Quotulatiousness

August 27, 2024

Was 1974 the worst year in British politics or just the worst year so far?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

I wasn’t in the UK in 1974 (although I did spend a couple of dystopian weeks there in January 1979), so I don’t know from personal experience just how bad things were, but as Ed West considers Dominic Sandbrook’s very informative social history Seasons in the Sun, he certainly helps make a strong case for it:

One of my favourite moments from reading Fever Pitch as a teenager was the passage where Nick Hornby and a friend bunk off school to watch Arsenal play West Ham, a game which was being held on a weekday afternoon because there wasn’t enough electricity for the floodlights. Britain was enduring a three-day week due to the energy crisis, and assuming the ground would be empty, Hornby is stunned to find it packed with 60,000 people, all skiving off work, and he recalls his hypocritical juvenile disgust at the idleness of the British public.

The scene encapsulates the comic crapness of that period, one that many of us have enjoyed laughing at with the recent Rest is History series on 1974. I began reading Sandbrook’s book Seasons in the Sun afterwards, from where the material for the series was drawn; the early chapters comprise a highly entertaining account of what he described on the podcast as “the worst year in British politics”. Reassuring, perhaps, for those of us inclined towards pessimism, although to paraphrase Homer Simpson, perhaps it was only the worst year so far.

Nineteen-seventy-four saw two elections, the first of which ended in a hung parliament, with Labour as the largest party, and the second with Harold Wilson winning with a majority of 3. These were fought between parties led by exhausted leaders who had run out of ideas, with a third, the Liberals headed by Jeremy Thorpe, soon to be notorious as a dog killer. Britain had declined from the richest country on the continent to one of the poorest in western Europe, and its economy seemed to be falling apart.

During his troubled four years in office Edward Heath had called a state of emergency several times, culminating in ration cards for petrol and power restrictions. In 1973 Heath had “told his Chancellor, Anthony Barber, to go for broke”, Sandbrook writes: “It was one of the greatest economic gambles in modern history: while credit soared and the money supply boomed, Heath hoped to keep inflation down through an elaborate system of wage and price controls”. By October that year, “his hopes were unravelling at terrifying speed”.

The “Barber boom” led to “house prices surging by 25 per cent in just six months, the cost of imports rocketing and Britain’s trade balance plunging deep into the red”. Yet just a week after Heath had published details of his “Stage Three” incomes policy, “the Arab oil exporters in the OPEC cartel announced a stunning 70 per cent increase in the posted price of oil, punishing the West for its support for Israel. It was a devastating blow to the world economy, but nowhere was its impact greater than in Britain.”

The stock market lost a quarter of its value in just a month, while by January 1974 share prices had fallen by almost half in under two years. Just before Christmas, the government cut spending by 4 per cent, and Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Denis Healey, “warned his colleagues that Britain stood on the brink of an ‘economic holocaust'”. Nine out of ten people told a Harris poll that “things are going very badly for Britain” and nearly as many foresaw no improvement in the coming year. They turned out to be correct.

Amid trouble with the National Union of Mineworkers, in November 1973 “Heath announced his fifth state of emergency in barely four years. Floodlighting and electric advertising were banned; behind the scenes, the government began printing petrol ration cards. As the railwaymen voted to join the miners in pursuit of higher pay, it seemed that Britain was sliding into darkness. Offices were ordered to turn down their thermostats, while the BBC and ITV were banned from broadcasting after 10.30 at night. On New Year’s Day, with fuel supplies running dangerously low, the entire nation went on a three-day working week.” Happy days.

August 26, 2024

The craft of the historian, then and now

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

At Extra Muros, Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson contrasts the way historians used to research and write their books with the much more convenient, yet still imperfect methods of modern historians:

Another difference between ancient historians and their modern counterparts.

In days of yore, when visiting an archive required long journeys by sea, or, at the very least, a tiring trek o’er moor and mountain, considerate historians stuffed their works, with extensive excerpts from primary sources.1 Later, when trains, planes, and automobiles made it easier for people to visit the places where original documents could be found, these quotations shrank, eventually to the point where the word “citation”, which had once described the products of scholarly stenography, came to designate the label that enabled readers to locate the one-of-a-kind text in question.

No doubt, this development saved many trees from the woodman’s axe. At the same time, however, it changed the role played by historians. Rather than showcasing selections from the correspondence of old-timey movers and shakers, Clio’s children devoted most of the ink that they spilled to the explanation of texts that, despite the blessings bestowed by coal and petroleum, most readers would not be able to read.

Many a noble soul resisted the temptation to sacrifice verbatim reproduction on the altar of erudite interpretation. Realizing that readers might prefer a faithful facsimile of the real McCoy to a ponderous paraphrase, these saints of the scriptorium prepared primary sources for the press. However, rather rewarding these benefactors of the historically curious with condign praise, the denizens of the faculty lounge often dismissed them as “editors” and, in moments of especial cruelty, “antiquarians”.

In the fullness of time, the convenience provided by recent interpretations led many historians to prefer them to the relics of bygone bureaucracies. After all, reading a fresh-smelling, neatly-bound, clearly-printed, recently-written book asks less of a scholar than the deciphering of unfamiliar turns-of-phrase scribbled on the dusty, mite-bitten contents of cardboard boxes. Moreover, while the reader of a scholarly monograph often enjoys a wide choice of restaurants and coffee shops, and, at the very least, the delights of his own kitchen, the archival archaeologist must often make do with the decidedly institutional offerings of a ground-floor cafeteria.

Ostentatious reliance on recent interpretations also enables a scholar to exhibit his collegiality. “See”, the favorable footnote screams, “someone noticed your work and, marvelous to say, made use of it”. Conversely, failure to cite the work of a peer, let alone a scholar of superior standing, signals a degree of nonchalance bordering on contempt. “I am fully aware”, it says to the author of the unreferenced work, “that you poured your heart and soul, as well as a dozen years of your life, into your study, but I could not be bothered to type out its title, let alone turn a page to discover its date of publication”.

Finally, the making of new monographs out of the pieces of slightly older ones honors the founding fable of the research university, the myth of scholarly progress. The monograph still warm from the press, we presume, offers more in the way of insight and understanding than one that has been sitting on the shelf for decades. (If you wish to drive a dagger into the heart of an older academic, describe one of his earlier works, especially one that once made a splash in the kiddie-pool of his subfield, as “somewhat dated”.)2

Prejudice in favor of up-to-date interpretations creates a paradox. Historians, who exist to bring the past to life, favor interpretations created on the eve of now. The speakers for the dead (hat tip to Orson Scott Card) limit themselves to the thoughts of the living.

    1. For a brief, and delightfully documented, description of the work of the paragon of this approach to the writing of history, Angelo Fabroni (1732-1803), see Anthony Grafton The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) pages 82 and 83.

    2. Ask me how I know!

August 25, 2024

Woke libraries

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

Frank Furedi on the already well-advanced plan to turn public libraries into safe spaces for progressive indoctrination:

“Robarts Library” by mattclare is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

In recent times, the Library has become the target of what I characterise in my new book, as The War Against The Past. The current project of dispossessing Western society of its historical legacy has gained a powerful influence over the institutions of culture. That is why the Library – a repository of the knowledge and wisdom gained through the past – has become the target of cultural vandalism.

The promoters of the culture war in the Library often justify their action on the ground that their target is not so much the past – but the “racist past”. This is the argument used by the Government backed supporters of a campaign in Wales who wish to reorganise libraries along the lines of anti-racist principles. These racially obsessed cultural warriors insist that Libraries throughout Wales must embrace the goal of becoming anti-racists if the devolved Labour government’s pledge to “eradicate” systemic racism by 2030 would be realised. To ensure that libraries and the “racist” buildings holding their collection are cleansed of the sin of “whiteness”, a £130,000 project designed to indoctrinate local librarians in “critical whiteness studies” has been devised.

The project of racial indoctrination pursued in Wales warns that staff training sessions will be necessary to ensure that libraries align with anti-racist principles. However, it insists that such training sessions should not take place in buildings with a “racist past”. From the standpoint of the authors of the document proposing “critical whiteness studies”, many buildings housing libraries must be avoided because they serve as symbols of racism. Do they presume that the buildings in question can contaminate members of the public with the racist plague? Or are they merely interested in tearing down the walls of racist buildings in order to rebuild them as temples to the doctrine of decolonization?

In a world, where the racialisation of every dimension of life has acquired its own imperative, it was only a matter of time before buildings became demonised as racist. There is now a veritable literature authored by academic racial entrepreneurs who insist that buildings can be racist. One enthusiastic social scientist supporting this thesis offers numerous “examples of buildings being racist”. The racialisation of building and the material properties used in their construction has acquired the character of a veritable fetish. “Concrete, steel and glass buildings are ‘racist'” is the title of one contribution on this subject.

The Welsh Government appears to be consumed by the quest of ridding its nations of racist buildings. As far back as 2021 it published an audit of all such buildings as well as, schools, streets, statues and pubs that it regarded as the product of Wales’ racist past. In effect almost any building, street name or pub whose name was linked with a historical figure was by definition racist. Gone are the days when a pub is allowed to call itself Admiral Nelson or the Duke of Wellington.

The policy of renaming a building, street or a statue is bad enough. What is far worse is when a library is forced to subordinate its book collection to the imperative of racialization. In the name of ridding the book shelves of their “whiteness” and “racist past”, a library becomes a target of officially sanctioned cultural vandalism.

Throughout the Anglosphere. Cultural vandalism is justified on the ground of settling scores with colonialism, racism or white supremacy. For example, school libraries in Australia have removed “outdated and offensive books on colonialism” from their collection[v]. The purge of a school library in Melbourne was guided by Dr Al Fricker, a Dja Dja Wurrung man and expert in Indigenous education with Deakin University. In the course of auditing all 7000 titles on its library shelves. Fricker showed little nostalgia towards the collection. He stated that some of the books removed were almost 50-year-old and were “simply gathering dust anyway”. He stated that “we wouldn’t accept science books being that old in the library, so why do we accept other non-fiction books to be that old, because nothing is static”.

There is something truly disturbing about the idea that a library ought to rid itself of old non-fiction books. In my discipline of sociology that would mean ridding libraries of the 19th century pioneers of the field. In effect the call to reject old non-fiction books constitutes the annihilation of the intellectual legacy of the social sciences and the humanities.

QotD: P.G. Wodehouse’s unique way to get letters delivered

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In previous columns […] I wrote about Homage to PG Wodehouse, a 1973 tribute edited by Thelma Cazalet-Keir, sister-in-law of Wodehouse’s beloved stepdaughter Leonora. My final extracts begin with an account by the American Guy Bolton (1884-1979), who collaborated with the Master on no fewer than 21 musical comedies for the stage and became his lifelong friend. In one of my favourite anecdotes, he describes how he called on Wodehouse in London in the mid-1920s.

“He was living in bachelor quarters in a tall, old-fashioned building in Queen’s Gate. His flat was on the fifth floor. There was no lift. I was travel tired and I toiled up the long staircase, pausing on the landings to pant. I found his door ajar and, entering, I found him writing a letter. He greeted me with a cheery ‘Hurrah, you’re here!’ and added, ‘Just a tick and I’ll get this letter off.’

“He shoved the letter in an envelope, stuck a stamp on it, then went over to the half-open window and tossed it out. ‘What on earth?’ I asked. ‘Has the joy of seeing me brought on some sort of mental lapse? That was your letter you just threw out of the window.’ ‘I know that. I can’t be bothered to go toiling down five flights every time I write a letter.’ ‘You depend on someone picking it up and posting it for you?’ ‘Isn’t that what you would do if you found a letter stamped and addressed lying on the pavement? All I can say is it works.’ ‘Well I wish you’d write me a letter while I’m here in London. I’d like to show it round in America – a bit of a score for good old England’.”

Bolton goes on: “It was the second day after moving into a fourth-floor flat in South Audley Street when my doorbell rang and I opened it to a rather stout individual somewhat out of breath. ‘Are you Mr Bolton? I have a letter for you.’ The envelope was in Plum’s handwriting.

“He said he was a taxi driver but refused a tip, accepting instead a bottle of Guinness. While he was drinking it, I phoned Plum. ‘I have your letter,’ I said. ‘What?’ said Plum in a slightly awed voice. ‘I only threw it out of the window 20 minutes ago.’ ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘It’s by far the quickest way to send a letter to a friend in London.’ ‘Yes, indeed. The GPO had better look to their laurels and keep an eye on their laburnums’.”

Of his friend, Bolton says: “He has one quality that is rare in our age. It is innocence. It carries with it a trusting belief in the goodness of heart of his fellow men. Suspicion and distrust have no place in his nature. The characters in his books share in it – even his villains are likely to succumb before a finger shaken by one of those bright-eyed, no-nonsense Wodehouse heroines.”

Alan Ashworth, “That reminds me: A final homage to Wodehouse”, The Conservative Woman, 2024-05-21.

August 24, 2024

Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans

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

In The Critic, Daniel Johnson reviews Richard Evans’ latest book on the history of Hitler’s Germany, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich:

History records nothing more vile than Hitler and his henchmen. At the height of his power in 1942, Heinrich Himmler boasted that “the Führer has laid this very serious command [extermination of the Jews in occupied eastern Europe] upon my shoulders. No one can take it away from me.” By the end of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring had become a “voluptuary”, wearing lipstick and dressing in a toga, accompanied by a suitcase containing most of the world’s supply of the drug paracodeine. Joseph Goebbels, meanwhile, devoted his brief reign as Hitler’s successor to poisoning his six children.

The word “Nazi” has become synonymous with evil. Inevitably, therefore, it has also lost much of its original meaning — a case of Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black”. There is a danger that new generations will no longer know what made the Nazis and their crimes uniquely heinous.

Professor Sir Richard Evans has gathered a representative sample of “Hitler’s people”, ranging from the monstrous to the grotesque, into a single volume. It’s not a work of original research but a collective portrait of “the faces of the Third Reich”. Their unifying factor is the Führerprinzip — their unquestioning obedience to and adulation for Adolf Hitler.

Hero-worship in this, its most sinister form, is still with us. From Narendra Modi to Donald Trump, from Marine Le Pen to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, democracies are still menaced by demagogues. If we are honest, we have all felt the gravitational attraction of “charisma” — a secularised theological concept coined by Max Weber to denote the political authority exerted by an extraordinary individual. Evil often elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Charisma in this sense is contemporaneous with the emergence of Hitler. His cult of charismatic leadership is indistinguishable from the ideology of National Socialism. Cults of this kind had already been prefigured in his day by those of Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin. But the case of Hitler, who cultivated the phenomenon in its most extreme form, remains the paradigm. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and other contemporary despots are still in his debt.

Nazi Germany was indeed run by legions of little Hitlers, each demanding obeisance whilst lording it over their frequently competing or overlapping jurisdictions. The Third Reich was, in this sense alone, a diabolical reincarnation of the First, the Holy Roman Empire, with its patchwork of feudal domains. No medieval monarch, though, had the technological means to inflict such mayhem and misery upon humanity.

QotD: How did the Romans themselves view the change from Republic to Empire?

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

The Romans themselves had a lot of thoughts about the collapse of the republic. First, we should note that they were aware that something was going very wrong and we have a fair bit of evidence that at least some Romans were trying to figure out how to fix it. Sulla’s reforms (enforced at the point of a much-used sword) in 82-80 BC were an effort to fix what he saw as the progressive destabilization of the the republic going back to the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus (133). Sulla’s solutions were hamfisted though – he assumed that if he annihilated the opposing faction, crippled the tribunate and strengthened the Senate that this would resolve all of the problems. Cicero likewise considered reforms during the 50s BCE which come out in his De re publica and De legibus. The 50s were a time of political tumult in Rome while at the same time the last years of the decade must have been loomed over by the knowledge of an impending crisis to come in 49. Cicero was never in a position to enact his idealized republic.

Overall the various Romans who contemplated reform were in a way hindered by the tendency of Roman elites to think in terms of the virtue of individuals rather than the tendency of systems. You can see this very clearly in the writings of Sallust – another Roman writing with considerable concern as the republic comes apart – who places the fault on the collapse of Roman morals rather than on any systemic problem.

We also get a sense of these feelings from the literature that emerges after Augustus takes power in 31, and here there is a lot of complexity. There is quite a lot of praise for Augustus of course – it would have been profoundly unwise to do otherwise – but also quite a lot of deep discomfort with the recent past, revealed in places like Livy’s deeply morally compromised legends of the founding of Rome or the sharp moral ambiguity in the final books of Vergil’s Aeneid. On the other hand, some of the praise for Augustus seems to have been genuine. There was clearly an awful lot of exhaustion after so many years of disruption and civil war and so a general openness to Augustus’ “restored republic”. Still, some Romans were clearly bothered by the collapse of the republic even much later; Lucan’s Pharsalia (65 AD) casts Pompey and Cato as heroes and views Caesar far more grimly.

We have less evidence for feeling in the provinces, but of course for many provincials, little would have changed. Few of Augustus’ changes would have done much to change much for people living in the provinces, whose taxes, laws and lives remained the same. They were clearly aware of what was going on and among the elite there was clearly a scramble to try to get on the right side of whoever was going to win; being on the wrong side of the eventual winner could be a very dangerous place to be. But for most regular provincials, the collapse of the Roman Republic only mattered if some rogue Roman general’s army happened to march through their part of the world.

Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: August 6, 2021: Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living Standards, and Zombies!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-08-06.

August 23, 2024

How to bind loose pages together: a simple method

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

Annesi Bindings
Published Mar 7, 2021

This video demonstrates a very simple way of binding loose pages together. It is intended for people who have texts that they want to bind together, but who are looking for a better method than simply stapling, paper clips, or ring binding. The video is suitable for non-bookbinders and only requires minimal materials and PVA glue.

If you are looking for how to bind loose pages into a hardcover book, I demonstrate that in this video:
• How to Bind a Perfect-bound Book

August 20, 2024

Folk tale fictions about childbirth in “traditional cultures”

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

Jane Psmith finds that “everyone” has been doing certain “traditional” things during and after childbirth that she somehow wasn’t informed about until just a short while ago:

I just had a baby, which means I have once again been immersed in a sea of advice about how “traditional cultures” do things. And miraculously, every single kid, I discover some new practice I’ve never heard of but that apparently just everyone did until about five minutes ago. This time it was vaginal steaming. (Don’t Google, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.)

Which cultures, exactly? Oh, you know … the traditional ones, the ones whose folk wisdom is untrammeled by Western medicalization, where the pregnant woman is treated to the most nutritious foods, birth is a joyous event surrounded by supportive kin, the new mother puts her baby to the breast the minute he’s born, and she’s waited on hand-and-foot in bed for a month afterwards. So, you know, not the Ngongo of central Africa, who forbid women from eating meat, or the Netsilik Inuit or !Kung, both of whom send laboring women off to give birth in silent isolation, or any of the peoples from Fiji to northern Alberta who delay nursing for days … In fact, you might be excused if you began to suspect that the real measure of how “traditional” a culture is boils down to how much it resembles the practices of crunchy WEIRD people. You might even, if you had a nasty suspicious frame of mind, conclude that all this discussion of “traditional cultures” is just a disguised way of asserting our own preferences.

None of which is actually unique to the babies. (I’ve written about the babies before.) It’s not even unique to our era. The idea that we have been corrupted by civilization, that more primitive societies lead purer, nobler, more harmonious lives and enjoy access to truths and virtues we have lost, goes back millennia.1 And so, naturally, does the practice of using the supposed superiority of those other cultures as clubs to beat our own. Tacitus’ Germania, for instance, is a fun read if borderline useless as a source on the actual Germanic tribes — but it’s a wonderful guide to the angst of the early Empire and the pervasive fear that greed, luxury, and ambition had replaced the nobility, valor, and honor that had once characterized the Romans. Nowadays, of course, no one writes about the barbarians’ fides and virtus; instead you’ll get paeans to their idyllic existence lived in harmony with nature, their peaceful sense of community, and probably their joyful embrace of gender and sexual diversity. But either way, most of the books about small-scale societies are actually books about us and what the people writing the books think we lack.

Even professional anthropologists tend to assume that small-scale (this is a polite way of saying “primitive”) societies are more satisfying, meaningful, and fulfilling than complex ones. But in their case it goes hand in hand with another, allied assumption: that these societies have developed beliefs, practices, and institutions that work well for them. After all, the thinking goes, we know that people change their tools and their behavior when their environment changes, abandoning anything that no longer serves their needs and adopting new ways of life. Therefore, anything they haven’t abandoned must be somehow adaptive. Sure, these “primal communities” might do things that seem odd to us — things like torture, infanticide, ceremonial rape, cannibalism, and so forth — but they must serve some useful function or they wouldn’t have persisted. Thus, for example, the classic ethnography of the Navajo argues that their overwhelming fear of witchcraft, which led to pervasive anxiety, a hypochondriacal obsession with magical curing rituals, and of course regular violence perpetrated against suspected witches, actually had great benefits because it allowed the Navajo direct their stress and hostility at marginal members of the community and “keep the core of the society solid”.

The problem with this framework becomes obvious as soon as you mentally translate from some strange foreigners with funny (or no) clothes to, say, a business in the industrialized world. (Which can easily be larger than the kind of small-scale society that interests anthropologists.) No one would ever say, “Well, sure, the leadership of this company allows their mediocre employees to bully their highly productive peers out of the department so they do better in the stack ranking, but the company hasn’t gone bankrupt so it must be a savvy business move. Probably the solidarity created by banding together to surreptitiously delete someone else’s code enhances productivity more than losing a 10x engineer detracts from it …” But this is exactly what anthropologists (professional and armchair) are tempted to do when they set out to understand and explain another culture. Yes, sometimes apparently bizarre behavior contains a deep and hidden wisdom, but sometimes it’s just messed up.

That’s the case the late UCLA anthropologist Robert Edgerton set out to make in Sick Societies: that some primitive societies are not actually happy and fulfilled, that some of their beliefs and institutions are inadequate or actively harmful to their people, and that some of them are frankly on their way to cultural suicide. The mere fact that people keep doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually working well for them, but just as the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, your society can stay dysfunctional longer than you can stay alive.

    1. At least in the Occident. My informant tells me that the Noble Savage is a less common trope in, say, China. Maybe the Blue savages are just less noble.

August 19, 2024

Bret Devereaux on Nathan Rosenstein’s Rome at War (2004)

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

Although Dr. Devereaux is taking a bit of time away from the more typical blogging topics he usually covers on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, he still discusses books related to his area of specialty:

For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004). This is something of a variation from my normal recommendations, so I want to lead with a necessary caveat: this book is not a light or easy read. It was written for specialists and expects the reader to do some work to fully understand its arguments. That said, it isn’t written in impenetrable “academese” – indeed, the ideas here are very concrete, dealing with food production, family formation, mortality and military service. But they’re also fairly technical and Rosenstein doesn’t always stop to recap what he has said and draw fully the conclusions he has reached and so a bit of that work is left to the reader.

That said, this is probably in the top ten or so books that have shaped me as a scholar and influenced my own thinking – as attentive readers can no doubt recall seeing this book show up a lot in my footnotes and citations. And much like another book I’ve recommended, Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003), this is the sort of book that moves you beyond the generalizations about ancient societies you might get in a more general treatment (“low productivity, high mortality, youth-shifted age profile, etc.”) down to the actual evidence and methods we have to estimate and understand that.

Fundamentally, Rome at War is an exercise in “modeling” – creating (fairly simple) statistical models to simulate things for which we do not have vast amounts of hard data, but for which we can more or less estimate. For instance, we do not have the complete financial records for a statistically significant sample of Roman small farmers; indeed, we do not have such for any Roman small farmers. So instead, Rosenstein begins with some evidence-informed estimates about typical family size and construction and combines them with some equally evidence-informed estimates about the productivity of ancient farms and their size and then “simulates” that household. That sort of approach informs the entire book.

Fundamentally, Rosenstein is seeking to examine the causes of a key Roman political event: the agrarian land-reform program of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, but the road he takes getting there is equally interesting. He begins by demonstrating that based on what we know the issue with the structure of agriculture in Roman Italy was not, strictly speaking “low productivity” so much as inefficient labor allocation (a note you will have seen me come back to a lot): farms too small for the families – as units of labor – which farmed them. That is a very interesting observation generally, but his point in reaching it is to show that this is why Roman can conscript these fellows so aggressively: this is mostly surplus labor so pulling it out of the countryside does not undermine these households (usually). But that pulls a major pillar – that heavy Roman conscription undermined small freeholders in Italy in the Second Century – out of the traditional reading of the land reforms.

Instead, Rosenstein then moves on to modeling Roman military mortality, arguing that, based on what we know, the real problem is that Rome spends the second century winning a lot. As a result, lots of young men who normally might have died in war – certainly in the massive wars of the third century (Pyrrhic and Punic) – survived their military service, but remained surplus to the labor needs of the countryside and thus a strain on their small households. These fellows then started to accumulate. Meanwhile, the nature of the Roman census (self-reported on the honor system) and late second century Roman military service (often unprofitable and dangerous in Spain, but not with the sort of massive armies of the previous centuries which might cause demographically significant losses) meant that more Romans might have been dodging the draft by under-reporting in the census. Which leads to his conclusion: when Tiberius Gracchus looks out, he sees both large numbers of landless Romans accumulating in Rome (and angry) and also falling census rolls for the Roman smallholder class and assumes that the Roman peasantry is being economically devastated by expanding slave estates and his solution is land reform. But what is actually happening is population growth combined with falling census registration, which in turn explains why the land reform program doesn’t produce nearly as much change as you’d expect, despite being more or less implemented.

Those conclusions remain both important and contested. What I think will be more valuable for most readers is instead the path Rosenstein takes to reach them, which walks through so much of the nuts-and-bolts of Roman life: marriage patterns, childbearing patterns, agricultural productivity, military service rates, mortality rates and so on. These are, invariably, estimates built on estimates of estimates and so exist with fairly large “error bars” and uncertainty, but they are, for the most part, the best the evidence will support and serve to put meat on the bones of those standard generalizing descriptions of ancient society.

August 18, 2024

A view of the near future – “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

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

Christopher Gage suspects that Lionel Shriver’s new book Mania didn’t require a lot of deep thinking about possible future trends, just a few glances at the headlines in British newspapers would provide all the inspiration necessary:

Lionel Shriver’s novel, Mania, asks “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

Set in an alternate timeline eerily flirtatious with our own, Mania depicts a world in which intelligence and competence, those oppressive agents of the modern bête noire — contrast — provoke outraged mobs.

The Mental Parity Movement demands a Khmer-Rouge-style Year Zero. To suggest the existence of differing abilities and competencies is to be “brain-vain”. In this final “great civil rights fight”, stupidity is euphemised as “alternative processing”. The mob cancels Frasier for brain vanity. After regulations prevent Pfizer from hiring qualified scientists, a toxic vaccine lays waste to millions.

The protagonist, a free-thinking academic named Pearson, cancels herself after she adds Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to her class syllabus. But the book is not the offending item. The word “idiot” is illegal. So too, is the “D-Word”. Pearson falls foul of social services after calling her seven-year-old daughter “dumb”. Her daughter grasses her up for this most heinous offence. For her crimes, Pearson endures a mandatory course entitled “Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity”.

Akin to our culture, mass neurosis devours that of Mania. The citizens scour the earth for evidence of the gravest offence: cognitive bigotry.

The Mental Parity Movement even renames “sage” — stripping the haughty herb of its sapiosexual swagger.

Mania imagines a world in which mediocrity is brilliance and where platitude is profundity. I suspect Shriver wasted little time on research. Turning on one’s television furnishes a commonplace book with a bottomless wealth of material.

This week, Harry and Meghan embarked on an unroyal tour of Colombia. On the agenda was a summit on misinformation and online harm. At this “responsible digital future” fandango, the former soap actress and the former royal spermatozoa relayed their fears. Essentially, hordes of toothless oiks with Wi-Fi often say nasty things online.

On stage, Harry adopted the pose of the modern soothsayer. His tieless open collar oozed Sicilian ease.

Speaking in Adverb English, Harry avoided anything as threatening or as harmful as a declarative sentence. Harry talks as if everything is a question as not to arouse predators. The Prince droned on, auditioning the Californication of his mother tongue. The same mother tongue Harry’s ancestors spread around the globe via what some may deign to be less than inclusive methods.

How can I put this in Mania-approved euphemism? Harry is minimally exceptional. Harry is to intelligent thought what lead pipes are to potable water.

August 15, 2024

Yet another revisionist history of World War II

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest anonymous review at Astral Codex Ten, the book to be considered is How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O’Brien:

To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?

  • It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.
  • That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
  • I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.

I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.

The Wikipedia-Level Story of World War II (and O’Brien’s Counterargument)

To understand why O’Brien’s argument is so novel, you need to know the modern-day conventional understanding of the story of World War II. Here is my summary of the conventional narrative of World War II:

  • Germany conquered Poland and France. It tried to bomb the UK into submission/maybe enable an invasion. That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain, thanks largely to the plucky efforts of British airmen (memorably summarized by Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.)
  • Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.
  • The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and a bloody strategic defeat at Kursk, after which the Soviets relentlessly pounded Germany to defeat.
  • The US and the UK sent a lot of material help and eventually fought the Germans too, most notably in the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. However, most of the fighting was done by the Soviets.
  • It is very difficult to say how important the aerial bombing campaigns of the Western Allies were in defeating Germany. The Germans moved much of their production underground, insulating them from truly disastrous effects.
  • The U.S. mostly fought alone against Japan, which won a series of impressive early victories (e.g., Pearl Harbor, the conquest of Singapore) until the decisive Battle of Midway, after which the vastly larger US industrial base outproduced Japan into oblivion.
  • The US bombed the Japanese into submission by destroying Japanese cities, ultimately by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By examining where the Axis focused their productive capacities and how the Allies disrupted those capacities, O’Brien challenges virtually every part of that narrative:

  • The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing. The fact that British fighter planes were flying over their own territory meant their attrition rate of pilots and aircraft were far lower than the Germans’.
  • American and British bombing mattered far more to the war’s outcome than the battles of the Eastern Front, which consumed a much smaller portion of German expenditures.
  • American and British airpower made German battlefield victories on the Western Front virtually impossible and dramatically limited the force Germany could bring to bear in the East.
  • Japan (really, Japan plus the giant empire it conquered at the beginning of the war) was an industrial behemoth to rival the Soviet Union. However, the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet by American air and sea forces wrecked Japan’s economy.
  • The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war.

August 13, 2024

Feelings … nothing more than (climate) feelings …

Filed under: Books, Environment, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Have you been metaphorically beaten over the head about your climate sins? Your carbon buttprint? You know your very existence is a threat to Mother Gaia, right? Well, Katharina van Bronswijk is worried that you’ll stop listening to the neverending lectures about you and your evil externalities:

Climatism is a political programme bound to a broad social movement. Most of its momentum comes not from The Science or The Experts, but from diffuse cultural forces that we should probably try to understand, if only because they are driving our entire civilisation straight into the ground. Against all advice, I will therefore steer the plague chronicle into this ridiculous quagmire of leftoid green babble, with a look at our first lesson in Unlearnings, namely “Unlearn Repression”.

This superficial and disorganised essay is the work of an infuriating young woman named Katharina van Bronswijk. She’s a psychotherapist best known for her 2022 book, Climate in Our Heads. Fear, Anger, Hope: What the Ecological Crisis is Doing to Us. It belongs to that genre of inevitably unreadable monographs, in which the author herself appears on the cover, looking windswept, pioneering and undaunted:

“Climate feelings” are van Bronswijk’s niche in the extremely crowded enterprise of CO2-bothering. In “Unlearn Repression”, she argues that we should not suppress our negative feelings about climate change, but rather embrace them in constructive ways on behalf of the planet.

Now, van Bronswijk is the kind of deeply unoriginal person who just says the same things over and over. Everything she writes in “Unlearn Repression” flows directly from Climate in our Heads; she’s been digesting, reheating and reworking this same overboiled intellectual artichoke for almost two years now, through various media interviews and even in this English-language TEDx Talk. Throughout this woman’s work is the vague anxiety that the climatists have perhaps overdone it with doom and gloom, and that a lot of people have had enough of hearing about a climate apocalypse that never quite happens.

Van Bronswijk is naturally very dumb, but more than that she is painfully condescending, oblivious, verbose and just awash in litres of estrogen. I defy anyone to read her work and not come away from it a raging misogynist. This odious overpromoted schoolmarm belongs out of sight in a childcare centre teaching young children the alphabet. Perhaps she should also be in a choir, or part of a local environmental club dedicated to collecting litter in parks. That our society has denied van Bronswijk and so many others like her these proper outlets for their instincts and instead pushed them into public activism and intellectual production itself explains a great deal of what is wrong with the world.

“Unlearn Repression” opens with some autobiographical details, because of course everything van Bronswijk talks about is all about van Bronswijk. Like so many Germans of her generation, she was radicalised by school climate propaganda – specifically, by her teacher’s fateful screening of that classic propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth:

    Back then … I was happy for the welcome distraction of watching a film instead of doing normal lessons. But afterwards I was shocked and asked my mum for answers to all the questions and challenges. She didn’t have any solutions for me, how could she? I was alarmed and started to think about the impending consequences of climate change and what could be done about it. I found approaches in newsletters from NGOs and by reading up on animal and environmental protection … That was when my dream bubble burst and I realised: the world is unfair and, unlike all the Disney stories of my childhood, there will be no single hero*ine who saves the world. And there is no magical or technical miracle solution either.

Al Gore’s film so terrified the young van Bronswijk, that for a while she retreated into conspiratorial theories about why climate change is not happening, which qualifies our crayon psychotherapist to pronounce upon the psychology of those who deny the climate. This deeply evil and irrational movement is driven primarily by “white men”, because they “still enjoy most of the privileges in our society, and therefore have the most to lose”.

Taboo by Eric Kaufmann

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

In Quillette, John Lloyd reviews Eric Kaufmann’s Taboo:How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution:

Earlier this year, Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of political science, left Birkbeck College in the University of London where he had taught for twenty years. He was also head of the political science department there, and already had a number of deeply researched books behind him. But neither long service, departmental prominence, nor publishing success offered much of a defence against three separate attempts to cancel him. Indeed, his 2018 book Whiteshift told against him, since it argued, inter alia, that white majorities should have as much right to protect their identity and culture as minorities, a position now perceived by some as evidence of racism. “Repressing white identity as racist”, he wrote, “and demonising the white past, adds insult to the injury of this group’s demographic decline. This way lies growing populist discontent, or even terrorism.”

During the first part of his career, Kaufmann mostly kept his conservative views to himself, and with good reason. When he revealed them in Whiteshift, he became a marked man and spent several years fending off persistent efforts to strip him of his job and livelihood. His academic colleagues were generally unsupportive, and some of them participated in the campaign against him. So, he left Birkbeck for the University of Buckingham, the first of a small clutch of private universities created since the 1970s with the enthusiastic backing of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Buckingham takes pride in rejecting leftist monoculture in favour of an approach that privileges open debate without the risk of career obliteration.

These days, Kaufmann is — as the Scots saying goes — a “bonnie hater” (or what others might call a “happy warrior”). With his new book, he joins the best of those (disproportionately American) writers, journalists, and politicians alarmed by the activities of ideologically motivated individuals and organisations operating under the vague umbrella term “wokeism”. This inchoate movement, Kaufmann maintains, is deeply destructive of freedom (and of freedom of speech in particular), learning, virtue, public morality, patriotism, and emotional continence. It is, Kaufman recently told the Daily Mail, an “Orwellian threat to the [E]nlightenment — free speech, equal treatment, due process, objective scientific truth. I believe this new woke ideology threatens the foundations of our civilisation.”

Wearying of the years of harassment he received for his views (none of which, he stresses, was ever physical), Kaufmann moved to Buckingham. He wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to establish a Centre for Heterodox Sociology where progressive doctrines could be studied, dissected, and debated, a pursuit he believes would be impossible anywhere else. Buckingham received first prize for free speech in last year’s National Student Survey. It will now be required to live up to that distinction, since Kaufman’s approach — after many years spent avoiding conflict — has become direct and uncompromising. Any determined left-leaning student or scholar would find this an intolerable provocation — a display of prejudice and bigotry meriting expulsion from the scholarly body lest it spread to innocent souls insufficiently prepared to counter it.

The list of progressive doctrines Kaufmann has compiled to define “wokeism” is probably the most comprehensive assembled to date. Much of what concerns him most relates to education. He believes that higher education, in particular, has become a place of inflexible dogmas on race, gender, emotional fragility, and anti-white bias rather than a home of serious study, reflection, and discussion. But he does not believe—as many other critics of contemporary progressivism do—that this is a kind of warmed-over Marxism, in which the fragile student has taken the place of the exploited proletarian. Instead, progressivism’s concern for the outnumbered, the vulnerable, and the frail can be traced back to Christ’s teachings, and especially to his Sermon on the Mount reported in Matthew 5:5: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” This injunction is now marshalled into a secular hallowing of blacks (above all), Muslims, women, and LGBT individuals.

Kaufmann calls the upshot of this genealogy “cultural socialism” — a movement that privileges equality, but equality of outcome not merely opportunity. He points to a speech that US president Lyndon Johnson delivered to students at the historically black Howard University in 1965, in which Johnson claimed that “we seek not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result”. Suddenly, Kaufmann remarks, “the door was open to restricting liberty and equal treatment in the name of achieving ‘equality of result’.” Such a regime, he points out, will inevitably disincentivise effort and excellence. Why forgo pleasure to work hard when the dedicated and indolent alike will all be made equal in the end? It’s worth remarking, however, that socialism does not necessarily provide the low road to unequal equality. Kaufmann quotes the historian Eric Hobsbawm — an unapologetic communist until he died in 2012 — who insisted that privileging one group over another will destroy society by breaking it into mutually hostile communities.

The Original Secret History

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, France, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Ayling
Published Apr 28, 2024

This is the story of Procopius’s Secret History Of Justinian – originally written around 550, but not published until 1623.

In this video we look at how Procopius wrote the text, how it survived, almost unknown, for 1,000 years, how it came to be published in the 1620s, and the extraordinary ramifications when it was.

00:00 Introduction
00:44 The Original Composition Of The Secret History
02:40 The Survival Of The Text In Greek Manuscripts
05:56 The Rediscovery And Publication Of The Secret History
08:23 Secret Histories Go Viral

To learn more about Secret Histories, sign up to receive my catalogue of rare books devoted to the subject – https://www.tomwayling.co.uk/register

I couldn’t have made this video without the help of two works in particular. The first is Brian Croke’s magisterial Procopius: From Manuscripts To Books: 1400-1850. The second is The Secret History In Literature, 1660-1820 which is edited by Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell.

My name’s Tom and I’m an antiquarian bookseller – you can browse the books I have for sale on my website: https://www.tomwayling.co.uk/

QotD: The weird world of the Iliad

Filed under: Books, Europe, Greece, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Jane Psmith:] … as weird and crufty and full of archaism as it is, the Iliad is actually the first step in the rationalization of the ancient world. Like, it’s even weirder before.

Homer (“Homer“) presents the gods as having unified identities, desires, and attributes, which of course you have to have in order to have any kind of coherent story but which is not at all the way the Greeks understood their gods before him (or even mostly after). The Greeks didn’t have a priestly caste with hereditary knowledge, or Vedas, or anything like that, so their religion is even more chaotic than most primitive religions. “The god” is a combination of the local cult with its rituals, the name, the myths, and the cultic image, and these could (and often did) spread separately from one another. The goddess with attributes reminiscent of the ancient Near Eastern “Potnia Theron” figure is Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, or Athena, depending on where you are. Aphrodite is born from the severed testicles of Ouranos but is also the daughter of Zeus and Dione. “Zeus” is the god worshipped with human sacrifice on an ash altar at Mt. Lykaion but also the god of the Bouphonia but also a chthonic snake deity. Eventually these all get linked together, much later, primarily by Homer and Hesiod, but even after the stories are codified — okay, this is the king of the gods, he’s got these kids and this shrewish wife, he’s mostly a weather deity — the ritual substrate remains. We still murder the ox and then try the axe for the crime, which has absolutely nothing to do with celestial kingship but it’s what you do. If you’re Athenian. Somewhere else they do something completely different.

I also really enjoyed this book, and I think for similar reasons to you. Because you’re right, at the end of the classical world it wasn’t just the philosophers. One major theme in Athenian drama is the conscious attempt to impose rationality/democracy/citizenship/freedom (all tied together in the Greek imagination) in place of the bloody, chthonic, archaic world of heredity.1 It’s an attempt at a transition, and one which gets a lot of attention I think in part because people read the Enlightenment back into it. But my favorite part of the The Ancient City is Fustel de Coulanges’s exploration of the other end of the process: where did all the weird inherited ritual came from in the first place?!

The short version of the answer is “the heroön“. Or as he puts it: “According to the oldest belief of the Italians and Greeks, the soul did not go into a foreign world to pass its second existence; it remained near men, and continued to live underground.” Everything else follows from here: the tomb is required to confine the dead man, the burial rituals are to please him and bind him to the place, the grave goods and regular libations are for his use, and he is the object of prayers. Fustel de Coulanges is incredibly well-read (that one sentence I quoted above cites Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, “sub terra censebant reliquam vitam agi mortuorum“, plus Euripides’ Alcestis and Hecuba), and he references plenty of Vedic and later Hindu texts and practices too. I also immediately thought of the Rus’ funeral described by ibn Fadlan and retold in every single book about the Vikings, in which, after all the exciting sex and human sacrifice is over, the dead man’s nearest kinsman circles the funerary ship naked with his face carefully averted from it and his free hand covering his anus. This seems like precautions: there’s something in the ship-pyre that might be able, until the rites are completed, to get out.2 And obviously we now recognize tombs and burial as being very important to the common ancestors of the classical and Vedic worlds — from Marija Gimbutas’s kurgan hypothesis to the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the Yamnaya culture (Ямная = pit, as in pit-grave) — their funerary practices have always been core to how we understand them. But I’m really curious how any of this would have worked, practically, for pastoral nomads! Fustel de Coulanges makes it sound like you have your ancestor’s tomb in your back yard, more or less, which obviously isn’t entirely accurate when you’re rolling around the steppe in your wagon.

I’d also be interested to see an archeological perspective on his next section, about the sacred hearth. This is the precursor of Vesta/Hestia and also Vedic Agni, the reconstructed *H₁n̥gʷnis (fire as animating entity and active force) as opposed to *péh₂ur (fire as naturally occurring substance). I looked back through my copy of The Wheel, the Horse, and Language and (aside from a passing suggestion that the hearth-spirit’s genderswap might be due to the western Yamnaya’s generally having more female-inclusive ritual practices, possibly from the influence of the neighboring Tripolye culture), I didn’t find anything. I suppose this makes sense — you can’t really differentiate between the material remains of a ritual hearth and a “we’re cold and hungry” hearth, especially if people are also cooking on the ritual hearth so there’s not a clear division anyway. But if anyone has done it I’d like to see.

I don’t know enough of the historiography to know whether Fustel de Coulanges was saying something novel or contentious in the mid-19th century, but he seems to be basically in line with more recent scholarship even if he’s not trendy. But The Ancient City can be read as a work of political philosophy as well as ancient history!

Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.

    1. And of course that tension is extra intriguing because the dramas are always performed at one of these inherited rituals, in this case the city-wide Great Dionysia festival, although it was a relatively late addition to the ritual calendar. Incidentally it’s way less bizarre than the Attic “rustic” Dionysia which is all goat sacrifices and phallus processions. (There’s also the Agrionia in Boeotia which is about dissolution and inversion and nighttime madness, and another example of “the god” being a rather fluid concept.)

    2. Neil Price, in his excellent Children of Ash and Elm, says that the archaeological evidence seems to confirm this:

    “Most of the objects [in the Oseberg ship burial] were deposited with great care and attention, but at the very end most of the larger wooden items — the wagons, sleds, and so on — were literally thrown onto the foredeck, beautiful things just heaved over the side from ground level and being damaged in the process. The accessible end of the burial chamber was then sealed shut by hammering planks across the open gable, but using any old piece of wood that seems to have been at hand. The planks were just laid across at random — anything to fill the opening into the chamber where the dead lay. The nails were hammered in so fast one can see where the workers missed, denting the wood and bending or breaking off the nail heads.”

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