Quotulatiousness

July 10, 2024

After 1177 B.C.

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jane Psmith reviews the follow-on book from Eric Kline’s bestseller about the Bronze Age Collapse, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations:

Sometime around 1150 BC, the dense network of politically, economically, and culturally interdependent states around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. In 2014, GWU archaeologist Eric Cline wrote a book about it. And then, surprisingly, it became a bestseller.

Okay, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise: most people can recognize an obvious historical analogy when it hits them over the head, and the globalized1 state system of the Late Bronze Age has extremely clear parallels to the modern day. An interconnected and cosmopolitan world? Centralized state bureaucracy? High-level diplomacy between ruling elites? A technologically complex civilization enabled by extensive international trade along lengthy and elaborate supply chains? Well, gosh, that seems remarkably familiar. An audience that had just weathered a global financial crisis (and, later, a global pandemic) was perfectly poised to appreciate Cline’s exploration of the fragility of complex systems. No wonder it sold! (A copy entered the Psmith household in early 2020 for, uh, obvious reasons.)

Cline’s basic argument in the book was that the Collapse was due not to any single cause but to a “perfect storm” of calamities: drought and accompanying famine, earthquake, internal rebellion, external invasion. These were all problems that the civilizations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean had faced and survived in the past, but under their combined onslaught the most fragile parts of the system at last began buckle. When one society disintegrated, its sudden absence from the interconnected global economy became a new stressor on its surviving neighbors — until at last, domino-like, the whole thing came down.2 It would be decades, or in some places centuries, before the standard of living returned to anything like its previous level, and it would be nearly five hundred years before an international system as complex and sophisticated as the world of the Late Bronze Age emerged.

Now, a decade after his original book, Cline has a sequel exploring what happened after the Collapse. Which civilizations were able to rebound to something approaching their former glory, which barely managed to limp along into the Iron Age, and which vanished into the sands of time? And, more importantly, why?

This is a much more difficult story to tell. The original 1177 B.C. spent much of its page count on the zenith of Bronze Age civilization, the 15th through 13th centuries BC, to explain what it was that did the collapsing. It’s a sweeping tale, full of wonderful stories and fascinating digressions into the historicity of the Trojan War (yes) and the Exodus (not archeologically substantiated) as well as being a compelling portrait of a complicated set of societies. Cline’s narrative darts from Egypt to Assyria to the Aegean to the Hittites, treating each in turn as he moves forward through time towards what we all know is coming.

But chronological framing is impossible for the sequel. There is, definitionally — there can be — no grand narrative of regional divergence after the fall of a “world-system“. The fate of Mesopotamia is no longer linked to that of Greece; there are no more Cretan envoys in New Kingdom tomb reliefs, no more battles between the Hittite Great King and the wanax of a Mycenaean palatial center, no more Uzbek tin shipwrecked off the coast of Anatolia. Once the ties are cut, each story must stand alone, and accordingly Cline gives each region its own chapter.

Alas, this is a lot less fun to read.

    1. For sufficiently small values of “globe”. But larger than you might expect!

    2. The revised 2021 edition apparently gives a larger role to climate factors, especially the 3.2kya megadrought, but that’s not the one I read and anyway the other elements were still present.

July 4, 2024

“In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team”

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

Ted Gioia isn’t impressed with the changes we’ve seen over the years among the Silicon Valley leadership:

Yes, I should have been alarmed when this cult-ish ideology took off in Silicon Valley — where the goal had previously been incremental progress (Moore’s law and all that) and not being evil.

When I first came to Silicon Valley at age 17, the two leading technologists in the region were named William Hewlett and David Packard. They used their extra cash to fund schools, museums, and hospitals — both my children were born at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital — not immortality machines, or rockets to Mars, or a dystopian Internet of brains, or worshipping at the Church of the Singularity.

Tech leaders were built differently back then. When famous historian Arnold Toynbee visited Stanford in 1963, he had a chance encounter with William Hewlett. Afterwards Toynbee marveled over his new acquaintance, declaring: “What an amazing fellow. He has more knowledge of history than many historians.”

In other words, Bill Hewlett had more wisdom than ego. He invested in the community where he lived — not the Red Planet. Instead of promulgating social engineering schemes, Hewlett and Packard built a new engineering school at their alma mater, and named it after their favorite teacher.

They wouldn’t recognize Silicon Valley today. The FM-2030s are now in charge.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invested in engineering, not social engineering

Another warning sign came when Google hired cult-ish tech guru Ray Kurzweil — a man who had once created a reasonable music keyboard that even Stevie Wonder used.

But Kurzweil went on to write starry-eyed books of utopian tech worship which come straight out of the weird religion playbook (The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity is Near, etc.)

What does tech look like when it gets turned into a religion? Kurzweil summed it up when asked if there is a God. His response: “Not yet.”

In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team.

I note that, when Forbes revisited Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, they found that almost every one went wrong.

So what does he do?

Kurzweil follows up his book The Singularity is Near with a new book entitled The Singularity is Nearer. Give the man credit for hubris. This is exactly what religious cults do when their predicted Rapture doesn’t occur.

They just change the date on the calendar — Utopia has been delayed for another 12 months.

But, of course, Utopia is always delayed another 12 months. Meanwhile the cult leaders can do a lot of damage while preparing for the Rapture.

And despite the techno-elite’s apparent endless quest for perfection in their own lives, the enshittification of the technology they deliver to us proles continues relentlessly:

Here’s a curious fact. The more they brag about their utopias, the worse their products and services get.

Even the word upgrade is now a joke — whenever a tech company promises it, you can bet it will be a downgrade in your experience. That’s not just my view, but overwhelmingly supported by survey respondents.

For the first time since the dawn of the Renaissance, innovation is now feared by the vast majority of people. And the tech leaders, once admired and emulated, now rank among the least trustworthy people in the world.

It was different when Linus Pauling was peddling his horse pills — he eventually set up shop in Big Sur, far south of the tech industry, in order to find a hospitable home for his wackiest ideas.

Nowadays, Big Sur thinking has come to the Valley.

And when you set up cults inside the largest corporations in the history of the world, we are all endangered.

Just imagine if Linus Pauling had enjoyed the power to force everybody to take his huge vitamin doses. Just imagine if Bill Shockley had possessed the authority to impose his racist eugenics theories on the populace.

It’s scary to think of. But they couldn’t do it, because they didn’t have billions of dollars, and run trillion-dollar companies with politicians at their beck and call.

But the current cultists include the wealthiest people in the world, and they are absolutely using their immense power to set rules for the rest of us. If you rely on Apple or Google or some other huge web behemoth — and who doesn’t? — you can’t avoid this constant, bullying manipulation.

The cult is in charge. And it’s like we’re all locked into an EST training sessions — nobody gets to leave even for bathroom breaks.

There’s now overwhelming evidence of how destructive the new tech can be. Just look at the metrics. The more people are plugged in, the higher are their rates of depression, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, mental illness, and other alarming indicators.

If this is what the tech cults have already delivered, do we really want to give them another 12 months? Do you really want to wait until they deliver the Rapture?

June 28, 2024

Ruling Medieval France

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

In Quillette, Charlotte Allen reviews House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France by Justine Firnhaber-Baker, a period of history I know mainly from the English point of view:

I’m a PhD medievalist, but the history of medieval French royalty was never my specialty, and my ignorance was vast.

I’d assumed, for example, that the French kings of the Middle Ages were mostly fainéants whose writ scarcely ran past the Île-de-France region (encompassing the city of Paris and its environs). The English monarchy across the Channel had been centralised since the days of Alfred the Great (849–899); but the French kings seemed to rule in a more symbolic capacity, being perpetually at the mercy of the powerful dukes and counts of autonomous French regions such as Normandy, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Anjou, Blois, Toulouse, and Languedoc. These regional rulers were technically royal vassals. But, in actuality, they saw themselves as absolute rulers in their own right, and so had no compunction against turning on the crown when they thought it would further their interests.

My impressions had been formed by accounts of the 17-year-old Joan of Arc’s having to personally drag the Dauphin (the future King Charles VII) to Reims for his coronation in 1429, and by Shakespeare’s historical plays, which portrayed the French as fops incapable of defending their territory against the robust and brotherly English during the Hundred Years’ War. Indeed, the whole point of that war (from the English perspective) was that, by dynastic right, large portions of France’s fractured political landscape actually belonged to England.

The one medieval French royal (by marriage) I did know something about, Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122–1204), dumped her French husband, King Louis VII (1120–1180) after he bungled the Second Crusade, a costly and embarrassing adventure on which Eleanor had accompanied him on horseback. (“Never take your wife on a Crusade”, a medievalist friend of mine once sensibly quipped). To top off his disastrous final loss of his Crusader army in 1148 during an ill-considered attack on Damascus — which, although Muslim-ruled, was in fact an ally of Latin-Christian Jerusalem — Louis and Eleanor had failed to produce a son. No sooner was the ink dry on their divorce in 1152 (technically an annulment, since the two were Catholics), than she married Henry Plantagenet, son and heir of the duke of Anjou, who two years later became King Henry II of England. Henry quickly procreated five sons (among fourteen surviving children) with his new bride. Thus began the dynasty that would rule England for more than three centuries.

As everyone who has seen The Lion in Winter knows, Henry II’s relationship with Eleanor was far from tranquil, but two of their sons succeeded him to the English throne: Richard the Lionheart and King John (of Magna Carta fame or infamy, depending on your perspective). Henry was, besides king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, through his great-grandfather, William the Conqueror, and his mother, Matilda, who’d married Henry’s Anjevin father, Geoffrey, after her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, died in 1125.

Eleanor’s grounds for annulling her marriage to Louis had been that he was her fourth cousin, which violated the Catholic Church’s (selectively applied) consanguinity restrictions. But Henry was even closer kin, being her third cousin. The humiliated and (understandably) rankled Louis demanded that Henry, as his feudal vassal, explain why he’d failed to ask permission to marry (let alone marry his boss’s ex). Henry declined to reply, the feudal equivalent of declaring oneself in rebellion. Louis retaliated by invading Normandy — unsuccessfully — and trying to hold onto Eleanor’s Aquitaine on the claim that he’d become its duke by marriage (Henry II was meanwhile making the same claim) before giving up and remarrying himself in 1154.

A colour-coded political map of France during the twelfth century, indicating the early expansion of the Angevin Empire — i.e., the territorial possessions of the House of Plantagenet — from the time of Geoffrey V of Anjou (1113–1151). The Plantagenets would rule in England, and parts of France, till the demise of Richard III of England (1452–1485).

I’d assumed that French kings wouldn’t hold much in the way of real royal power until the time of King Louis XIV (1638–1715), who declared (perhaps apocryphally), L’État, c’est moi, and forced French regional nobles to reside in his over-the-top palace at Versailles (where they’d dissipate their incomes via elaborate court ceremonies instead of making trouble from their provincial power bases).

But the scales have now been knocked from my eyes, thanks to Justine Firnhaber-Baker, a professor of French medieval history at the University of St Andrews. The subtitle of her new book, House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France, refers to the Capetian dynasty founded by Hugh Capet (c. 940–996), who took his royal title in 987 A.D. Every French monarch, from Hugh’s reign to the French Revolution and beyond, had Capetian blood running through his veins — including the aforementioned Louis VII, who was a direct descendant of Hugh, and the bookish, dithering King Louis XVI, who was not, but who nevertheless went to the guillotine in 1793 under the derisive sobriquet “Citizen Louis Capet”.

June 27, 2024

California’s Trudeau

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power by Ellie Gardey Holmes, a biography of California’s own Justin Trudeau:

I’ve been appalled by Gavin Newsom for years, but to read Ellie Gardey Holmes’s powerful and unflinching new book Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power is to find one’s contempt for this hideous creature skyrocketing. If he has any redeeming qualities, any special gifts, any attributes that might illuminate an admirable and recognizably human side, there’s no sign of them here. This is a man who, despite having no discernible talent for governance or anything else, was lucky enough to be born into one well-off family – his great-grandfather co-founded the Bank of Italy, which later became the Bank of America – and to be, from earliest childhood, a sort of honorary member of an even richer family, the Gettys, his father being best friends with oil magnate Gordon Getty, who was like a second father to young Gavin.

Both men, his biological father and his second father, used their considerable influence from the beginning to help Gavin rise to power. Indeed, as surely as any Kennedy or Bush, Gavin Newsom was born into a political machine and bred to be a politician. After he and Getty played a big role in helping Willie Brown to get elected mayor of San Francisco, Brown named Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission. Soon he was promoted to the Board of Supervisors, a post he held from 1997 to 2004. “Because of his lack of qualifications,” writes Gardey Holmes, “Newsom entered office entirely indebted to Willie Brown”. Observers referred to him, in fact, as “an appendage of Willie Brown”. Quick sidebar in the midst of this tale of political advancement: when his mother was dying, Gavin was pretty much AWOL, although he was present when she underwent assisted suicide – which, at the time, was illegal in California. Others had been prosecuted for their participation in such actions; Gavin was not, a foreshadowing of many other occasions on which he would be treated as exempt from the rules governing the behavior of ordinary mortals.

In 2003 he was elected mayor. One of his first acts was to authorize the issuing of marriage licenses for same-sex couples, even though he had no power to do any such thing. He even performed some of the marriages himself. This cynical move (which even California’s two Democratic Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, opposed) was a cheap stunt, carried out at the expense of gullible gays, whose marriages were soon enough ruled invalid by the state Supreme Court – but it had the desired effect. It made him a national figure and it won him the esteem of the mainstream media. Bob Simon told him on 60 Minutes that he might well have “set a record for instant fame in this country”.

From the beginning of his life in “public service” – that laughable term – Newsom’s vanity and ambition were flagrantly palpable. Although the New York Times described him during his mayoralty as the subject of “local adoration”, some San Francisco insiders resented his brazen focus “on self-aggrandizement and personal publicity” and his relative indifference to the city’s growing problems on a variety of fronts. Routinely, he stole credit for other people’s initiatives and acted as if he were exempt from the rules. A police officer drove him to his wedding in Montana in his official SUV – a definite no-no.

After two terms as mayor he had his eye, naturally, on the Governor’s Mansion – but polls convinced him to run for Lieutenant Governor instead. He spent two terms in that job, too, but hated it: he had no real power, no real staff, no real budget, and he felt disrespected by his boss, Jerry Brown. The initiatives he did support were destructive “progressive” bilge of the first water: for example, he was the only statewide elected official to support Proposition 47, which converted many felonies to misdemeanors, helping to set off the still ongoing rash of shoplifting that has made San Francisco, particularly, an international joke. For the most part, however, instead of addressing the state’s problems he put his energies into enhancing his national profile. He became a fixture on shows like Real Time with Bill Maher. He also wrote – or at least signed his name to – a book calling for the transformation of government by means of “digital technology”; the book’s argument didn’t make much sense, and even Stephen Colbert, usually a reliable left-wing shill, dismissed it as “bullshit”.

And then, inevitably, in 2019, Newsom became governor, thanks in no small part to massive donations from the Gettys and Pritzkers and his role as “the darling of the upper class”. California was already on the skids, but Newsom accelerated the process. He pulled National Guard troops from the southern border, saying that “[t]he border ’emergency’ is a manufactured crisis and California will not be part of this political theater”. He even had the state sue President Trump over his border emergency declaration, which according to Newsom was nothing but an expression of “division, xenophobia, [and] racism”. Instead of canceling one of the state’s notorious boondoggles – the program to build a staggeringly expensive high-speed rail line from San Francisco to San Diego – he shortened the planned route, so that the trains would run only between Merced and Bakersfield. This made the rail line an even more ridiculous proposition, but Newsom’s priority was not to provide a useful means of public transportation but to keep the state from having to return the federal money appropriated for the project to a government run by Donald Trump, who from the beginning of his governorship Newsom singled out as his personal enemy – an action that profoundly enhanced his popularity among California Democrats. Indeed, instead of seriously dealing with California’s jobs and education crises, Newsom focused relentlessly on attacking Trump. A hundred days into his governorship, he bragged childishly that California was “the most un-Trump state”.

June 22, 2024

The End of Everything

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Books, Europe, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In First Things, Francis X. Maier reviews Victor Davis Hanson’s recent work The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation:

A senior fellow in military history and classics at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Hanson is a specialist on the human dimension and costs of war. His focus in The End of Everything is, as usual, on the past; specifically, the destruction of four great civilizations: ancient Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and the Aztec Empire. In each case, an otherwise enduring civilization was not merely conquered, but “annihilated” — in other words, completely erased and replaced. How such catastrophes could happen is the substance of Hanson’s book. And the lessons therein are worth noting.

In every case, the defeated suffered from fatal delusions. Each civilization overestimated its own strength or skill; each misread the willingness of allies to support it; and each underestimated the determination, strength, and ferocity of its enemy.

Thebes had a superb military heritage, but the Thebans’ tactics were outdated and their leadership no match for Macedon’s Alexander the Great. The city was razed and its surviving population scattered. Carthage — a thriving commercial center of 500,000 even after two military defeats by Rome — misread the greed, jealousy, and hatred of Rome, and Roman willingness to violate its own favorable treaty terms to extinguish its former enemy. The long Roman siege of the Third Punic War saw the killing or starvation of 450,000 Carthaginians, the survivors sold into slavery, the city leveled, and the land rendered uninhabitable for a century.

The Byzantine Empire, Rome’s successor in the East, survived for a millennium on superior military technology, genius diplomacy, impregnable fortifications, and confidence in the protection of heaven. By 1453, a shrunken and sclerotic Byzantine state could rely on none of these advantages, nor on any real help from the Christian West. But it nonetheless clung to a belief in the mantle of heaven and its own ability to withstand a determined Ottoman siege. The result was not merely defeat, but the erasure of any significant Greek and Christian presence in Constantinople. As for the Aztecs, they fatally misread Spanish intentions, ruthlessness, and duplicity, as well as the hatred of their conquered “allies” who switched sides and fought alongside the conquistadors.

The industrial-scale nature of human sacrifice and sacred cannibalism practiced by the Aztecs — more than 20,000 captives were ritually butchered each year — horrified the Spanish. It reinforced their fury and worked to justify their own ferocious violence, just as the Carthaginian practice of infant sacrifice had enraged the Romans. In the end, despite the seemingly massive strength of Aztec armies, a small group of Spanish adventurers utterly destroyed Tenochtitlán, the beautiful and architecturally elaborate Aztec capital, and wiped out an entire culture.

History never repeats itself, but patterns of human thought and behavior repeat themselves all the time. We humans are capable of astonishing acts of virtue, unselfish service, and heroism. We’re also capable of obscene, unimaginable violence. Anyone doubting the latter need only check the record of the last century. Or last year’s October 7 savagery, courtesy of Hamas.

The takeaway from Hanson’s book might be summarized in passages like this one:

    Modern civilization faces a toxic paradox. The more that technologically advanced mankind develops the ability to wipe out wartime enemies, the more it develops a postmodern conceit that total war is an obsolete exercise, [assuming, mistakenly] that disagreements among civilized people will always be arbitrated by the cooler, more sophisticated, and more diplomatically minded. The same hubris that posits that complex tools of mass destruction can be created but never used, also fuels the fatal vanity that war itself is an anachronism and no longer an existential concern—at least in comparison to the supposedly greater threats of naturally occurring pandemics, meteoric impacts, man-made climate change, or overpopulation.

Or this one:

    The gullibility, and indeed ignorance, of contemporary governments and leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising. The retreat to comfortable nonchalance and credulousness, often the cargo of affluence and leisure, is predictable given unchanging human nature, despite the pretensions of a postmodern technologically advanced global village.

I suppose the lesson is this: There’s nothing sacred about the Pax Americana. Nothing guarantees its survival, legitimacy, comforts, power, or wealth. A sardonic observer like the Roman poet Juvenal — were he alive — might even observe that today’s America seems less like the “city on a hill” of Scripture, and more like a Carthaginian tophet, or the ritual site of child sacrifice. Of course, that would be unfair. A biblical leaven remains in the American experiment, and many good people still believe in its best ideals.

June 21, 2024

QotD: Identity fetishism

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

This is going to sound really weird, but bear with me: I’d like you to check out Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, by Sam Fussell. It was written in the early 90s (I think) describing the bodybuilding scene of the mid-1980s, and when I first read it, twenty-odd years ago, it came off like the tale of a recovered alcoholic, or more accurately a well-controlled schizophrenic — the male version of all those mental illness memoirs the chicks were into back then (Prozac Nation; Girl, Interrupted, and so on). Certainly Fussell himself pitched it that way — he says that even bodybuilders call their thing “the disease”. From the Current Year’s perspective, though, it looks a lot more like the leading edge of an increasingly common phenomenon that I’m going to call “identity fetishism”.

Fussell is almost embarrassingly frank about why he got into bodybuilding: He was terrified. A scrawny, desperately insecure guy, he just couldn’t handle the social pressures of life in New York. He saw muscles as armor. If he made his exterior so intimidating that no one would want to get close to him he’d never have to get close to anyone. The whole thing is a sustained exercise in fremdschämen — Fussell is a hard guy to like before his transformation, and frankly repulsive afterwards. It’s a short read, and fascinating, but it’s not an easy one.

Do slog through it, though, and I think you’ll see what I mean. The thing that prevents so many of us from really getting into the Left’s headspace, I think, is sheer exhaustion. Forget hardcore SJWs for a sec; just think of what it must take to be, say, a hipster. I mean, seriously, just look at this fucking hipster. The time, the money, the sheer goddamn effort it must take! I’m bushed just writing about it, and that’s nothing compared to what Fussell did.

If you’re a weightlifter, you know. If you’re not, trust me, you don’t want to know. Same deal with endurance athletes, of course, and so on — I’m sure “runner’s high” is real, and it’s great, but son, I really don’t want to experience it. I have experienced “the pump”, famously described by Arnold himself as “like cumming”, but trust me, drugs are a lot better if you just want to get high, because getting to “the pump” fucking hurts. A lot. See Fussell for details.1

Much easier, then, to invest all that time and energy and money into an outward show that, though it no doubt costs as much — perhaps more! — isn’t nearly as painful (I’m sure getting elaborate tats hurts, but if the choice was between that or legs day, I’d be The Illustrated Man). Best of all, of course, is one that doesn’t take anything but time — you know, like, say, Twitter …

All that no doubt seems like a long ride for a short payoff, but unlike my infamously lax attitude towards “the Classics”, I’m going to insist that if you want to get the point of this one — and I consider it important enough to have invested all these words in it — you’re really going to have to go read the book. Fussell is self-aware enough to see himself for what he is, and the Twitterati are of course oblivious, but the psychology is the same. It’s a fetishized identity, and it’s terrifying, because those are our rulers.

Severian, “Identity Fetishism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-24.

    1. Worst of all, you don’t get it during “legs day”, the most excruciating part of weightlifting, which is why so many guys skip it. It’s nothing but pain. I was never more than a moderately serious weightlifter back in my youth, but that’s the sole criterion of seriousness — do you skip legs day? If yes, then get back to Planet Fitness, you poseur.

June 18, 2024

Spice: King Of The Poor Man’s Kitchen

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

Townsends
Published Mar 3, 2024

One of the questions we seek to answer on our channel is that of the plight of poor folks in American history. What did they eat? How did they dress? Did they have enjoyment in life? They didn’t have the best cuts of meat or the most sought after ingredients. What they did have was plenty of flavor! Spice is the king of the poor man’s kitchen.
(more…)

June 16, 2024

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four at 75

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

Ed West on the attempts by many different parties to claim the legacy of George Orwell for their own purposes:

No writer’s legacy and approval is so fought over as George Orwell, whose final — and most celebrated — work Nineteen-Eighty-Four was published seventy five years ago this month.

The most influential piece of political fiction in history, such is the success of the dystopian novel that its themes have been recited to death by columnists, often by people I imagine he would have loathed (including me).

Orwell’s nightmare became a particular focus of conservative commentators from the 1990s with the rise of “political correctness”, which might be seen as both a form of politeness and at the same time a way of policing opinions by changing the language. As Orwell’s Newspeak was described, it was to ensure that dissent cannot be voiced because “the necessary words were not available”. Newspeak, along with thought police and doublethink, has become a part of our political vocabulary, while even the proles have Big Brother to entertain them. No one can doubt that Orwell has won the final victory, and the struggle for the writer’s soul forms part of Dorian Lynskey’s entertaining and informative The Ministry of Truth, a biography of Nineteen-Eighty-Four which was published at the time of the last significant anniversary.

Lynskey, a hugely gifted writer who specialises in the relationship between arts and politics, is very much on the Left and sees the modern parallels with the Trumpian disdain for truth, although the great man himself is now often more cited by the Right. Indeed the anniversary was recently celebrated by the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs with a new edition and an introduction by my friend Christopher Snowdon.

Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical (aren’t we all?). In the preface to his book, publisher Victor Gollancz wrote that “The truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob – still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.”

As Lynskey writes: “Until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticised existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility.”

Such awareness is surprisingly rare among intelligent journalists and commentators, especially when ideology takes a grip — and Orwell was introduced to this reality in quite brutal form.

The background to both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm was Orwell’s disillusionment during the Spanish Civil War. The conflict between Nationalists and Republican galvanised western intellectuals and marked the turning point when the intelligentsia became firmly wedded to the Left. Over a thousand writers went to fight in Spain, and while few entirely understood the political situation they did grasp, as Malcolm Muggeridge said, that “it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at last joined in bloody combat”.

In reality it was a conflict in which both sides committed appalling atrocities, although Franco’s forces certainly outdid their enemies in murderous scale. That ruthlessness partly explains their victory, but the Republicans were not helped by the seemingly endless factionalism that saw various squabbling leftist acronyms fight each other, and which makes the war hard to follow. There was the socialist UGT, the Russian-backed PSUC, the anarchist FAI and anarcho-syndicalist CNT, and also the POUM, Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, which rather belied its name by falling out with both Stalin and Trotsky.

Spain was an education for Orwell. Witnessing in Barcelona a Russian known only as “Charlie Chan”, allegedly an agent of NKVD, he wrote: “I watched him with some interest for it was the first time I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists”.

He recorded how, with the honourable exception of the Manchester Guardian, “One of the dreariest effects of this has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right”. Welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web, George Orwell.

QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte – the great man?

Filed under: Books, France, History, Military, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

John: … I think my favorite big picture thing about the Roberts book [Napoleon the Great] is the way it cuts through two centuries of Anglophone ignorance and really shows you why the continent flung itself at this man’s feet. The pop culture image of Napoleon as this little bumbling dictator is so clearly a deliberate mystification by the perfidious British who felt inadequate in the shadow of this guy they (barely) beat.

Remember, the real Napoleon was so impressive he literally caused a crisis in 19th century philosophy! Everybody had carefully worked out their little theories, later exemplified by Tolstoy, about how human agency doesn’t matter in history and everything is just the operation of vast impersonal forces like the grinding of tectonic plates, and then boom this guy shows up and the debate springs to life again. You know it’s real when two guys as different as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are both grappling with what we can learn from somebody’s existence. And I think Raskolnikov’s unhealthy Napoleon fanboyism was supposed to be a bit of a satire of some very real intellectual currents among the European and Russian intelligentsia.

So what do you think? Does Napoleon vindicate the great man theory of history? I’m still working out my own answer to this, which I briefly allude to in my review of Zhuchkovsky’s book. Basically, I think we can transcend the traditional dichotomy by constructing a political/military analogue of the Schumpeter/Kirzner theory of entrepreneurship. Vast, impersonal forces (such as technological progress or structural economic changes) can create opportunities — in fact they’re pretty much the only thing that can, because the force required to reconfigure society is usually far beyond what any person or group can manage.

But once the opportunity is there, it takes a lot less raw power to act on it, assuming you can recognize it. Imagine a process of continental drift that slowly, slowly raises a mountain-sized boulder out of the ground, and every year it’s inching closer to this precipice, until finally it teeters on the edge. A human being could never have done that, it would be far too heavy, but once it’s up there, there might be a narrow window, a few precious moments, when a solid shove by somebody sufficiently perceptive and motivated can direct and harness this unimaginable force.

So the question is: what made Europe so ripe for Disruption (TM) at that moment? Obviously the French Revolution, and there were some pretty important changes in the nature of warfare too. What else?

Jane: Well, you know what I’m going to say: it’s the Enlightenment, stupid.

I was going to compare Napoleon to, say, Odoacer, but I don’t think the analogy actually holds. The Goths were conquerors from outside; their approach, their whole worldview, was very different from the Romans’.1 But Napoleon is extremely inside. The people he comes from are not actually all that different from the ancien régime — they’re feuding hill clans, but they’re aristocratic feuding hill clans — and yet he’s so thoroughly a creature of Enlightenment modernity that even when he’s engaging in the time-honored feuding hill clan pastime of resisting integration by the metropole he’s doing it by writing pamphlets. He might be a Corsican nationalist but he’s been intellectually colonized by France. Or, more accurately, by the elements of French culture that are in the process of undermining and overthrowing it.

I think you’re right about political entrepreneurship. (So here we see the Psmiths wimp out and answer the great man/impersonal force dichotomy “yes”.) It’s perhaps more neatly summed up by that famous Napoleon quip: “I saw the crown of France lying on the ground, so I picked it up with my sword”. Which: based. But also, if we’re going to continue his metaphor, he didn’t knock the crown onto the ground. Everything was already irredeemably broken before he got there. And this, I think, distinguishes him from the Germanic conquerors, who found something teetering and gave it a final push. Caesar, similarly, came up in the old order but dealt it its death blow.

But back to the Enlightenment: the crown is on the ground because the culture that held it up has fallen apart, and it’s fallen apart because gestating in its innards was an entirely different culture that’s finally burst its skin like a parasitic wasp and emerged into the light of day. A lazy reading of history sees Napoleon with a crown giving people titles and building palaces and goes “ooh, look, he’s just like the ancien régime“, but this is dumb. Napoleon is obsessed with modernizing and streamlining. He wants to wipe away the accumulated cruft of a thousand years of European history and build something smarter and cleaner and more rational. He’s just better at organization and psychology than the revolutionaries were. The French Revolution (and the total failure of the Directory) created the material conditions, but the entire intellectual milieu that made the French Revolution possible also made it possible for people to look at Napoleon and go “whoa, nice”.

Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.

    1. There’s some very interesting stuff on this, and about later efforts from both cultures to bridge the gap, in Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.

June 12, 2024

“Consumption inequality” really has fallen significantly since Orwell’s day

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall on some of the points raised by Christopher Snowdon’s new introduction to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Eric (“George Orwell”) Blair’s press card portrait, 1943

Eric Blair, the useful one, once pointed out that:

    In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.

That’s from Chris Snowdon’s new intro to 1984 – you should buy a copy.

Not that Eric knew enough economics to know this but what he’s talking about is consumption inequality.

Sure, we’ve Oxfam squealing that wealth inequality is rising summat fearsome. It ain’t — they fail to account for what we already do to reduce wealth inequality. Many tell us that income inequality is rising summat fearsome. It ain’t. Global income inequality has been falling this past 40 years and as all men are indeed brothers it’s the global number that matters.

But the one that’s really fallen like a stone is that consumption inequality. Consumption is also really the only one of the three that matters. Sure, a world in which there are those without three squares and a crib is not a good one. But once all do have three squares etc. then whatever other inequality there is is, well, it’s not actually all that important is it?

[…]

We really have got to what Orwell thought would be equality. In 1930s England (which was his mental reference point) all of these things – all – were signifiers of significant wealth or income:

As a poorer country the UK was a little behind on these things but my best guess would be that we’re ahead of the US on washing machines today (the US still has a habit of communal machines in apartment blocks). And it amuses that central heating isn’t even on the list. This was something very middle class indeed in the 1960s, really only became “normal” in the UK in the late 70s into the 80s. As with double glazing. These days you’re defined as being in fuel poverty if you cannot heat your house, always and all of it, to a level that no one at all could before that central heating. No, really, coal fire heated houses might average 10oC in winter and that would only be in rooms with an actual fire — others would be at 0oC.

This is not to get into a Four Yorkshiremen but people would be astonished at how cold houses were 1970s and earlier. My own arrival in the US in 1981 had me wondering how they had heating systems that heated all the house, properly, all winter. How could anyone afford that?

England “is a parochial country doomed to nostalgia and irrelevance by its unwavering belief in a series of grandiose historical myths”

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

In The Critic, Fred Skulthorp reviews England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country and How to Set Them Straight by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears:

Should Keir Starmer find himself in Downing Street after the next election, he will have little to play with in terms of zeitgeist. Unlike Blair, there is no Cool Britannia to tap into. There are few unifying cultural figures and despair seems the only discernible national mood. Starmer has only the recent success of the Lionesses and an oft-quoted anecdote about his dad being a toolmaker to inspire the nation.

But there is one nation-renewing narrative on the centre-left that has emerged since 2016. England, unlike the rest of Europe, is a parochial country doomed to nostalgia and irrelevance by its unwavering belief in a series of grandiose historical myths. The real 21st century England is being held back by people singing “Rule Britannia” at the Last Night of the Proms and the fantasies of Daniel Hannan.

In England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country, Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin and former Labour Party speechwriter Mike Stears embark on a journey to set us free from such falsehoods. In Hull we find that William Wilberforce has given the nation an unqualified moral superiority. In Plymouth we discover that Sir Francis Drake is the inspiration for “the aggressively macho nationalist idea” that Brexit can “restore the country’s global reach”. In Runnymede we find that Magna Carta has given rise to the idea of an “Anglo-Saxon birthright sealed with the blood of dead kings”.

Whether anyone actually believes these things is beside the point. These national myths, the authors insist, can account for everything from the popularity of Michael Portillo’s railway documentaries to the 2016 vote to leave the European Union.

Journeys in search of England tend to lend themselves more to projection than discovery. This book presents the worst of that sin. Reading Seven Myths is a bit like being stuck on a very long car journey and regretting having asked the driver: “Whatever happened to the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics?”

Unsurprisingly, much of what follows spouts repackaged Blairite clichés about football, curry and the NHS. Lingering behind their polemic is the tedious psychodrama of the Corbyn years and Labour infighting about how the party should allow itself to feel patriotic. This book is as much about two middle-aged Starmerites trying to work out what it is acceptable to like between their party, the electorate and the limited scope of their inquiry into the England of the 2020s.

And the scope is indeed limited. Reportage and interview, where the book is allowed to breathe away from the grating polemic, is cramped, incomplete and tokenistic. The most memorable soundbite is from Nigel Farage, who tells them — perhaps half-mockingly — that his favourite place in England is London: “It gets faster and more trendy every year that comes”.

Interactions with the public are even more painful. “What do you think of Enoch Powell?” one “brown-skinned man” is asked in Wolverhampton. A refugee from Hong Kong is asked “Does Magna Carta mean anything to you?” Unsurprisingly these conversations don’t return much, but they pave the way for the eye-rollingly mundane conclusion that when it comes to English identity there is “complexity everywhere” (as if anyone’s sense of national identity were ever simple).

Still from the 1964 movie Zulu with Michael Caine as Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, 24th Regiment of Foot.

For a book that spends nearly 400 pages debunking myths and trying to correct the course of English history, its sources require a lot of reading between the lines. Many can be narrowed down to soundbites from a few politicians and forgotten op-eds in the Telegraph (one quoted is dated as far back as 2004).

All this generates endless false dichotomies, strawmen and reductive statements to account for a grander myth loosely referred to as “English exceptionalism”. At times, attempts to source these myths in the body politic come across as comically desperate. Zulu (1964) becomes a film which kept alive the “British Empire myth” and which “the current generation of politicians would have watched growing up”.

Ironically, the writing itself is laced with the sins of myth-making: boring, trite, incoherent, lazy and unfunny. At times it veers into self-parody. In Runnymede, the “high iron gates” of a housing development near the Magna Carta memorial serve to remind us that national identity myths can “make others feel excluded”. In Plymouth, Greta Thunberg is placed in a pantheon alongside Darwin and Drake who both set sail from the Devon port: “None of these dead Englishmen have as much relevance right now as [the voyage] undertaken from the same city by a Swedish Girl”.

June 11, 2024

History-Makers: Sun Tzu & the Art of War

Filed under: Books, China, History, Humour, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Mar 1, 2024

TBH I prefer “Moon Aquarium” but Sun Tzu is pretty cool too.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
The Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated and with introduction by Lionel Giles (1910)
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Addiss & Stanley Lombardo (1993)
“Sun Tzu’s Art of War” & “Sun Tzu Through Time” from Masters of War: History’s Greatest Strategic Thinkers by Andrew R. Wilson, Ph.D.
“China: A History” by John Keay
“Sun-zi and the Art of War: The Rhetoric of Parsimony” by Steven C. Combs, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol.86, No 3, August 2000
“The Art of War” by Mark Cartwright and “Sun Tzu” by Joshua J Mark from World History Encyclopedia
R/AskHistorians answer by u/Iphikrates to the question “Who was Sun Tzu Writing For?” https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7ym4yr/comment/duicm6q/
(more…)

June 4, 2024

J.K. Rowling’s most convincing and true-to-life villain in the Harry Potter stories

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

I’m with Jon Miltimore on this — J.K. Rowling’s most disturbing and best-written villain isn’t “He Who Must Not Be Named” or any of the other (frankly cardboard-y) magical villains … it’s Dolores Umbridge, a career bureaucrat who could have been drawn from any western civil service senior management position:

Umbridge, portrayed in the films by English actress Imelda Staunton, isn’t some apparition of the underworld or a creature of the Dark Forest. She’s the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, the man who runs the government (the Ministry of Magic) in Rowling’s fictional world.

Umbridge wears pink, preaches about “decorum” in a saccharine voice, smiles constantly, and resembles a sweet but stern grandmother. Her intense, unblinking eyes, however, suggest something malevolent lurks beneath. And boy, does it.

“The gently smiling Dolores Umbridge, with her girlish voice, toadlike face, and clutching, stubby fingers, is the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter,” horror author Stephen King wrote in a review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the book in which Umbridge is introduced.

Umbridge’s “Desire to Control, to Punish”

What makes Umbridge so evil that King would compare her to Hannibal Lecter, the man widely considered the greatest villain of all time?

I asked myself this question, and I believe the answer lies in the fact that Dolores Umbridge is so real — and in more ways than one.

First, it’s noteworthy that Rowling based Umbridge on an actual person from her past, a teacher she once had “whom I disliked intensely on sight”.

In a blog post written years ago, Rowling explained that her dislike of the woman was almost irrational (and apparently mutual). Though the woman had a “pronounced taste for twee accessories” — including “a tiny little plastic bow slide” and a fondness for “pale lemon” colors which Rowling said was more “appropriate to a girl of three” — Rowling said “a lack of real warmth or charity” lurked below her sugary exterior.

The description reminded me of another detestable literary villain: Nurse Ratched, the despicable antagonist of Randle Murphy in Ken Kesey’s magnificent 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Kesey’s description of Nurse Ratched conjures to mind a character much like Umbridge.

“Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils — everything working together except the color on her lips and fingernails …”

While there are similarities in the appearances of Dolores Umbridge and Nurse Ratched, their true commonality is what’s underneath their saccharine exteriors.

June 3, 2024

The “mass graves” moral panic at three

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Father Raymond J. de Souza notes the almost un-noticed third anniversary of the dramatic announcement and ensuing moral panic over claims that hundreds of unmarked graves had been discovered at the site of a former Residential School in Kamloops, BC:

This past week marked the third anniversary of the dramatic announcement that 215 “unmarked graves” had been discovered near a former residential school in Kamloops. It was a global news story which had a significant impact in Canada. It was also a great media malpractice.

Many things were reported then that were not only not true, but had not even been claimed to be true by anyone. Recall the monstrously misleading headlines about mass murder and mass graves? For example, from the Toronto Star on 28 May 2021: “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found”.

Not true. No one ever claimed that remains had been found. Many people assumed that the “unmarked graves” held children, but the ground-penetrating radar employed cannot reveal if a body is in the soil, let alone whether it is a child or adult.

Tales of mass murder and mass graves produced a massive moral panic. Marches were held, symbolic children’s shoes were assembled, churches were burned and vandalized, hundreds of millions were committed to investigating further mass graves, the prime minister ordered flags at every embassy abroad and federal building at home to be lowered for nearly six months, a new federal holiday was instituted, the Catholic Church issued (another) apology and Pope Francis came to visit.

How can it now be that the anniversary of something so globally momentous passed so quietly this week?

It’s because the great media malpractice has been answered by journalists, a broader category in the digital world, who provided the effective response. It’s an inspiring David and Goliath tale of how courageous, good journalism beat out conforming, bad journalism.

We can take some pride here at the National Post, for on the first anniversary we published the remarkable reporting of Terry Glavin, who demonstrated exactly how media malpractice had produced a moral panic.

But aside from that, the work was carried out by writers — academics, reporters, amateur researchers and dogged citizens — outside of the legacy media. The story unfolded in C2C Journal, Dorchester Review, True North, Western Standard, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Quillette.

Last December, a single volume collecting much of this work was published: Grave Error: How the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools), edited by Christian Champion, founder and publisher of the Dorchester Review, and the well known academic and political player, Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus at the University of Calgary.

Those outlets which had perpetrated the original malpractice took a pass. The legacy media ignored the book, and Canada’s major book retailers did not sell it.

June 2, 2024

QotD: The Spartans do not deserve the admiration of the modern US military

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

The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta — Spartaganda, as it were — is alive and well.

Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises — an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.

Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other”, a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War — but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.

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