Quotulatiousness

July 30, 2023

“Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill clearly doesn’t think Caitlin Moran’s new book What About Men? is worth reading:

Men, I have bad news: Caitlin Moran is coming for us. She comes not to man-bash, not to holler: “All men are rapists!” It’s worse than that. She feels sorry for us. “I’m violently opposed to the branches of feminism that are permanently angry with men”, she writes at the very start of her very bad book. Instead she pities us. She frets over our toxic stoicism, our inability to be vulnerable, our unwillingness to be open about our fat bodies and small cocks. She wants to save us from all the “rules” about “what a man should be”. From all that “swagger” and “the stiff upper lip”. By the end I found myself pining for some good ol’ angry feminism. Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week.

What About Men? is, I’m going to be blunt, rubbish. I knew it would be from the very first page where Moran says that “when it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz”. Imagine using the word bantz unironically in 2023. What she means is that she’s done all the vagina stuff. She’s completed feminism. She’s known as “the Woman Woman”, she says, in an arrogant timbre that puts to shame those cocksure blokes who stalk her nightmares. She wrote the bestselling pop-feminist tome, How To Be a Woman (2011), which contained such gems of wisdom as “don’t shave your vagina” because it’s better to have a “big, hairy minge”, a “lovely furry moof”, “a marmoset sitting in [your] lap”, than a bald cooch. (Emmeline Pankhurst, I’m so sorry.) So now, naturally, she’s turning her attention to men. She’s discovered there is “a lot to say” about “men in the 21st-century”. Lucky us.

What she says about us is almost too daft for words. You realise by about page 22 that she’s never met a bloke from outside the media-luvvie, ageing rock-chick, “Glasto”-loving circle she famously inhabits. (I almost died of second-hand embarrassment when she said in How To Be a Woman that she lives an edgy existence, “like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash”. Maam, you write a celebrity column for hundreds of thousands of pounds for The Times.)

Even her cultural references in What About Men? are off, as befits a woman who is essentially a square person’s idea of a cool person. She laments that young men are in “the grip of a fad” for super-skinny jeans. Jeans so tight they look “sprayed-on”. Jeans so tight that the poor lad’s balls end up “crushed against the crotch seam, in vivid detail”. Really? It’s not 2006. Bloc Party aren’t in the charts. I’m no follower of fashion but even I know most young men haven’t been wearing bollock-squashing jeans for a few years now. My nephews wear baggy jeans, à la Madchester. Pretty much the only time you see unyielding denim these days is on the portly thigh of a mid-life-crisis middle-class dad. The kind of men, dare I say it, that Ms Moran mixes with.

Her commentary on t-shirts is a dead giveaway, too. The only fashion flare the tragic male sex is allowed to enjoy is the tee, she says. Especially past the age of 40. You’ll see fortysomething fellas in “band t-shirts, slogan t-shirts, t-shirts with swearing on”, she says. Will you? Where? Again, only in the knowingly dishevelled privileged set Moran exists in. Every man in his forties I know always manages to put a shirt on. So desperate are emotionally repressed men to express themselves, says Moran, that some even buy t-shirts “from the back pages of Viz” that say things like “Breast Inspector” or “Fart Loading: Please Wait”. Not once in my life have I seen a man in a Viz tee. The problem here isn’t men – it’s Moran’s man-friends. She could have saved herself the trouble of this entire book by befriending some normal blokes.

That Moran’s pool of men is shallow is clear from the fact that all the men she talks to for the book seem to be as steeped as she is in chattering-class orthodoxy. She includes a transcript of long chats with male acquaintances and, honestly, reading it feels like being stuck in a lift with craft-beer wankers who do IT for the Guardian. At one point she informs her readers that her male friends are mostly “middle-aged, middle-class dads who know about wine, recycle, have views on thoughtful novels” and would probably “cry if they saw a dog struggling with a slight limp”. Writing a book about men from the perspective of men like that is like writing a book about women from the perspective of Princess Anne.

July 8, 2023

QotD: The amputation of the soul

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

Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.

It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyound the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew Gardens and a jeweller’s shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.

Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.

It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. Mechanization and a collective economy seemingly aren’t enough. By themselves they lead merely to the nightmare we are now enduring: endless war and endless underfeeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where the executioner blows your brains out from behind. So it appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.

The gist of Mr Muggeridge’s book is contained in two texts from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity” and “Fear God, and keep His comandments: for this is the whole duty of man”. It is a viewpoint that has gained a lot of ground lately, among people who would have laughed at it only a few years ago. We are living in a nightmare precisely because we have tried to set up an earthly paradise. We have believed in “progress”. Trusted to human leadership, rendered unto Caesar the things that are God’s — that approximately is the line of thought.

Unfortunately Mr Muggeridge shows no sign of believing in God himself. Or at least he seems to take it for granted that this belief is vanishing from the human mind. There is not much doubt that he is right there, and if one assumes that no sanction can ever be effective except the supernatural one, it is clear what follows. There is no wisdom except in the fear of God; but nobody fears God; there fore there is no wisdom. Man’s history reduces itself to the rise and fall of material civilizations, one Tower of Babal after another. In that case we can be pretty certain what is ahead of us. Wars and yet more wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, Hitlers and super-Hitlers — and so downwards into abysses which are horrible to contemplate, though I rather suspect Mr Muggeridge of enjoying the prospect.

George Orwell, “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, 1940-03-30.

June 28, 2023

“I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ For Dummies“

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

Jane Psmith reviews The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, despite it not being quite what she was hoping it would be:

This is not the book I wanted to read.

The book I wanted to read was a detailed guide to bootstrapping your way to industrial civilization (or at least antibiotics) if you should happen to be dumped back in, say, the late Bronze Age.1 After all, there are plenty of technologies that didn’t make it big for centuries or millennia after their material preconditions were met, and with our 20/20 hindsight we could skip a lot of the dead ends that accompanied real-world technological progress.

Off the top of my head, for example, there’s no reason you couldn’t do double-entry bookkeeping with Arabic numerals as soon as you have something to write on, and it would probably have been useful at any point in history — just not useful enough that anyone got really motivated to invent it. Or, here, another one: the wheelbarrow is just two simple machines stuck together, is substantially more efficient than carrying things yourself, and yet somehow didn’t make it to Europe until the twelfth or thirteenth century AD. Or switching to women’s work, I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that with my arcane knowledge of purling I could revolutionize any medieval market.2 And while the full Green Revolution package depends on tremendous quantities of fertilizer to fuel the grains’ high yields, you could get some way along that path with just knowledge of plant genetics, painstaking record-keeping, and a lot of hand pollination. In fact, with a couple latifundia at your disposal in 100 BC, you could probably do it faster than Norman Borlaug did. But speaking of fertilizer, the Italian peninsula is full of niter deposits, and while your revolutio viridis is running through those you could be figuring out whether it’s faster to spin up a chemical industry to the point you could do the Haber-Bosch process at scale or to get to the Peruvian guano islands. (After about thirty seconds of consideration my money’s on Peru, though it’s a shame we’re trying to do this with the Romans since they were never a notably nautical bunch and 100 BC was a low point even for them; you’ll have to wipe out the Mediterranean pirates early and find Greek or Egyptian shipwrights.) And another question: can you go straight from the Antikythera mechanism to the Jacquard machine, and if not what do you need in between? Inquiring minds want to know.3

But I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing “Lest Darkness Fall” For Dummies, which I’ll admit is a pretty niche pitch, because The Knowledge is doing something almost as cool.4 Like my imaginary book, it employs a familiar fictional conceit to explain how practical things work. Instead of time travel, though, Dartnell takes as his premise the sudden disappearance (probably plague, definitely not zombies) of almost all of humanity, leaving behind a few survivors but all the incredible complexity of our technological civilization. How would you survive? And more importantly, how would you rebuild?

    1. I read the Nantucket Trilogy at an impressionable age.

    2. Knitting came to Europe in the thirteenth century, but the complementary purl stitch, which is necessary to create stretchy ribbing, didn’t. If you’ve ever wondered why medieval hosen were made of woven fabric and fit the leg relatively poorly, that’s why. When purling came to England, Elizabeth I paid an exorbitant amount of money for her first pair of silk stockings and refused to go back to cloth.

    3. Obviously you would also need to motivate people to actually do any of these things, which is its own set of complications — Jason Crawford at Roots of Progress has a great review of Robert Allen’s classic The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective that gets much deeper into why no one actually cared about automation and mechanization — but please allow me to imagine here.

    4. Please do not recommend How To Invent Everything, which purports to do something like this. It doesn’t go nearly deep enough to be interesting, let alone useful. You know, in the hypothetical that I’m sent back in time.

May 29, 2023

QotD: The size of the Great Library

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

… we can say that the Great Library was an extensive collection of books associated with the famous institute of learning and research that was the shrine of the Muses in Alexandria. That much is clear. But many of the other things often claimed about it are much less clear and some of them are pure fantasy, so it’s time to turn to the list of things that the “Great Library” was not.

    “It was the largest library in the ancient world, containing over 700,000 books.”

It is entirely possible that it was the largest library in the ancient world, though we have no way of confirming this given that we have little reliable information about the size of its collection. Despite this, popular sources regularly repeat the huge figures given for the number of books in the library in several ancient sources, and usually opt for the ones that are the highest. Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s popular history The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (Vintage, 2012) won critical acclaim and even garnered him a Pulitzer Prize, despite being panned by actual historians for its many howlers and weirdly old-fashioned historiography (see my detailed critical review here, with links to other scathing critiques by historians). Greenblatt’s account sticks closely to the nineteenth century narrative of “the dark ages” beloved by New Atheists, so it’s hardly surprising that the myths about the Great Library feature prominently in his account. Thus he informs his readers with great assurance that:

    “At its height the Museum contained at least half a million papyrus rolls systematically organised, labelled and shelved according to a clever new system … alphabetical order.” (Greenblatt, p. 88)

The figure of “half a million scrolls” (or even “half a million books”) is the one that is usually bandied about, but even that colossal number is not quite enough for some polemicists. Attorney and columnist Jonathan Kirsch plumped for a much higher number in his book God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism (Viking, 2004)

    “In 390 AD … a mob of Christian zealots attacked the ancient library of Alexandria, a place where the works of the greatest rarity and antiquity had been collected … some 700,000 volumes and scrolls in all.” (Kirsch, p. 278)

Obviously the larger the collection in the Great Library the more terrible the tragedy of its loss, so those seeking to apportion blame for the supposed destruction of the Library usually go for these much higher numbers (it may be no surprise to learn that it’s the monotheists who are the “bad guys” in Kirsch’s cartoonish book). But did the Great Library really contain this huge number of books given that these numbers would represent a large library collection even today?

As with most things on this subject, it seems the answer is no. […] Some of these figures are interdependent, so for example Ammianus is probably depending, directly or indirectly, on Aulus Gellius for his “700,000” figure, which in turn is where Kirsch gets the same number in the quote above. Others look suspiciously precise, such as Epiphanius’ “54,800”. In summary of a lot of discussion by critical scholars, the best thing to say is that none of these figures is reliable. In her survey of the historiography of the issue, Diana Delia notes “lacking modern inventory systems, ancient librarians, even if they cared to, scarcely had the time or means to count their collections” (see Delia, “From Romance to Rhetoric: The Alexandrian Library in Classical and Islamic Traditions”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 5, Dec. 1992, pp. 1449-67, p. 1459). Or as another historian once put it wryly “There are no statistics in ancient sources, just rhetorical flourishes made with numbers.”

One way that historians can make estimates of the size of ancient libraries is by examining the floor plans of their ruins and calculating the space their book niches would have taken up around the walls and then the number of scrolls each niche could hold. This works for some other ancient libraries for which we have surveyable remains, but unfortunately that is not the case for the Mouseion, given that archaeologists still have to guess where exactly it stood. So Columbia University’s Roger S. Bagnall has taken another tack. In a 2002 paper that debunks several of the myths about the Great Library (see Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 146, No. 4, Dec. 2002, pp. 348-362), he begins with how many authors we know were writing in the early Hellenistic period. He notes that we know of around 450 authors for whom we have, at the very least, some lines of writing whose work existed in the fourth century BC and another 175 from the third century BC. He points out that most of these writers probably only wrote works that filled a couple of scrolls at most, though a small number of them – like the playwrights – would have had a total corpus that filled many more than that, even up to 100 scrolls. So by adopting the almost certainly far too high figure of an average of 50 scrolls to contain the work of each writer, Bagnall arrives as a mere 31,250 scrolls to contain all the works of all the writers we know about to the end of the third century. He notes:

    “We must then assume, to save the ancient figures for the contents of the Library, either that more than 90 percent of classical authors are not even quoted or cited in what survives, or that the Ptolemies acquired a dozen copies of everything, or some combination of these unlikely hypotheses. If we were (more plausibly) to use a lower average output per author, the hypotheses needed to save the numbers would become proportionally more outlandish.” (Bagnall, p. 353)

Bagnall makes other calculations taking into account guesses at what number of completely lost authors there may have been and still does not manage to get close to most of the figures given in our sources. His analysis makes it fairly clear that these numbers, presented so uncritically by popular authors for rhetorical effect, are probable fantasies. As mentioned above, when we can survey the archaeology of an ancient library’s ruins, some estimate can be made of its holdings. The library in the Forum of Trajan in Rome occupied a large space 27 by 20 metres and Lionel Casson estimates it could have held “in the neighbourhood of 20,000 scrolls” (Casson, p. 88). A similar survey of the remains of the Great Library of Pergamon comes to an estimate of 30,000 scrolls there. Given that this library was considered a genuine rival to the Great Library of Alexandria, it is most likely that the latter held around 40-50,000 scrolls at its height, containing a smaller number of works overall given that ancient works usually took up more than one scroll. This still seems to have made it the largest library collection in the ancient world and thus the source of its renown and later myths, but it’s a far cry from the “500,000” or “700,000” claimed by uncritical popular sources and people with axes to grind.

Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.

April 26, 2023

HMS Prince of Wales, the media’s favourite target of abuse

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

Sir Humphrey defends the Royal Navy’s handling of the unplanned repairs to HMS Prince of Wales against the British media’s constant clamour that the ship is somehow cursed and not as good as sister ship HMS Queen Elizabeth by any measure:

HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and HMS Prince of Wales (R09) at Portsmouth in December 2019.

It’s never easy being the younger child. You don’t get anywhere near the same level of interest when key development milestones occur, people take your presence far more for granted and you often end up with your older sibling’s “hand me downs” and cast-offs. This is definitely true for warships where there is sometimes a perception that the first of class has a style and elan that other siblings lack. In the case of the QUEEN ELIZABETH class aircraft carriers it could be argued that QE has very much grabbed the headlines and glory while the PRINCE OF WALES (PWLS) has perhaps lacked as exciting an opportunity.

Following an incident which involved a propellor loss (something that befalls other navies too as the French carrier CHARLES DE GAULLE discovered), PWLS has had a challenging year in dry dock. The media are reporting it as the ship is broken, she needs a year in dock for extensive repairs and now todays Mail on Sunday story is that she has effectively become a “scrapyard” for her older sibling, providing parts and materiel as a donor vessel. It has hard to think of a less loved vessel in the eyes of the media. What is actually going on is a little more complex and perhaps boring.

In reality PWLS was sent to Scotland for an unplanned dry docking to resolve the issues with her propellor shaft. It seems to have become clear that this would take some months to resolve – which can feel a long time in a 24/7 newscycle, but realistically feels about right for repairing an extremely complex major warship and in line with historical timescales. The original plan for PWLS was that after she came back from the US last year, she’d not deploy in 2024 before undergoing a major capability upgrade anyway during the year. The purpose of this upgrade, which is standard for all newbuild warships, is to add on the new equipment and capabilities that have entered service since her build design was frozen many years ago.

Part of the challenge of building a complex warship is that at some point you need to lock the design down to enable construction to begin, rather than tinkering it to handle every new “oooh shiny” moment as new technology emerges. To solve this ships will usually enter service as per the specs agreed years before, then a period in refit is planned early in her life once the ship is working and commissioned to add on the various equipment items that have entered use. This is about bringing the ship up to the most modern standard at the time – throughout her life she will then continue to receive regular upgrades like this as new technology is developed.

In this case the plan evolved so that as she was in dry dock anyway the RN seems to have decided to merge the two pieces of work. What this means is that rather than return to sea in a meaningful way, PWLS will have spent about a year in both unplanned repairs and planned refit. Again this period of time out of service isn’t unusual for a major warship – if you look through most vessels lifespans, refits of 1-3 years are entirely common. It can though appear bad news if you interpret this data as saying that the emergency repairs will take a year.

April 25, 2023

QotD: What is military history?

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

The popular conception of military history – indeed, the conception sometimes shared even by other historians – is that it is fundamentally a field about charting the course of armies, describing “great battles” and praising the “strategic genius” of this or that “great general”. One of the more obvious examples of this assumption – and the contempt it brings – comes out of the popular CrashCourse Youtube series. When asked by their audience to cover military history related to their coverage of the American Civil War, the response was this video listing battles and reflecting on the pointless of the exercise, as if a list of battles was all that military history was (the same series would later say that military historians don’t talk about about food, a truly baffling statement given the important of logistics studies to the field; certainly in my own subfield, military historians tend to talk about food more than any other kind of historian except for dedicated food historians).

The term for works of history in this narrow mold – all battles, campaigns and generals – is “drums and trumpets” history, a term generally used derisively. The study of battles and campaigns emerged initially as a form of training for literate aristocrats preparing to be officers and generals; it is little surprise that they focused on aristocratic leadership as the primary cause for success or failure. Consequently, the old “drums and trumpets” histories also had a tendency to glory in war and to glorify commanders for their “genius” although this was by no means universal and works of history on conflict as far back as Thucydides and Herodotus (which is to say, as far back as there have been any) have reflected on the destructiveness and tragedy of war. But military history, like any field, matured over time; I should note that it is hardly the only field of history to have less respectable roots in its quite recent past. Nevertheless, as the field matured and moved beyond military aristocrats working to emulate older, more successful military aristocrats into a field of scholarly inquiry (still often motivated by the very real concern that officers and political leaders be prepared to lead in the event of conflict) the field has become far more sophisticated and its gaze has broadened to include not merely non-aristocratic soldiers, but non-soldiers more generally.

Instead of the “great generals” orientation of “drums and trumpets”, the field has moved in the direction of three major analytical lenses, laid out quite ably by Jeremy Black in “Military Organisations and Military Charge in Historical Perspective” (JMH, 1998). He sets out the three basic lenses as technological, social and organizational, which speak to both the questions being asked of the historical evidence but also the answers that are likely to be provided. I should note that these lenses are mostly (though not entirely) about academic military history; much of the amateur work that is done is still very much “drums and trumpets” (as is the occasional deeply frustrating book from some older historians we need not discuss here), although that is of course not to say that there isn’t good military history being written by amateurs or that all good military history narrowly follows these schools. This is a classification system, not a straight-jacket and I am giving it here because it is a useful way to present the complexity and sophistication of the field as it is, rather than how it is imagined by those who do not engage with it.

[…]

The technological approach is perhaps the least in fashion these days, but Geoffery Parker’s The Military Revolution (2nd ed., 1996) provides an almost pure example of the lens. This approach tends to see changing technology – not merely military technologies, but often also civilian technologies – as the main motivator of military change (and also success or failure for states caught in conflict against a technological gradient). Consequently, historians with this focus are often asking questions about how technologies developed, why they developed in certain places, and what their impacts were. Another good example of the field, for instance, is the debate about the impact of rifled muskets in the American Civil War. While there has been a real drift away from seeing technologies themselves as decisive on their own (and thus a drift away from mostly “pure” technological military history) in recent decades, this sort of history is very often paired with the others, looking at the ways that social structures, organizational structures and technologies interact.

Perhaps the most popular lens for military historians these days is the social one, which used to go by the “new military history” (decades ago – it was the standard form even back in the 1990s) but by this point comprises probably the bulk of academic work on military history. In its narrow sense, the social perspective of military history seeks to understand the army (or navy or other service branch) as an extension of the society that created it. We have, you may note, done a bit of that here. Rather than understanding the army as a pure instrument of a general’s “genius” it imagines it as a socially embedded institution – which is fancy historian speech for an institution that, because it crops up out of a society, cannot help but share that society’s structures, values and assumptions.

The broader version of this lens often now goes under the moniker “war and society”. While the narrow version of social military history might be very focused on how the structure of a society influences the performance of the militaries that created it, the “war and society” lens turns that focus into a two-way street, looking at both how societies shape armies, but also how armies shape societies. This is both the lens where you will find inspection of the impacts of conflict on the civilian population (for instance, the study of trauma among survivors of conflict or genocide, something we got just a bit with our brief touch on child soldiers) and also the way that military institutions shape civilian life at peace. This is the super-category for discussing, for instance, how conflict plays a role in state formation, or how highly militarized societies (like Rome, for instance) are reshaped by the fact of processing entire generations through their military. The “war and society” lens is almost infinitely broad (something occasionally complained about), but that broadness can be very useful to chart the ways that conflict’s impacts ripple out through a society.

Finally, the youngest of Black’s categories is organizational military history. If social military history (especially of the war and society kind) understands a military as deeply embedded in a broader society, organizational military history generally seeks to interrogate that military as a society to itself, with its own hierarchy, organizational structures and values. Often this is framed in terms of discussions of “organizational culture” (sometimes in the military context rendered as “strategic culture”) or “doctrine” as ways of getting at the patterns of thought and human interaction which typify and shape a given military. Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2006) is a good example of this kind of military history.

Of course these three lenses are by no means mutually exclusive. These days they are very often used in conjunction with each other (last week’s recommendation, Parshall and Tully’s Shattered Sword (2007) is actually an excellent example of these three approaches being wielded together, as the argument finds technological explanations – at certain points, the options available to commanders in the battle were simply constrained by their available technology and equipment – and social explanations – certain cultural patterns particular to 1940s Japan made, for instance, communication of important information difficult – and organizational explanations – most notably flawed doctrine – to explain the battle).

Inside of these lenses, you will see historians using all of the tools and methodological frameworks common in history: you’ll see microhistories (for instance, someone tracing the experience of a single small unit through a larger conflict) or macrohistories (e.g. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2008)), gender history (especially since what a society views as a “good soldier” is often deeply wrapped up in how it views gender), intellectual history, environmental history (Chase Firearms (2010) does a fair bit of this from the environment’s-effect-on-warfare direction), economic history (uh … almost everything I do?) and so on.

In short, these days the field of military history, as practiced by academic military historians, contains just as much sophistication in approach as history more broadly. And it benefits by also being adjacent to or in conversation with entire other fields: military historians will tend (depending on the period they work in) to interact a lot with anthropologists, archaeologists, and political scientists. We also tend to interact a lot with what we might term the “military science” literature of strategic thinking, leadership and policy-making, often in the form of critical observers (there is often, for instance, a bit of predictable tension between political scientists and historians, especially military historians, as the former want to make large data-driven claims that can serve as the basis of policy and the later raise objections to those claims; this is, I think, on the whole a beneficial interaction for everyone involved, even if I have obviously picked my side of it).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.

April 23, 2023

There’s a spectre haunting your pantry – the spectre of “Ultra-Processed Food”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business, Food, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Christopher Snowden responds to some of the claims in Chris van Tulleken’s book Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … And Why Can’t We Stop?:

Ultra-processed food (UPF) is the latest bogeyman in diet quackery. The concept was devised a few years ago by the Brazilian academic Carlos Monteiro who also happens to be in favour of draconian and wildly impractical regulation of the food supply. What are the chances?!

Laura Thomas has written some good stuff about UPF. The tldr version is that, aside from raw fruit and veg, the vast majority of what we eat is “processed”. That’s what cooking is all about. Ultra-processed food involves flavourings, sweeteners, emulsifiers etc. that you wouldn’t generally use at home, often combined with cooking processes such as hydrogenation and hydrolysation that are unavailable in an ordinary kitchen. In short, most packaged food sold in shops is UPF.

Does this mean a cake you bake at home (“processed”) is less fattening than a cake you buy from Waitrose (“ultra-processed”)? Probably not, so what is the point of the distinction? This is where the idea breaks down. All the additives used by the food industry are considered safe by regulators. Just because the layman doesn’t know what a certain emulsifier is doesn’t mean it’s bad for you. There is no scientific basis for classifying a vast range of products as unhealthy just because they are made in factories. Indeed, it is positively anti-scientific insofar as it represents an irrational fear of modernity while placing excessive faith in what is considered “natural”. There is also an obvious layer of snobbery to the whole thing.

Taken to an absurd but logical conclusion, you could view wholemeal bread as unhealthy so long as it is made in a factory. When I saw that CVT has a book coming out (of course he does) I was struck by the cover. Surely, I thought, he was not going to have a go at brown bread?

But that is exactly what he does.

    During my month-long UPF diet, I began to notice this softness most starkly with bread — the majority of which is ultra-processed. (Real bread, from craft bakeries, makes up just 5 per cent of the market …

His definition of “real bread” is quite revealing, is it not?

    For years, I’ve bought Hovis Multigrain Seed Sensations. Here are some of its numerous ingredients: salt, granulated sugar, preservative: E282 calcium propionate, emulsifier: E472e (mono- and diacetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids), caramelised sugar, ascorbic acid.

Let’s leave aside the question of why he only recently noticed the softness of fake bread if he’s been eating it for years. Instead, let’s look at the ingredients. Like you, I am not familiar with them all, but a quick search shows that E282 calcium propionate is a “naturally occurring organic salt formed by a reaction between calcium hydroxide and propionic acid”. It is a preservative.

E472e is an emulsifier which interacts with the hydrophobic parts of gluten, helping its proteins unfold. It adds texture to the bread.

Ascorbic acid is better known as Vitamin C.

Caramelised sugar is just sugar that’s been heated up and is used sparingly in bread; Jamie Oliver puts more sugar in his homemade bread than Hovis does.

Hovis Multigrain Seed Sensations therefore qualifies as UPF but it is far from obvious why it should be regarded as unhealthy. According to CVT, the problem is that it is too easy to eat.

    The various processes and treatment agents in my Hovis loaf mean I can eat a slice even more quickly, gram for gram, than I can put away a UPF burger. The bread disintegrates into a bolus of slime that’s easily manipulated down the throat.

Does it?? I’ve never tried this brand but it doesn’t ring true to me. It’s just bread. Either you toast it or you use it for sandwiches. Are there people out there stuffing slice after slice of bread down their throats because it’s so soft?

    By contrast, a slice of Dusty Knuckle Potato Sourdough (£5.99) takes well over a minute to eat, and my jaw gets tired.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to spend their money but, in my opinion, anyone who spends £6 on a loaf of bread is an idiot. Based on his description, the Dusty Knuckle Potato Sourdough is awful anyway. Is that the idea? Is the plan to make eating so jaw-achingly unenjoyable that we do it less? Is the real objection to UPF simply that it tastes nice?

April 13, 2023

QotD: The real purpose of modern-day official commissions

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

After the riots were over, the government appointed a commission to enquire into their causes. The members of this commission were appointed by all three major political parties, and it required no great powers of prediction to know what they would find: lack of opportunity, dissatisfaction with the police, bla-bla-bla.

Official enquiries these days do not impress me, certainly not by comparison with those of our Victorian forefathers. No one who reads the Blue Books of Victorian Britain, for example, can fail to be impressed by the sheer intellectual honesty of them, their complete absence of any attempt to disguise an often appalling reality by means of euphemistic language, and their diligence in collecting the most disturbing information. (Marx himself paid tribute to the compilers of these reports.)

I was once asked to join an enquiry myself. It was into an unusual spate of disasters in a hospital. It was clear to me that, although they had all been caused differently, there was an underlying unity to them: they were all caused by the laziness or stupidity of the staff, or both. By the time the report was written, however (and not by me), my findings were so wrapped in opaque verbiage that they were quite invisible. You could have read the report without realising that the staff of the hospital had been lazy and stupid; in fact, the report would have left you none the wiser as to what had actually happened, and therefore what to do to ensure that it never happened again. The purpose of the report was not, as I had naively supposed, to find the truth and express it clearly, but to deflect curiosity and incisive criticism in which it might have resulted if translated into plain language.

Theodore Dalrymple, “It’s a riot”, New English Review, 2012-04.

April 5, 2023

QotD: Harry Flashman’s adventures were not intended as “covert anticolonialism”

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

In their insistence on judging the value of a work of art principally in terms of its moral qualities, the publishers of today are heirs to a tradition of puritanism going back to Plato. But there has long been an anti-puritanical argument available too, the most notorious of them being the one articulated by Oscar Wilde: that to assess art in moral terms is to commit some sort of category mistake. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written, or badly written. That is all.” But that argument was never very persuasive by itself, and contains a large non sequitur. Why should that be “all”? Why can’t it be that part of what we’re saying in calling a book well-written is that it is morally exemplary? Surely it is those who call on us to leave our moral values at the door who have some explaining to do.

George MacDonald Fraser himself sometimes seemed to take Wilde’s view of the matter. He zealously repudiated, in his non-fiction, all attempts to defend his fiction as covertly anti-colonial, taking great pleasure in mocking critics who “hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism”. Was he “taking revenge on the 19th century on behalf of the 20th”? “Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy”? Were the books, as one religious journal was supposed to have claimed, “the work of a sensitive moralist” highly relevant to “the study of ethics”? No, he said, The Flashman Papers were to be taken “at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad”.

Is Fraser’s avowed amoralism the whole story? In one respect, the Flashman books are certainly amoral: they embody no systematic view that colonialism was wrong, illegitimate, unjust. (Nor, come to it, do they embody the view that it was right, legitimate and just.) As Fraser appears to see it in his fiction, empire was simply the default mode of political life in much of the world. This indeed was the case for much of human history. To be colonised was generally a misfortune for the colonised, but the individual coloniser was neither hero nor villain, just a self-interested actor acting on what he believed to be the necessities of his time and place.

We live in a world where we are constantly exercised by the problem of complicity. We wonder: am I complicit in climate change because I just put on the washing machine? In a sufficiently inclusive sense of the word “complicit”, of course I am: one of countless agents whose everyday actions add a tiny bit more carbon to the atmosphere. But outside an ethics seminar, what I’d tell you is that I was just doing my laundry because the clothes were beginning to stink.

Fraser was a deft enough writer to force his characters to confront the larger, what we today might call “structural” questions, in terms that belong to their own times, not to ours. At a pivotal moment in Flash for Freedom, Flashman is enslaved himself in America. Thrown into a cart with a charismatic slave called Cassy, he gets to hear her relish the irony of his position: “Well, now one of you knows what it feels like … Now you know what a filthy race you belong to.” Is there any hope of escape, he asks her desperately. None, she replies, “there isn’t any hope. Where can you run to, in this vile country? This land of freedom! With slave-catchers everywhere, and dogs, and whipping-houses, and laws that say I’m no better than a beast in a sty!” Flashman has the grace to be silent; what can he say?

Nikhil Krishnan, “Harry Flashman’s imperial morality”, UnHerd, 2022-12-26.

March 14, 2023

“Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do”

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

Bryan Caplan explains why he chooses to write the books he writes:

Almost by definition, writing controversial books tends to provoke negative emotional reactions. Anger above all. Anger which, in turn, inspires fear. And not without just cause; the sad story of Salman Rushdie sends shivers down the spine of almost any writer. If you write controversial books — or care about someone who does — you should be at least a little afraid of the anger your writing inspires.

[…]

In contrast, when I announced the imminent publication of Don’t Be a Feminist, the fear went through the roof. Several folks warned me of “career suicide”. Others told me that I had no idea what horrors awaited me. Friends staged mini-interventions on my behalf.

The underlying premise, naturally, was that the feminist movement is at once terribly powerful and horribly bad-tempered.

My best guess is that the warnings are overblown. Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do. Whether my guess is right or wrong, though, all this intense, widespread fear really ought to trouble the feminist conscience.

If I said, “Hi” to one of my kids’ friends, and they responded by fleeing in terror, my reaction would be, “Did I do something to scare him?” I would ask my kids, “Why was he so afraid of me?” If such incidents started to repeat, I would be severely troubled. “I thought I came off as a friendly dad, but I guess I’m seen as an ogre.”

The same applies if I were a feminist, and I discovered that critics are literally afraid to criticize feminism. If only a few critics feared feminism, my question would be, “What did we do to scare them?” If I discovered that fear of feminism was widespread, a full soul-search would be in order. “I thought we came off as a friendly movement, but I guess we’re seen as ogres.”

And guess what? Fear of feminism plainly is widespread.

What, then, are feminists doing wrong? Above all, cultivating and expressing vastly too much anger. Sharing your angry feelings is an effective way to dominate the social world, but a terrible way to discover the truth or sincerely convince others. Maybe you don’t mean to scare others; maybe you’re just acting impulsively. Yet either way, the fear feminists inspire is all too real.

March 4, 2023

Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

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

In The Critic, Robert Lyman reviews a recent book offering a rather more nuanced view of the British empire:

The book is a careful analysis of empire from an ethical perspective, examining a set of moral questions. This includes whether the British Empire was driven by lust or greed; whether it was racist and condoned, supported or encouraged slavery; whether it was based on the conquest of land; whether it entailed genocide and or economic exploitation; whether its lack of democracy made it illegitimate; and whether it was intrinsically or systemically violent.

Biggar’s proposition is simple: that we look at Britain’s history without assuming the zero-sum position that imperialism and colonialism were inherently bad, that motives and agency need to be considered and that good did flow from bad, as well as bad from good.

Whether he succeeds depends on the reader’s willingness to appreciate these moral or ethical propositions, and to re-evaluate accordingly. In my view, he has mounted a coolly dispassionate defence of his proposition, challenging the hysteria of those who suggest that the British Empire was the apotheosis of evil. Biggar’s calm dissection of these inflated claims allows us to see that they say much more about the motivations, assumptions and political ideologies of those who hold these views than they do about what history presents to us as the realities of a morally imperfect past.

He reminds us that British imperialism had no single wellspring. Most of us can easily dismiss the notion that it was a product of an aggressive, buccaneering state keen to enrich itself at the expense of peoples less able to defend themselves. Equally, it is untrue that economic motives drove all imperialist or colonial endeavour, or that economics (business, trade and commerce) was the primary force sustaining the colonial regimes that followed.

As Biggar asserts, both imperialism and colonialism were driven from different motivations at different times. Each ran different journeys, with different outcomes depending on circumstances. The assertion that there is a single defining imperative for each instance of imperial initiative or colonial endeavour simply does not accord with the facts.

Whilst other issues played a part, it was social, religious and political motives which drove the colonial endeavour in the New World from the 1620s: security and religion drove the subjugation of Catholic (and therefore Royalist) Ireland in the 1650s; social and administrative factors led to the settlement in Australia from 1788; and social and religious imperatives drove the colonisation of New Zealand in the 1840s.

In circumstances where trade and the security of trade was the primary motive for imperialism — think of Clive in the 1750s, for example — a wide variety of outcomes ensued. Some occurred as a natural consequence of imperialism. In India, Clive’s defeat of the Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah in 1757 was in support of a palace coup that put Siraj’s uncle Mir Jafar on the throne of Bengal, thus allowing the East India Company the favoured trading status that Siraj had previously rejected.

This led in time to the Company taking over the administrative functions of the Bengal state (zamindars collected both rents for themselves and taxes for the government). Seeking to protect its new prerogatives, it provided security from both internal (civil disorder and lawlessness) and external threats (the Mahratta raiders, for example). The incremental, almost accidental, accrual of power that began in the early 1600s stepped into colonial administration 150 years later, leading to the transfer of power across a swathe of the sub-continent to the British Crown in 1858.

Biggar’s argument is that, running in parallel with this expansion came a host of other consequences, not all of which can be judged “bad”. We may not like what prompted the colonial enterprise at the outset (not all of which was morally contentious, such as the need to trade), but we cannot deny that good things, as well as bad, followed thereafter.

February 25, 2023

Buttigieg isn’t covering himself in glory over his belated East Palestine train derailment response

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jim Treacher is clearly trying to at least pretend some sympathy for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but it’s a tough assignment:

Pete Buttigieg is the type of guy who walks into a job interview and says his biggest weakness is his perfectionism. As a kid he always had an apple for the teacher, and if she forgot to assign homework that day, he was the first with his hand up. He’s a repulsive little hall monitor, so all the other repulsive little hall monitors think he’s simply divine.

Mayor Pete and his fan club are having a really bad time right now, because for once he’s expected to actually do something. Producing results simply isn’t his specialty. After spending three weeks hoping the East Palestine, Ohio rail disaster would stop bothering him if he just ignored it, he finally showed up there yesterday.

And I’m starting to understand his reluctance:

What a visual, huh? He looks like a little kid playing Bob the Builder. It’s not quite Dukakis in the tank, but it’s close.

And then it got worse: He started talking.

He’s just so gosh-darn dedicated to his job, you see. His only mistake was listening to you people. He followed the norm. This is your fault!

And then he blurted out this instant classic:

Now, which of those words should you try to avoid when you’re talking about a disastrous train derailment? I’m starting to suspect this guy isn’t the unparalleled megagenius the libs keep telling us he is.

[…]

Team Pete is more concerned about reporters asking about East Palestine than about the disaster itself. The rest of us are just an abstraction to them. If they accidentally manage to help some of us, that’s fine. If not, that’s also fine. Either way, we cannot be allowed to stand in the way of their political aspirations.

Mayor Pete really did think this gig would be a cinch, didn’t he? Like, he could just do all the reading the night before the final and ace it. He’s positively resentful at being expected to do what we’re paying him to do. He thinks he’s too good for this job, which is why he’s very bad at this job.

Will Buttigieg’s tenure as transportation secretary ruin his presidential prospects? After all, that’s what this is all about for him. Maybe, maybe not. It’s not as if politics is about solving problems. All you have to do is claim you solved the problems, and your team will cheer for you no matter what.

February 21, 2023

Larry Correia’s In Defense of the Second Amendment

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Charles Curley reviews Larry Correia’s latest non-fiction book:

The name Larry Correia may ring a bell for Libertarian Enterprise readers. He has written fiction since 2008. He started with Monster Hunter, a self-published novel that later got a contract from Baen Books. He has since become a New York Times best selling author, and a finalist for the John Campbell award.

He also originated the Sad Puppies campaign, an effort to turn the Hugos away from their politically correct drift.

Yeah, guns and science fiction. TLE readers should appreciate that combination.

First off, this is not a scholarly exercise, nor does it break much new ground in the gun control arena. If you want scholarly language, look elsewhere, to, say, Don Kates, Stephen Halbrook, or David Kopel: in places this book is more of a rant than a treatise. So if you enjoy the snark of L. Neil Smith or H. L. Mencken, you’ll like this book. None the less, it has 12 pages of end notes and five pages of index. (But, oddly enough, no table of contents.)

Correia says so: “This book isn’t intended for policy wonks and pundits. I’m not an academic. I’m not a statistician. I’m a writer who knows a lot about guns.” (p. 23) And he’s tired of hearing the same tired old stuff trotted out again and again in any discussion about gun control. This book is his reply. “I won’t lie, I’d like this book to give ammo to the people on my side of the debate. To those of you who are on the fence, undecided, I want to help you understand more about how crime and gun control laws actually work.” (p. 23)

Chapter One is entitled Guns and Vultures. The vultures are the people who feed on every tragedy, trying to fit it into their agenda of more gun control and more dependence on the state. The people who heed Rahm Emmanuel’s famous dictum: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The people who wring their hands and say, we have to do something! even when the something has been tried before and found wanting, or even found impossible.

Much of the book is devoted to refuting the anti-gun arguments. I trust I needn’t outline those to TLE readers.

Note that while he’s confident that the book is well worth reading, he hasn’t actually read any of Larry’s fiction writing, so he can’t be dismissed as a fan who’d automatically recommend the book.

February 15, 2023

Refuting The End of History and the Last Man

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

Freddie deBoer responds to a recent commentary defending the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man:

… Ned Resnikoff critiques a recent podcast by Hobbes and defends Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of history”. In another case of strange bedfellows, the liberal Resnikoff echoes conservative Richard Hanania in his defense of Fukuyama — echoes not merely in the fact that he defends Fukuyama too, but in many of the specific terms and arguments of Hanania’s defense. And both make the same essential mistake, failing to understand the merciless advance of history and how it ceaselessly grinds up humanity’s feeble attempts at macrohistoric understanding. And, yes, to answer Resnikoff’s complaint, I’ve read the book, though it’s been a long time.

The big problem with The End of History and the Last Man is that history is long, and changes to the human condition are so extreme that the terms we come up with to define that condition are inevitably too contextual and limited to survive the passage of time. We’re forever foolishly deciding that our current condition is the way things will always be. For 300,000 years human beings existed as hunter-gatherers, a vastly longer period of time than we’ve had agriculture and civilization. Indeed, if aliens were to take stock of the basic truth of the human condition, they would likely define us as much by that hunter-gatherer past as our technological present; after all, that was our reality for far longer. Either way – those hunter-gatherers would have assumed that their system wasn’t going to change, couldn’t comprehend it changing, didn’t see it as a system at all, and for 3000 centuries, they would have been right. But things changed.

And for thousands of years, people living at the height of human civilization thought that there was no such thing as an economy without slavery; it’s not just that they had a moral defense of slavery, it’s that they literally could not conceive of the daily functioning of society without slavery. But things changed. For most humans for most of modern history, the idea of dynastic rule and hereditary aristocracy was so intrinsic and universal that few could imagine an alternative. But things changed. And for hundreds of years, people living under feudalism could not conceive of an economy that was not fundamentally based on the division between lord and serf, and in fact typically talked about that arrangement as being literally ordained by God. But things changed. For most of human history, almost no one questioned the inherent and unalterable second-class status of women. Civilization is maybe 12,000 years old; while there’s proto-feminist ideas to be found throughout history, the first wave of organized feminism is generally defined as only a couple hundred years old. It took so long because most saw the subordination of women as a reflection of inherent biological reality. But women lead countries now. You see, things change.

And what Fukuyama and Resnikoff and Hanania etc are telling you is that they’re so wise that they know that “but then things changed” can never happen again. Not at the level of the abstract social system. They have pierced the veil and see a real permanence where humans of the past only ever saw a false one. I find this … unlikely. Resnikoff writes “Maybe you think post-liberalism is coming; it just has yet to be born. I guess that’s possible.” Possible? The entire sweep of human experience tells us that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable; not just change at the level of details, but changes to the basic fabric of the system.

The fact of the matter is that, at some point in the future, human life will be so different from what it’s like now, terms like liberal democracy will have no meaning. In 200 years, human beings might be fitted with cybernetic implants in utero by robots and jacked into a virtual reality that we live in permanently, while artificial intelligence takes care of managing the material world. In that virtual reality we experience only a variety of pleasures that are produced through direct stimulation of the nervous system. There is no interaction with other human beings as traditionally conceived. What sense would the term “liberal democracy” even make under those conditions? There are scientifically-plausible futures that completely undermine our basic sense of what it means to operate as human beings. Is one of those worlds going to emerge? I don’t know! But then, Fukuyama doesn’t know either, and yet one of us is making claims of immense certainty about the future of humanity. And for the record, after the future that we can’t imagine comes an even more distant future we can’t conceive of.

People tend to say, but the future you describe is so fanciful, so far off. To which I say, first, human technological change over the last two hundred years dwarfs that of the previous two thousand, so maybe it’s not so far off, and second, this is what you invite when you discuss the teleological endpoint of human progress! You started the conversation! If you define your project as concerning the final evolution of human social systems, you necessarily include the far future and its immense possibilities. Resnikoff says, “the label ‘post-liberalism’ is something of an intellectual IOU” and offers similar complaints that no one’s yet defined what a post-liberal order would look like. But from the standpoint of history, this is a strange criticism. An 11th-century Andalusian shepherd had no conception of liberal democracy, and yet here we are in the 21st century, talking about liberal democracy as “the object of history”. How could his limited understanding of the future constrain the enormous breadth of human possibility? How could ours? To buy “the end of history”, you have to believe that we are now at a place where we can accurately predict the future where millennia of human thinkers could not. And it’s hard to see that as anything other than a kind of chauvinism, arrogance.

Fukuyama and “the end of history” are contingent products of a moment, blips in history, just like me. That’s all any of us gets to be, blips. The challenge is to have humility enough to recognize ourselves as blips. The alternative is acts of historical chauvinism like The End of History.

February 1, 2023

It’s the job of the music critic to be loudly and confidently wrong as often as possible

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

Ted Gioia points out that a lot of musical criticism does not pass the test of time … and sometimes it’s shown to be wrong before the ink is dry:

When I was in my twenties, I embarked on writing an in-depth history of West Coast jazz. At that juncture in my life, it was the biggest project I’d ever tackled. Just gathering the research materials took several years.

There was no Internet back then, and so I had to spend weeks and months in various libraries going through old newspapers and magazines — sometimes on microfilm (a cursed format I hope has disappeared from the face of the earth), and occasionally with physical copies.

At one juncture, I went page-by-page through hundreds of old issues of Downbeat magazine, the leading American jazz periodical founded back in 1934. And I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Again and again, the most important jazz recordings — cherished classics nowadays — were savagely attacked or smugly dismissed at the time of their initial release.

The opinions not only were wrong-headed, but they repeatedly served up exactly the opposite opinion of posterity.

Back in my twenties, I was dumbfounded by this.

I considered music critics as experts, and hoped to learn from them. But now I saw how often they got things wrong — and not just by a wee bit. They were completely off the mark.

Nowadays, this doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m painfully aware of all the compromised agendas at work in reviews — writers trying to please an editor, or impress other critics, or take a fashionable pose, or curry favor with the tenure committee, or whatever. But there is also something deeper at play in these huge historical mistakes in critical judgments, and I want to get to the bottom of it.

Let’s consider the case of the Beatles.

When the Beatles went on the road, stories like this followed them everywhere

On the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the New York Times bravely reprinted the original review that ran in the newspaper on June 18, 1967. I commend the courage of the decision-makers who were willing to make Gray Lady look so silly. But it was a wise move — if only because readers deserve a reminder of how wrong critics can be.

“Like an over-attended child, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is spoiled,” critic Richard Goldstein announced. And he had a long list of complaints. The album was just a pastiche, and “reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra”. He mocks the lyrics as “dismal and dull”. Above all the album fails due to an “obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition”. This flaw doesn’t just destroy the occasional song, but “permeates the entire album”.

Goldstein has many other criticisms — he gripes about dissonance, reverb, echo, electronic meandering, etc. He concludes by branding the entire record as an “undistinguished collection of work”, and even attacks the famous Sgt. Pepper’s cover — lauded today as one of the most creative album designs of all time — as “busy, hip, and cluttered”.

The bottom line, according to the newspaper of record: “There is nothing beautiful on ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”

How could he get it so wrong?

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