Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

It happens pretty often nowadays that at least two networks are available to me simultaneously. Normally it’s WiFi and some form of cell network — for instance, my Verizon card on my work laptop, or my iPhone. I suspect this is a pretty common situation, and will become more so. When it’s not WiFi+cell, it’s that you have several — quite often several dozen — WiFi hotspots visible from where you’re sitting.

Given the surfeit of connection methods, it would be cool to use them all at once: send out bits over as many connections as you can. This is called “channel bonding.” Under Linux, anyway, cell and WiFi seem like they’d be easier to bond than several WiFi channels, because I believe each WiFi adapter can only bond to a single WiFi channel at once. You’d probably only be able to bond distinct devices — for instance, the eth1 WiFi device and the ppp0 cell-network device.

My sense from the little I know about channel bonding is that it’s too low-level to, say, download a single video across two channels. You’d like to divide up a single HTTP request into several chunks, one chunk per channel, with chunk sizes proportional to the channel speeds. This would probably require that a high-level protocol (here HTTP) know details about a low-level protocol (Ethernet? Not sure where channel bonding fits in the stack).

Does anyone out there know whether it’s possible to use channel bonding in this way?

P.S. (2 September 2008): It occurs to me that at least three are often available: WiFi, cellular modem from Verizon, and Bluetooth connection to my iPhone. So then I could bounce an Internet connection from the phone to the laptop. Hot.

It’s probably the case that Sarah Palin is unqualified to be one heartbeat away from the presidency — the vice president alongside a 72-year-old man. And Joe Biden may well be a decent candidate (though there are doubts on that score).

What I hate to see, though, is how everyone has turned into a hack for his own party in the past few days. All Democrats are now required to pile on Sarah Palin — she is clearly unqualified, and McCain can surely have nominated her only for the basest of reasons. Meanwhile, Obama’s choice of Biden was surely due to the latter’s strong backbone, foreign-policy whateverwhatever, graven visage, endless experience, etc., etc. Let’s admit it: no matter whom Obama chose (with obvious exceptions like Joe Lieberman), the Dems would be hailing the choice as further proof of Obama’s sainthood.

This hackery wouldn’t be so obvious were it not for everyone’s piling on Biden recently as an egomaniacal blowhard. Overnight he has been transformed into this party’s savior. It’s ridiculous to watch.

Our politicians are all bloodless hacks. Can’t we do ourselves a favor and not join them in the hackery?

I did it: I bought an iPhone yesterday. The thing is its own elevator pitch: use it for 15 seconds, and it is clear that every other cell phone — at least among the ones I’ve used — is not even playing the same game.

My friend Chris Rugen and I have discussed this device at length. My question generally is: is it that Apple’s great, or all the rest suck? That is, is Apple doing something that everyone else should be doing? Or are they doing something that it was genuinely hard for anyone to think of? “Intuition” is a notoriously fuzzy concept, but Apple’s UI is intuitive. Everything on this phone behaves the way you’d expect it to, down to little details. For instance, when you’re on a call the screen goes dark; pull the phone away from your ear, though, and it lights back up. Then there’s the effortless and physically realistic way of scrolling down a long list: flick your finger, and the screen moves in the direction you flicked, as though you were pushing an actual piece of paper; flick harder, and it moves faster.

They got all the details right — so much so that the phone imparts a great feeling of comfort to the person using it. There’s none of the standard UI frustration and panic, wherein you find that the tools you’ve been forced to use have made your life harder rather than easier.

Granted, it’s only been a day, so this may all change. And I do think Apple has aimed for the 80% — or even 90% — case: I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to set up the iPhone to talk with a SASL-authenticated SMTP server. Perl’s inventor, Larry Wall, has described Perl as a language which makes easy things easy and difficult things possible; Apple may well make most things easy and difficult things impossible. Time will tell.

Finally, I do feel obliged to point out that I am by no means a technology fetishist — or even a Mac fetishist. I’m constantly surprised by the number of people who land on my random blog entries through unexpected Google searches, so I should establish my bona fides: I am a straight-up Linux man ’til end of days, and I can’t actually remember the last bit of up-to-the-minute technology I bought. I’d been relying on crappy LG Verizon phones for years, ever since my beloved Motorola StarTAC ignominiously exploded in Somerville. Their unifying principle was “gets the job done, but not much else.” Granted, the definition of “the job” evolved over the years: it had to be able to send text messages and take photos. A notepad function would be nice, too.

Eventually I got an iPod, on which I promptly installed RockBox. Now I was typically carrying around a laptop, a cell phone, and an iPod, and sometimes a digital camera. Clearly these are all destined to become one device. I still didn’t have a notepad, so I always sent texts to my email account, reminding myself to do various things. Google sends me texts regularly to inform me of upcoming events, which helps. But really I just want to interact directly with my Google Calendar. And if I could drop the computer altogether, except occasionally (e.g., when writing blog posts), that would be ideal.

The iPhone looks like a terrific computer replacement. Google Reader and Calendar under the iPhone are a joy, as is Facebook. It’s a web platform against which everyone is developing now, and it’s certainly the mobile platform to beat.

A friend made the point to me a while back that maybe Microsoft doesn’t suck, but that instead monopolies generally suck: competition is good. Apple will not be top dog forever; Google will probably release phone software within the year which brings the PC revolution to mobile phones (finally), and with any luck Apple’s hermetically-sealed hardware and software will eventually seem as antiquated in the phone world as they do on the desktop. (And incidentally: OS X sits atop a kernel developed by an open-source community, and its Safari browser relies on the goodwill of the Konqueror/KHTML community. Apple doesn’t seem to give very much back. How about, at the very least, a version of iTunes for Linux?) What Apple has done is to permanently raise the bar: Android phones will immediately be compared to the iPhone; every tech writer on earth will pile on it if the UI is crap. And at a rumored release price of $400, Android will especially have a hard time competing with a $200 iPhone.

In any case, Android isn’t out yet, and I had a severely busted phone. It seemed silly to keep using crap when a truly excellent device was available. Someday soon, I hope I can bring my open-source principles to mobile phones as well.

(And yes, I have played with the Neo FreeRunner. It is a cruel joke.)

P.S. (31 August 2008): Turns out the SASL thing was my bad. I just needed to choose the appropriate authentication type. I now have the email client all set up.

Can someone who knows more than I do about the academic market explain something to me? I mentioned to a friend today that it seems like Ph.D.s take much longer to obtain than they used to, and likewise that people seem to do post-docs now much more than they did. She replied that, among other things, the market for academic jobs is much tighter now than it used to be: more applicants for the same or a smaller number of positions.

That’s been my sense for a while now too. Does it bespeak market failure? If the market for academic jobs were working well, wouldn’t it work like so?

1. Lots of people are getting Ph.D.s, but the number of undergraduate students (who pay the faculty’s salaries, no?) is staying constant. So there’s no room for more faculty, and there’s a natural constraint on faculty sizes.
2. There being more applicants than usual, either fewer grad students get jobs or the ones who do have jobs make less money. Or they keep adjunct jobs for years.
3. Since there are now too many applicants chasing too many jobs, word would trickle back that academic jobs are just not where you want to be if you want a family and something other than Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.
4. Applications to grad school would decrease.

Yet this doesn’t seem to be happening. In fact if I had to guess, I would bet that applications to the non-remunerative or small academic fields are increasing. And if more people are doing post-docs than used to, then the cost — measured by years of foregone monetary opportunities — is going up, even while the jobs themselves are paying less. Is that right?

But all of this is totally from the outside, so it’s almost certainly wrong. Does anyone out there have good numbers about the economics of the academic job market? Bonus points if your data address my suspicion that government loans for grad students encourage people to study what the job market wouldn’t otherwise support. (Not in a good way, either: the same way credit cards encourage purchases that your salary wouldn’t support … until something bad happens, and everyone is filing for bankruptcy en masse.)

I get the feeling I was one of the last people to hear about Man on Wire. I only heard about it when my friend Andrew Pratt linked to a Design Observer article about it.

It is a tremendous film, about a ridiculously high-energy Frenchman named Philippe Petit who walked on a highwire between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. That’s a 200-foot walk between 1400-foot-tall towers … on a thin cable. Just writing about it is making my palms sweat profusely, which is a repeat of what happened when I read that Design Observer piece yesterday.

The film cuts back and forth between video clips from the 1970’s and imaginary depictions of what it must have been like. Occasionally I wonder whether the entire film is fictional, but it appears not to be: a New York Times article from 1985 refers to Petit as the man “who walked a high-wire strung between the towers of the World Trade Center 11 years ago.” That’s about as canonical as I need.

Everyone affiliated with Petit was swept into his reality distortion field. I’m pretty sure everyone in the theatre was caught within it too. Petit tells you he’s going to walk between the Twin Towers; your only available response is, “Sure. When?”

Off he and his friends go, planning the walk for months. One important concern is that those buildings sway; consequently, the cable would sway side to side and up and down, and for some reason would even rotate. So the planners had to do a bit of engineering. Ordinarily, it seems, the approach would be to throw a pair of ropes over the wire and strap them to the ground to damp the motion. Here the ground is a quarter of a mile away, and in any case they’re going to do this all in secret. Instead they ran a pair of wires to other points on the towers, thereby (I gather) using the towers’ own movement to cancel itself out. The filmmakers never explain to us whether they consulted an engineer, or whether highwire walkers intuitively know something about damping the sway of a skyscraper. (The film also never tells us what Petit does for money. He takes a few several-thousand-mile flights during the planning; it’s not clear how he affords these. I like to imagine that the French government supports Buster Keaton types with grant money.)

When the walk finally does come, it is breathtaking. It is breathtaking even without any video; oddly enough, this is just about the only part of the event, from planning to completion, that wasn’t caught on tape. From the ground we see a still photograph of this black dot far away, and we recognize that it is Petit … laying down on the wire. He is staring up at the heavens, on a high wire perched at the top of New York City. I am getting dizzy just thinking about it. And again with the palm sweating.

The filmmakers interviewed everyone involved in the planning. Nearly all of them start crying at one point or another; this was clearly the greatest moment of their lives — an event that they hardly know how to describe, much less process. At a press conference soon after the highwire walk, a police officer tells us that you couldn’t really call it “walking”: it was “dancing.” Rather than climb into the officers’ arms when they asked him to get down, he walked back and forth, again and again — eight times in all, for 45 minutes, smiling all the way.

The great accomplishment of this film is to leave the audience feeling enraptured and bowled over, just like the participants. It is a must-see.

I’ve been delaying and delaying and delaying buying a new cell phone, for reasons I needn’t really rehearse here. At the moment, the options seem like so:

• Wait until October for a Google Android-powered phone. (Or September 17, depending upon whom you ask.) This would require me to switch to T-Mobile.

• Get an iPhone 3G. This would require me to switch to AT&T.

• Get a Nokia E71, about which Joel “On Software” Spolsky raved.

• Stay with Verizon and get an LG Voyager, about which Adam Gerard raved.

• Stay with Verizon and get a BlackBerry.

“Staying with Verizon” here just means “buy one of these devices off eBay and wait to see how the phone wars play out.”

The common perception of Democrats is that we’re weak-willed pacifists. The reality, says Dennis Perrin, is that the Democrats are just as much a part of this country’s bloody history as any other party. They’ve been at the vanguard of U.S. imperialism since at least President Wilson.

What’s more, we’re hypocrites. We’re willing to cheer on President Clinton’s violence against, say, Yugoslavia, because that’s Democratic violence. Republicans, of course, “cheer mass murder because they’re evil and stupid.” Not us, though. Says Perrin:

Had Clinton been president after 9/11 and desired an invasion of Iraq (a natural extension of his policy of sanctions and bombing) as part of the War on Terror, chances are extremely high that a vast majority of liberals would have supported him, based on their previous allegiance.

All Americans buy into whatever the reigning orthodoxy is; usually that reigning orthodoxy involves the need to bomb a defenseless country into submission. We’ve been doing it forever, from massacres in the Philippines to Nicaraguan death squads to the Iraq War. This isn’t characteristically Republican; it’s characteristically American.

Structurally, the problem is that we have a political atmosphere that confines debate to a narrow range of admissible topics. Says Perrin of the Iran-Contra hearings: “[C]over-up, dismissal, suppression and destruction of evidence, and round-the-clock rationalizing [particularly on the part of the U.S. media] helped to squelch what, in a functioning constitutional democracy, would have been grounds for presidential impeachment and criminal prosecution.”

Which is where Perrin trips me up: what would make this country functional? His book is profoundly pessimistic about “the American talent for self-delusion,” but he’s too slash-and-burn to want to fix it. In that way, Savage Mules is a lot like A People's History of the United States: since the accepted truths about U.S. political life are so far off from the reality, Perrin needs to bang us over the head for a while until we can see things clearly; he has little time left to explain what might fix our problems. If you read Sandy Levinson on Balkinization, by contrast, you’ll identify a host of systemic problems that need to be addressed before any long-lasting change will come our way: abolishing the Electoral College; allowing the president to be removed by something akin to a no-confidence vote; stripping the vice president of any responsibility or staff. Read Hendrik Hertzberg, and you’ll get an impassioned defense of the National Popular Vote as a way to eliminate the Electoral College without a Constitutional amendment. These are bloggers looking for solutions; on the basis of his book, anyway, it’s not clear to me that Perrin cares particularly much about such things.

To a lot of us, indeed, it seems as though blogs are where the most interesting political discussion happens nowadays. Blogs should be free of the disease that Noam Chomsky pointed out so many years ago, namely that corporate media reflect the interests of their corporate masters. Granted, we are often parasitic on the corporate media, feeding off the work that they do and spitting out commentary. More than that, says Perrin, we — like all Americans — parrot back the mainstream foreign-policy line and accept whatever bloody wars our party tells us to back.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the annual Kos convention, which Perrin attends at the end of Savage Mules. The unfortunate bit about his attending the convention is that he is clearly trying to be Too Cool For The Democrats. The narrowmindedness of all the “Kossacks” (nyuk nyuk nyuk) forces Perrin to smoke a joint in the hotel bathroom and toss back a few soothing drinks. He’s like Holden Caulfield among the Democrats. That last chapter made me reconsider the rest of the book: is Savage Mules ultimately about Perrin’s own vanity?

His spearing the “American talent for self-delusion” is maybe odder, when you consider that he — like many of us, including me — voted for Nader in 2000. Are Nader voters self-deluded? If so, then Perrin is self-deluded as well. Or maybe Nader voters are among the enlightened. Maybe there’s the tiniest glimmer of hope that a few people want to fix things, and were willing to endure their friends’ ridicule to do so. Maybe not all Americans are self-deluded.

If you want hope, and you want to get to work, then Perrin’s book is not for you.

Work is such that I desperately need a vacation. “I would like to go to the Cape,” I says to myself. A coworker tells me that if I can wait past September 10, Provincetown is cheap. Granted, there wouldn’t be much in the way of beach time, but it would be nice fall weather. The same coworker says that one can rent bikes and pedal around the Cape. Which would be fun.

In any case, the point is not to hang out on the beach, as much as it is to get entirely off the grid. So I’ve added an extra element to this notional vacation: leave my computer and my cell phone at home. Tell people that in the event of an emergency — but in no other case — they can call the hotel. Then make sure always to tell the hotel where I’m going, just in case emergencies do arise.

If anyone has any tips on making a Provincetown trip affordable, or has anything else to add about Cape Cod trips … or for that matter, if anyone has access to cheap housing in or near P-town … do let me know.

Attention conservation notice: 900 or so words of whinging ahead about the MBTA, and about the city generally.

There’s an article in today’s Globe about the continuing MBTA construction delays at Kenmore. I would give a substantial fraction of my salary — seriously — if people could explain to me why MBTA projects are always overdue and wildly over budget, and if those same people could then solve the problem.

It’s been noted many times recently: in an era of expensive gas, a functioning MBTA would jump in and prove to people that mass transit is just what they’re waiting for. It’s not happening: the MBTA is falling even more apart at precisely the time when it ought to be working better.

To add insult to injury, the MBTA’s putative leader, Dan Grabauskas, drives an SUV to work every day from his home in Ipswich. This despite the fact that Ipswich is right on the commuter rail (Newburyport line, a couple stops shy of the end). And also despite the fact that the MBTA is now running a campaign it calls “Dump The Pump” to get people onto its vehicles.

Every time the MBTA could be overdue on a project, it is. The Longfellow Bridge is sort of fixed now, so trains passing over it can now go 25 mph rather than the 10 mph where they’ve been stuck since June; this is still slower than the usual 40+-mph travel speed over that bridge. Several times over the past few months, we’ve heard that the repairs would be completed within a weekend or two.

When an organization screws up this consistently, the press owe it to us to ask why it always screws up. Like Tom Friedman, the MBTA “does not get these things right even by accident.” I wish the MBTA itself had the honesty to explain this: after the hundredth T slowdown because of “signal work,” someone should be asking why signal work so consistently slows down the trains. Do other transit systems have so many signaling problems? Or are “signaling problems” cover for “breakdowns in union negotiation”?

I’m inclined to look at Boston generally. I’m unversed in the Big Dig, and of course I realize the fundamental fact about it: the city and the U.S. were moving an interstate highway under a 400-year-old major metropolis built on landfill. That’s nontrivial. I understand this. But it’s the same issue as with the MBTA: being Boston, the smart money would have bet that the project would go insanely far over its budget.

For a city with so many universities and so many smart people — and especially so many engineers — you’d expect that it would be the greatest city in the world, and that its construction projects would be monuments to man’s technological achievements. It’s not so, unfortunately. (Perhaps I flatter universities.)

The reason this gets to me so much, if it’s not clear, is that I love my city. I moved back here after being away for a year and really missing the place. Every time I flew into Logan, I would say a little something — seriously — to Boston upon first spotting its skyline. It was always something like “Hey Boston. Glad to see you. I missed you.” I still say something to Boston when I’m riding the red line over the Longfellow.

I want only the best for this city. I want it to succeed. When college students graduate, I want them all to stay here. I want the constant influx of new faces and smart people to make this place fun, livable, and dynamic. By all rights it should be the coolest town on earth: lots of young people means lots of restaurants selling good cheap food all night long. Like New York City, I should be able to duck into a diner at 5:00 in the morning. I should be able to buy noodles whenever the urge overtakes me.

Yet it’s not like that. I blame the T for some of that. We should be like Paris: no more than a 10-minute walk from any spot in the city to a T stop. The T should be running 24 hours per day like New York’s subway. And with all the smart people in this city, engineering problems should not grind the place to a halt.

It all smells very much like politics: buried deep within the MBTA and the city government, someone has paid someone else off; or the union won’t fix something because one of its members is pissed at Grabauskas; or there’s a feud going between the Italian wing and the Irish wing of city government. Something. If someone knows the politics, I’m sure that’s 99% of the story; I would love to hear it. And I would love for the Globe to dig down to this next level. When a bridge is effectively running at 25% capacity for a few months, I want my local media to explain the root cause, rather than constantly turning to “MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.”

What I want to know is: as someone who loves this city very deeply, what can I do to fix what’s broken? I’m not leaving this place. I want to make it better.

Guys keep hitting on my wife, which I can understand, so it doesn’t bother me. She looks pretty good, all’s fair. But please, don’t tell me I’m So Lucky or that I’m A Lucky Man. Brenna could not understand why this would make me angry when them kissing her arm or whatever would not. I let her in on a little man secret. When you tell a guy that he is a Lucky Man, you aren’t saying it because she seems like a really nice person. What you are telling him is that you would so fuck that. You would fuck that to pieces.

–Tycho from Penny Arcade

• Bade my lovely girlfriend farewell at the ungodly hour of five-what-the-hell-o’clock, as she headed for the airport in Manchester on her way to Chicago for a week. (I am now a bachelor. Call if you would like to hang out.) Passed back out into dreamland.

• Woke up around 7:30, wandered around her now-empty house, showered, got out the door by 8:30.

• Walked the 2.7 miles from her house to the train station in Exeter, NH. Did this in 48 minutes. I was all worried that I would miss the train, so I didn’t even stop by Me & Ollie’s as is my wont. I decided to hold off on breakfast and coffee until I got back to Cambridge, at which point I would satisfy both needs at Toscanini’s. Tosci has a killer Sunday brunch; as its owner, Gus Rancatore, described it: “It’s food that people would actually want to eat, and better than the sort of brunch you’d go to with your parents.” Consequently, it is packed on Sundays. I wonder why Tosci doesn’t then serve breakfast every day, like Miracle of Science does. (MoS’s weekday breakfasts, starting at 7 a.m., are to my mind one of Cambridge’s undiscovered treasures. My friend Joe and I are routinely two of three people there at that time of morning.)

• As it happened, the train was 10 or 15 minutes late anyway. Without coffee or adequate sleep, I passed out near-immediately into a very deep slumber from which I didn’t awake until Woburn — a “city” that one Amtrak conductor routinely announces like so: “Next stop, Woburn: the bio-tech ghetto!” You might think, by the way, that “Woburn” is pronounced like the two words “whoa” and “burn.” In that you would be wrong. If you aren’t inclined to adopt the accent, you’ll pronounce the first syllable “woo”; if you want to be a local, the whole word is “woo-bin.” But no one ever pronounces it like it’s spelled. Sort of like “Worcester,” which is not “War-chest-er”; it is “Woost-er.” A little 411 for the non-Massholes in the room.

• Home, Tosci, coffee, breakfast. And a nap on the couch before an open window with a light breeze wafting in.

I have had worse days.

Hands raised if you believe the above-quoted statement is shorthand for the following.

“I have a lot of ill-formed ideas about what god is, and I do believe in a creator. But I don’t want to take the time to think too hard about what I actually believe. If I were reasonably precise about my own thoughts, it might turn out that I’m obviously wrong. So I’m going to cover some uncooked thoughts in metaphysical handwaving; this aura of mystery around essential triteness will make people think I’m deep, or that my god is somehow lodged deep within my soul — when in fact the truth is that there’s no there there, and I don’t really have anything interesting to say on the topic.”

Another possible alternative for this post’s title:

“I don’t believe in god. Yoga’s cool, though.”

I don’t have much time to write about the subject right now, but I’ll ramble at some point soon about the virginity of the Virgin Mary. It seems like a good jumping-off point for some non-vacuous discussion of Christianity. Specifically: my sense is that Aquinas tried to reduce the portion of Christian doctrine that had to be taken on faith to as small a core as possible. My sense further is that Mary’s virginity is part of this irreducible core.

From The Reformation, page 97:

Erasmus faced up to one theological issue dependent on the use of allegory that later proved as troublesome to Protestants as to Catholics: This was the universally held belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity … Much of the traditional case for this belief, which has no direct justification in Scripture, was based on an allegorical use of Ezek. 44:2, which talks about the shutting of a gate that only the Lord could enter. This was then bolstered by a forced Greek and Latin reading of Isaiah’s original Hebrew prophecy that a young woman (not a “virgin” in Hebrew) would conceive a son Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14). Erasmus could not read these texts as Jerome had done. In response to shocked complaints about his comments, he set out a precise position: “We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books.” In other words, Erasmus acknowledged the ancient claim that there were matters of some importance that had to be taken on faith — because the Church said they were true — rather than because they were found in the Bible. Erasmus had begun to discover a problem that would become one of the major issues of the Reformation and that faced all those who called for Christianity to go back ad fontes. Did the Bible contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition the Church guarded, independent of it? The issue of Scripture versus tradition became a vital area of debate that had no straightforward outcome for either side, whatever they might claim.

And here’s Aquinas, from the Summa. It’s unconvincing unless you accept some ideas about the perfection of God and of Christ. I don’t accept those ideas, as it happens.

It seems to me that questioning as far as possible the roots of faith could lead just as easily to a deep faith as it could to atheism.

Anyway, more on this later. It seems to me that diving deeply on this one issue would go a long way toward understanding Christianity more broadly.

Maybe the quickest way to summarize my understanding of the Reformation, now that I’ve finished MacCulloch’s book, is like so: “Christians took some time off from killing Jews and Muslims to kill each other. Eventually the descendants of the original mother Church numbered like grains of sand, all mutually loathing one another. After exhausting themselves with murder, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, some of those descendants decided that it would be better to figure out how to get along with one another. And lo, Toleration was born.”

The somewhat longer story is that the Ottoman Empire was encroaching on Europe’s southern and eastern borders, and actually took over enough land — Granada, for instance — to scare the daylights out of Christians. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others took this opportunity — quite coincidentally, it seems — to fume about the Church’s corruption. The laity saw the Ottomans’ invasion as a warning sign that the last days were coming, and that the Church would have to atone for its sins. This combined with, it seems, increasing literacy and the birth of the printing press to make access to the Bible easier. Hence people could turn to their Scripture, see that doctrine wasn’t always as their priests insisted it was, and maybe even occasionally compare one Church father to another. Origen, for instance, stands uncomfortably beside Augustine. So we begin the sola scriptura movement, justification by faith alone, and a move away from centralized Church hierarchy.

The Church didn’t take this laying down, of course, so they fought back on multiple fronts and eventually reclaimed most of Europe as Catholic territory. Spain never needed this “Counter-Reformation,” as it happens, because Spain never succumbed to the Reformation itself. Spain had already had an Inquisition directed by the infamous Tomás de Torquemada, so it had already weeded out internal resistance. The Church of the eastern tradition, which we today label Greek and Russian Orthodox, never had a Reformation, because it had already been overrun completely by the Ottomans.

Once the gates to questioning were open, people ran off in every conceivable direction from what the Bible said. The Bible actually says nothing about infant baptism, so the Anabaptists (literally rebaptists) picked up on that and insisted on adult baptism. The Bible left it questionable, at the very least, whether Mary was actually a virgin (the Bible apparently said Jesus had brothers — I did not know this), so various people questioned her holiness. There were debates over what seem nowadays like obscure, needless theological disputes, such as whether the physical substance of the wafer is everywhere in the world that people happen to be eating it — whether Christ’s body, that is, magically transports itself into each worshipper’s mouth. This is known as the doctrine of “real presence.” People seem to have died over it. MacCulloch doesn’t convincingly explain for non-believers how a small-scale doctrinal issue translates into large-scale murder.

There’s a fascinating and no doubt endlessly depressing sociological study just waiting to leap out of real presence. Here’s a provisional hypothesis: people often fight with each other more when they agree than when they don’t. I wonder whether more blood has been spilt amongst Christians than between Christians and Muslims.

Somehow Europe changed from millennia under a single church to viewing that same church’s leader, the Pope, as the Antichrist. I would like to explain how this happened, but I don’t really understand it — and unfortunately, I don’t think MacCulloch’s book is the place to go to explain that arc. He covers more or less all of Europe from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries, jumping around from country to country at will. It’s hard to pick out a “moral of the story,” and in fact I think MacCulloch eschews such a moral. He appears to be of the historical school that takes Big Lessons as insults; there’s something to be said for this, if you’d prefer not to see your histories make straightforward what is in fact complicated, contingent, and random. From this reader’s perspective, anyway, MacCulloch’s style is more distracting than helpful. His book would probably work better as a reference — grab it off the shelf and find something relevant to your particular area of interest — than it does as a straight-through narrative.

The theology in MacCulloch’s book is slight — really only enough to put a bit of context around these disputes. Yet the theological questions seem fatal. As I think Augustine was the first to point out: if god is omniscient, then he knows how our lives will play out. If he knows how our lives will play out, then it takes an act of great sophistry to claim that we have free will in any meaningful sense. Predestination might also make you ask what the purpose of prayer is; hasn’t god already made up his mind? If you’re Aquinas, you’re going to argue that god is perfect, therefore unchanging, therefore not in the business of making decisions; his mind was made up long ago. Indeed, this perfect god spends his time contemplating himself. (I honestly forget how Aquinas justifies prayer, under this light.)

Some scholars of the Reformation, most notably Calvin, took this predestination to heart. Here’s where the logic of predestination runs into politics. Time and again throughout MacCulloch’s book, theologians pull their worshippers back from the brink just before those worshippers realize where the logic of their religion is leading them. If all that matters is faith, for instance, and if all the truth one needs is available in books that any of us can read, then self-appointed leaders have much less of a role to fill. This wouldn’t work at all, of course. At the very least, it wouldn’t help the religion to fit well into civil society: political leaders need their people to stay in line.

The unkind view of this reality is that theology is so much chin music to support a preconceived conclusion. The more charitable take is that society as a whole takes time to understand the consequences of its own beliefs — much like Copernicus, who died without really understanding what he had wrought; it took Galileo and Newton to push the revolution to its logical end. (Newton, by the way, spent as much time writing about Christian mysticism as he did about the inverse-square law; so MacCulloch tells us.)

No matter how logical all these conclusions might be, the logic still has to start from axioms. If you’re a Christian, those axioms will almost certainly contain something about God’s role in the universe or Christ’s perfection. If you are a non-believer, these axioms need arguing. I’ve not yet found a book on the subject of Christianity that argues in a manner calculated to convince rational, educated nonbelivers. Supposedly Aquinas went as far as anyone to reduce Christianity to a tiny core surrounded by an impenetrable wall of logic, but the core is still unbelievable if you’ve not already bought into some contentions about Christ. I haven’t, so much of the theological debate — over, again, issues such as whether Christ is literally in the wafer — look irremediably silly to me.

The most interesting part of this book, to me, is what happened at the end of centuries of religious murder: societies dipped their toes in the water of “toleration” — i.e., “not killing other people because they think of god differently than you do.” This is what liberal democracy is: it’s the realization that since we’re all going to have to live together, we all need to give up a little something to make it work. Even getting this off the ground is very tricky: if Catholics believe that they will always be in the majority, why should they believe that they need to relent at all in their pursuit of religious monopoly? Here’s where some studies comparing the spread of religious toleration in homogeneous societies to heterogeneous ones would be valuable; for his part, MacCulloch notes that the United States was one of the first places where toleration took off, and was also the destination for immigrants from all over Europe. (Martha Nussbaum published a book recently subtitled “In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality”, which I just couldn’t get into.)

Like Borge’s infinite library, there probably lies within The Reformation the answer to every secret, and the disproof of every answer to every secret. I’d have liked a shorter volume with more clear story arcs — more analysis and less data. With that said, this is probably the sort of book that one returns to over the years, finding bits of goodness each time.