The best books on human action

I respect this book because it challenges the common-sense distinction between action and inaction. Part of the epic Hindu poem Mahabharata is a cunning text. On its spiritual surface, it preaches overcoming suffering, casting away ego, practicing detachment, and unifying oneself with the divine. Yet these tenets simultaneously boost Krishna’s rhetoric to convince Arjuna to slaughter his own family.

This is a thinly veiled attack on the Buddhist ideal of doing nothing on the grounds that every inaction involves action and vice versa. Its real insight, for me, is that we should sometimes actively do nothing. My favorite instance of the Gītā’s widespread influence is a contemporary Bengali no-loitering sign that reads: ‘If you have nothing to do, please do not do it here.'

While I had seen the film adaptation with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacClaine in my teens, I only came to read Carrie Fisher’s extremely funny autobiographical book at the recommendation of the writer Lou Sarabadzic, who rightly thought I’d be amused that the rehab clinic inhabitants are not so focused on not doing drugs as they are on doing not drugs.

Carrie and her friends spend thirty days talking and thinking of such things as quitting, stopping, committing to not doing drugs, not playing an instrument, giving it up, and ‘using up all the Not Cry.’ The whole thing made me re-think how human agency, willpower, and control work.

I’m obsessed with the parallels between the heroine of Gail Carson Levine’s fairy tale and personal AI assistants that are controllable through verbal commands, such as Cortana, Siri, or Alexa. Ella is under a spell that causes her to “always be obedient,” her behavior is triggered by commands that she literally cannot resist “obeying.”

While ultimately powerless, she is able to briefly resist any command that doesn’t require immediate action. Ella has a will of her own, but it is paralyzed. In this, she resembles Andrew Martin in Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man. 

I love Levine’s ‘teenage fiction’ because it has helped me to better comprehend some complicated philosophies, such as Fred Dretske’s distinction between triggering and structuring causes of behavior. In a strange twist of fate, my PhD supervisor’s son played ‘Prince Charmont’ in the film adaptation.

This distinction between doing and suffering may be traced back at least as far as Homer. What I love most about Anthony Powell’s epic 12-volume about such agents and patients is how it satirizes so-called ‘men of action’. Seemingly in control of their life and imposing their will upon the world, these ‘history makers’ ultimately prove to be marionettes who have been dancing to the music of their time all along.

The plot largely consists of people bumping into one another and life is accordingly portrayed as a series of accidents, rather than of good or bad decisions. One of my favorite metaphors Powell uses for this is that of a Ghost Railway rushing downhill in total darkness and crashing through closed doors. All aboard!

What is positive and what is negative in action? The novel’s protagonist, Fiona Maye, is a judge haunted by her past ruling on a medical case, which could be described as both saving one twin and taking the life of another. Was her verdict of separation really only intentional under the former description (to use a phrase coined by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe)?

I adore how the book is replete with characters who remain standing, say nothing, refuse treatment, give up, forget, let go, etc., yet in so doing, are also said to be doing favors, acting kindly, destroying marriages, and taking risks. It is only in actively choosing not to do what they can do that humans can be ethical (think of hunger strikes, conscientious objecting, and veganism).