Should You Judge this Book by its Cover?
Julian Baggini
Granta/Allen & Unwin, $35
Reviewed by Mark Broatch

Proverbs are cultural wisdom; the institutional knowledge of a society. But, of course, not all knowledge is valuable or useful, and it changes over time. And so we get the seemingly contradictory "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" against "Out of sight, out of mind". Or "Look before you leap" against "He who hesitates is lost."

Julian Baggini, a British philosopher, notes that it's not that such oppositions cancel each other out, but that each saying only captures part of the truth. Baggini takes 100 aphorisms, many of them proverbs, and separates the specific truth from the universal claim, quoting other sayings to compare and contrast. If there is one thing we can never do enough of these days, it's making our thinking clearer.

For WB Yeats' "The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity", Baggini notes suicide bombers, political ideologues and religious zealots have replaced Ireland's sectarian hatreds. But he pulls apart the idea that it might be an endorsement of apathy. Noting Burke's claim that good men doing nothing allows evil to success, Baggini says the timely answer is two-fold: the good need to weaken the convictions of the bad or gain a bit more passion themselves. "It is not enough to trust our own decency." We must, he says, win the argument against fanaticism or be prepared to defend our values with more passion - though not, surely, more violence.
Occasionally I was left asking for more clever exploration, but some terrific wisdom lies within these pages, and I was alerted to the some proverbs I did not know and the truth of some I thought I did. The Spanish: "Appetite comes from eating" and "Pay for love with love; everything else with money." That it is not "Revenge is a dish best served cold" but "Revenge is a dish that can be served cold." Revenge becomes not a dirty but sometimes necessary business to "something we should schedule to maximise our enjoyment".
Modesty, something many New Zealanders prize as a core of their national personality, is the highest form of arrogance, reckon the Germans. It is a brave politician who says a problem deserves fixing, but it is better to do nothing as current solutions would only make it worse. On the other hand, it would be anti-progressive conservatism to apply the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule to, say, slavery. The key word in "Charity begins at home", argues Baggini, is "begins". Rather than being a justification for not giving to overseas causes, it should be a blueprint for extension. "Far from the eyes, far from the heart" is the French take on "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over". And martyrdom is clearly no longer, as GB Shaw naively thought, the only way to fame without ability.
One thing that might occur to rationalists is that the Bible is possibly the first example of advocacy journalism. "You are my friends if you do what I command," John reports. Baggini argues that the message of this and the Good Samaritan "undermines the kind of sectarian, parochial thinking that fuels conflict between peoples" and is one of Jesus' "most progressive messages".
The author's final words, however, are the wisest in the book: if we stop thinking about what phrases or quotations mean, we oversimplify or misunderstand them and their insight is lost. "To be wise is not to achieve a state of maturity from which one never regresses, but to keep one's understanding sharp by persisting in a habit of constant questioning and a refusal to take things for granted."

Footnote:
Mark Broatch is the editor of the Sunday Star Times Books pages and the author of the word reference In a Word (New Holland). His review was first published in the Sunday Star Times, 15 November and is reproduced here with permission.