Most Influential Books

Thinking about books that have changed me, there are a few that go back to high school:

• Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style", for impressing on me that writing is a craft and a skill
• George Orwell's "1984", for impressing on me the power of words, and the importance of naming things correctly, and also that government can be corrupt
• Shakespeare's "Hamlet", for giving me an appreciation of the soaring heights of the best of the English language, as well as planting the seed that would flower decades later in a life quest to see all of Shakespeare's works, which was itself a pillar in one of the most important friendships in my life
• Plato's "Apology", for impressing on me the value of goodness and truth
• a book that I think was by Evelle J. Younger (Calif Attorney General in the 1970s) called something like "A Student's Guide to Legal Rights", which outlined the rights that students had (e.g., to refrain from pledging allegiance) and the constitutional principles and cases that established them, which gave me a lifelong love and fascination for constitutional law. (I can't remember the exact title or be sure of the author. I only know that I found it in the Petit Park branch of the LA Public Library in the 1970s.)

Books that affected my life from college days:

• Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian". Long before Hitchens or Dawkins had even been born, there was Russell. Not that I was ever a believer, but he was an early hero of the despised minority of atheists, clear in his arguments and forthright in his convictions.
• Jeffrey Stout's "The Flight From Authority", the text for a freshman year class that looked at the intellectual crisis that occurred post Reformation when knowing what was true was no longer a matter of asking the right authorities. It gave me a lifelong appreciation for a particular strand of philosophy that happened to find its home at Princeton in the Religion Department, introduced me to some professors who were profoundly influential to me, and acquainted me with a vital conversation in contemporary philosophy including Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and others.
• Richard Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", a tour-de-force critique of post-Enlightenment philosophy
• the Fannie Farmer cookbook, for giving me the essentials to gain confidence in my own basic cooking skills, providing a foundation for a lifelong love of cooking.

There are also a bunch of books from my coming out days, in which I was avidly devouring gay fiction, hungry to find constructive images of what being a gay man could be like, or at least to learn what it was to be a gay man in the world then. There were many classics here -- Andrew Holleran's "Dancer From the Dance", Edmund White's "Best Little Boy in the World", David Leavitt's "Lost Language of Cranes" -- to name a few. But I think the ones that stuck with me the most were Mary Renault's "The Charioteer" and Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" series.

In the decades since college, I think a few books have had substantial impact on my life and/or influence on my thinking:

• Andrew Sullivan's "Love Undetectable", for crystalizing the virtues of love and friendship and the value of being gay
• Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls", which taught me that a life well lived is not measured by its time span, and that love, even if fleeting, is worth having
• Nina Planck's "Real Food", which, along with Michael Pollan's seminal "Simple Rules" New York Times essay, really set me on the path of more locally grown, farmers market-driven, home-cooked eating.
• Jeffrey Stout's "Democracy and Tradition", which I read in 2008 during the Calif Prop 8 (anti-gay marriage) battle, and which took the philosophical dialogues I'd been following for years and gave them very practical application in how to address my fellow citizens about a vital and controversial issue
• Arnold Kling's "Learning Economics", which taught me not only the basics of economics, but the economic way of thinking (so that I was already predisposed to love Freakonomics when that came out)
• Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul", for showing me that "conservative" doesn't have to be synonymous with "selfish and judgmental" (and in a way, this book entry really is a proxy for Andrew's blog, which I read religiously for years and was enormously influential on me)
• Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness", for illuminating me about how fallible our cognitive processes are, and that one should plan with humility
• David McCullough's "1776", for giving me a proper sense of awe for how, had slightly different decisions been made at certain points, certain advice ignored or followed, certain unknown things discovered, or even the wind blown differently on a certain day, our fate could have been entirely different, and that the course of history is fragile. (His "John Adams" also gives me comfort, when I am despairing that our political polarization is worse than ever, that no, actually, it's not.)
• Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", for giving a vivid argument of how much we owe to our circumstances and our forebears
• Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", for giving a visionary argument for how much we, on a biological and evolutionary scale, owe to our circumstances

Reflections on Antonin Scalia

I can say this about Scalia: the man knew how to wield a pen. His dissents were always colorful and entertaining, a guilty pleasure to read. How can one not appreciate someone who can drop words like "argle-bargle" and "jiggery-pokery" when brandishing his prose? It's unfortunate that this skill wasn't put in the service of better ends. In the annals of the Court, Scalia will be remembered for bringing the notions of "textualism" and "originalism" into currency. These are the ideas that correct judicial interpretation of the Constitution can be readily found by reading the plain words (textualism) and understanding the Founders' original meaning (originalism). They are meant to counter the notion that the Constitution is a "living document" that must be interpreted by the Court according to its essential principles in light of current understanding. Students of religion will recognize these theories as they apply to Biblical hermeneutics, and students of history will recognize how well the idea that one can gain universal agreement on the clear interpretation of the "plain words" (sola scriptura) works out. Taken at face value, Scalia's principles would have to rule that the Air Force is unconstitutional, as the plain text of the Constitution enumerates only an Army and a Navy, and the idea of military air power would not have been conceived of by the Founders. Though challenged on it, Scalia never did really explain how an originalist could endorse a decision like Brown v. Board of Education (the 1954 decision that ended school segregation), since the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment certainly didn't foresee or intend that implication themselves. His dodge is that he would have correctly decided Plessy v. Ferguson in the first place (that's the notorious 1896 case that ruled "separate but equal" schools constitutional). That's cheap hindsight. It's far more likely that an 1896 Scalia would have been as benighted by the prejudices of the day, finding segregated schools a reasonable social norm, as the present-day Scalia who heartily endorsed Bowers v. Hardwick (the infamous 1986 case upholding the constitutionality of sodomy laws). As called out in a New York Times opinion piece by Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner and law professor Eric Segall, Scalia is really a theocratic majoritarian at heart, content to find no power in the Constitution to protect minorities against the tyranny of the majority, at least when it comports with his own conservative morality. When his principles would seem to lead to a conclusion that went counter to his personal morality, his intellect and prose would be brought to bear to torture his principles into confessing the desired conclusion. See, for example, his opinion for the Court in Raich v. Gonzales, finding that Congress's Commerce power could regulate people growing pot in their own backyard for their own personal use, and Justice Thomas's dissent in a rare split from Scalia. Likewise, one might well wonder how a textualist or an originalist finds "corporate personhood" (the idea that corporations are persons, and thus have the same rights as persons) in the plain text or original meaning of the Constitution. While he refused to see the straight lines from the Founders' principles through de Toqueville and John Stuart Mill to landmark decisions like Griswold (finding a fundamental right to marital privacy that made it unconstitutional to outlaw contraception) and Lawrence (overturning Bowers and sodomy laws), he could see "penumbras" when he wanted to. Ultimately, he was as guilty of "interpretive jiggery-pokery" as anyone. His originalism may have provided better cover for his anti-gay animus, except that his apoplectic dissents on every landmark advance in gay rights over the last thirty years unabashedly laid bare his conservative moral prejudices. Despite the clear constitutional jurisprudence that "bare animus" is insufficient rationale for a discriminatory law (i.e., a majority may not outlaw a minority without a reason better than "ew that's weird"), Scalia, in his dissent in Romer v. Evans, rises to the defense of bare animus when it amounts to moral disapproval of homosexual conduct. Beyond his legacy of originalism, he also leaves a legacy of coarsening the level of discourse around contentious issues, unfortunately now embodied in the records of our highest court, and emulated by many of his Federalist Society acolytes. The admittedly entertaining creativity of his prose often belied bare pugnaciousness, light on real argument. He was famous for his tart interrogations during oral arguments, and the zingers in his dissents. Here is a typical example in his stinging dissent in Obergefell (last year's landmark gay marriage ruling):

If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

This is just plain mockery of Justice Kennedy's opinion, with no particular "disciplined legal reasoning" of its own to offer. (One might claim that there is legal reasoning elsewhere in the dissent, but really, no, it's just one long rant about "judicial putsch" that could have been equally aimed at Lawrence or Griswold or Loving or even Brown.) If ever there were a time to hide one's head in a bag, I would think it would be after writing something so derisive and insulting about a colleague I'd be facing the next day (and working closely with for the rest of my life). Often it is only the cleverness of the prose that distinguishes Scalia's writing from the incivil name calling and insults found on the typical Internet comments page (or more recently, the Republican debates). One might consider him the Supreme Court's original troll. A few years ago, when he was speaking at Princeton, a gay student pointed out the language in some of Scalia's dissents that was especially offensive (such as comparing homosexuality to bestiality or pedophilia) and asked him, even if he still stood by his argument, if he had any regrets for his offensive choice of words. No, he did not. It is ironic that he worried he was witnessing the deterioration of our culture with the advance of gay rights (despite his best efforts to fight it at every opportunity), and yet by his own example he lead the coarsening of constitutional legal discourse and contributed to the erosion of respect for the institution he served. That being said, I will miss reading his dissents. There is the guilty pleasure of the zingers, of course. But the best part of reading a Scalia dissent is knowing that it was a dissent, and that despite his grandiloquent tantrums, liberty and justice prevailed.