Quotulatiousness

April 25, 2024

Jeremy Black reviews Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The author of a book on the same topic says that Sathnam Sanghera’s work “really should have devoted more attention to the pre-Western history“:

With its pretensions and authorial conceit, Sanghera’s book is actually rather a good laugh. He apparently is the word and the way for Britain, which “cannot hope to have a productive future in the world without acknowledging what it did to the world in the first place”, a process that is to be done on his terms in order to overcome a British allergy to the unattractive aspects of the imperial past.

Stripped to its essentials, this is a book that repeats well-established themes and serves them up in a familiar fashion. Although 461 pages long, only 247 are text and, with a generous typeface that is a pleasure to read, there is only so much space for his analysis. Unfortunately, that is what is on offer.

It might be thought appropriate to establish what was different or familiar in British imperialism in a Western European context by comparing in detail, say, Britain’s Caribbean empire with those of France, Spain and the Dutch. It might be thought useful to assess Britain as an Asian imperial power alongside Russia or the Ottomans, China or the Persians.

It might be appropriate to follow the direction of much of the world history approach over the last half-century and assess empires as shared projects in which there were many stakeholders, British and non-British. To turn to the British empire, it might be useful to discuss the oldest “colony”, Ireland, or to assess policy in (Highland) Scotland. It could be appropriate to consider how the causes, context, course and consequences of British imperialism varied greatly.

Sanghera has not risen to the challenge. His study is conceptually weak, methodologically flawed, historiographically limited and lacking basic skills in source assessment. This is a pity, as his position as a journalist, and his link with Penguin, provide an opportunity for using his abilities as a communicator to expand public understanding of the subject.

Sanghera criticises “an enervating culture war on the theme of British empire”. He rightly draws attention to the flaws of the “balance sheet” view of British empire, but I am less confident than he is about how best to consider what he terms “a culture war”. The promotion of “understanding” for which he calls is scarcely value-free, nor does he adequately address the degree to which there have always been “culture wars” in both Britain and its colonies and former colonies. Unsurprisingly so, as there were substantive issues at stake, and questions of goal and identity were very much part of the equation.

From reading journalists’ comment pieces, it is hard to avoid the sense that they feel that there is a correct view (theirs, what a surprise) and that others are variously culture wars, populist, ignorant, etc. This is the standard approach to history, notably national history, and, particularly in the case of Britain, empire and slavery. Yet, such a stance scarcely captures the complexities of the issue, a problem very much seen in Sanghera’s work, despite his claim to nuance.

April 23, 2024

Debating the economic impact of the Raj on India

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, India — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Daily Sceptic, Nigel Biggar looks at a few books making or refuting the narrative on how much or how little British rule in India extracted or contributed to the economic life of the subcontinent:

Beyond slave-trading and slavery, what were the economic effects of British imperial dominance? Can they be reduced to Britain’s leeching wealth from exploited subject peoples?

For over a century, that is what Indian nationalists have claimed. It is also what the politician Shashi Tharoor claims in his 2016 book, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. Against him, however, the Bengali-born, LSE-based economic historian Tirthankar Roy has declared of the nationalist critique that “generations of historians … have shown that it is not [true]”. Pace Tharoor, the statistic that India produced 25 per cent of world output in 1800 and 2–4 per cent in 1900 does not prove that India was once rich and became poor: “[i]t only tells that industrial productivity in the West increased four to six times during this period … The proposition that the Empire was at bottom a mechanism of surplus appropriation and transfer has not fared well in global history”.

On the contrary, the British Empire’s commitment to free trade gave Indian entrepreneurs new opportunities to grow. Some of them visited England in the late 19th Century, observed the workings of manufacturing industry, imported machinery and expertise to India, built factories employing Indians, and then outcompeted Manchester. This is exactly how the Tata Iron and Steel Company began in Bombay – the same company that now owns what remains of the British steel industry.

What is more, colonial governments often protected native producers against British business, in order to moderate economic and social disruption, partly because they genuinely cared for the welfare of native people and partly because they didn’t want to have to manage the political unrest that foreign commercial intrusion could excite. Famously, in 1910-11 colonial officials barred Lever Brothers from acquiring concessions in Nigeria on which to establish palm-oil processing mills with widespread hinterlands, since Africans were already producing for the world markets and generating tax revenue and because the alienation of large areas of land risked provoking native opposition.

Further still, the British were the leading exporters of capital from the mid-19th Century to at least 1929. Between 1876 and 1914, Britain invested over a third of its overseas capital in the Empire, over 19% of it in India. Of course, British investors often made a profit out of this. That’s the thing about investment: you tend to want to grow your money, not waste it. But if the British gained, so did colonial peoples. Take railways. By 1947, British India had 45,000 miles of railway track, most of it constructed with private capital, whereas five years later un-colonised China still had less than 18,000 miles. For sure, the railways served military purposes. But they also served commercial and economic ones: one estimate reckons that when the railway network reached the average district, real agricultural income rose by about 16%. And it served the welfare purpose of efficient famine relief, too.

A basic reason why the British sent their capital overseas to the Empire, enabling the growth of businesses and the building of infrastructure, was that colonial states provided sufficient political stability and legal certainty to make the risks of financial ventures worth taking. (Badenoch hints at this in her reference to the economic effects of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.) That explains why Australia’s economic growth compares so favourably with that of many Latin American countries, and why, between the 1860s and 1890s, Australia was the richest country on earth.

In sum, the considered judgement of the Swiss historian Rudolf von Albertini, whose work – according to the world’s “leading imperial economic historian”, David Fieldhouse – was based “on exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial world to 1940”, was simply this: “colonial economics cannot be understood through concepts such as plunder economics and exploitation”.

April 22, 2024

Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones

Filed under: Books, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From last week’s blog post, Bret Devereaux reviews a book by a former instructor from his undergraduate days, documenting Roman values and attitudes and how understanding their views of themselves helps put their actions into context:

I studied under Barton as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but only looped back around to fully read her book on Roman honor during my Ph.D studies. This is a book about Roman culture and the Roman worldview – or more correctly the way the Romans view themselves and more crucially their innermost selves. This is an important exercise for the student of history, because, as L.P. Hartley famously put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. And so part of what the historian aims to do is not merely know what happened, but in order to understand why it happened, to be able to get into the minds of those people in the past, doing things differently. To put another way: we must also understand the vibes. This is a book about some serious Roman vibes.

The focus of Barton’s book, of course, is the Roman concept of honor and the whole constellation of ideas and concepts that circle around it (virtus, pudor and so on). For Barton, the Roman lived for the discrimen or certamen – that moment of testing and decision for which we have so many well-worn phrases (“sorting the wheat from the chaff”, “separating the men and the boys” and so on).1 It is in that moment that the Roman is, in a sense, most alive, propelled forward by virtus, guided by the other virtues, to pass the test and thereby win honor.

Two things, I think, distinguish Barton’s approach. The first is a focus on how these ideas make Romans feel and act; the man of honor shines, he is fiery, he glows. He stands tall, while others defer to him. The man filled with shame is the opposite. Understanding how real these ideas could be in Roman culture is in turn important for understanding how the Roman state – republic and empire – works, because it is predicated on those values, on the assumption that those not yet tested defer to those with honos who have been so tested and have shown their virtus. Second, the way Barton engages with the sources leaves a strong impression: the reader is bombarded with quotations (translated in the text, original in the footnotes) where the Romans can speak themselves about their values. And goodness do the Romans ever speak for themselves – almost never one example but half a dozen or more.

That strength can also be a weakness: to get that many references, Barton has to cast a wide net, especially chronologically and it isn’t unusual to see different examples for a point covering centuries, for instance from Plautus (late 3rd cent. BC) to Seneca (mid-late 1st cent. AD) in the same paragraph. That somewhat weakens the book’s ability to address chronological change, though Barton does work a bit of that chronology back in some of the later chapters. That said, Barton’s conception remains rooted with the bulk of her sources in the Late Republic (c. 133-31 BC) and while she stretches beyond this and notes some changes, this is fundamentally not a chronologically focused work. On the upside, the book is printed with footnotes (often taking up half a page or more!) with both original text for the translations and other useful notes, so for the student a trip from Barton’s prose to the original sources is quick and often quite fruitful.

Barton’s prose is very readable. As someone who sat in her classes, I can hear her lecture voice in the pages – she is well-known among the students as a passionate lecturer (now retired) who would shout and gesture, jump up and down and even get a bit misty-eyed at the fall of the Gracchi. The passion, I think, comes through in the book as well, to its benefit and that’s important, because this is fundamentally about things the Romans themselves were passionate about. I will also note, I think this book combines well with J.E. Lendon’s Empire of Honor (somewhat harder to obtain) to give a the fullest picture of honor in Roman affairs. But for someone looking to understand how the Romans thought about their own inner-lives and emotions, Roman Honor is, I think, the place to start.

    1. One thing that’s striking: whereas the Greek equivalent, the agon is a contest against another, the Roman discrimen is a test against any sort of challenge or hardship. Greek arete (“excellence”) tends to be comparative in nature: the best, the strongest, the fastest and so on, whereas the Roman equivalents are less inherently comparative. Virtus is not zero-sum. That doesn’t mean the Romans aren’t competitive, but it is, I think, a subtle but real difference in ethos (especially aristocratic ethos).

April 19, 2024

Breakfast in Jane Austen’s England

Filed under: Books, Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jan 16, 2024

What you could tell about someone from their breakfast in Jane Austen’s England, and a recipe for Bath buns as she might have eaten them for her first meal of the day.

Caraway buns topped with glaze, sugar, and caraway, served with butter. Perfect for a Jane Austen inspired breakfast with some hot chocolate

City/Region: England
Time Period: 1769

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person who has recently risen from bed must be in want of breakfast. In Jane Austen’s time, breakfast could be around 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning if you were a manual laborer or servant, or it could be as late as 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon if you were upper class.

Jane wrote a letter to her sister Cassandra saying that she wanted to join her on her trip to Bath, but didn’t want to inconvenience their hosts, so she would fill up on bath buns for breakfast. I can see why this would have been a sound strategy. The buns are denser than modern versions, but still soft and very good (they would certainly fill you up). The caraway is present but not overpowering, and they’re sweet but not as sweet as a dessert.

Caraway comfits were candy-coated caraway seeds (think M&Ms), but they don’t use caraway to make them anymore. I mimic them as best I can with caraway seeds and sugar.

    To make Bath Cakes.
    Rub half a pound of butter into a pound of flour, and one spoonful of good barm, warm some cream, and make it into a light paste, set it to the fire to rise, when you make them up, take four ounces of carraway comfits work part of them in, and strew the rest on the top, make them into a round cake, the size of a French roll, bake them on sheet tins, and send them in hot for breakfast.
    — The Experienced English Houskeeper by Elizabeth Raffald, 1769

(more…)

April 18, 2024

“… the scary part of town, the place where the true freaks and degenerates hang out, is general topology“

Filed under: Books, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Psmith does his level best to make mathematics interesting to layfolk like you’n’me:

In our end of year post I threatened to write more math reviews, and multiple people in the comments egged me on. So now, with Jane laid up in the final stages of pregnancy, I have seized control of the Substack for a very special lightning round of math textbooks I recently enjoyed. No, wait! Don’t close the tab! I promise that some of these will be fun for non-mathematicians as well.

  • Counterexamples in Topology, by Lynn Arthur Steen and J. Arthur Seebach Jr.

The mathematicians I have known included some eccentric characters. In fact when one considers research mathematicians as a class, it’s usually the normal people who are the exception. But there are degrees of weirdness. One of the most delightful things about the world is how fractal it is, and this extends to human hierarchies. Take any unusual group of people — frequent-flyers, monastics, the ultra-wealthy, members of genealogical societies — and zoom in on them, and it turns out there are even stranger or more elite subgroups buried within. This is true of mathematicians too, each subfield has its reputation, some of them regarded with awe, others with disdain. But ask any mathematician, “Who are the real weirdos? Who are the ones who are truly cracked?” The answer will be unanimous: it’s the topologists.

Topology is the study of spaces in the most abstract sense, so abstract that they may not even support a well-defined notion of distance (if your spaces are guaranteed to have distances, then you are now doing geometry rather than topology). Topology takes a coarser view of space: forget about curvature, distance, or really anything involving numbers at all. To a topologist, two points can be “near” each other or not, “connected” or not, and beyond that it doesn’t matter. This is the source of all the jokes about topologists mistaking donuts for coffee cups,1 but the kind of topology that studies multi-holed donuts, algebraic topology, is actually comparatively tame and normal. Also relatively normal is differential topology, which is the next neighborhood over from differential geometry, and which produces cool videos like this.

No, the scary part of town, the place where the true freaks and degenerates hang out, is general topology. General topology is where we go to figure out the basic definitions and frameworks that underlie the rest of topology. It’s about exploring what nearness and connectedness even are, and when mathematicians are trying to figure out what things are, that usually means probing the outer limits of what they can be. So general topology turns into the study of the most bizarre and deformed and disturbing spaces accessible to human cognition. No wonder its practitioners are a little weird.

Which brings me to this book, whose perversity is laid out right there in the title. It’s a big book of counterexamples to statements which seem obviously, intuitively correct. In general topology, things that seem intuitively correct are usually wrong:2 the field is notorious for proofs that almost work but twist out of your grasp at the last moment. A big book of counterexamples is exactly what you want for understanding why your proof that “all Xs are Ys and all Ys are Xs” falls flat. Seeing the logic fail is one thing, but seeing a concrete example of an X that is not a Y (or vice versa) brings it home with a satisfying finality.

But the real reason I love this book is the names, oh, the names. Let me flip through the table of contents with you: are “the Infinite Cage” and “the Wheel Without Its Hub” examples of topological spaces, or planes of the underworld? Are “Cantor’s Leaky Tent” and “Tychonoff’s Corkscrew” important counterexamples, or Level 2 wizard spells? I could spend hours idly leafing through this book, pondering these twisted and prosperous spaces, imagining them as worlds in themselves, imagining the bizarre sorts of creatures that might live there. Is this a math textbook or an RPG sourcebook? Trick question, they’re the same thing.

    1. One of the proudest moments of my mathematical career was when I attended a faculty tea and a distinguished topologist asked me for a donut and I handed him a cup of coffee instead. Everybody lost it. Alas, I turned out to be much worse at math than I am at improvisational comedy, and my mathematical career ended shortly afterwards.

    2. This is why we have the “separation axioms“. Every rung on that latter is the “well, actually …” to something that seems self-evident but isn’t.

April 15, 2024

Simon & Schuster, founded 1924

Filed under: Books, Business, History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte provides a thumbnail history of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster:

The firm was started by Richard Leo Simon, a Great War veteran and piano salesman, and his partner, Max Lincoln Schuster, an auto magazine editor. They had met when Simon failed to sell Schuster a piano. They scraped together $8,000 in savings and loans from friends, family, and a telephone operator, and launched their first title in 1924: The Cross Word Puzzle Book, a collection compiled by the editors of the New York World, which was reputed to have the best crossword of the day. Each copy of the book came with a pencil and an eraser.

Messrs. Simon and Schuster initially called themselves The Plaza Publishing Company (something S&S doesn’t mention on its history webpage). They didn’t want to be personally associated with a novelty publishing project.

The novelty project sold 40,000 copies in three months and just under half a million in its first year, earning the boys a profit of $100,000, which has to be the fastest start ever for a book publisher. The Cross Word Puzzle Book was a cash cow for decades to come — there were at least fifty-six more editions, the vast majority published as S&S books. Its proceeds funded many better quality publishing initiatives.

Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy was published in 1926 to critical success and impressive sales. Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse won the Pulitzer in 1934, as did Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again in 1940. Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, which started publishing in 1935 and would take forty years to complete, also won a Pulitzer and was another huge seller.

By the time S&S acquired the paperback rights to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind in 1942 and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1945, it was already the leading publisher in America. To make sure everyone knew it, the boys moved into a stunning new headquarters at one of the most expensive addresses in the world, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, part of Rockefeller Center.

While it was winning its share of literary awards and publishing some great books, Simon & Schuster never forgot its roots in commercial projects. In mid-life it was famous as the how-to publisher: How to Read a Book, How to Improve your Memory, How to Raise a Dog, How to Think Straight, How to Play Winning Checkers, and the bestselling granddaddy of them all, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has sold a staggering thirty million copies and still routinely shows up on bestseller lists.

Interestingly, the operational brains behind S&S was an unnamed partner, Leonard Shimkin, who joined the company as business manager at age seventeen. It was largely at Shimkin’s initiative that S&S launched Pocket Books in 1939, establishing the concept of inexpensive paperbacks, which broadened the reading public and opened the door to the expansion of genre fiction. He was also the one who walked Dale Carnegie into S&S.

The boys sold the company to Marshall Field, owner of the Chicago Sun, in 1944 but continued to work at it. They bought it back when Field died in 1956, this time with Shimkin taking an equity position. Simon retired in 1957 and Schuster not long after, eventually leaving Shimkin with sole ownership.

Meanwhile, the hits kept coming. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in 1961, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1966, Alex Haley’s Roots in 1976, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove in 1985, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in 1988, and so on.

In 1975, Shimkin sold S&S to Gulf + Western, the first in a depressing series of corporate foster homes, none of which has known anything about or cared anything for books. G+W became Paramount in 1989, which was acquired by Viacom in 1994, which split into two companies in 2005, with Simon & Schuster becoming part of CBS Corporation, which in 2019 was merged back with Viacom, which in 2022 changed its name to Paramount Global and, after failing to unload S&S to Penguin Random House that same year, landed it with KKR the next. More on why all the corporate shuffling is far from over here.

Simon & Schuster and its subsidiary, Scribner, are the last great American-owned monuments to the golden age of American book publishing, which runs from about 1920 through to … I don’t know, the 1970s? All the others — Random House, Knopf, HarperCollins, Little, Brown & Co. — are owned by foreign conglomerates (HC’s owner, News Corp, is technically American but its controlling family, the Murdochs, are culturally British when they’re not being Australian).

April 13, 2024

When there was an active counterculture

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia on a recent oral history of the countercultural touchstone, The Village Voice:

At the start of her oral history of The Village Voice, author Tricia Romano provides a “cast of characters”. It goes on for 15 pages, and includes 216 people — each with some connection to the alternative newspaper.

Many people nowadays have never lived in a society with such a vibrant counterculture. In a time when official sources all seem part of a predictable Disney-fied monoculture, just reading this list of names and mini-bios can be a revelation.

Many of these individuals are now revered as historic figures who changed society. They had power and prestige. It’s easy to forget that most of them operated as outsiders.

That’s how they wanted it.

These renegades at The Village Voice knew that working outside the system — and typically against the system — was their superpower. They could criticize ruling institutions. They could speak harsh truths. They could go against the grain.

One thing is certain: They didn’t align their interests with globalist corporate CEOs, billionaire technocrats, the surveillance state, and establishment bureaucracies. They would have laughed at journalists who did that — believing, rightly, that honest media requires distance, or even an adversarial stance, vis-à-vis entrenched powers.

Because that’s what a counterculture does. That’s what it’s expected to do.

Romano captures the peculiar vibe in the title of her book The Freaks Came Out to Write. She makes clear that The Village Voice wasn’t The New York Times and it definitely wasn’t The New Yorker.

Nobody ever stepped into its madcap offices and said “Ah, the Gray Lady”. No reader ever picked up a copy and expected to see Eustace Tilley on the cover.

Can you tell the difference between culture and counterculture?

And The Voice was heard. Even establishment insiders knew they needed to listen to these “Freaks”. Sometimes they feared The Voice, sometimes they secretly agreed with it, but they always treated it as a force deserving respect.

Until recently that’s how it worked. The tension between insiders and outsiders was a source of creative energy in society. The upstarts provided alternative views and new ideas. They kept everybody accountable.

I’m pointing this out because this no longer happens. This is the world we’ve lost.

QotD: Architects and modern architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Britain, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Eventually, the deeply impoverished language of Bauhaus or Corbusian architecture became evident even to architects, possibly the most obtuse professional group in the world (though educationists are not far behind). But their turning away from the dreariness of what Professor Curl calls Corbusianity has hardly improved matters. They discovered the delights — for themselves — of originality without the discipline of even a reduced vernacular, of giving buildings outlandish shape simply because it was possible to do so, the more outlandish the more attention being drawn to themselves. Thus the skyline of the City of London has been adorned with Brobdingnagian dildoes and early mobile telephones, turning the city into a damp, overcrowded cut-price Dubai; and Paris — the City of Light — has been the dubious distinction of having built three of the worst buildings in the world, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Philaharmonie, the latter two by the architect who dresses like a fascist thug, Jean Nouvel. I cannot pass these buildings without thinking au bagne!; and indeed, I have a French book whose title, Faut-il pendre les architectes?, asks whether it is necessary to hang the architects.

Professor Curl’s is a very painful book to read. In one sense his targets are easy for, as the photos amply demonstrate, modernist architecture and its successors are so awful that it scarcely requires any powers of judgment to perceive it. It is like seeing a TV evangelist and knowing at once that he is a crook. Yet modernist architecture, despite its patent hideousness and inhumanity, still has its defenders, especially in the purlieus of architectural schools. Moreover, the population has been browbeaten into believing that there was never any alternative, and it is obvious that to undo the damage would take decades, untold determination and vast expenditure. Removing the Tour Montparnasse alone would probably cost several billion. No one is prepared to make this colossal effort.

What Walter Godfrey wrote in 1954 is debatable:

    It is not an exaggeration to say that nine men out of ten have lost all sensitiveness to an art that was once a matter of common interest.

If this is true, it is because they have learned to accept, or swallow what they are given. The epidemiology of graffiti, however, suggests to me that, at least subliminally, men still take notice of their surrounding and are affected by them: defacement is overwhelmingly of hideous Corbusian surfaces, that is to say on what Corbusier called “my friendly concrete”.

As for the architects and their acolytes, the architectural commentators, they hide behind the claim that most people do not “understand”. They claim that modernist architecture is better than it looks or functions, that it is “honest”, a weaselly word in this context. The architects cannot recognise the obvious for the same reason that Macbeth could not stop murdering once he had started:

    I am in blood
    Stepped in so far that should I wade no more
    Returning were as tedious as to go o’re

Professor Curl has written an essential, uncompromising, learned, sometimes slightly densely, critique of one of the worst and most significant legacies of the 20th century. He offers a slight glimmer of hope in the existence of architects who, bravely, have resisted the blandishments of celebrity status and the approbation of their corrupted peers. His book has a wonderful bibliography, the fruit of a lifetime of reading and reflection, that will give me occupation for a long time to come. It is a loud and salutary clarion call to resist further architectural fascism.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.

April 12, 2024

QotD: Prepper fantasy versus prepper reality

Filed under: Books, Gaming, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… note that this is also a bit of a rebuke to the dominant strain of prepper fantasies, such as those I began this review with. Prepper fantasies are most fundamentally fantasies of agency, dreams that in the right crisis the actions you take could actually matter, and that in the wake of that crisis you could return to a Rousseauian condition of autonomous activity freed from the internal conflicts engendered by societal oppression (whether that oppression takes the form of stifling social convention or HRified bureaucratic fiat). It’s obvious how the prepper fantasies relate to the great survival stories like Robinson Crusoe, or to the pioneer dramas of the American Westward expansion. It’s a little less obvious, but just as deeply true, that they’re connected to stories of rogues, rascals, and reavers like those by Robert E. Howard or Bronze Age Pervert. All of these stories, fundamentally, are about how a man freed from external restraint and internal conflict can apply himself to better his condition.

The thing is these stories are totally ahistorical — the best that solitary survivors have ever managed was to survive, none of them have rebuilt civilization. As Jane notes in her review of BAP, the sandal-clad barbarians have generally been subjected to a “tyranny of the cousins” even more intrusive and meticulous than the gynocratic safetyism that Bronze Age Lifestyle offers an imaginative escape from. And as for the pioneers, Tanner Greer notes that:

    Many imagine the great American man of the past as a prototypical rugged individual, neither tamed nor tameable, bestriding the wilderness and dealing out justice in lonesome silence. But this is a false myth. It bears little resemblance to the actual behavior of the American pioneer, nor to the kinds of behaviors and norms that an agentic culture would need to cultivate today. Instead, the primary ideal enshrined and ritualized as the mark of manhood was “publick usefuleness”, similar, if not quite identical, to the classical concept of virtus. American civilization was built not by rugged individuals but by rugged communities. Manhood was understood as the leadership of and service to these communities.

It would be too easy to end the review here, with the implication that the prepper identity is a fantasy of radical individualism and like all such fantasies, kinda dumb. But the thing is, the prepper world has by and large absorbed this critique and incorporated it into its theorizing. In contrast to the libertarian fantasies of the 1970s, second-wave prepperism (reformed prepperism?) is constantly talking about community, the importance of having friends you can trust, of cultivating deep social bonds with your neighbors, etc.

What Yu Gun reminds us is that this is still totally ahistorical, but this time in a way that indicts not only the preppers, but also a much broader swathe of our society. A man without a community is unnatural, but so is a community without leadership, hierarchy, and order. The prepper version of community is a vision of freely contracting individuals respecting each others’ autonomy while cooperating because it’s in their best interests. This is also the folk version of community that motivates much of our economic and legal regime. Scratch an American “communitarian”, and underneath it’s just another individualist.

If you hang out on prepper forums, a recurrent mantra is to “practice your preps”, that is to start living on the margin as if the apocalypse had already occurred. The purpose of this is to gain experience in the skills you’ll need after the end, and to work out the kinks in your routine now, while it’s still easy to make adjustments. Originally this meant practicing getting lost in the woods, using and maintaining your weapon of choice, eating some of your food stockpile, or whatever. In second-wave prepperism it means all that, plus a bunch of new stuff like hanging out with your neighbors, attending community barbecues, and whatever else it is that freely contracting individuals like to autonomously do while temporarily occupying the same space.

But for we third-wave preppers, it has to take on a very different meaning. Greer’s essay that I quoted above is mainly about how leadership and service in local-scale organizations served as training for leadership and service in much larger groups aimed at problems with much higher stakes. In other words, they were practicing their preps. One of the great secrets of leadership is that following and leading are actually closely related skills, and that practice at one of them transfers well to the other. This is difficult for we Americans to see, because an aversion to hierarchy is built into our national character, and consequently we operate with impoverished models of what it means to be in a position of authority or of subordination.

Long ago I read an article contrasting Western and Korean massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Even if you know nothing about computer games, you probably know that in most of them you are the hero, the chosen one, the child of destiny. Talk about fantasies of agency! MMORPGs thus have a tricky needle to thread — somehow all the thousands and thousands of players need to simultaneously be the chosen one, the child of destiny, etc., etc. And they mostly accomplish this by just rolling with it and asking everybody to suspend disbelief. But this article claimed that Korean MMORPGs are different — when players join these games, they’re randomly assigned a role. A tiny fraction might become kings or generals or children of destiny, with the power to decide the fates of peoples and kingdoms, but most are given a role as ordinary soldiers or porters or blacksmiths, and toil away at their in-game mundane tasks, without much ability to affect anything at all.

We like to imagine that after the bombs fall and the smoke clears we will emerge as the new Yu Gun, apportioning merit and assigning tasks. And perhaps you will indeed be called upon to do that, so you should prepare yourself to step up and do it. That preparation will involve some practice commanding others and some practice obeying others’ commands, because the two are inextricably bound together. But in life as in Korean video games, there’s isn’t very much room at the top. Far more likely, when the stage of history is set, we will be cast in a supporting role, like the Korean gamer assigned to role-play as a peasant or like Yu’s followers standing in orderly ranks. Let us not turn our noses up at this vocation, the poorly-behaved seldom make history.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 by David A. Graff”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-06-05.

April 7, 2024

Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain (1942)

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Henry Getley on the US War Department publication Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain produced for incoming GIs on arrival in Britain from early in 1942:

[W]ith their troops pouring into this country from 1942 onwards to prepare for D-Day, officials at the US War Department did their best to make the culture clash as trouble-free as possible. One of their main efforts was issuing GIs with a seven-page foolscap leaflet called Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain.

It’s available in reprint as a booklet and makes fascinating reading, not least for its straightforward, jargon-free writing style and its overriding message – telling the Yanks to use “plain common horse sense” in their dealings with the British.

In parts, it now seems clumsy and condescending. But its purpose was praiseworthy – to try to get American troops to damp down the impression that they were overpaid, oversexed and over here. Many GIs qualified in all three aspects, of course, but you couldn’t blame the top brass for trying.

The leaflet paints a sympathetic (some would say patronising) picture for the incoming Americans of a Britain – “a small crowded island of forty-five million people” – that had been at war for three years, having initially stood alone against Hitler and braved the Blitz. Hence this “cradle of democracy” was now a “shop-worn and grimy” land of rationing, the blackout, shortages and austerity. But beneath the shabbiness, there was steel.

    The British are tough. Don’t be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. If need be, they can be plenty tough. The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.

There were helpful hints about cricket, football, darts, pounds, shillings and pence, warm beer and badly-made coffee. And because we are two nations divided by a common language, the Yanks were urged to listen to the BBC.

    In England the “upper crust” speak pretty much alike. You will hear the newscaster for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). He is a good example, because he has been trained to talk with the “cultured” accent. He will drop the letter “r” (as people do in some sections of our own country) and will say “hyah” instead of “here”. He will use the broad “a”, pronouncing all the a’s in “banana” like the “a” in father.

    However funny you may think this is, you will be able to understand people who talk this way and they will be able to understand you. And you will soon get over thinking it’s funny. You will have more difficulty with some of the local accents. It may comfort you to know that a farmer or villager from Cornwall very often can’t understand a farmer or villager in Yorkshire or Lancashire.

The GIs were warned against bravado and bragging, being told that the British were reserved but not unfriendly. “They will welcome you as friends and allies, but remember that crossing the ocean doesn’t automatically make you a hero. There are housewives in aprons and youngsters in knee pants in Britain who have lived through more high explosives in air raids than many soldiers saw in first-class barrages during the last war.”

April 5, 2024

“[T]oo many charlatans of this species have already been allowed to make vast fortunes at the expense of a gullible public”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on his “emerging love-Haidt relationship” as Jonathan Haidt’s new book is generating a lot of buzz:

If Haidt has special expertise that wouldn’t pertain to any well-educated person, I wonder a little in what precise realm it lies. Read the second sentence of this article again: he’s a psychologist … who teaches ethics … at a business school? Note that he seems to have abandoned a prior career as an evolutionary biology pedlar, and the COVID pandemic wasn’t kind to his influential ideas about political conservatives being specially motivated by disgust and purity. Much of The Anxious Generation is instead devoted to trendy findings from “neuroscience” that it might be too kind to describe as “speculative”. (I’ll say it again until it’s conventional wisdom: a “neuroscientist” is somebody in a newly invented pseudofield who couldn’t get three inches into the previously established “-ology” for “neuro-“.)

These are my overwhelming prejudices against Haidt; and, in spite of all of them, I suspect somebody had to do what he is now doing, which is to make the strongest available case for social media as a historical impactor on social arrangements and child development. Today the economist/podcaster Tyler Cowen has published a delightfully adversarial interview with Haidt that provides a relatively fast way of boning up on the Haidt Crusade. Cowen belongs to my pro-innovation, techno-optimist, libertarian tribe: we both feel positive panic at the prospect of conservative-flavoured state restrictions on media, which are at the heart of the Haidt agenda.

But reading the interview makes me somewhat more pro-Haidt than I would otherwise be (i.e., not one tiny little bit). On a basic level, Cowen doesn’t, by any means, win the impromptu debate by a knockout — even though he is one of the most formidable debaters alive. Haidt has four key reforms he would like to see implemented politically: “No smartphones before high school; no social media before age 16; phone-free schools; far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.”

This is a fairly limited, gentle agenda for school design and other policies, and although I believe Haidt’s talk of “rewiring brains” is mostly ignorable BS, none of his age-limitation rules are incompatible with a free society, and none bear on adults, except in their capacity as teachers and parents.

The “rewiring” talk isn’t BS because it’s necessarily untrue, mind you. Haidt, like Jordan Peterson, is another latter-day Marshall McLuhan — a boundary-defying celebrity intellectual who strategically turns speculation into assertion, and forces us, for better or worse, to re-examine our beliefs. McLuhan preached that new forms of media like movable type or radio do drive neurological change, that they cause genuine warp-speed human evolution — but his attitude, unlike Haidt’s, was that these changes are certain to happen, and that arguing against them was like arguing with the clouds in favour of a sunny day. The children who seem “addicted” to social media are implicitly preparing to live in a world that has social media. They are natives of the future, and we adults are just observers of it.

April 2, 2024

Rob Henderson reviews Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein

Filed under: Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rob Henderson reviews the last published work of Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein:

Are crowds smart or dumb? You may have heard the terms “wisdom of the crowds” and the “madness of crowds”. The former idea is that the collective opinion of a group of people is often more accurate than any individual person, and that gathering input from many individuals averages out the errors of each person and produces a more accurate answer. In contrast, the “madness of crowds” captures the idea that, relative to a single individual, large numbers of people are more likely to indulge their passions and get carried away by impulsive or destructive behaviors. So, which concept more accurately reflects reality?

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein provides the answer. The authors share research indicating that “independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds”. That is, if you want to use crowdsourcing to produce accurate information, you have to ensure that people make their judgments in private. If people provide their answers in a public setting where they can see everyone else’s answers, then the crowd can transform wisdom into madness.

Relatedly, Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant has stated that “you get more and better ideas if people are working alone in separate rooms than if they are brainstorming in a group. When people generate ideas together, many of the best ones never get shared. Some members dominate the conversation, others hold back to avoid looking foolish, and the whole group tends to conform to the majority’s taste.” People converge on ideas they believe are held by the majority, when often they are simply acquiescing to the most assertive and strident members of the group. Grant suggests that the best way to sidestep this problem is to have people think up ideas on their own before the group evaluates them.

In Noise, Kahneman and his colleagues report findings indicating that, in tasks involving estimation, such as the number of crimes in a city or geographic distances, crowds are wise as long as they registered their views independently. But if people learn what others estimated, then crowds do worse than individuals. The book states that, “while multiple independent opinions, properly aggregated, can be strikingly accurate, even a little social influence can produce a kind of herding that undermines the wisdom of the crowds”.

There are many reasons why Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow became a groundbreaking hit, while Noise did not reach quite the same heights (Kahneman and his statistically savvy co-authors might cite regression toward the mean). One reason for the difference may be the years in which the books were published. In 2011, the educated class generally favored meritocratic and objective measures for judgment and decision-making. They found the message that we should challenge the role of bias in our everyday judgments appealing, and believed that we should rid ourselves of habits that lead us to judge other people or situations unfairly. Today, however, much of intellectual culture has changed. Now that luxury beliefs are ascendant, relying on objective measures is no longer fashionable.

Publishing and the AI menace

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte fiddles around a bit with some of the current AI large language models and tries to decide how much he and other publishers should be worried about it:

The literary world, and authors in particular, have been freaking out about artificial intelligence since ChatGPT burst on the scene sixteen months ago. Hands have been wrung and class-action lawsuits filed, none of them off to auspicious starts.

The principal concern, according to the Authors Guild, is that AI technologies have been “built using vast amounts of copyrighted works without the permission of or compensation to authors and creators,” and that they have the potential to “cheaply and easily produce works that compete with — and displace — human-authored books, journalism, and other works”.

Some of my own work was among the tens of thousands of volumes in the Books3 data set used without permission to train the large language models that generate artificial intelligence. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or disturbed. In fact, I’ve not been able to make up my mind about anything AI. I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other models to see how they might be useful to our business. I’ve found them interesting, impressive in some respects, underwhelming in others.

Unable to generate a newsletter out of my indecision, I called up my friend Thad McIlroy — author, publishing consultant, and all-around smart guy — to get his perspective. Thad has been tightly focused on artificial intelligence for the last couple of years. In fact, he’s probably the world’s leading authority on AI as it pertains to book publishing. As expected, he had a lot of interesting things to say. Here are some of the highlights, loosely categorized.

THE TOOLS

I described to Thad my efforts to use AI to edit copy, proofread, typeset, design covers, do research, write promotional copy, marketing briefs, and grant applications, etc. Some of it has been a waste of time. Here’s what I got when I asked DALL-E for a cartoon on the future of book publishing:

In fairness, I didn’t give the machine enough prompts to produce anything decent. Like everything else, you get out of AI what you put into it. Prompts are crucial.

For the most part, I’ve found the tools to be useful, whether for coughing up information or generating ideas or suggesting language, although everything I tried required a good deal of human intervention to bring it up to scratch.

I had hoped, at minimum, that AI would be able to proofread copy. Proofreading is a fairly technical activity, based on rules of grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. AI is supposed to be good at following rules. Yet it is far from competent as a proofreader. It misses a lot. The more nuanced the copy, the more it struggles.

March 28, 2024

QotD: Honest scholarship … and whatever passes for scholarship these days

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Although not one in ten thousand academics and other intellectuals would express dissent from what Bob says above [Bob Higgs’ post on Facebook], quite a few express their disregard for what he says through their actions. As Bob notes, an excellent example of this academic utter shoddiness or execrable dishonesty (you pick) is Duke University “historian” Nancy MacLean and her well-documented penchant for presenting fabrications as facts. Another example is Cornell University “historian” Ed Baptist.

Equally distressing as these (and an increasing number of other) examples of scholarly utter shoddiness or execrable dishonesty is the complete incredulity of many people in accepting the “findings” of such “scholars”.

A perverted form of amusement can be had by imagining what sort of “scholarly” output you might offer to the world were you to operate according to the standards used by “scholars” such as Nancy MacLean. Free to present fiction as fact, you might, say, claim that because Dr. MacLean studied at the University of Wisconsin, and because Wisconsin was once home to the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer – and because in her book Democracy in Chains she did not explicitly denounce serial killing – that Dr. MacLean’s work is a surreptitious attempt to justify serial killing.

Of course, any such conclusion would be both preposterous and inexcusably unethical. Anyone who (unlike me here) seriously offered such a wacky, detached-from-all-reality, ideologically motivated thesis to the public should lose not only any claim to scholarly respect, but any claim to respect of any sort. And yet the bases for the conclusions reached by “scholars” such as Dr. MacLean are no more realistic than are those in my previous, satirical paragraph.

Don Boudreaux, “The Wisdom of Bob Higgs”, Café Hayek, 2019-08-29.

March 26, 2024

What Makes a Good Book

Filed under: Books, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lost Art Press
Published Nov 26, 2023

✅ Read and subscribe to the Lost Art Press Blog: https://blog.lostartpress.com/
🏪 Visit Our Store: https://lostartpress.com

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress