Description of the World - Part 49

Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: a Portrait of the Mexicans (For me, Mexico is at once a hallucination and the most ordinary place in the world because I grew up with Chicanos and worked summer jobs digging ditches with them but I also dreamed about the Aztecs and Mayans and flamboyant Mexican baroque and Under the Volcano and Don Juan the Yaqui shaman, not to mention Sor Juana. I don’t think Riding contributed anything much to the stew.)

John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty (This is Keegan’s attempt to do for naval warfare what he did for land warfare in Face of Battle. He wanted to capture the experience of sea battles as he had for land battles.)

Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea (Perhaps because I grew up in a town with a large Japanese-American population, I took it for granted that understanding history had to involve more than understanding the doings of one scraggly peninsula—Europe, that is, not Korea—and I’ve dutifully followed that up by reading histories of most of the countries of the world. Assimilating all that information is another matter, of course. I’ve spent enough time with Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Indian history to have a sense of places and times. What I retain of Korean history is largely a sense that there is a considerable there there. The rest is fragments. On the other hand, I’ve known many Koreans and, as a denizen of the Pacific Rim, don’t confuse them with the Chinese or Japanese. Whatever your skepticism about national characteristics, the Koreans I’ve spoken with believe in them, insisting in particular on the contrast between their individualism and Japanese group think. My experience is congruent with that, at least as far as the Koreans go. The Koreans I’ve been friendly with would all make lousy ants.)

Mark Edward Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (I’m obviously a person afflicted by curiosity, but as wide-ranging (or defuse) as my interests may be, I have a fairly small number of questions to ask the world. I just ask the questions of more parts of it. One of the fattest dossiers I maintain is on issue of how radically the world’s various traditions of thinking differ from one another. How big is the space of possible modes of understanding and how much of the space has ever been occupied? The domestic policy version of the question is the true extent of the internal diversity of Western philosophy—as it might have been put in my youth, is there more to English philosophy than cricket jokes? Is continental philosophy theosophy for the carriage trade? The foreign policy version has to do with whether Nagarjuna or Mo Ti were philosophers or perhaps practitioners of a distinct but analogous occupation. Of course a similar set of questions can be and often is asked about science, mathematics, theology, jurisprudence, philology, and literary criticism considered not in regards their results but their practices. If you assume that philosophy and the rest ask inevitable, obvious questions, the game is over before it begins. You’re like a Newtonian who thinks of infinite space and eternal time as a given. I’m taking the side of Leibniz side of this one. We ants shouldn’t just take it for granted that we’re crawling across an infinite plane. Maybe we’re on a sphere. Maybe on a donut. We’ll have to figure that out from right here. Similarly, I’m not willing to simply assume that philosophy comes down to figuring out the answer to the traditional obvious questions of what is, how do we know, and what should we do. I want to look and see.

Well, that’s kind of a tangent, not that I’m adverse to those. But the connection to the Lewis’ book is this: One way of looking at the question of modes of thinking is the relationship of thinking to power. The scribal sages who developed the international proverb business in the ancient Middle East presumably sought the ear of the king just as the sophists sold rhetoric lessons to the leaders and would-be leaders of the Demos. Just what the political vocation of the philosophers, strictu sensu, was is somewhat harder to say. Like Vito Corleone, Thales claimed to buy and sell olive oil for a living, but that was just his day job. Plato famously got in trouble trying to advise a tyrant; and Aristotle “played the taws upon the bottom of a king of kings,” though Alexander didn’t use the Politics as a practical guide to conquering the world. It’s in China that a tradition of sages grew up that not only aspired to advise kings but eventually succeeded in creating an imperial ideology, or rather two of them, the totalitarian legalism of the Qin and the Confucian humanism of the Han. If the Chinese sages are philosophers, as Europeans in the Enlightenment certainly thought they were, then China provides one of the first instances before 1917 of philosophy (supposedly) in charge. Can secular thinkers design a world and call it into being? What are the limits of that ambition? We think of China so often as the homeland of spontaneity, of the Tao, of inaction (wu wei), of the sage doing nothing and everything being accomplished that we forget that it’s institutions were premeditated to a remarkable degree.

The legalist thinkers devised a plan and the Qin monarchs followed it, eventually unifying the warring kingdoms. It was a top-down operation. Confucian and Taoist orthodoxy did a pretty good job of obscuring how much they learned from this ruthless program. The apologists for the Han claimed that they corrected the violence and inhumanity of the Qin, but the Han and subsequent dynasties continued many its fundamental innovations: the insistence that the empire is “all under heaven,” the central role of the Emperor, and the establishment and standardization of a single writing system. If the Chinese imperial system had an author, it was Lord Shang, not Master Kung.

Of course the Legalists were extremely hostile to the humanistic doctrines of the other sages. According to the Book of Lord Shang, which is more than a little analogous to the Management of Savagery, the state suffers when it is infested by the twelve lice: rites, music, odes, history, moral culture, filial piety, brotherly love, sincerity, benevolence, duty, criticism of the army, and being ashamed of fighting. It’s small wonder the Han successors were anxious to disassociated themselves from this cruel purism; but it built the state once and for all, which is why the Communists rehabilitated the Legalists; and to this day make sure that the First Emperor, Shi Huangdi, is always represented deferentially in historical movies.)

Description of the World - Part 48

Fourth Shelf

John Keegan, The Mask of Command (I kept reading Keegan even though he never produced another book with the freshness and virtuosity of the Face of Battle. Writers on military subjects are at risk for becoming hacks. I don’t think Keegan succumbed to temptation in this book, but this brief treatise on military leadership would have been more credible, if less commercial, if he’d written a section on the greatest of 20th Century generals, George Marshall.)

Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (I used to be a bigger fan of demographic explanations than I am now, but how many remains a fundamental question in history. The big battalions don’t always win—or starve—but more is usually more. Bailyn's book makes you suspect that a crucial reason why the Colonists won the Revolution was because America received a large infusion of population in the years before Lexington. It wasn’t just numbers. The earlier edition of the huddled masses arrived with a chip on their shoulder. It was like spraying nitro in the carburetor. One of the quarrels between Great Britain and North America was about frontier policy. Parliament wanted to put the breaks on the headlong expansion of settlement into Indian country. The Americans, especially the newest Americans, were looking for room. Bailyn’s books are full of charts and tables; but like Braudel’s works, they are anything but dry and analytic. There’s no contradiction between statistics and an interest in human lives. Every number in the count is a somebody.)

Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, ed. Roy Basler (I’m not quite ready to write an essay on Lincoln as Raskolnikov, but it is true that the aspiration to become a world-historical individual wasn’t limited to ax murderers. That was just Dostoevsky’s black comedy cover of Hegel’s tune. In an address all the way back in 1838, Lincoln spoke of “towering genius,” which “thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.” I don’t think Lincoln would have cultivated the pose of harmless humorist so assiduously if he weren’t aware that he was a dangerous man, someone whose moral passion depended on an essential supplement of amoral ambition. Somebody suggested to me that Daniel Day Lewis overplayed Lincoln’s sufferings; and it’s true that after seeing the movie, you’re like to find yourself thinking, “Heck, Jesus just had that one bad day…” Reading some of Lincoln’s writings makes you wonder if is there’s such a thing as longing for the cross and feeling guilty about it long in advance of the crucifixion?)

Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Modern World (This book attempts to explain “the periodic waves of state breakdown in the early modern world.” The work that operates at the intersection of history, sociology, and political science, a sweet spot to my way of thinking. When I read it, I was impressed with Goldstone’s specific diagnosis of the factors, especially demographic factors, that lead to widespread disorder and misery—this author is not a romantic about revolutions. What upset the historians about the book was its author’s attempt to quantify things, something I had barely taken notice of on a first reading—what he arrived at were something like the figures of merit engineers sometimes use to rank the quality of refrigerators. Since we’re a long way away from being able to do dimensional analysis on history, I tend to ignore such efforts. Anyhow, I thought Goldstone picked up some very important recurring features that lead to failing states and violent revolutions, in particular, the unwillingness of elites to pay the freight for the system even though they depended on it for their own well being. Conservatives are always complaining about high taxes, but inadequate taxation is a central part of the story of the English and French Revolutions and, more recently, of the collapse of the Manchu dynasty. I’ve talked to people who assume that the French kings and Chinese emperors were like the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood movies, perpetually squeezing the peasants. In the real world, it’s the local powers that who do most of the squeezing; and things go to Hell because they aren’t squeezed enough themselves. Another leading indicator is too many well educated people with disappointed prospects—I don’t know if that means that we should expect the Winter Palace to be stormed by unemployed law students this time around, but the impossibility of democratizing privilege is surely a plausible explanation for what happened in 1968. That’s the very short version of Pierre Bourdieu’s take on it. What Goldstone calls “ideologies of rectification and transformation” are also requisite, though he doesn’t believe that which candidate ideology wins out is predictable. Of course all the causes Goldstone identifies have causes of their own: I expect if he rewrote the book today, he’d look more closely at climatic changes as a reason that times of trouble are so often synchronized across countries or ever continents. Of course any work of historical sociology is bound to have implications for the current situation. Looking over my underlinings, I came across a paragraph that perfectly makes a point that I’ve tried to make on countless occasions. I don’t know whether it is where I got the idea or not. The author writes “One clear sign of America’s lack of understanding of the coming crisis is the nature of the debate over the federal budget and budgeting for social security…. the ability to pay off deficits and provide a secure retirement for the baby boomers depends primarily on future U.S. production. No matter how many dollars are ‘saved,’ they will be useless to holders of government bonds or to those receiving social security checks unless the economy is producing enough goods and services for recipients to make desired purchases.” At this point, I usually add a complaint about the superstitious faith people place on the mathematics of compound interest. Same rant though.)

  

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: a History of the World, 1914-1991 (This book is almost more of a memoir than a history. It certainly isn’t up to the standard of Hobsbawm’s 19th Century histories, which are exemplary; but Hobsbawm is perfectly aware of its shortcoming. He quotes twelve people’s summaries of the short 20th Century at the outset of the book. I think Franco Venturi’s comes closest to his own: “Historians can’t answer this question. For me the twentieth century is only the ever-renewed effort to understand it.”)

What Do Republicans Want?

What are policies intended to accomplish? It seems a little naive to take the word of the supporters on that; and even if you aren’t completely cynical about politicians, it’s obvious that a great many proposals are floated for sheerly tactical reasons or to to advertise an attitude rather than directly seek to change the way things are done. Since different segments of political parties and movements want different things from the same policies, there won’t be a single answer in any case. It’s also true that talking about the objective intentions of a class of people in the way the old Marxists used to do is high-handed and also presumes that anonymous social processes have purposes of their own. Still, we can perform the following experiment, which might teach us something even if we understand that it wouldn’t teach us everything. What would you guess the Republicans were trying to do if you simply considered the predicable effects of their preferred policies and ignored their explanations?  In other words, let us play dumb—the other side is free to claim we aren’t actually playing at that. Anyhow, here’s the short list I came up with this rainy morning of policies and their predicable results:

1.  Lower taxes on the rich, weaken unions, oppose raising the minimum wage, etc.: Increased economic inequality

2.  Reneging on the Iran deal: A nuclear Iran and/or another war in the Middle East

3.  Destroying the ACA: Lower life expectancy among the poor

4.  Wage the drug war with increased intensity: Ensuring the profits of the drug cartels by providing price support for illegal narcotics

5.  Outlaw abortion, reduce the availability of contraception, and eliminate sex education: More teenage pregnancy and a larger number of illegal abortions

6.  Take no steps to deal with climate change: Protecting old industries while slowing the growth of new industries

Outcomes aren’t everything. I’m well aware that there are deontological justifications for many Conservative policies, i.e., they’re right just because they’re right, damn it. For example, many, especially in the rank and file, oppose progressive taxation or the whole notion of an income tax simply because they don’t think it’s fair. Overturning Roe vs Wade won’t cut down on the number of abortions, but allowing it to stand strikes makes many right wingers feel like they are complicit in a great crime. That admitted, I do think that it is telling that conservatives care enough about consequences to devise elaborate, implausible theories of how their policies will do the reverse of what it appears they were designed to do. Trickle down economics is so counter-intuitive that it shouldn’t have taken forty years of experience and Thomas Piketty’s 900 pages to discredit it. It’s still around because it’s useful, not because it's cogent. I simply don’t believe Republicans are dedicated to slopping the hogs because they want to make bacon. We know who's running Animal Farm. 

Description of the World - Part 47

Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: the Structure of Human History (This ambitious book appeared in the late 80s, but I think of it as belonging to a somewhat earlier period, perhaps because I haven’t heard Gellner’s name mentioned much recently or because Gellner’s particular brand of grand sociological synthesis seems a bit dated. Trying to figure out what happened in history is also a preoccupation of mine, of course, so I’m not complaining about the general program. What altitude you chose to fly when you take your panoramic picture, matters a great deal, however, though there may not be a single best choice. I once suggested to some grad students the following exercise: write a one sentence, a one paragraph, a one page, and a ten page history of the human race and then decide which view was the most illuminating. Everybody thought that was an interesting idea, but nobody actually did it. Well, I did write a one-page history of mankind once, though I don’t know where I put it. I do remember my one sentence summary: History is the struggle between elites over who who gets to exploit the others. Of course putting things that way is mostly just an expression of annoyance. It’s rather like Gellner’s tic of calling the powerful of the Earth thugs, which he does quite often. Looking over my marginalia, I find myself thinking that Gellner’s view of the development of human thought if not human society is surprisingly like Comte’s, which may simply reflect the extent to which Comte was simply right, much as we’d like to hope for something more exiting.)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (I don’t know if it is possible to read a book that has been read as often and as badly as this one. I gave up trying long ago. I didn’t happen upon one phrase in the book that demonstrates that the author’s view of the country is perhaps a bit dated: “…the people are therefore the real directing power.”)

George Pernoud and Sabine Flaissier, The French Revolution (This is actually an anthology of eye-witness accounts. It tends to focus on sensational events, which tends to leave the reader with the impression that the Revolution was all about the Terror. Because other accounts are similarly structured, I suspect most people have a foreshortened view of what happened. The Bastille fell on July 14, 1789. The terror didn’t begin until September of 1783, a full four years later, the equivalent or the full term of an American presidency.)

Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prado: Francesco di Marco Datini 1335-1410 (Dantini was a self-made man who left behind an enormous volume of letters and other records. The book makes an excellent counterpart to Peter Brown’s Eye of the Needle. Brown wrote about how the early Christians dealt with the contradiction between the radical critique of wealth found in the New Testament with the need to incorporate the rich into the church. Origo wrote about how that same resolution or perpetual lack of resolution took place in an individual merchant.)

Paul Fussell, Wartime (Fusell’s book on the first war, The Great War and Modern Memory is a much better known work, and when I think of Fussell I recall an essay he published about Hiroshima, which was not so much an argument in favor of the rightness of dropping the bomb as an avowal of how obvious the decision seemed to him back in ’45 when he was recovering from war wounds and faced with his comrades the prospect of yet more war in a different theater. As a some time copy editor, i’ve recast many thousands of sentences from the passive to the active voice, sometimes more out of the custom and usage of my trade than any serious reason, indeed, in technical writing the passive is more natural than the active because engineers and scientists are more concerned with what objects than subjects. Fussell reconstructs one edit of this sort that did matter. When Eisenhower composed the message he would sent in case the Normandy invasion failed, he originally wrote “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and the troops have been withdrawn.’ He changed that to “I have withdrawn the troops” before he stuck the paper in his pocket. Fussell was a literary critic by trade, an expert on prosody in fact, but he was interested in the ethics of forms, not formalism.)

Pius II, Commentaries, Volume 2 (Before he became Pope in 1458, Pius II started out as the humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. I’ve got the first volume of these memoirs around here some place. He called them Commentaries in analogy with Caesar’s works, which neither man called histories because they are too unadorned and straightforward to deserve a title reserved for the more artful efforts of genuine historians. Of course it’s the very fact that Pius didn’t strive for elegant effects that makes his account of his life readable to us—he certainly knew how to pile on the rhetoric. This volume, which is mostly about the frustrations of trying to rally the Italians, Germans, and French against the Turkish menace was less entertaining than the first, which includes a memorable account of what it’s like to get elected Pope.)

J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, 3rd edition (This tome is a monument to an influential error. Thompson was the great mavin of Mayan studies for many years, but his belief that Mayan hieroglyphs symbolized ideas instead of words in the Mayan language held back the decipherment of the script for decades. The same seductive error retarded efforts to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Thompson was rather like a later-day Athanasius Kircher on this score, though his work was less fantastic, and he did manage to decode the calendar signs. The physicist Richard Feynman played a minor but genuine role in getting past Thompson’s mistake, a fact duly noted in Feynman’s official obituary and perhaps included because the obituary writer was familiar with the Thompson book, indeed with this very copy, and had been inspired by it into reading up on the subject.)

Description of the World - Part 46

Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (My first encounter with Himmelfarb was her book on Darwin. She came across as a classic liberal arts idiot in that effort: she simply didn’t get the science involved. That display of ignorance soured me on her far more than her politics or even her role in whelping Bill Kristol, the Bagdad Bob of the American right. I should probably reread this book, which actually has a fine reputation, especially since my knowledge of the first half of the 19th Century in England is not what it should be granted how important those events were. If you read as much as I have, you can begin to believe that you don’t have to figure out where all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle go. You can guess the rest of the picture from the shape of the hole. Unfortunately, that method doesn’t work very well. A modern Tory may well be the right person to consult on the origins of attitudes towards the poor and their identity or distinction from the working class. The timing would be right for me as well since I’ve recently been doing a lot of thinking about the dark matter of human history, i.e., the ignorable, ignored, and largely invisible majority of mankind.)

John B. Wolf, The Barbary Coast: Algeria Under the Turks (It’s more than a little unfair to characterize the North African regimes as republics of cut throats and thieves as the blurb writer did on the back of this book—every sea coast of the early modern world turned out its share of pirates and privateers. The world depicted in this history is nevertheless startling. In the divan or ruling council of the janissary court, it was forbidden to use your fist to make a point, but you could kick or stomp on anybody that offended you, something that happened to a French consul. Mel Gibson would have felt right at home.)

Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (I believe in reading prefaces because the acknowledgements reveal the exclusiveness and stability of the various invisible colleges that dominate serious thinking. The same names appear over and over. There are other rewards to preface reading, however, including occasional admissions like the concluding comments in the preface to this impressive tome: “For errors of fact and the vagaries of our interpretations, we have no one to blame but ourselves—or rather, each other. One of the joys of collaborations is the almost limitless opportunity it affords for mutual recrimination.” Wikipedia informs me that the authors stayed together for all that. I wrote at the end of the chapter on Bruno, “These historians cheat a bit. Bruno comes across differently in Yates who, of course, is the far greater scholar.” Allow me to recant the ‘of course” if not the whole remark. Despite my snark, I took this book very seriously as witness the great many annotations. Alas, one of the principal reasons I regret not being God is that I can’t remember what I’ve read, even what I read in books I obviously enjoyed tremendously. One line of thought that apparently impressed me was the connection between cities and utopias. The authors quote a declaration of the commune of Brescia justifying a law that forbade the destruction of a building that had been owned by a felon: “Quod civitates facte sunt ad similitudiem paradisis.” — Englished by the Manuels as “For cities are made in the likeness of paradise.” This isn’t just a theological theme—the City of God, the heavenly Zion. The original perfect republic was a city, and the Greeks not only imagined ideal cities, they actually built ‘em—Hellenistic cities were laid out and contrast strongly with other foundations in the same region that simply happened willy nilly. Whether devised by a god or a sage, a utopia is a system created according to a rational plan, never just the happy outcome of an anonymous process.) 

Manilla folder with some assorted writings of mine (Includes a translation of the first act of Macbeth into modern English. There have been many such translations and adaptations, but I wanted to see if I could keep the meter and yet be clear. The main lesson I learned from this exercise is just how easy it is to assume you know what Shakespeare meant in lines you’ve heard a hundred times and perhaps know by heart. Rump-fed ronyon? I came up with fat-assed housewife. Suggestions? A couple of tries were fun to write—or invent. I have no shame—like Wonder Wart Hog, I’m lucky my superpowers don’t include pride. Shakespeare has the Sergeant describe Macbeth and Banquo’s attack on the Norwegians like this:  “As cannons overcharged with double cracks, so they/Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:/Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,/Or memorise another Golgotha…” I managed “There blood still up, they broke heads and carved/Terrible reeking wounds in Norwegian flesh./it was a second Calvary, I tell you, but on that Mountain of Skulls/They were all thieves and died for their own sins.” That has next to nothing to do with the original, but it was fun to write. There are some loose sheets in the folder with some random thoughts, one of which is apropos of all the historiography books I’ve mentioned in this survey: “I rate the ideas and judgments of historians separately because they are the results of contrasting mental operations. Since good historians are often feeble theoreticians, I generally pay more attention to their judgments than their arguments. For that matter, I trust my own judgments more than my deductions, having noticed that my sense of things is a much sounder oracle than any system I ever contrived.” Speaking of unsound system, the last item in the folder is a six page summary of my thinking entitled Descriptio Mundi, not to be confused with the Description of the World.  It reads like a demented Monadology except that the original Monadology was already sufficiently demented for most people’s tastes. Maybe the better analogy would be to the fragments of Heraclitus. After all, I used to be called Heraclitus of Aphasia back in the day. Of course, Heraclitus didn’t set out to write fragments as I do. Saves time. It’s convenient, rather like getting run over by an ambulance. One paragraph that bears on something I wrote about Assmann the other day: “Hegel, among many others, recognized that God was perfectly incomprehensible as a solitary in-itself. Indeed, it is the impossibility of God that motivates the creation. The world has to come into existence so that God could be proleptically posited as its ground and cause. By such means, the theologians postponed atheism for a while.”)

Description of the World – Part 45

David Halberstam, The Powers that Be (This book appeared in 1979, but I would have guessed that it was older, in part because mass-market paperbacks of that vintage were printed on paper that turned yellow in a few years. I never managed to get into it.)

Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: a Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Darnton has written extensively about the role of “philosophical” books in the run up to the French Revolution, where “philosophical” pretty much means pornographic, a terminological quirk that may seem unfair to philosophers, even if parents really should warn their daughters and often enough their sons about philosophy profs. The Encyclopédie certainly wasn’t pornographic or aimed at a mass market like the publications of the Bibliothèque bleue, but it’s hard to imagine the Revolution could have taken place without it, Darnton looks at in this book as a business proposition. “The publishers made a fortune from it. On an initial investment of about 70,000 livres, their profit may have reached as much as 2,500,000 livres.” I’ve always assumed that projectors of big publishing projects are motivated by vanity—it’s their version of empire building—but at least in this case, Diderot and co. made it pay. That sucyh ventures don’t always pan out was shown by the fate of the sequel. The last editor of the Encyclopédie, Panckouke, eventually produced an even more ambitious work, the L’Encyclopédie méthodique of some 210 volumes, which no one remembers. It has achieved, in fact, the ultimate in oblivion; for “it has not aroused the appetite of a single, thesis-hungry graduate student.”)

Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing, 2nd revised edition (Dover reprinted a number of titles such as this one that are useful as sources of information because nobody cares much about the opinions of the author. For the record, Barnes came down on the Germany-wasn’t-responsible side of the war guilt debate between the wars and ended his career as a holocaust denier—he was an old-school anti-semite of the sort you could still encounter in the Ivy League back in the 60s. For my purposes, the problem with Barnes isn’t his politics or his prejudices but his lack of insight into what the philosophers actually thought about history. His Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche are pop versions. Of course you can argue that intellectual historians err when they try to figure out what any significant thinker actually thought since what plays a role in subsequent history is normally the received misunderstanding, not the actual philosophy. Anyhow, I didn’t read Barnes to find out about Hegel. Barnes could be memorably obtuse, however. One comment I marked off: “in politics we still rely upon rhetoric, which was but a Hellenistic elaboration of shamanistic incantations and formalistic deliverances of chieftains.” I don’t know if that’s more unfair to modern rhetoricians or to ancient shamans. Barnes is a pretty good quoter, though. I liked this bit he copied from J.B.Black, commenting on Gibbon’s style: “The specific gravity of his style is so high that it seems capable of floating anything, from the interminable Persian and Byzantine wars to the abstruse theological disputes of the early Church and the technicalities of Justinian’s legal reforms.” I also appreciated the long paragraph from Karl Pearson that makes fun of theories of racial purity and national mentalities by detailing the mongrel ancestry of Charles Darwin.)

John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Searle takes the sensible approach of acknowledging that human agreement creates some of the facts of the world without getting particularly excited about it. Since the realities created by social convention include money and marriage, I’m not quite so dismissive, having found these entities sufficiently formidable. There are national styles in the tone you take about your ideas and these stances are only irrelevant if you have decided they are. Searle has made this point himself by noting how modern French thinkers find it professionally necessary to write obscurely in order to lend an air of mystery and grandeur to ideas that are cogent and valuable but not necessarily very surprising or alarming absent a complicated exposition and studied dramatization. Searle claimed in an interview that Foucault told him that he wrote badly or at least unclearly on purpose in order to establish his bona fides. Since Searle is completely fluent in French and Foucault was his colleague and friend at Berkeley, I can well believe the story. Still, writing with exaggerated plainness is also a stylistic and political choice; and you can turn the Searle’s point around. I agree that the rock is there even when we don’t think about it and it’s the same thing however we think about it when we do get around to thinking about it. Kicking the rock, however, is rhetoric. I’m not agitated about the objects, but find objectivity more problematic.)

Alan Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (I used to fantasize about a political atlas of the Earth that didn’t play favorites. One section would lay out all the territories of individual dogs, another the contested borderlands between one ant hill and the next, and so on. Of course, once you imagine that, the next thing is the historical atlas version—the library had better be pretty big. Corbin’s book proposes a different set of alternative maps, a geography and history of France that’s anthropocentric but set in a different sensory key: What the last three centuries smelled like and what different conclusions do you come to if sniff this time instead of looking. Versailles in smell-o-vision: “The unpleasant odors of the park, gardens, even the chateau, make one’s gorge rise. The communicating passages, courtyards, buildings in the wings, corridors, are full of urine and feces; a pork butcher actually sticks and roasts his pigs at the bottom of the minsters’ wing every morning, the avenue Saint-Cloudis covered with stagnant water and dead cats.” Of course the author was more interested in making some points a la Foucault about all of this, but the book comes across as the non-fiction version of Suskind’s novel Perfume.)

Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (I was taught that one way of drawing a likeness was to lightly and carelessly outline the features over and over again. Every version got something wrong, but as you redrew the face on the same sheet, something recognizable emerged from the overlapping lines. I can’t honestly recall much about this particular biography of Lincoln, except that the author frequently quotes Lincoln’s law partner Herndon; but it and countless other books, movies, and Lincoln’s own writings have built up a strong image of the man in my mind that creates an effect of realism, though perhaps a misleading one.)

Edward Schaffer, The Vermillion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (To a great extent, our understanding of the world is built up of views of particular countries and cultures as they appear to us. If we’re a bit more sophisticated we may take into account how we appear to them. The human fact, however, properly includes how other peoples have appeared to each other.* This is a book about how the ancient Chinese made sense or tried to make sense of their exotic southern neighbors, especially the Vietnamese. Schaffer wrote a companion book that deals with the Chinese understanding of Central Asia.

*The Egyptologist Assmann claimed that becoming aware of the existence of other peoples was a critical moment in the development of the civilization of Egypt and West Asia. From very early on, the rulers of the emerging states developed the notion of brother kings. Something similar is basic to the historical religions, all of which are really meta-religions. Even the faiths that claim to have been original—Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism—took definite form after the emergence of challengers. They became original after the fact. Religions are about other religions.)

Description of the World - Part 44

Consumer Reports, How to Clean Practically Anything (Belongs in the kitchen.)

The Baffler #19 (You often hear that the political left has no new ideas and if you mean it lacks some overarching new theoretical foundation comparable to Marxism in either scope or seductiveness, that’s quite true. There’s been plenty of less grandiose, more empirical thinking, however.

The problem is that when an accurate diagnosis of political and social problems doesn’t result in actions that either ameliorate the problems or at least create new ones, the repetition of the diagnosis is just depressing. Which is probably why I didn’t subscribe to the Baffler after reading this issue even though the contributors are mostly people I respect or at least think are usefully wrong.)

Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (Kolko argued that political progressivism, far from representing a revolt against the business interests, was a way that they could maintain and even increase their control over the economy and the workers. I don’t know what to think about the specific thesis of this book, but I have developed my own suspicions about Teddy and Woodrow’s versions of reform in the years since I read it. I prefer to call myself a liberal instead of a progressive because, in Roosevelt’s version at least, progressivism was high-handed, top-down, careless about civil and political liberty, and stood for an aggressive, imperialistic foreign policy. Of course Democratic politicians use the word progressive because they think liberal has become poisonous, but there is something Daddy-Warbucks-like in the politics of at least some of the modern progressives that is reminiscent of Rooseveltian noblesse oblige. Bloomberg comes to mind; but so does Obama’s especially when he does trade policy via secretive commissions. That is not necessarily disastrous; and, as I’ve often written, it may be the best we may hope for in the post-democracy era. I think that government has to play a major role in a modern economy, not only on the distribution but the supply side—the alternative is stagnation and environmental degradation—but if the people have no effective and on-going voice in the process, the result will not be a rationalized economy but an economy organized in favor of the few and just for that reason one that is not that dynamic or efficient either.)

Wallace Sterner, The Spectator Bird (Like many another novel in my collection, I never got around to reading this one. I was going to say that my semi-allergy to fiction is based on the prejudice that half of the novels I encounter begin with a description of the weather. Then I opened this paperback and read “On a February morning, when a weather front is off the Pacific, but has not quite arrived….”)

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture (This copy has many underlined passages, but I know the annotations aren’t mine because they carefully identify the main points instead of pointing out quirky bits as mine are prone to do. I did read it, however, and found it rather better than some of Gay’s other efforts, perhaps because Gay lived through the era he describes in the book. I’ve had the suspicion for some time that his later books, the big ones especially, were like Rubens paintings, i.e., creations of the studio, impressive canvasses not all of whose brush strokes were made by the master. Well, I’m probably being unfair. I have a certain antipathy to Gay left over from a long argument I had with him about something or other at a cocktail party—only the memory of the bad feelings remain. Incidentally, I don’t mention having met the man by way of name dropping, though it probably comes across that way, when I make comments like that. To me it is just the reverse—not a way of bragging but simply more evidence that I am, indeed, a human tangent line that over his life touched a great many things, ideas, and people, some of them important, but only at a point. Anyhow, it’s no trick to meet eminent historians, philosophers, and scientists, at least until they become celebrities. It’s mostly the insignificant people of the day that have the armed guards. You can exchange emails with the folks who will be discussed in 22nd Century intellectual history courses.)

  

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (I first read this book in a library copy when it first came out and was delighted to acquire my own copy when it was reissued in a single-volume paperback I could mark up. This is my favorite scholarly book, bar none. A great deal has been written about the advent of the book and its consequences since; and, of course, the idea that printing “altered the face and state of the world” [Bacon] is hardly new. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin wrote a notable work on the subject. In my opinion neither the old nor the new works on this topic compare to Eisenstein—I noticed that David Wooton, the British historian, came to the same conclusion in his recent Invention of Science. For Eisenstein’s larger findings, you really need to read the book, which is hardly an unpleasant assignment; but little observations and facts lend her work much of its richness. For example, she points out that Gutenberg’s first print job was not the Bible, but an indulgence and in another place that when “ they handled manuscript books copied by eleventh and twelfth-century scribes, quattrocento literati thought they were looking at texts that came right out of the bookshops of ancient Rome.”)

Description of the World - Part 43

Mario Rabinowitz, “Beamed Black Hole Radiation: Cosmology and Ball Lightening Connected” an offprint from Infinite Energy, Issue 25, 1999 (Mario used to give me offprints from time to time. Like many other physicists, he has a taste for speculation, in this instance, a proposal that little black holes (LBHs) may actually be quite common in the universe and that radiation from them may occur by other, less violent means than Hawking radiation (the process described in the movie Theory of Everything). He proposed that LBHs may explain mysterious but apparently quite real terrestrial phenomena like ball lightening, account for much of the missing mass in the Universe, and even cause the acceleration of cosmic expansion. They might also serve as an energy source, a veritable Mr. Fusion. Is any of this likely? Probably not. On the day after the big drawing, however, it occurs to me that the chances that Rabinowitz guessed correctly, though very small, are nevertheless considerably greater than the odds were of winning the Powerball apocalypse and three people did that.)

J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (Hannah Arendt wrote an introduction to this edition of Gray’s meditation on his four-year long experience of war. Arendt noted that the book made no stir at its first appearance and only gradually developed a following “of readers in very different walks of life who cherished it as a triumph of personal discovery and, perhaps for this very personal reason, began to think of its author in terms of affinity, closeness and affection, which are very rarely felt even in the presence of masterpieces.”  She wrote that back in the earliest 70s. Since then the book seems to have gradually disappeared from awareness. I know I haven’t thought about it for years. It wasn’t that I ever made quite the emotional connection with it that Arendt mentions; but looking through it now, I recall the strong impression it made on me then and something of the way the impression diminished very slowly afterwards like the sound of a bell fading away when you listen to it in a quiet place. It may be a good time to strike that bell again since America is now living in a time when the vast majority never experience war directly and yet glorify its practitioners while a large few experience the effects captured by some of Gray’s chapter headings, especially the “Enduring Appeals of Battle” and “the Ache of Guilt.” We should be very careful. It is simply not the case that the experience of war always turns thoughtless adolescents into life-long pacifists. The reality is vastly more complex. Historically, some of the most politically dangerous people have been veterans, even authentic war heroes. To think that no one could want renewed war if they knew what it was really like is not true at all; it’s the All-Quiet-On-the-Western-Front fallacy. Gray writes about men who found the experience of peace profoundly empty, so empty that it could produce a nostalgia for times when things happened and one’s relationships with others was not perpetually optional. That doesn’t mean that the returning soldiers don’t remember how awful it all had been, but that the boredom of a life without events can sometimes seem even worse. Succumbing to that can be and is resisted, of course, but that it is one of the lingering wounds of war is a fact.) 

Richard White, Railroaded: the Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (There aren’t any quantum leaps in history. If the great transitions in society seem mysterious, it’s simply because we mostly don’t bother to figure out how they took place or, as is certainly the case with many of the most momentous passages of American history, the processes are too embarrassing to recall. Several years ago it occurred to me that countless books, many of them admirable, have been published about the Founders and Abraham Lincoln but that works that covered the period between the end of the Civil War and the Progressive era have been far fewer or at least far more obscure. Even the dead zone between Jackson and Lincoln, the administrations of the Presidents that Jeopardy contestants get wrong, attracted more attention (Schlesinger, Sellers, Howe, Sean Wilentz). I scanned the shelves at Borders—it was towards the end of their run—but found an obvious gap, and it didn’t much help to ask the professional historians I know for some recommendations. What makes this lacuna surprising is that the Gilded Age was the inflation phase of the American Big Bang. It was in those years that the U.S. caught up with and then passed the other industrial powers and it became clear that our political power would also be decisive in the future. If you squint at the 19th Century to see the big shapes, the looming fact is that of the two monster powers, Russia was kept in check by the others while we were not. Of course there are some explanations for the lack of interest in the period. One of them is how badly we behaved as a people in the aftermath of the Civil War. That makes us reluctant to linger over our failures. One of the few really impressive historical works about the era is Eric Foner’s Reconstruction, a history as painful to read as Thucydides. It’s also true that the age was marked by a struggle between labor and capital that any serious historian would have to address. Not much commercial potential in writing labor history or retroactive muckraking. Or maybe it’s just that the period bores people. Evidently it bores me, I left the bookmark at page 88 of this well-written book even though I’m supposed to be interested in the topic.

Description of the World - Part 42

Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (When I was in grad school, my cohorts and I looked down on everything English (except the Beatles), in part because it was the time of the French invasion but mostly in reaction to the Old Blue reverence for everything British, which was quite obvious at the time even if the temple of the cult, the Yale Center for British Art, didn’t open until ’74. Our attitude was just as parochial as theirs, although I hope it is not a false memory that I occasionally voiced some misgivings about it at the time. I certainly wasn’t above snarking about English civilization and especially English thinkers. “It’s telling,” I used to say, “that the greatest English philosopher was an Austrian.” (These days I’d say, he was a Scot.) Of course when I was young, I didn’t even have much respect for Charles Darwin, a judgment that astonishes me in retrospect. It wasn’t that I had even the slightest doubt about the reality of evolution—as a small child I learned of the overwhelming evidence for it from my father’s historical geology textbook—but I thought of Darwin as a rather unsophisticated fellow who solved the mystery the way beef-witted detectives uncover a crime, i.e., by stumbling over a large corpse. Natural selection? Wasn’t that an obvious idea? You didn’t have to be deep to figure that out. In those days I wanted to be deep. Granted the prejudices I acquired in my school days, it’s rather surprising to discover how much I’ve read about the English over my adult life. Why did I pick up a substantial biography of Disraeli in the early ‘80s? Perhaps it was because I had already encountered and enjoyed some of the writings of his father Isaac and wanted to find out how you get from a scholarly if rather whimsical Jew to a Tory prime minister, who, incidentally, famously took the side of Bishop Wilberforce and the angels against Charles Darwin.)

William H. Prescott, Conquest of Mexico (As I think I mentioned, I don’t know if I got through the Conquest of Peru, but I believe I did read this book. I may have liked it better simply because Cortez is an entirely more attractive character than Pizarro. Even the best of the conquistadors were brutal, of course, which is why the Black Legend is not just a legend. The fact that they, some of ‘em anyhow, were inspired by religious and chivalrous fantasies, doesn’t change that. Don Quixote thought of himself as a sort of Amadis de Castile, but Cervantes portrayed him as more of a dangerous madman than a cute old man all the same. Speaking of madmen: the first parts of Aristo’s poem about another crazy knight [Orlando Furioso] appeared in 1516. Cortez set off for Mexico and adventures comparably romantic, hallucinatory, and bloody in 1519. Fortunately for his reputation, he attacked the only people on Earth who were even crueler than the Spanish.)

Edward Crankshaw, Bismarck (Since defenders of reaction are rather plentiful these days, it perhaps behooves us to pay attention to their character traits. The author writes of the young Bismarck, “… he brought to the defense of reaction the classic behaviour of the young rebel, and the resultant mixture is unusual indeed.” I wrote in the margin “Disraeli?” I could have mentioned a great many less impressive figures. I give Bismarck considerable credit for retaining a sense of realism about his politics, but there really are quite few idiot reactionaries that began their careers as idiot radicals and probably vice versa. I believe the aging William F. Buckley wrote someplace that if he had it to do all over again, he might have been a Communist. These guys are born plotters. Crankshaw says about his subject, “The tragic Bismarckian paradox was that this great hero of the people who liked to be led was not a leader at all. He was a manipulator.” Back in my first year or two of college, when I was still officially a Republican, the would-be supremos of the tiny conservative club at Pomona would scheme behind each other’s backs and pull me aside to get my support for a coup, all in order to seize a chairmanship that wouldn’t even matter on a resume. Of course Bismarck’s schemes did matter. The run-up to the Franco-Prussian war reads like an episode of House of Cards. Apropos of some of his statements at the time, Crankshaw writes, “It would be interesting to know where Bismarck drew the line between lying and not lying. That such a line existed somewhere in his mind is evident from the last remark; but to the outsider it remains invisible.” You could ask the same question about Ted Cruz, the most Bismarckian, or at least the most intelligent, of the current crop.)

Richard Gough, The History of Myddle (The pews in English churches were assigned to local families in order of their standing in the community so that it was possible for the local antiquary Richard Gough to chronicle the whole parish using a chart of the church as an index. The blurbs for the book liken it to Ladurie’s Montaillou, which reconstructs life in a medieval village by recourse to the records of the Inquisition; but at least formally, the better analog is Life: A User’s Manual [La Vie mode d’emploi] a novel by George Perec that narrates the interlocking lives of the inhabitants of a large apartment block in Paris. I can’t claim to have read this book in its entirely, though I’ve dipped into it from time to time. Many of the pages read like the duller parts of the Bible with lots of so and so begot so and so, but some sections are rather racy. Gough had a considerable education by the lights of his time—the book dates to 1700—but he could be rather rough in his judgments of his fellow villagers despite the frequent Latin quotations. In fact, he could be rough using the Latin quotations. For example, “Richard Tyler now living [!], of whom I may say, many had done wickedly, butt hee excelled them all.” Like Gough, I omit a complete list of Tyler’s sins,  which included knocking up somebody’s wife and then eventually knocking up the resulting bastard daughter. “Ex pede Herculem” I can well believe that country life is hardly an idyll. I knew an Englishman who somehow fetched up in a West Virginia college and attempted to begin his career as a rural sociologist by conducting field work in the surrounding hills. His notes had began to resemble the rough draft of a Faulkner novel with accounts of incest and overlooked homicides before he suddenly switched over to writing purely theoretical papers at the extremely persuasive suggestion of a local sheriff who, or so I gathered from the rather sketchy account I got in a bar one night, observed local custom by locking his wife in the basement when he had to be away on business.)

Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, Volume II (I once owned the first volume of this set, but left it in a taxi cab in Fort Lauderdale before I could read more than the first book of the series, The Pioneers of France in the New World. I’ve regretted that ever since. I find Parkman’s narrative highly readable, and there’s something strangely pleasurable about reading of the extraordinarily violent events that took occurred in places with domesticated names. There really was a sack of Schenectady. I marked off one anecdote in particular that tells how a Jesuit nagged one Chief Rat of the Michillimackinac Hurons to put an Iroquois prisoner “in the kettle” in the interest of French policy—the governor was worried that the Hurons were sparing their captive as a prelude to a rapprochement with the Iroquois. Parkman assures us in a footnote, which quotes the French source for this episode that “metter a la chaudière, though derived from cannibal practices, is often used figuratively for torturing and killing.” That’s a relief. Parkman’s account of the deaths of Wolfe and Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham is probably the most famous set piece of this series of books, but his account of the capture of Louisbourg by Massachusetts militia men under William Pepperill in 1745 made a bigger impression on me. The successful expedition was a colonial initiative, and thirty years later the Americans remembered what they had been able accomplish on their own. They also remembered that Lousibourg had been trade back to the French in exchange for Madras by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

Description of the World - Part 41

Third shelf

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 14th edition (An entertaining compendium of cultural detritus that was my go-to bathroom reading in the constipated 90s. Where else would you learn about the Limbus Fatuorum where the souls of those too stupid to blame and yet an embarrassment to heaven are stored after death. “All these, upwhirled aloft,/Fly o’er the backside of the world far-off/Into a Limbo large and broad, once called/the Paradise of Fools.” [Milton]*  I also particularly enjoyed the proverb “Great cry and little wool, as the Devil said when he sheared the hogs.” Pretty well describes the results of trolling the commentators on the National Review website.

*Question for class discussion. When I was 14, I got the measles and was seriously ill for weeks, indeed, I was delirious with fever for several days. Since I couldn’t sleep, the radio was left on beside my bed and I had to listen to the Battle of New Orleans Song—“In 1814 we took a little trip/Along with Gen’ral Jackson/Down the mighty Mississip’”—over and over again. When that wasn’t going on, my mother read to me. In fact she read me Paradise Lost in its entirely, more because she actually liked Milton a lot than because it was an obvious therapeutic choice. So here’s my question. If you seriously believe that everything you experience leaves a memory, albeit one you can’t retrieve by normal recollection, does that mean that I read the passage about the Paradise of Fools differently when I encountered it in Brewer’s than I would have had I never heard it before? Really?)

Mario Rabinowitz, “Weighing the Universe and its Smallest Constituents,” a paper from the IEEE Engineering review, November 1990 (I did some work for Dr. Rabinowitz in the 90s—as I see from the inscription, he gave me this offprint in ’92. He calculates the mass the the universe at approximately 10⁵⁴ kilograms. It should be remembered that this was the weight a quarter of a century ago. The universe should report any unexplained weight loss that occurred since that time to its physicist.)

John Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Assmann is an egyptologist from Heidelberg University; but his ideas about the nature of social memory, the role of literary canons, and the origins of history are not the work of a narrow specialist—the chart on page 257 reflects an extraordinary level of theoretical ambition. Assmann never discusses the Axial Age concept, but his work reminded me of Jaspers nonetheless, not in its conclusions but in its scope. In the years after World War II, German thinkers were under a cloud for obvious reasons; and, with the exception of Heidegger and some of the Frankfort school people, the foreign intellectuals who agitated Americans were mostly French. For the last couple of decades, I’ve found myself reading Germans more and swiping their ideas. The notion that I’ve appropriate most shamelessly from Assmann is his distinction between the long-term memory of societies, which can span centuries or millennia, and the living memory of people, which is barely 80 years or so. Actually, Assmann’s system is three-fold because long-term memory is typically divided between the memory of origins, which is typically vivid and mythologized, celebrated in ritual and solemnly recounted in canonical writings, and the stuff that happened between the founders and your grandparents, i.e., the stuff that only professional historians give a damn about.)

Valorie Hutt, The Aquarian: 1995-1997 (This is a bound copy of the astrology magazine my sister published and mostly wrote for a couple of years. It’s a meaningful memento to me because of her even though nothing is more alien to my way of thinking than astrology. I used to tell my sister and her compatriots that she had to forgive my skepticism.—“You know how us Geminis are!”—but I’m not exactly a skeptic on this topic.  My antipathy towards astrology isn’t fundamentally because of its obvious shortcomings as an explanation of anything, however. Being wrong’s OK—I’m probably wrong about everything I think and that doesn’t make me nervous or and it certainly doesn’t shut me up. I also collect and cherish the improbably theories of others. I just don’t like astrology aesthetically. It’s right up there with Kern Country, raspberry ribbon candy, and the shape of Scotland in the list of things for which I feel an inexplicable dislike. Val had a better sense of humor about all this than I do. She even reprinted in her magazine a nonsense poem I sent her in a letter:

As Good as it Gets

All on a hot and wintry day,
Right here, which is to say,
Very far away,

I came to like a catastrophe,
My rusty eyes

Focusing on the pimple-spangled fundament 
of a departing dream,
Obscure astrology.
Then, for the first time in my life,
As I often do,
I blessed the children and the animals
Just in case I’m God almighty and forgot.
If the sigh I heard were my own,
I would have been alone,
But as it was
There was nobody there but me.)

R.J.W.Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History 1576-1612 (I’ve long had a certain affection for Rudolf, perhaps because he looked a little like my Uncle Ralph if you judge by his bust and not by Archimboldo’s portrait of him as the God Vertumnus. He had some other things going for him: he was a notable patron of the arts, the employer of Kepler and host to Tycho Brahe, and a keeper of the peace as the Holy Roman Emperor. On the other hand, he was also a devotee of the occult, at the end a weak and indecisive leader, and perhaps frankly mad. He belonged to a sliver of time between the dying Renaissance and the early Baroque, the same time as Shakespeare and Cervantes. After his brother Matthias deposed him and the Hapsburgs reverted to their role as active defenders of the Roman faith, the stage was set for the Defenestration of Prague and the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War that followed it. The Evans book focuses on the intellectual and artistic side of a great historical transition, but it’s perhaps more about an ending than a beginning.)