Book reviews: ‘The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives and Divides Us’ and ‘Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor’

‘The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives and Divides Us’ by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

“Rebecca Newberger Goldstein isn’t the first philosopher to argue that we are driven by the quest to justify our existence,” said John Kaag in The Atlantic. But in her stirring new book, the accomplished author presents the pursuit of what she calls “mattering”—an idea she introduced in her 1983 novel, The Mind-Body Problem—as the human instinct that overrides all others. Seeking to pinpoint the origin of the instinct and exploring how its existence informs the definition of a life well lived, she comes to “a somewhat surprising conclusion”: that we are all fighting entropy—the tendency of any closed system to slide into chaos—and any of us is living a good life if we are contributing to that fight by assisting in, in her words, “the spread of flourishing, knowledge, love, joyfulness, peace, kindness, comity, beauty.”

Goldstein groups people into four mattering types, and those categories prove “very helpful,” said Yascha Mounk in Persuasion. “Socializers,” she says, find meaning in being useful to others. “Competitors,” meanwhile, seek to matter more than others. “Transcenders,” in turn, look for fulfillment in their relationship to the divine, while “heroic strivers” set a standard of excellence for themselves and chase it. All four types of pursuit can go awry, as Goldstein shows, and it’s hard to see exactly how any of us can be certain we don’t take such a path. But her systematic approach to defining the good life is “going to change how I think about the world,” and it’s reassuring to read about examples of journeys heading in a destructive direction that turn toward the good. In one story she tells, a neo-Nazi skinhead befriends Black inmates in prison, finds a Jewish mentor, and has since dedicated his life to fighting extremism.

“As philosophy, The Mattering Instinct stands on uncertain foundations,” said Dominic Green in The Wall Street Journal. Goldstein, with her love of physics, makes much of the connection between “matter” the verb and “matter” the noun, but the overlap is really just a quirk of English. She also talks about “mattering instinct” and “longing to matter” as if the phrases are interchangeable, but “an instinct is innate” while “a longing is culturally determined.” More problematically, she imagines that we may one day arrive at a way to objectively distinguish between the ways that individuals seek to matter while being open-minded enough to accept that everyone seeks meaning in their own way. That’s not the pursuit of truth through logic. That’s wishful thinking, and the wide readership this book has enjoyed is further evidence of “an entire civilization undergoing an existential crisis.”

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‘Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor’ by Christine Kuehn

We all have family secrets, but “few have darker ones than Christine
Kuehn,” said David A. Taylor in the Washington Independent Review of Books. In her best-selling memoir, the first-time author shares a story long withheld from her: Her German grandparents were Nazi spies who channeled enough information used in the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that her grandfather was the only person convicted for the attack. “Surely this must be historical fiction,” you’ll think, said Julia M. Klein in The Forward. But several years before Pearl Harbor, Otto and Friedel Kuehn were rising figures in Nazi party when their daughter, 19-year-old Ruth, began an affair with Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi propagandist learned that Ruth’s biological father was Jewish. Soon, the entire family was shipped to Hawaii, with three being paid to gather intelligence.

The story, as told in Family of Spies, is “full of suspenseful twists and cinematic details,” said Sylvia Brownrigg in The New York Times. Otto and Friedel hadn’t been very discreet spies, throwing lavish parties in Hawaii that won them access to U.S. naval officials but also attracted so
much attention that the FBI sent an agent to investigate them. “As the story hurtles toward Dec. 7, 1941,” with the FBI nearly closing in, “the book acquires page-turning urgency.” When the attack comes, Kuehn
describes the devastation vividly, and “ultimately, there is the catharsis of seeing Otto, Friedel, and Ruth apprehended.” But the author’s future father, then 15, was incarcerated, too, and he was innocent.

Kuehn “writes with dual aims,” said Rebecca Brenner Graham in The Washington Post. She seeks to understand what her father went through as he was blindsided by his family’s treachery and broke with them by testifying against his father. She also grapples with whether the other side of the family were monsters, and this through line of the book is “hamstrung by an assumption that people must be monsters to do evil.” While it’s brave of her to condemn her forebears, she’d have been braver to allow that some people who cause great harm are not so different from the rest of us.