some professors got their positions by talent instead of by qualifying for quotas based on non-talent factors.}
An Essay on the Principle of Population by T. R. Malthus is available in many printings.
WWII and Postwar Soviet Espionage
Over the years there has been a growing number of discovered and confessed Soviet agents in England. British government documents dealing with this that were scheduled to be declassified recently had their declassify dates extended several decades. Fortunately, there was document sharing between the British and US governments during the war and the US copies have been declassified. The results were the revelation of just how extensively the Soviet intelligence services had infiltrated all aspects of the British government and how may famous, institutional people had been Soviet agents. This explains the "foolish" actions of the British government during and after the war.
Mask of Treachery by John Costello, is published by William Morrow and Co. This is the best summary of what happened. It is based on all of the collected evidence and former British intelligence agents who are now more inclined to talk about the past. It explains how people in key places were able to filter the evidence so that those who made decisions on it came to the conclusions and operational decisions desired by the Soviets. An example is the agents sent to evaluate the various resistance movement in Europe. They sent back information that caused the British government to aid the pro-Soviet groups more than the others. This explains why eastern Europe was taken into the iron curtain.
If the British were this infiltrated, it stands to reason that other countries had the same situation.
Venona by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, is published by Yale. During the war the Soviets user HF radio to contact their agents in this country. US Intelligence copied the encrypted transmissions and later when high speed computers were available decoded them. These decodes are now available as declassified documents. As it turned out, everyone who was publicly accused of being a Soviet agent was a soviet agent. Senator McCarthy was right, and the professors and journalists were wrong. This is to be expected since these two professions are invariably filled with gullible people who also have severe mental illness problems of egomania that keeps them from admitting mistakes. One famous case was the Piltdown Man fraud. The skeletal remains of a primate were artificially modified with modern hand tools which left their marks and fooled about 200 Ph.D. students and their thesis committees. The fraud was discovered by a layman. The fraud was used as "evidence" in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
GCHQ by Nigel West, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. This book is the best of the lot on WWII code breaking. It discusses other items, such as the crass incompetence at all levels of the British foreign intelligence service which motivated Churchill to start the SOE which had problems of its own. Both organizations were relatively ineffective during the war and MI6 continued to be ineffective for many years after the war.
Sell Out by James Adams, is published by Viking. This book does the best job I have ever read of researching and describing the life cycle of a mole. It describes Aldrich Ames. A further good feature of the book is the digressions in describing other important historic situations. One bad feature of the book is the author's conclusion that what happened is confined to the CIA. My personal experience is that human nature is universal. I have seen similar problems in the military, academia, and industry. It has occurred in the recent scandal of the Catholic church covering up the wide spread child molesting over the past several decades. The other bad feature is the solutions to the problem which involve both the either-or logical fallacy and what is commonly called "throwing out the infant with the bath water." The author claims that there is no need of human intelligence operations in the modern world. I suspect that the former occupants of the World Trade Center would not agree with this.
Vietnam
There was a lot of hype, jive, and hoopla from journalist during the war. So much so that the truth never got out. One aspect of the war was the definition of success. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Sec. of Defense Mc Namara lived in a paper work fairy land where what happened on paper was more important than reality. The following two books illustrate how destructive policies were followed because anyone who said that the king had no clothes would be punished. The truth was that the south was so infested with espionage agents that the other side knew everything that was going to happen.
Secret Army Secret War by Sedgwick Tourison, is published by the Naval Institute Press. Team after team of agents were infiltrated into North Vietnam in the face of mounting evidence that they were captured upon arrival. To cover up this problem, they were listed as killed and the payments to their relatives were stopped, even though these payments were supposed to be continued after their death.
Code Name Bright Light by George J. Veith, is published by the Free Press (Simon and Schuster). Throughout the war efforts were made to rescue POWs. Every raid was preceded by the POW camps being evacuated hours or days before. No one every wondered why.
One area of hype, jive, and hoopla from journalist during the war was about the Phoenix program. The following book is based on interviews with participants. It exposes the outright lies told by the journalists and repeated by politicians. (President Truman, in his memoirs, says that half of everything journalists say are outright lies.)
Phoenix and the Birds of Prey by Mark Moyar, is published by the Naval Institute Press. If you think that the control of public information described in Orwell's 1984 could never happen, read this book and compare the eye witness accounts with your memories of the "news."
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis was a versatile writer. His work covered many areas and ran to over 50 titles.
Jack by George Sayer published by Crossway Books is the best biography by far. It is written by a life long friend of Lewis.
Light in the Shadow Lands by Kathryn Lidndskoog published by Multnomah Press is an expose of the mismanagement of Lewis' literary estate and the rewriting of history to include a certain person in a favorable light.
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis is his clearest statement of his theological and ethical beliefs.
Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis is the clearest statement of his political beliefs that the less government the better.
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger held many White House level posts during the Vietnam and post Vietnam era. He wrote his memoirs over many years in five volumes. They reveal the inner workings of international politics, domestic politics, and journalism. These books will be depressing to read. They show how journalists were totally off base in understanding situations and falsely reported the news, frequently knowingly falsely. They show how several politicians took advantage of the situation for their own personal benefit even though it caused much misery in other countries.
White House Years in two volumes covers the beginning until near the end of the war in Vietnam.
Years of Upheaval in two volumes covers the last part of the war in Vietnam to Watergate.
Years of Renewal covers the post-watergate era.
You are going to cry over the congressional and senatorial moral scumbags, who were presented by journalists as the saviors of the world, as they sacrificed millions of lives in Cambodia so that they could appear in the fairy land of journalism as heroes. Had they postponed the pullout announcement five more days these Cambodians would have lived, but the politicians would not appear as heroic in the fairy land press reports if they did that.
You are going to cry over the moral scumbags, who were presented by journalists as the saviors of the world, as they made great public shows of being tough on the Soviet Union by demanding exit quotas for Jews that were far in excess of the actual applications by Jews to leave the Soviet Union. As a result of this meddling in internal Soviet affairs, the Soviets raised the exit visa disapproval rate from 1.6% to much higher.
You will hopefully be offended at the journalist that presented the Church Committee findings in such a slanted way that the viewers blamed the presidential assassination orders on all of the recent presidents except Kennedy who was the one who ordered all of the assassinations.
Science
Most people do not have the time to investigate primary documents and so rely on journalists and PBS for their science knowledge. Unfortunately they get short changed. The following four books, by experts, illustrate how far off base journalists and PBS programs can get. The social predictions by Aldus Huxley in the fifth book is frighteningly accurate.
The Genesis Question by Hugh Ross, published by Navpress. This book strips off the built up tradition surrounding the description of creation presented in the first eleven chapters of the Bible and uses Hebrew grammar and word definitions to show that the description matches exactly with recent scientific evidence, such as DNA distributions, astronomy measurements, etc.
Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe, published by Free Press (Simon and Schuster). This book reveals just how complex living organisms are and contain complex subsystems that would cause death to the organism if all of the subsystems did not function the way they do.
Unauthorized Freud by Frederick F. Crews, published by Viking. This book uses the letters of Freud and other documents to show that Freud's theories carried into practice by him were failures at curing his patients. The patients frequently got worse and had to be institutionalized under the care of others in order to be cured. Freud was pretty much a media event created by Journalists.
Alfred C. Kinsey by James H. Jones, published by Norton. This book shows how Kinsey dry labbed his "research" to produce the desired results.
Brave New World Revisited by Aldus Huxley. This book was written in 1958 as a follow on to Brave New World which was written in 1932. In it Huxley predicts the rapid disintegration of society which we are experiencing, and he gives the reasons. The reasons turn out to be the social engineering goals of many politicians and journalists today, 40 years later.
Collective Electrodynamics by Carver A. Mead. This book has two main thrusts. The first part shows how E&M theory can be derived from potentials and quantum mechanics. The second part reviews research and theory since the 1930 era that shows that quantum mechanics is deterministic (not statistical) and continuous. It is only the limitations of our measurement methods that lead to the early view of jumps and statistics. This is bad news for the various social theories of the 1930 era which somehow used the statistics and jumps of quantum mechanics to invent new social orders (that had been thought of over the previous thousands of years, tried, and found wanting.)
End Times
The scenario of the end of civilization as we know it as described several places in the Bible draws a lot of curiosity. Unfortunately, it attracts low grade "experts" and fake TV preachers that tell the public what the want to hear. One example is the relative time of the events. The public is told that it could start tomorrow. The Bible in the description of the events represents Ethiopia as a major military power. It is not very likely that they could attain this status by tomorrow.
Another phenomena is the presentation of a relatively recent theory as being the only theory held during the past 2000 years. Books written on the subject prior to 50 years ago and still available in used book stores unanimously present another theory. The following two books are a rediscovery of the original theory from the evidence presented in the Bible. P.S. the relatively recent theory is called the Pre-Tribulation Rapture.
The Sign by Robert van Kampen published by Crossway Books. This is by a theological layman who had a vocation that required the sifting of evidence.
The Pre-Wrath Rapture of the Church by Marvin Rosenthal published by Nelson. This is by an ordained pastor who was frequently questioned by the above author in his search.
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