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| 4.27
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| Sep 05, 2019
| Oct 29, 2019
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Do our present cultural values reflect our cultural history? Umm, I would have thought so! Did Tom Holland need almost 600 pages to investigate this p
Do our present cultural values reflect our cultural history? Umm, I would have thought so! Did Tom Holland need almost 600 pages to investigate this premise? I am a great fan of the podcast “The Rest is History”, co-presented by Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Whenever Holland even mentions the word Christianity, Sandbrook immediately blurts out “here we go again”, which always makes me laugh out loud. Holland's point is that, while we readily acknowledge the influence, let's say, of Islam in the development of Muslim cultures, we take the historical fact of Christianity so much for granted that we are tempted to completely dismiss it as having actually been a vital influence in the formation of the Western Mind. (Indeed, we may be embarrassed to admit such an influence.) A crucial point here is whether you believe, as Holland does, that the intellectual transformation that occurred during the Enlightenment period was itself a natural consequence of Christianity's inbuilt capacity to continually reform itself. Did Jesus or Paul or any of the subsequent Church Fathers really design a religion that was so open to the movement of the “spirit” that it would eventually welcome a post-enlightenment scientific ethos that would do away with a personal God altogether? So, one characteristic of Christianity that Holland regards as rather special is the fact that it is not a purely rule-based religion. Many Christians have trusted that, if they truly open themselves to its influence, the Spirit of God will show them how to think and what to do that will be pleasing to God and will therefore be the right thing to do. Holland himself is clearly, at the very least, agnostic to the existence of any such personal God who would care to offer such guidance. His analysis of the influence of Christianity on the modern Western mind never considers whether a Christian or any other kind of God might or might not objectively exist. But at some level this issue is, if not the elephant in the room, then something that one might want to take into some consideration. If society tries to base itself on fixed rules, where do those rules come from? If society allows individuals to be motivated by some inner voice, where does this voice actually originate? If neither the rules nor the individual voices come from God, then the religious trappings dissolve and we are really talking about purely political systems that are either conservative (based on traditional rules) or liberal (based on the rights of the individual). Two problems arise if the religious trappings are taken too seriously. If the rules are taken as absolutely God-given then we end up with the tyranny of the divine right of kings. On the other hand, if a particularly strong-willed individual can claim that his personal ideas actually come from God, then he can whip up a crowd who will take up the new ideological thinking without much or any reasoned debate. (Needless to say, any ideological claim to represent the absolute truth will take on the same power as a supposedly divine revelation and will be equally dangerous.) The historical record that Holland describes so vividly swerves between an established church that tries to lay down rules and individuals who reject these rules and claim to be guided by the Spirit. One might argue that the endless ensuing religious debates, often spilling into ghastly levels of violence between factions, somehow informed Europeans how to go about resolving purely political differences in opinion. Since Holland focuses so exclusively on how he feels Christianity influenced the Western mind, this is the argument he implicitly makes. I suppose there is something to it. After all, a society constrained by a more rigid rule-based religion is likely to maintain a more rigid social and political system as well. Then again, oppressive rules have throughout history sparked independent-minded thinkers to lead popular revolt against the established order. Dressed in spiritual garb, wasn't that what Jesus himself was doing? In terms of promulgating a decent moral code of behaviour, is Christianity as special as Holland seems to be claiming? He realises that this could easily cause offence. After all, most if not all civilisations have included the so-called Golden Rule at least as an ideal to aim for within your own social group. But Holland makes the point that Jesus' message was stronger, in particular in the repeated claim that the last shall be first. The Old Testament makes this claim with regard to the Jewish people as a people, but Jesus was clearly applying it to individuals in a personal relationship with their God. Is it a “social gospel”? Not really in its original conception, because Jesus himself clearly believed that the last would have to wait until the Day of Judgment for God to make them first. But the idea that the meek shall (or at least should) inherit the earth surely did influence social movements from the Levellers and the Diggers in the seventeenth century right up to the socialists of the nineteenth century and beyond. Also, as Holland repeatedly points out, there is something rather unusual about the way in which Christianity gives a special twist to the traditional notion of making a sacrifice to the gods. A religion founded on the idea that God himself became human and sacrificed himself to redeem humanity is so weirdly clever that it was bound to have a special appeal. But how does it stack up against, say, Buddhism or Jainism with their emphasis on non-violence? Holland is frustratingly equivocal about whether he really thinks the Western mind has been tuned up to a rare degree of moral perfection by the special nature of Jesus' teachings. His moral comparisons remain exclusively focused on the Western mind before and after the influence of Christianity and so he deftly avoids making any direct comparison between modern nations who have been influenced by different religious traditions. These different world religions all demonstrate a rich cultural history illustrating humanity's various attempts to come to grips with those aspects of human experience that are at once seemingly of the most crucial importance but are also completely unknowable (by science as well as religion). Some may say that a lot of irrational superstitious nonsense has caused a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering in the world. Others would say, as Holland does, that “a myth ... at its most profound ... can be true”. I would argue a bit over the word “true” but presumably what he means is that myths can be profoundly useful in helping to communicate a certain moral and purposeful way in which society can come together and shape itself by influencing the mindset of its constituent individuals. When I first heard about this book, I was rather repelled by its apparent thesis. but I ended up finding it much more subtly thought-provoking than I expected. Holland relishes the narrative approach, which makes it almost impossible to flip back through the book to find any clear exposition of what he is ultimately trying to say. Since Christianity is completely enmeshed in the overall cultural development of the West, his thesis becomes a rather slippery thing that one can't wholeheartedly accept or deny. But I can imagine Holland waking up one morning, either as an avowed agnostic or atheist (I'm not quite sure how he would label himself), and thinking, now wait a minute, I've been far more influenced by this Christianity business than I have cared to admit. And he has certainly awakened that same thought even in me, an atheist with some leanings towards anti-theism! But I will still laugh out loud when Sandbrook finds his next opportunity to say “here we go again”. ...more |
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really liked it
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What a splendid little book! Kishtainy makes it perfectly clear that, for him, economics should be about making things work reasonably well for everyo
What a splendid little book! Kishtainy makes it perfectly clear that, for him, economics should be about making things work reasonably well for everyone. Needless to say, some economists have appeared over the years to be relatively unconcerned about the poorest in society, but Kishtainy gives everyone a fair hearing. And, in so doing, he achieves what he clearly set out to do, that is, to show that the field of economics has developed in a surprisingly logical way when considered from a historical point of view, and that it continues to evolve. The purely historical approach allows one to more clearly see how different ideas about money, trade and so forth emerged out of the changing social and political conditions, from the city states of classical Greece, the financial needs of kings and empires, through to the eventual transformation from feudal to industrial societies. During the Enlightenment, a more strictly logical approach started to be applied to the study of economics, with the development of theoretical models and attempts to (occasionally!) check the validity of these models against careful observation. Many people today probably view economic history mostly in terms of the switch from a Keynesian state intervention model to a neoliberal laissez faire model. The Great Depression and two world wars inevitably brought about more state control over the national economies of countries such as the US, the UK and of course in Hitler’s Germany. Meanwhile, the USSR had embarked on a very dramatic experiment in state control of their economy. The US and UK experiences can be fairly neatly summarized as the rise of Keynesian economics from the 1930s through to the 1970s, followed by its quite dramatic replacement by neoliberal thinking, as ushered in politically by Reagan and Thatcher. But Kishtainy embeds our modern experience into a long historical progression of evolving ideas about how groups of individuals can best provide each other with goods and services. Kishtainy focuses on the specific contributions of individual economists. Here, I will try to pull out some of the economic concepts that came to be developed alongside and in response to historical changes in society without repeating the credit he gives to the rather long list of individual thinkers. There are some very basic but essential themes. The role of money, the role of government, how individuals freely form a market for the buying and selling of goods and services, private property rights versus worker rights, the analysis of how a market economy might reach an equilibrium condition versus the sort of analysis required to deal with a dynamically changing economy, the application of mathematical models versus verbose but supposedly logical treatises, ideal assumptions versus imperfections due to power distortions and human irrationality etc. The earliest empires used money both internally and to facilitate external trade, but the leaders of the day probably thought more about how to maintain some form of law and order within their empires and how to militarily protect and expand them rather than the niceties of economic theory. In fact, Kishtainy essentially begins with Aquinas' squeamishness - inherited from Aristotle - about conducting business for profit, and especially the supposedly unnatural business of money begetting more money as interest payments. This reminds us that the word “economics” is derived from the Greek for household management and there was a time when it meant little more than that. Kishtainy points out that feudalism was all about the services expected to be rendered between the different rungs of a very fixed society. Until merchants shook things up with new adventurous foreign trading, the only perennial economic issue was how a monarch might persuade the people, whether nobles or peasants, to pay for new wars. But when European nations started to compete over the spoils of the exciting new foreign trade routes that were opening up, the mercantilist economists believed that a nation should focus on exporting more valuable goods than it imports in order to maintain or accumulate gold reserves. There was no appreciation that trading could produce a win-win situation; back then it was very much considered a zero-sum game. After all, there was little thought given to developing ways to produce things more efficiently over time. Once all the Spice Islands etc. had been discovered, it was known to be a finite world and so in a way it was a zero-sum game back then. Until the Americas were plundered, even the world's supply of gold was relatively fixed, making it a suitable form of money supply for the time. Of course, once gold and silver came flooding into Europe from the Americas, these precious metals instantly became far less precious, providing – not for the first time - an economic lesson about the instability that will occur if you suddenly increase the money supply; a lesson that those in charge of it have often found hard to learn. Gold enables armies to be mobilized quickly, which was hugely important back then and expressed the ultimate power of a sovereign ruler. But you can't eat gold, and the Physiocrats in France pointed to the crucial nature of the agricultural sector that literally provides the essential fuel for civilisation to run on. They recommended taxing the landowners instead of the peasant farmers. Of course it wouldn't have made much difference. The powerful aristocracy would simply have demanded higher rent from the peasants who were themselves powerless to escape their society's apparent demand that they live at no more than a subsistence level. The Physiocrats also consolidated the growing idea that money circulated around the national economy rather like blood pumped around the body. So, as the Enlightenment starts to take hold, we see how some thinkers started to try to build simple models of how the economy operated. Kishtainy doesn't include this in his brief history, but it should be mentioned that the Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun made profound observations about the history of civilisation which included some very original comments on economic issues way back in the fourteenth century. Anyway, in Europe, the classical economists appear on the scene in the eighteenth century, rolling their intellectual sleeves up and introducing crucial ideas such as national income, division of labour, and the potential benefit of free trade based around each nation's comparative trade advantages. Adam Smith even proposed the enlightened idea that workers' wages could go up above subsistence level if the demand for labour ever exceeded the available supply (which had historically only occurred after the great Plague reduced Europe's population by a third). But, as scientific and technological knowledge started to drive an industrial revolution, it soon became clear - at least in England - that the masses of agricultural workers, displaced by more intensive farming methods, were forming a huge supply of low-skill industrial labour for the newly developing industrial towns. Apart from Malthus' grim mathematical modelling predicting that an exponentially growing population would always outstrip available food supply, the development of economic models took a back-seat for a while. How, after all, can you dispassionately model an economy that is now reliant on a pool of workers, many of whom are struggling to even maintain subsistence living conditions? Should you include measures of starvation and misery? For, by the mid-eighteenth century, England had become a far cry from Smith's happy society of bakers and blacksmiths. Instead, a group of proto-socialists started to propose new models of a type of society in which workers would be valued as humans rather than as just another highly expendible raw input for the capitalist factories. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx was predicting that communism would inevitably triumph over an unsustainable capitalist model. Later, Lenin would rather bitterly comment how, by the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialist expansion had in fact sustained capitalism so that the workers back home were becoming increasingly satisfied with their own economic conditions. As a result, they became swept up into a nationalistic fervour and opted to waste their lives fighting each other in the First World War trenches rather than join an internationalist workers' revolution. By the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called neoclassical economists got back to the serious business of economic modelling. Most of the standard textbook notions now come into clear focus, such as how price is established at the intersection of supply and demand curves, the concept of marginal utility, perfect competition within an ideal market and a proper analysis of the cost of production etc. Most, if not all, of these notions live in a rather ideal and stable world in which economic activity is imagined to occur close to some sort of equilibrium condition. But, in the chapters that follow, Kishtainy shows how subsequent generations of economists mostly concerned themselves with exploring the crucially important departures from ideality as they arise in the real world. And so you get Pigou exploring so-called externalities – goods or “bads” that affect individuals who are not included explicitly in certain trading relationships. Nowadays the classic example is someone buying a tankful of gasoline for their car without paying the rest of society for the harmful emission of carbon dioxide it will produce. A possible solution is a carbon tax, which, of course, has to be imposed as a government intervention. This demonstrates how government meddling in the pure running of a free market can actually be seen as a way for externalities to be properly accounted. Other economists tackled the realities of imperfect competition, such as the power of advertising to create product differentiation. If you will only buy Coke rather than Pepsi, you may not mind if its price keeps creeping up. And, of course, you can also find situations where a buyer rather than a seller may have been able to shut out competition. The classic case is a company town where the workers have no choice but to sell their labour to the one big local company. Land, labour and money were the three main components of a feudal economy. Industrial economy modified this slightly into raw materials, labour and capital. Whereas money is primarily a convenient exchange medium for any form of business transaction being conducted in the present, money as capital represents an investment in a future where there is an expectation of economic growth. Earlier adventurous merchants had started it all off with the need to raise money to fit out trading ships that might sink on the open sea. There was a risk of catastrophic loss offset by the possibility of making a fine profit. Early industry also posed some risk, although one can't help thinking that industrial capitalists sometimes exaggerate this as a justification for not sharing the profits with their workforce. In the modern world, we also place a lot of value on knowledge. Obviously, scientific and technological knowledge was essential at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but it was something the capitalist would buy relatively infrequently, whenever he wanted to apply some technical advance to his manufacturing process. The factory workers themselves were not considered repositories of essential knowledge; they were deemed “unskilled” and simply had to be intelligent enough to follow instructions. But in today's world, many employees need to be able to acquire and use knowledge and so there is a need for economists to take “human capital” into account. Knowledge and the relative lack of it crops up in many places in the second half of Kishtainy's book. There is the scepticism that is often felt about whether governments and their civil servants know nearly enough to justify their poking their noses into the economic machinations of the nation in the first place. In a world where partial ownership of a company can be traded on the stock market, do investors have access to enough information to be able to judge what is an appropriate share price? What if investors somehow have almost perfect information – what does that imply about being able to predict the movements of the stock market? On the level of the pricing of everyday products like a second-hand car, Kishtainy discusses what one economist figured out about this. Since the prospective buyer will usually have far less information about the car than the current owner, they will not be prepared to pay top dollar for a good car since they can't be completely sure that it is a good car. Equally well, the seller of a bad car does not have to accept the low price that is actually appropriate for a bad car. So, most second hand cars will end up selling for some intermediate price. The owners of good cars will be reluctant to sell at that price but the owners of bad cars will be delighted. So, the market for second hand cars will be dominated by crappy cars! Unless, of course, every potential buyer is able to take their potential purchase to a good mechanic to get it properly checked out. But that introduces a new problem: how to find a good mechanic! According to the UN, unpaid work could be equivalent to as much as 70% of the world's economic production. Much of this work has been traditionally – and often still is – performed by women. So Kishtainy devotes a chapter to some of the feminist economists who have explored the issues of unpaid work and wage disparities in general. Back in 1992, George Soros famously sold short about $10 billion worth of pounds sterling, on the reckoning that the UK government would sooner or later be forced to unpeg the pound from the Deutschmark, which was forcing them to keep UK interest rates painfully high. Nowadays, most nations allow their currency to float on the open foreign exchange market, which allows for both a free movement of currency into and out of the country as well as enabling the central bank to control interest rates. Kishtainy also covers more recent dramatic financial crises such as the 2008-2009 global recession that was triggered by a bubble that developed within the US housing market. At the time, a huge volume of sub-prime mortgages were being recklessly lent out by unscrupulous bankers. If and when the bubble burst, these mortgages would be instantly exposed as enormously high risk, but were packaged up into securities that offered high rates of return for apparently low risk and were sold to global investors. The other big story that Kishtainy covers is the reemergence of high levels of both income and (especially) wealth inequality exacerbated by the neoliberal policies from the 1980s to the present day. Packed full of useful insights into how economists have refined their ideas over the centuries, Kishtainy makes every chapter an entertaining read. My only criticism: I'm pretty sure that his attempt at explaining why manufacturers will offer more product (supply) if they can sell it at a higher price is completely wrong. The law of supply simply states that there is an incentive to sell more of an item if it can be sold at a higher price because this should translate into increased profit. But, apart from that minor quibble, I highly recommend this book to anyone who would like an approachable introduction to the essential ideas that have been developed over time within the field of economics. ...more |
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| 0060744936
| 9780060744939
| 0060744936
| 3.96
| 8,011
| 2003
| Mar 14, 2006
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really liked it
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Although this book recounts well-known history, most of it was new to me. The “plot” is as dramatic as anything you might imagine in a work of fiction
Although this book recounts well-known history, most of it was new to me. The “plot” is as dramatic as anything you might imagine in a work of fiction, so I should warn readers that my review does contain spoilers... Leonie Frieda tells the amazing story of how a Florentine noblewoman, considered a poor match for French royalty, became the most significant power behind the French throne during the tumultuous period of the French Wars of Religion. The book is obviously extremely well researched and the story is told in such a compelling way that the historical characters really come alive. If you want to read the book, you may wish to stop here. If you have already read the book and would like a reminder about the historical twists and turns that Catherine was forced to live through, I hope you enjoy my brief synopsis. Catherine married Henry (who later became Henry II of France) in 1533 when they were both fourteen. It took eleven years for Catherine to become pregnant, but she subsequently gave birth to ten children, several dying before they reached their first birthday. Three of the males became kings of France. The first two were sickly and died young, so that Catherine acted as regent for much of their reigns. Catherine was a Catholic who was - in terms of her own private beliefs - relatively tolerant of the Protestant ideas being introduced to France by reformers such as John Calvin, a Frenchman who had been forced to flee to Switzerland in 1534. Catherine mostly just wanted to maintain stability within France, but the country was becoming extremely polarised between the Huguenots (French Protestants) and the ultra-Catholic faction. After years of the monarchy trying to accommodate these religious differences, in 1562 violence started to break out between the two sides. But ten years later, Catherine's son Charles IX invited the Protestant King of Navarre to come to Paris to marry his sister Margot. Paris was staunchly Catholic, but the bridegroom and his Protestant friends were promised a safe welcome. The Protestant leaders who arrived in Paris for the wedding had declared their intention to head north afterwards to help the Protestants in the Netherlands throw off their Catholic Spanish rulers. Charles had at one time been supportive of such a move, simply because he rather pathetically wanted to attempt to flex some military muscle. But Catherine saw how destabilising this would be for France. So, immediately after the wedding, Catherine and the dauphin (her younger son Henri) arranged to have the Protestant leader Coligny murdered, which they hoped would neatly decapitate the Protestant cause in France. Instead, the initially botched attempt ended up unleashing a wave of mob violence against the Huguenots throughout France. A year later, Henri goes off to become King of Poland, but Charles dies the following year so Henri grabs a load of jewels and sneaks out of Poland at night in order to get back home to claim the French crown as Henri III. Subsequently, he and his wife fail to have any children and so he ends up publicly proclaiming the Protestant King of Navarre as the legitimate heir to the French throne. This causes the Catholic League to plot to kidnap or murder Henri III so that they can control who succeeds him to the throne. Henri gets wind of the plot and he now arranges to have the top ultra-Catholic leaders murdered, where years before he had plotted with his mother to kill off the Protestant leadership. But this time, Catherine, ill and dying, is horrified. She dies the following year, six months before Henri III is himself assassinated. Amazingly, the Protestant King of Navarre does become the next king of France (as Henri IV). A few years later, he converts back to Catholicism and becomes a very popular ruler among non-extremists. But the Protestants feel betrayed and the ultra-Catholics remain suspicious, so he is subjected to numerous assassination attempts, one of which succeeds in 1610. The Protestant movement had initially been a reaction to the way in which the Catholic Church had morally degenerated by the sixteenth century. The Church had become such a powerful and wealthy establishment that the papacy attracted candidates whose qualities were – to put it politely – often more temporal than spiritual and who could bribe their way into office. Martin Luther had railed against the sale of indulgences, which were originally intended to be given in exchange for good works or pilgrimages performed by the individual. But, the test for Protestant heresy often revolved around whether they disavowed the Catholic belief that bread and wine really turns into the body and blood of Christ during Communion. It seems an odd issue to end up causing so much actual bloodshed. In reality, such differences in opinion, while considered important to some, ended up labelling French citizens as belonging to one or other of two easily identified groups with different political agendas, always a great recipe for a bloody civil war. Catherine and her sons were prepared to be politically flexible if it looked like it would ensure stability, but the actual leaders of the Protestants and the Catholic League didn't seem to care about avoiding all-out civil war. It's a story that is still all too familiar nowadays. Individuals get drawn into identifiable groups often based initially on reasonable differences of opinion. But, in the end, extremist leaders refuse to give up their dreams of power and fail to even attempt to find a compromise solution. Their followers then get whipped up into a frenzy and end up committing appalling atrocities against the other side. As the French say: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose! ...more |
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| Oct 01, 2001
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Given all the horror that has erupted in the Middle East recently, I thought it was high time I pulled this book off the top row of my bookshelf, blew
Given all the horror that has erupted in the Middle East recently, I thought it was high time I pulled this book off the top row of my bookshelf, blew the dust off and read it cover to cover. As a Brit, I have always accepted the notion that the British really screwed up in making various incompatible promises to both Arabs and Jews during the First World War. Tom Segev is one of a group of Israeli historians who question the usual Zionist narrative about the founding of the state of Israel. In One Palestine, Complete, it feels to me that he gives a pretty balanced account, although unfortunately the Arab nationalist viewpoint is mostly carried by the voice of only a single individual, Kalil al-Sakakini, while a much larger sampling of contemporary British and Zionist opinions are heard throughout the book. The British during the First World War wanted the Arabs on their side to fight against the Ottomans and promises were made. But words were cheap in the turmoil of war, especially when final outcomes remained uncertain. Some Brits back then were almost fanatically pro-Arab (well, Lawrence of Arabia was anyway). Interestingly, Segev makes it clear that most of the British military serving later in Mandatory Palestine also tended to privately express more sympathy towards the Arabs than the Jews. Ironically, Segev also makes it clear that, in agreeing to support Zionism in 1917, both Lloyd George and Balfour were influenced by the most classic antisemitic trope of them all – that the Jews actually controlled the world just below the surface of international politics. For they strangely believed that Jews inside both the US and Russia might have been able to help persuade these two countries to stay in the war. In 1917, the US had just joined so the concern about them staying in seems especially hard to understand. Chaim Weizmann almost single-handedly managed to persuade them to publish the Balfour Declaration in November of 1917 by entirely misrepresenting himself as the official voice of world Jewry. In fact, at that time, the vast majority of Jews living outside Palestine were probably not in favour of the Zionist project. After all, if you didn't particularly wish to move to Palestine, the setting up of a Jewish homeland might encourage your antisemitic neighbours to suggest to you that you now “go back home”. Two months earlier, The US President, Woodrow Wilson, warned the Brits that it was not a good time to support Zionism. But then he suddenly changed his mind. In the interim, Weizmann had leaned on the influential American Zionist Louis Brandeis to help make this happen. Segev suggests that this rapid turnaround seemingly provided Lloyd George and Balfour with a dramatic confirmation of their notions about the global power of world Jewry. But Louis Brandeis had provided an enormous amount of help to Wilson in his earlier political campaigns, so his influence was in fact purely personal. Politicians in the West were bound to think that if they helped the Arab world as a whole to gain - at some time in the future - full independence from Ottoman rule, surely there would be room within that vast geographical region for a few million Jews to eventually establish their own homeland or even possibly a separate independent state. Surely the 700000 or so native Arab Palestinians could be absorbed into places like the future neighbouring country of Jordan? As it turned out, many Palestinians did end up becoming fully naturalized citizens of Jordan, but only as a result of being pushed out as refugees in 1948. Given that the Balfour Declaration became incorporated into the official British Mandate, it is hardly surprising that the British High Commission in Palestine allowed and enabled the Zionists to build up a shadow government in waiting. But the Arabs had another distinct disadvantage. For, whereas Zionism as a movement had started in the 1880s and was gathering momentum and could tap into a lot of energy and money from American and Europeans Zionists, most of the Arab population were simply trying to recover from Ottoman rule and the mass starvation that had occurred towards the end of the war (which Segev describes very graphically). During Ottoman rule, when some Jews started to be allowed to settle in Palestine, the Arab leaders had been able to persuade the Ottomans to prohibit the selling of land to the incoming Jews. When the British reversed this rule, Jews usually found themselves able to purchase as much land as they needed in the early days. The problem, common in many parts of the world, was that the people displaced by these land purchases were often tenant farmers and it was absentee landlords who were happily selling the land that the farmers lived on. Sometimes, according to Segev, those selling the land were, somewhat ironically, also vocal Arab nationalists. There is plenty of criticism implied simply in the facts that Segev presents, but he never outlines what he thinks the British should have done differently. Should Britain not have supported Zionism? Several other countries made murmurings of support around the same time, apparently including Germany which rather panicked the British. And, while I have stressed here the weirdly antisemitic reasoning that Lloyd George and Balfour used to convince themselves to support Zionism, a more decent ethical response to the historical suffering of European Jews was also undoubtedly part of the picture as well. I have always tended to think of pogroms in Eastern Europe as a horror of the nineteenth century, but Segev reminds us that around 1918-20 there were the most appalling pogroms going on in what is now the Ukraine-Moldova region, where the White and Red Russians were battling things out and the Jews were often hated equally by both sides. This naturally put pressure on the British to loosen Jewish emigration into Palestine. It does seem strange that President Wilson was so easily persuaded to change his mind and to end up in support of the Balfour Declaration. Imagine how the peace talks of 1919 would have proceeded if the Jewish claim to land in Palestine – based on the fact that they had called it their own two thousand years earlier – had been employed by others as a precedent for their claims to ancient lands. But, having read Segev's book, I'm not convinced that the Balfour Declaration was the full extent of the problem. Segev quotes various British administrators who concluded that the Zionists were able to pull the strings during the British Mandate because there was no clear policy from London. Indeed it looks as though, while there was almost no explicit policy, there were some very definite implicit assumptions. It was assumed (with some justification) that, having just been released from rule by the Ottoman empire, countries like Palestine needed to develop over a period of time before become fully independent. The ostensible purpose of a finite duration Mandate was to enable this to occur. The next assumption was that it would be the minority European Jews who would inevitably be the group within Palestine most able to lead the country into full independence, whether the British stacked the game in their favour or not. And the final rather weak assumption was that the majority Arab population would understand that this could also all be in their best interests as well, since the European experience of the Jewish population would supposedly help modernise the country for the benefit of all. Could better planning have secured a more peaceful end result? Perhaps but it seems unlikely. Unfortunately, the British clearly didn't have enough self-interest in the area to justify pouring in the amount of money required to make any plan they might have had really work. The fact that the British were initially quite worried about the financial burden should perhaps have been reason enough to decline accepting the responsibility of the Mandate in the first place. But, having requested it, they then proceeded to treat the Arabs very much as second-class citizens, both with regard to accepted pay scales and how they were treated by the justice system. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that the Arabs would early on start to resent the clearly favoured status of the Jews. They had no real power to influence British policy and so violence against the Jewish settlers was the inevitable response. The Zionist plan was to use immigration to try to build up a Jewish majority, which was expected to take many years. But, when the British started to clamp down on illegal immigration, some Jewish factions turned to violence against the British. This hastened the desire of the British to leave in a hurry, with no time to even consider a proper handover to any international UN Mandate. The UN had in any case only just been created and would have been completely ineffective in 1948. Any hope for a peaceful coexistence had been totally shattered as a result of British policy. Looking back at the situation in 1917, and considering the Balfour Declaration as a done deal, it is nevertheless perhaps conceivable to imagine a relatively benign (if not totally fair) policy. The Arab population could have been explicitly offered the choice to peacefully join with the Jewish population in an attempt to create some sort of secular state or joint federation of Arab and Jewish states. This would have required the British to come up with the funds to enable it to commit to properly ushering in such an arrangement as smoothly as possible during the Mandate. Those Arabs who wanted to live in a clearly Arab majority state could perhaps have been offered very favourable financial incentives to move to Transjordan. I’m speculating wildly here, and I want to stress that I am not suggesting that this would have been a particularly fair proposal from the Arab point-of-view. The real point I am trying to make is that there may have been some room for cautious optimism back in 1917 but by 1948 the British had completely blown it. By then the Arab population had been conditioned to utterly resent the presence of the increased Jewish population. The Jews, still a minority in 1948, and having seen plenty of violent Arab resentment, correctly concluded that their only hope for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East required them to quickly attempt to drive out the Arabs. My reading of this book confirms my initial sense that the whole responsibility for the tragedy of modern-day Israel-Palestine lies with the lack of any coherent British policy or commitment to a peaceful future during the Mandate. And so, the road to someone else's tragedy was paved with a smattering of good intentions and a massive dose of extraordinarily irresponsible behaviour by a waning “big power”. One Palestine, Complete was published just before the complete failure in 2000 to resolve anything at Camp David. I'm sure there are some great books that have been written since then that also cover this period of history. But I did learn a lot from this one, and the personal recollections that Segev managed to dig up really make this earlier period of history come alive. I have already mentioned the unfortunate paucity of Arab voices. However, Segev does quote what one Arab nationalist (Aouni Abd al-Hadi) once said to the Zionist leader Ben-Gurion: “If I were in your place I would be a Zionist, and if you were in my place you would be an Arab nationalist like me.” In other words, there was no lack of mutual understanding, at least between these two important leaders. They would probably also have agreed with each other that a violent conflict was by then inevitably written into the future for both of their peoples to endure. ...more |
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I first read LOTR when I was a teenager. Now, on rereading it, it's fun to check some of the details of the original against the Jackson films. But I
I first read LOTR when I was a teenager. Now, on rereading it, it's fun to check some of the details of the original against the Jackson films. But I also get to clarify some points that I had either missed all those years ago or had forgotten since. For example, I totally forgot that Gandalf ends up sporting one of the Three Rings as he boards the ship along with Frodo and Bilbo as guests of the elves on their way to Valinor. Which begs several questions. How did he end up getting one of the rings that were meant for the elves? (The Silmarillion apparently explains that Gil-galad gave one of the rings to Cirdan who passed it on to Gandalf.) Another question: do Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel wear the rings or hide them out of sight? After all, it's a big deal when Frodo puts his ring on... Presumably people would have noticed if Gandalf always wore his, and if he wasn't careful he might have lost it fighting the Balrog. But where did he hide it? And how did these rings convey power to the owners if they didn't have to wear them? Also, when Galadriel tests herself to see whether she can resist taking the One Ring of Power from Frodo, I never before quite understood the extent of the temptation, given that the power of her ring, which supports the magical and peaceful existence of the elves at Lothlorien, will fade if the One Ring is successfully destroyed. Of course, she does have Valinor to sail off to. The other thing that really struck me on this second reading is how the style of writing in “The Return of the King” is often intentionally very archaic, with passages sounding like they might have been lifted out of the Old Testament. Anyway, overall, reading these books is a great way to escape into a fantasy world. The plot is wonderfully constructed. The characters don't have enormous depth to them, with extremely sharp distinctions between the good, who are mostly good-looking, and the bad, who – apart from the deceptive Saruman who has inwardly gone rotten – are invariably extremely ugly! Occasionally, the descriptions along the way of all the trees and the rocks and the valleys and the shadows and the tufts of grass can get a bit tedious. But, if you're in the right mood, it lulls you nicely before Tolkien inevitably ratchets up the drama again a few pages later. ...more |
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Very predictable well-meaning British Labour politician (prime minister from 2007-2010). Extremely dry style so not really terribly inspiring. This was Very predictable well-meaning British Labour politician (prime minister from 2007-2010). Extremely dry style so not really terribly inspiring. This was written during the COVID pandemic. Brown was dismayed by the lack of any real international solidarity when it came to sharing vaccine supplies, but he saw hope in people coming to some realization that they would have to work together in future to combat other global problems. He did not foresee the post-COVID inflationary pressures and the end of the sustained period of low interest rates. So his proposals to throw lots of money around to stimulate economic growth seem a bit dated right now. And with the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the start of a new war in the middle East, it feels like we need so much more than Brown's plodding prose to rekindle any "Power of Hope". Just throw money around and hope that economic growth will solve all of our problems. But he is right that all of our real problems must ultimately be solved by engaging better global cooperation. ...more |
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Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Polanyi's The Great Transformation both arrived in bookstores in the same year, 1944, just in time to advise the world
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Polanyi's The Great Transformation both arrived in bookstores in the same year, 1944, just in time to advise the world how to reshape itself economically once the war was over. While Hayek's book warned politicians about the dangers of interfering with a free market, Polanyi saw the concept of the self-regulating market as a stark utopia that would already have destroyed society had society not at times taken steps to protect itself. Whatever your political and economic beliefs, this book is well worth reading. The major points are made with clarity but some detailed points left me scratching my head. For those of us who appreciate that in many ways the world seems to be a better place than 200 years ago but wonder whether certain negative consequences that have gone along with “progress” could have been avoided, Polanyi's work is a great place to start. He relates a rather well-known story, how in 1834 the British parliament enacted a brutal new Poor Law while continuing to pass laws enabling increasing swathes of agricultural land to be enclosed and huge numbers of farm labourers to be displaced. Thus, a wave of men, women and children were swept into the new industrial towns. The output from the new factories were commodities to be sold in the market. The inputs - labour, land and money – were also treated as commodities, but Polanyi calls this a fictitious designation. For, whereas a linen shirt might sell for almost nothing if there is a glut on the market, it is a moral outrage for humans to become valued at nothing if there is a glut of unskilled labour available, as there was at the time. Back then, the prevailing notion was that the manual labour required by keep society functioning would only get done if there was a very large mass of the population who were driven by hunger to perform those jobs. The iron law of wages proclaimed that the minimum wage would be automatically set at an extremely low subsistence level. But, with a huge glut of unskilled labour and a merciless Poor Law, additional profits could be made by pushing that subsistence level even lower. If some of the newly formed proletariat literally starved to death, there would be other stronger specimens who would still show up to work. And they wouldn't complain if the working conditions were appallingly unhealthy and brutally dangerous. Polanyi does not dwell on the moral outrage, but focuses instead on demonstrating his logical case that society must inevitably be destroyed if it is forced to become subservient to the stark “utopia” of a purely self-regulating market. Nowadays, progressive economists like Kate Raworth stress the idea that we need to put our economic system back where it belongs – embedded in society and the natural world. This is precisely what Polanyi was saying 80 years ago. Two extreme political reactions had already occurred by the time he wrote this book, namely communism and fascism. The socialist impulse seems to us the more obvious reaction, and was developing during the nineteenth century in Britain alongside the rise of industrial capitalism. Neoliberalism stresses freedom for entrepreneurs and investors to move society's overall material productive capacity forward. But socialists (like Polanyi himself) aim to protect the less powerful members of society (who also happen to perform most of the work) from the dislocating effects of laissez faire capitalism. The freedom for investors to make economic “improvements” must be balanced against the need to protect the survival and “habitations” of the individual workers. (This terminology reflects Polanyi's analysis of the land enclosures that removed agricultural workers' cottages from the land to make way for new methods that ultimately improved agricultural yields.) Polanyi presents a rather controversial view about the rise of fascism. Instead of the usual notion that fascism was largely a reaction against the threat of communism (which itself was an extreme version of the socialist reaction against capitalism), Polanyi views communism and fascism as two alternative primary attempts for society to protect itself from an economic system that threatens to destroy it. Consider the British experience. As he writes earlier in the book, both the working class and the landed aristocracy had reasons to prefer the “good old days” to the horrors of the nineteenth century industrial towns. Then came the Great Depression and the First World War. By the thirties, some workers (and especially their intellectual sympathisers) would look towards socialism and perhaps ultimately communism for a better way, while some of the aristocracy flirted with fascism. The socialist reaction promised to save society by looking after every one of its members and thus guaranteeing a basic freedom from want, while the fascist reaction promised safety and stability by creating a strong nationalistic society. Both solutions ensured that society would control the economy and not the other way around. Today, Polanyi's fictitious commodities are still present. The labour commodity is still often vulnerable, with a “precariat” with zero hours contract jobs. The land commodity is not only unaffordable housing but also a degraded environment. Whereas the enclosures produced short-term dislocation and pain but ultimately improved agricultural productivity, today we must worry about how long-term unsustainable “improvements” in our standard of living are causing long-term negative consequences such as climate change to our global “habitation”. Polanyi's analysis of money as the third fictitious commodity centred on the disruption to small business due to the inadequacies of the supposedly self-regulating effects of tying national currencies to the gold standard. Nowadays the US (and other) governments still expect their financial markets to largely regulate themselves, which they singularly fail to do appropriately. When things go really wrong, “society” has to suffer the ensuing recession and is also expected to bail out the financial sector. Polanyi ends with a few words about freedom in a complex society. Free enterprise and private ownership are important elements of a healthy society that is not overly controlled by a centralised state. There will always be a tension between the liberal instinct to not unduly hamper such freedoms with excessive state regulation and the need to protect other freedoms. In particular, there is always the need to provide to all members of society the basic freedom from want and misery. Many neoliberals like Hayek do (to be fair) occasionally stress that basic welfare provisions should be provided by the state. The question remains, whether completely structuring society around a market that tries to find the “right” price for everything appears to promote individual freedoms but in fact forces all individuals to conform to the false ideal of an ever-calculating “economic man”. State planning tends to be derided by neoliberals as a threat to freedom. But making society almost completely subservient to a market economy also involves an assault on certain types of freedom. In any case, Polanyi asserts that laissez faire capitalism did not arrive naturally and unplanned but was in the first place forced upon society by the enactment of considerable government regulations. He never says this, but it seems to me that the simplicity of a purely self-regulating market is a projection into the field of economics of the scientific impulse to try to find the simplest model possible. It would be so very convenient if this model had sufficient power to provide an invisible hand that would appropriately rule every aspect of our lives. But we have to balance our use of human labour and the living conditions that society can provide for its least powerful members - as well as a need to live sustainably on a finite planet - against our desire to make endless market-driven improvements to our collective standard of living. Unfortunately we now know that a simple market mechanism never finds the right price for Polanyi's fictitious commodities. ...more |
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I enjoyed reading several Dickens novels when I was a teenager. But then for years I left him alone. What I remembered of his writing led me to dismis
I enjoyed reading several Dickens novels when I was a teenager. But then for years I left him alone. What I remembered of his writing led me to dismiss it as too remote in time and his unique style had lost its appeal for me. Some of his characters seemed to me overdrawn to the point of being freakish caricatures and therefore entirely unrealistic. And the coincidences that were sometimes required to make his plots work stretched too far my willingness to suspend disbelief. But then I watched the wonderful 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House and discovered that here was a plot and some characters I could truly appreciate. And so I returned to sporadically reading Dickens again. A couple of weeks ago I noticed we had a copy of Little Dorrit on our bookshelves and I grabbed it on a whim. Up until then I had probably assumed (correctly as it turned out) that the title character would be another absurdly angelic Little Nell type character and I had found The Old Curiosity Shop to be rather disappointing. But I have just finished reading Little Dorrit and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Right at the beginning, Dickens introduces a rather mysterious assortment of characters. Two are languishing in a jail in Marseilles, several get to know each other while being held in quarantine also in Marseilles, and one of these is returning from having spent the last twenty years in China. Yes, that they all happen to be in Marseilles at the same time is one of those coincidences that Dickens loves to try to get away with. In fact, the jail need not even be in Marseilles, it could be anywhere for the plot to work just as well. Some of the minor characters are indeed strange and ridiculous creatures as expected. Pancks the rent collector snorts and steams his way everywhere like a tugboat and Dickens insists on reminding the reader of this charming simile every time Pancks appears until it almost loses some of its charm. Two characters talk complete nonsense the whole time, Flora in lengthy monologues and her late husband's aunt in short bursts. But there are plenty of characters who are brilliantly and carefully drawn so that Dickens can make his usual sharp observations about Victorian society. This is what I have come to admire most about Dickens' writing. There is the rollicking fun of his crazy characters – I seem to have been won over by these again - and usually a strong plot that carries the whole thing on. In Little Dorrit he particularly wanted to give the reader a considerable sense of mystery, sustained through much of the book, as to what might draw his set of disparate characters together. Gradually he connects them up and towards the end he suddenly tightens the knot. But there is also the underlying critique of society and a morality tale told without any lecturing or preaching. And, far from seeming too remote in time, I have come to appreciate how relevant to today’s world some of Dickens’ satire remains. Clennam’s experience with the Circumlocution Office has recently been mirrored almost exactly in my own current experience with the UK’s Probate Office, which proudly displays an equivalent level of expertise in ensuring that no business with them ever makes any discernible progress. My only criticism would be that Dickens’ story gets wrapped up in such a hurry at the end, and of course in a way that leads me to raise my eyebrows at the unlikelihood of it all. But it's amazing what deficiencies you are prepared to overlook when overall a book has given you so much pleasure. ...more |
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In 2018 William Nordhaus became a co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on attempting to integrate climate change
In 2018 William Nordhaus became a co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on attempting to integrate climate change issues into mainstream economics. He began studying this problem back in the early 1990s, when acid rain and the ozone hole were a bigger public concern than greenhouse gas emissions. The Spirit of Green is quite effectively written in that it clearly conveys Nordhaus' ideas, and so this review will mostly focus on the actual ideas themselves. He finished writing the book as COVID-19 closed in around us all, and so he chose to add some thoughts about the need for governments to act in emergency situations. Strangely, he refrains from talking about any economic issues related to pandemics. A couple of obvious topics would have been to what extent governments should provide financial support to individuals and businesses affected by pandemic restrictions and the cost and availability of new vaccines. Nordhaus advises government preparedness to meet emergencies such as future pandemics and appropriate government intervention. But his writing about climate change itself doesn't seem to even remotely suggest that this issue should itself perhaps be treated as an emergency right now. He is certainly no neoliberal, but, as a self-professed neoclassical economist, he constrains himself to stay within the limits of his professional outlook. His recommendation to apply a carbon tax to “internalize the externality” has still not been applied in his own country, the US, and has mostly been applied only rather modestly in some other countries. Yet he comes across as patiently optimistic. Perhaps he is encouraged by the fact that government intervention in North America and Europe did prompt technological innovation that significantly reduced acid rain and that a global banning of CFCs reduced the ozone hole. He must hope that a similar result will eventually reduce greenhouse gas emissions ideally on a global scale. If Nordhaus feels any frustration at this much slower response to curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, it never comes out in the book. In fact, he exorts business and individuals not to try to cut back too much, but only enough to just cancel the cost to society of each additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted. One reason he is so calm is that he firmly believes in the concept of substitution of goods. This is all very well for, say, the creative destruction of the VCR business in favour of DVD technology. But irrevocable damage to the planet isn't really creative destruction, and it's unclear what technological gadgets will make up for the loss. So, what is the right price to put on a ton of carbon dioxide? Nordhaus explains very smoothly the benefits of simply putting a price on the emissions to signal the actual environmental cost. It all sounds so easy, rational, straightforward. Perhaps the most reasonable thing is to start off with a price that business and consumers will accept and then crank it up over time. That way, you use it as a signal for society as a whole to find ways to shift away from fossil fuels over time, without claiming to know what the correct price is. Nordhaus occasionally hints at this, although he mostly seems convinced that there is a correct price. He often mentions the (now slightly dated) US government estimate of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide, which was actually calculated using a version of Nordhaus' DICE model. But, even if you have a good handle on the actual future costs of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere now, the present value is strongly dependent on the discount rate. This is a meaningful enough concept if you are thinking of lending money to someone who you hope will repay it to you in ten or so years time, but what does it mean to discount the future value of the climate for your or anyone else's grandchildren? Nordhaus talks about a pollution Laffer curve. The standard Laffer curve is meant to show that if you tax economic activity too highly, that activity will cease altogether and you will receive no tax revenue. Nordhaus focusses a lot on the revenue generating capabilities of a carbon tax, without clarifying how he thinks this revenue should be spent. If it is going to be vital for stimulating a Green New Deal initiative, then it is important to actually raise sufficient revenue. But if it is primarily meant to be a signal for all of us to find ways to shift away from fossil fuels, then surely it doesn't matter if it increases over time to become such a prohibitive penalty that it serves to ban certain activities altogether. Who cares that it raises no revenue if it has done its job? Nordhaus steers well clear of so-called tipping points. He does mention fat-tailed probabilities in a general hand-waving way, but he never comes right out to admit that no minor adjustment to today's economy will help if we are actually moving towards the possibility of massive methane emissions from melting tundra, or a significant destabilization of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. Come to that, even the minor (in geophysical terms) melting of the Himalayan glaciers will not be a minor issue to the millions who depend on them as a primary source of water. Is $40 per ton supposed to cover that? Since Nordhaus first started thinking about these issues thirty years ago, considerable progress has been made in renewable technologies such as solar and wind, but the large-scale adoption has been miserably slow. Nordhaus is brutally realistic when he states that, even if carbon taxes were applied globally to his complete satisfaction, there is no chance that we will keep the global temperature rise within 2º C, and little chance that we will stay within 3º degrees for that matter. There are other more inspirational economists who propose more radical ideas, such as Kate Raworth's doughnut economics. Raworth and others are ultimately attempting to change the global zeitgeist in order to move us all towards a truly sustainable mode of economic behaviour. This is absolutely necessary but it is also (if one is to be even mildly realistic) hard to imagine it ever happening. Meanwhile, it surely doesn't hurt to have someone like Nordhaus try to nudge the more reactionary members of society to accept some sort of cost structure for what has become the most omnipresent economic externality of them all. ...more |
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We all know the original story. Lucifer gets uppity and is kicked out of heaven. Disguised as a snake, he tempts Eve with an innocent-looking apple fr
We all know the original story. Lucifer gets uppity and is kicked out of heaven. Disguised as a snake, he tempts Eve with an innocent-looking apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And so, Adam and Eve break God's one and only rule and, in their turn, they get kicked out of Eden. Fast forward many millenia, and you have a still powerful Church, whose primary job appears to be – for Pullman at least - to erect and maintain a fence around that Tree of Knowledge. It is arguably true that Evil only entered the world when we humans developed enough ability to think as consciously as we do. It is the very acquisition of this consciousness that can be equated with the biblical metaphor of eating the fruit from the tree. Pullman has another symbol for this awakened consciousness. With the aid of special photography equipment, some form of dust or elementary particles can be seen streaming towards adult humans in Lyra's world. Another world is losing its dust and this appears to be an environmental tragedy for its curiously evolved mulefa inhabitants. For Pullman, the awakened consciousness is Good, and the Church itself is Evil. And so, he wishes to run the biblical story backwards. It is a bit of a stretch, because the reader is bound to wonder why Will and Lyra are selected to replay the Adam and Eve story in reverse. Will has become the rightful owner of the Subtle Knife that can cut windows into different worlds, and Lyra has an uncanny ability to read the truth-telling alethiometer that has been given to her. The witches have a prophecy that someone special like her will appear. And she ultimately proves herself by being brave enough to enter the world of the Dead. Just as God would have wished for the original Adam and Eve to behave themselves, the Church now fears more than almost anything else that Will and Lyra will fall in love, which somehow Pullman convinces us (or tries to convince us) will be an equally earth-shattering event. Meanwhile, Lyra's father, the extremely powerful Lord Asriel, is waging all-out war with whatever actually occupies the heavens. The significance of Will and Lyra's story appears to be that instead of causing the fall from God's grace of future humankind as they gain conscious knowledge of the world, they will instead bring about the end of the Church's unreasonable control over the hearts and minds of humanity. They will re-establish the notion that free-will and conscious knowledge in fact constitute the essential way in which Goodness also can enter the world. Pullman's universe is a multiverse in which doors between worlds can be opened with especially powerful knives. The alethiometer is a magical device that can tell the truth about the future. But, exotic as Pullman's universe is, it relies on very little unexplainable magic. Rather, he takes us on an adventure with the starting point supposedly fairly close to how the modern-day physicist describes our world, but with a few twists in order to make his narrative work. His message is the simple message of the atheist who finds the physical world thrilling enough as it is, and who believes that humans can make truly ethical and life-affirming decisions without being told what to do by some anachronistic Church that merely tries to perpetuate outdated superstitious nonsense. Pullman relies on our natural empathy for household pets in his creation of animal daemons that are the visible alter-egos of each character in Lyra's world. It is tempting to imagine that they are supposed to represent a sort of spiritual aspect of each person, but that would miss the point entirely. They simply represent the self-love and self-caring aspect of the conscious human experience, and also enable the characters to argue within themselves about what they should do next. They also express the maleability of a young person's character before the shape-shifting daemon settles into some final fixed adult form. In the world in which the city of Citagazze exists, and where Will becomes the new owner of the knife, the number of windows that have been opened into different worlds by previous knife owners have spawned Spectres that prey on adults and turn them into zombies. They remind me of the dementors in the Harry Potter series that J K Rowling was writing at the same time. But perhaps Pullman's most remarkable notion is that everyone has a personalised Death who walks silently beside them throughout their lives, but who stays quietly hidden out of sight until the individual needs to be reminded that their actual death is approaching. There is a rich cast of other fantastical characters like the tiny Gallivespians, the witches, the cliff-ghasts, harpies and angels. As for the main characters, there is a tendency for them to be easily categorised as either good or evil in intent, although Lyra's mother Mrs Coulter changes sides towards the end. Lyra's father, Lord Asriel, supposedly wants to create a true Republic of Heaven but, like any massively egotistic revolutionary, he is prepared to engage in rather cruel and violent means in order to achieve his end. Lyra and Will are ultimately willing to join forces with him, but they have a far more soft-hearted approach towards battling the evil in the world. This trilogy of books clearly doesn't work for everyone. Many appear to admire the first book, drawn in perhaps by the captivating idea of the people of Lyra's world having visible animal daemons with whom they have a wonderful emotional bond. Some readers found the third book hard to take, with Pullman devoting rather a large number of pages to the somewhat tedious story of the ex-nun now particle physicist Mary Malone getting to know the rather simple and unengaging mulefa. On a first read, I did find it hard to go along with the notion that Will and Lyra's completely normal and extremely understated love story could somehow become an epoch-defining event that would be supremely threatening to the Church. On a second read, I knew what to expect and found myself marvelling at how the author had managed to pull this bit of storytelling off as well as he did. In any case, understated as the romance has been, the final sacrifice that the young lovers must make did (I must admit) create a lump in my throat. I suppose if I were a fully paid-up member of the Christian church, in any of its flavours but perhaps especially the Roman Catholic variety, I would feel that Pullman was being a bit unfair in his seemingly relentless attack on organised religion. I assume that he chose to base the Church in Lyra's world on features of the main branches of the western Christian Church (the Protestant and Catholic flavours) because he wanted his story to work as a version of Milton's Paradise Lost in reverse. It is quite possible that he chose to make more direct reference to the Roman Catholic Church because, living in the UK, he sees a dogmatism there that has disappeared from the official Anglican church, and historically it has arguably been more centralised and repressive than any of the Protestant offshoots. But his purpose is surely to provide a standard humanist critique of any organised religion that tries in any way to impose its moral teachings on the individual. Perhaps it would have been fairer and more to the point to include another world in his multiverse dominated by a religion where its fanatical adherents physically attack writers who publish books that are considered blasphemous. One can argue that his desire to kick away aspects of faith that many still hold dear and precious is rather brutal, but his basic message is nevertheless unfortunately still incredibly relevant in our world today. ...more |
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I was initially a bit put off reading Sapiens because some history and anthropology expert reviewers were being a bit snooty in questioning its accura
I was initially a bit put off reading Sapiens because some history and anthropology expert reviewers were being a bit snooty in questioning its accuracy and originality. But, having heard Harari interviewed recently, I went ahead and read his 21 Lessons and then decided that I simply had to read the book that initially brought him such world attention. The twenty-five million people who have apparently bought Sapiens could all be wrong about its value or might have regretted purchasing it. But then, those experts might be a bit biased out of professional jealousy. (I mean, it's possible, don't you think?) They might even be strictly correct in their criticisms but the book could still be a very good and thought-provoking read for a layperson. And it sure was. As far as the big sweep of the historical narrative goes, it actually didn't seem particularly original. But Harari's ability to be genuinely thought-provoking comes out more in the almost throw-away comments he makes along the way. Here's one: “Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth. This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings – a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens.” Now, I get a pretty strong impression overall that Harari favours liberal humanism over nazism or communism, the other social creeds whose strategies for social stability he explains in the paragraph preceding the one I am quoting from. But he is remarkably clear-sighted about what liberal humanism is and isn't based upon. Here's another. Harari talks about the inherent contradictions that societies have always had to grapple with. He provides an example: how the Christian medieval world placed a strong value on both chivalry and piety. A modern reader might nod their head and think, yeah that was pretty daft, basing a society on such obviously incompatible values. But then, in the same sentence, Harari gives another example: how in the modern world we struggle with the contradictory notions of liberty and equality. He doesn't expound on it at all because it doesn't need expounding upon. Is it original to point out that liberty (the American way) is not completely compatible with equality (supposedly the Communist way)? Hardly. But by juxtaposing his observation about the modern world next to a rather similar observation about the medieval world, it does bring our own wooly-headed contradictions into sharper focus. The overall structure of the book is fairly predictable. Harari gives a potted prehistory of homo this and homo that before we get to the only remaining species of the homo genus, namely us, homo sapiens. He leads the reader through the agricultural revolution – “History's Biggest Fraud” as the title of chapter 5 cheerfully calls it. He avoids completely romanticising the lives of the hunter gatherers before they were - as he puts it - domesticated by the crops that they learned to cultivate. But he does point out that hunter gatherers typically had a healthier diet than the farmers who came after them. And the successive centuries of history have proved to be a long slog for the peasant farmers whose back-breaking labour provided food to enable all the colourful actors of history to play their parts. He also makes the point that the agricultural life forced humans to think and worry about the future, whereas the hunter gatherers would basically have taken one day at a time. Harari suggests that the main function of language in small tribal groups may have been to gossip about others in the group. After all, it is important to know who you can trust. As the groups became much larger after the advent of agriculture and the development of towns and cities, language enabled the art of story-telling to propagate imagined realities that served a purpose in binding large populations into stable, cohesive societies. He follows this arrow of history towards an ever greater unification of humans by describing the main unifying factors: money, empire and religion. He goes on to claim that both the scientific revolution and modern global empire-building were stimulated by a new-found realisation that humans truly didn't know everything that was worth knowing. As a result, the English and the Dutch (in particular) developed a trust in a future that would enable more benefits to be reaped that the present. This was a necessary frame of mind for the capitalist idea of credit to develop. For trust in the future meant that the act of lending money should be rewarded through the dividends of future growth. And so we arrive at what Harari calls the permanent revolution of modernity, with technological and societal transformations coming at us ever faster, weakening family and community structure and leading to the big question whether “progress” is causing the happiness of the average individual to increase or decrease. Just as his chapters often segue nicely, so the end of Sapiens touches on the topic of his next book, Homo Deus. As our original genetic evolutionary development becomes superceded by the much faster results of bio and infotech developments, evolution will become increasingly replaced by intelligent design after all! In anticipation of his next book, Harari ends Sapiens with the question: “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?” ...more |
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really liked it
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I haven't read Sapiens or Homo Deus yet, but I thought I would have a go at Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. As many reviewers have pointed o
I haven't read Sapiens or Homo Deus yet, but I thought I would have a go at Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. As many reviewers have pointed out, the 21 chapters don't actually provide 21 specific lessons. But Harari definitely guides the reader towards helpful ways to think about some of the challenges that have already become evident in the first quarter of this century and what might be in store for us in the relatively near future. And one can definitely pull out some specific lessons. But before we get onto those, let me try to give a general overview of Harari's main ideas. One theme is that we have all been brought together into modern-day nations by the elaboration of various stories (religious, nationalist etc.) that have been very useful in cementing groups of humans to work and live successfully together but are ultimately more like myths than true stories. Well, that in itself is not such an original idea, but Harari combines this with the notion that, even if you were to try to liberate yourself consciously from the influence of these myths, you would still not be able to enjoy the level of free-will that you might imagine that you have, because in fact your mind has always been so thoroughly immersed within human society that “authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they are already trapped inside a box... [T]he mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology.” This, of course, is also not a particularly original idea either. But there is a more subtle point that Harari develops. Despite the myth of individuality, there is one aspect of reality that is only authentically experienced by individuals – the experience of suffering. No doubt influenced (as a secular Israeli Jew) by the long shadow cast by the Holocaust, it seems that for Harari the existence of suffering is the ultimate undeniable reality that is uncovered by a search for the meaning of life. And so, “morality doesn't mean following divine commands. It means reducing suffering.” On this subject of secular morality, I think Harari explains his position particularly carefully and well. But overall I am left wondering, once we meditate our way into a fuller understanding of how much our brains are immersed in the conditioning matrix of those around us and the lasting influences of those who have come before, what then? All stories are distortions, but should we try to build a new (inevitably distorted) story based around our need to tackle global issues like climate change or not? Should we worry more about uncontrolled advances in bio/infotech or climate change? Harari covers both topics, but he appears to talk in a more imaginative and focussed way about the possible effects of bio/infotech on the future “evolution” of individual humans compared to what he has to say about the effect of humanity on the rest of the planet. Maybe Harari primarily views the future in terms of very dramatic technological advances. Does he worry that our future adoption of bio/infotech may cause us to lose our conventional biological feelings in such a way that adaptation to a new climate becomes almost trivially unimportant? He never says anything like this but it seems to me to be a logical conclusion given his overall emphasis. He urges the science fiction writers to be more realistic about what are the real dangers with AI-driven robots etc. But the rapidity with which he feels that bio/infotech could alter the biological experience of humans in the relatively near future seems rather unrealistic to me, whereas the dire warnings about how dramatically the climate might change within a couple of decades seems to me far more urgent. My copy of this book included a Q & A session with Harari at the end. One question concerns climate change denialists. Curiously, Harari speculates that the denialists must suspect that the renewable energy companies are bribing the climate scientists. I have never heard that explanation before! In the body of the book, he makes the point that you might expect the political right-wing (traditionally conservative) to want to conserve the environment more than the left-wing (who want radical change to improve disadvantaged humans and to that end might be willing to transform the environment radically as well). But the point nowadays is surely that the reactionary right is scared witless about the radical left using climate change issues to dismantle everything about Western society that currently relies on our enormous commitment to oil and gas. The right believes that the transformation will be devastating to our current “standard of living.” It hardly matters whether they believe that the radical left actually wants to wreck the system in this way or whether they believe that the radical left is simply naive about the unintended consequences of their demands. It surely all comes down to whether you focus on your fear about the effects of dramatic change to business as usual now, or whether you focus on a fear that business as usual will indeed bring about the chaos that climate scientists predict for the not-too-distant future. Neither fear is particularly irrational, but, unfortunately, they map rather neatly onto today's extremely polarized political divisions. Anyway, here is a list of some of the actual lessons that I have tried to cull from the book. 1. We need to be more aware that we mostly make decisions using chemical calculations called feelings rather than freely willed conscious thoughts and also that AI can be programmed to be very good at evaluating human feelings. 2. Don't worry about robots gaining consciousness and rebelling; instead, worry about the intentions of the humans who are giving them the orders that they will in fact follow faithfully. Also, watch out for AI creating a massive group of humans who are no longer exploited but become instead simply irrelevant. 3. If you want to remain 100% committed to the truth, you will have to give up some power, because power ultimately works through the creation of some fiction. 4. Try to keep your fear of the future under control. It is hubris to assume the worst. Bewilderment is a more appropriate feeling and demonstrates an important level of humility. 5. “[T]rust more in those who admit ignorance than in those who claim infallibility.” 6. Be wary of free news sites (you may get what you pay for). If you're really interested, read original scientific papers (rather expensive if you don't have access to university library subscriptions!) 7. Try observing your mind closely through activities like meditation. No doubt there are other specific lessons in the book that I have missed. One final thought. Hahari's book is packed full of interesting ideas and insights, but I feel like picking away a bit more at one of them. He claims an importance to suffering because only an individual can truly experience it. Does he mean to imply that a feeling such as ecstasy, because it can be experienced not only alone but also in a group setting like a rock concert, therefore has a less existentialist quality to it? Is he truly claiming that suffering is what is essentially meaningful in life? If so, doesn't that imply that it would be better if biological life didn't exist? That is a perfectly legitimate position to hold, but I somehow doubt whether Harari himself feels that way about life. Some of the stories that Harari warns us about are perhaps also intended to convince us that life, with all the suffering (and its unequal distribution among individuals) is inherently worthwhile and on balance a good thing rather than a bad thing. This strikes me as a profound issue when considering the two alternatives: meditation (possibly as an escape into nirvana) versus the (perhaps grudging) acceptance of life-affirming stories. ...more |
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really liked it
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I recently heard an interview with Kate Raworth. She came across as extremely smart but she seemed so positive about the future that it struck me as r
I recently heard an interview with Kate Raworth. She came across as extremely smart but she seemed so positive about the future that it struck me as rather incongruous. I understand that her own advocacy of her transformative ideas as outlined in this book have already had some impact in certain cities around the world. But the enormity of what is required to make this all happen on a scale that will actually have an impact on our global sustainability issues is tremendously daunting, and it feels like we don't have the time to wait for slow but sure changes to take effect. In any case, the liveliness and intelligence of her 21st century thinking and her seemingly boundless enthusiasm about the transformative power of her ideas are tremendously impressive. She presents her ideas as a very radical departure from conventional economic thinking. What is particularly clever is that she places all the blame on the old-school economists rather than, say, right-wing politicians. This is brilliant, because, over the last few decades there hasn't actually been a whole lot of difference in the economic thinking on either side of the political debate. And so, Raworth neatly sidesteps all the ghastly polarisation that makes sensible debate almost impossible these days. And she doesn't threaten the climate change skeptics with any do-or-die catastrophe timeline. She simply preaches a message that should in fact be completely obvious to everyone on this planet: we can't enlessly increase our growth model based on the traditional linear “take-make-use-lose” (i.e. extract and waste) design. Well, okay, she doesn't entirely side-step political commentary. Chapter 5 (Design to Distribute) does rather assume that the reader is onboard with the notion of distributing more evenly the various benefits that are accrued by members of society working together. But again, Raworth lays the blame on classical economic thinking, which gave us the coldly rational “economic man” not just as a crude model but as an ideal for how we should all aspire to think and act. In chapter 2 (See the Big Picture), Raworth's obviously correct picture of the market embedded within social and global physical structures rather than being a self-contained entity leads to her vision in chapter 3 (Nurture Human Nature), inviting the reader to imagine the shift from the cardboard cutout rational economic man to a fully connected and reciprocating socially adaptable human being, which is surely what being “human” still means to all of us when it comes right down to it. I have been wrestling with the word “growth” ever since trying to educate myself about the degrowth movement as promoted by thinkers such as Jason Hickel. Raworth nicely describes the limitations of attaching a money value to everything that might be considered marketable and treating these items, because they are now easily quantifiable, as the whole “utility” that each of us would like to see maximised. Hence the critique by Raworth and many others about the absurdity of making policy decisions based endlessly around achieving GDP growth, and how on earth to seriously move away from such an entrenched idea. One aspect of all this that I think writers like Raworth have not really addressed is the tremendous convenience factor for individuals, businesses and governments in always thinking in monetary terms and perpetuating the linear design model. It's all very well to show how the world will be a better place by thinking about complex systems and distributive and regenerative design models, but it's going to be hard to shift people away from what is so damned convenient. I actually think this (rather than say monetary greed) is perhaps the biggest challenge and needs to be addressed by another round of clever 21st century thinking. But Raworth's first round is brilliant, challenging and well worth reading. ...more |
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I will start by laying my cards out on the table. Even if one doesn't give a hoot about the rest of the planet (the birds and the fishes and so on), a
I will start by laying my cards out on the table. Even if one doesn't give a hoot about the rest of the planet (the birds and the fishes and so on), at some stage it is obvious that – simply for the human species to continue to thrive or ultimately merely survive – we will one way or another have to embrace the notion of “Less is More.” This book is often cited as the place to start if one wants to learn more about the “degrowth” movement. While there is mainstream awareness of the Green New Deal political movement in the US and Europe, the more radical degrowth movement warns that “green growth” is ultimately impossible and engages in a revolutionary critique not only of the lifestyles of the “1%” but also of most of the rest of us living in highly developed Western economies. Hickel writes: “Mention the word capitalism, and people immediately get their hackles up.” But that doesn't stop him patiently explaining how relentless growth is baked into the very fundamentals of capitalism. I agree with a lot of what he says, but over the last few years I have also spent quite a lot of time playing the devil's advocate and trying to tease out in my own mind exactly how this all works in detail. There is surely a whole spectrum of possible business practices that can exist between the private owner of a small company who actually cares about the real value of his or her product (but still wants to turn a profit in producing it) and the corporation run almost entirely by accountants whose only professional concern is to maximise share-holder profit. Hickel alludes to this himself but chooses to restrict the definition of the word “capitalism” to apply only to the latter end of the spectrum. It is generally considered reasonable that someone who lends money for a time to a complete stranger will expect to be paid something for performing that service. I have often asked myself whether or not this is what is at the root of a perpetual growth economy. Hickel talks about the problem of banks creating ever more debt that has to be repaid with interest that compounds over time. There is certainly a lot of truth in this when it comes to personal credit card debt. But in 2020 (when this book was published), the banks had money coming out of their ears and the interest rates back then were still close to zero percent. But either the banks were reluctant to lend or companies were reluctant to borrow, probably both. So the story isn't quite as simple as banks forever pushing debt out into the world. While some businesses succeed, others fail, so again it isn't entirely obvious that the stock markets should inexorably keep on growing under capitalism in spite of temporary downturns. Nobody invests money in the hope of losing any of it, so it is doubtless true that investment goals could be described as a desire for endless capital accumulation. But that doesn`t automatically ensure that it will happen. Where I think Hickel gets the focus right is when he talks about what choices are available to society as productivity improves. Each worker could work fewer hours to achieve the same output or work the same hours and produce more. The major problem, as Hickel correctly points out, is that governments usually react to improved productivity with policies that attempt to maintain full employment. This is surely the most direct cause for endless economic growth. Government policy that simply prioritises full employment (rather than being more creative about alternative methods of income distribution) automatically results in policies that will attempt to endlessly grow GDP. Hickel doesn`t mention this but imagine a world in which all jobs are fully automated (worker productivity has in effect become infinite). At that point, governments would have to come up with dramatically different policies across the board. Hickel provides a rather harrowing account of the historical development of modern capitalism. He provides disarming evidence that “capitalism has always needed an 'outside', external to itself, from which to plunder value, for free, without an equivalent return.” He refers to all the fixes that have been employed to sustain this process. Land enclosure displaced the rural population to create a cheap workforce for the factories, colonialism provided raw materials and an expanding market for goods; then there was the slave trade, the westward expansion of the US across the North American continent etc. But on a finite planet the outside is closing in: our twentieth century growth economy has already filled up the atmospheric “commons” with greenhouse gases. Hickel's most urgent message is that “green growth” will not be green. Even if our energy needs magically stop growing, it will require massive environmentally destructive mining operations to source the materials required to provide enough solar panels, wind turbine blades and batteries. And there is no evidence that resource extraction can ever be decoupled from GDP growth. I believe all this but the question remains: how on earth do we turn our economies and current lifestyles around for degrowth to occur - most importantly a global reduction in raw material extraction? Even if everyone supported the idea it would be hard. I suppose Hickel's answer to this is given in the epigraph (which quotes Wendell Berry) at the beginning of the book: “We don't have a right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does the Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” Okay. But how should the degrowth movement go about convincing enough other individuals to want to do the right thing and even then, how to go about actually making such a transformation happen? After all, it would be nice to succeed in this! Hickel sounds optimistic because he truly believes that his proposals will actually make the world a more satisfying place in which to live and hopes that this will somehow convince the rest of us. But he sounds hopelessly naive when he lapses into imagining some sort of unrealistic utopia. First he wields a stick to mercilessly beat up on the evils of capitalism, and then he proffers a carrot – how we will all be happier caring more for each other and the planet. Marx did a similar thing and encouraged violent revolution. Leftist environmental groups (Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil etc.) are more into Gandhi-style peaceful disruptions nowadays. In Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth stresses participatory democracy, which seems like a good place to start. But is it enough? Perhaps the only way to radically change today's Zeitgeist is for the younger generations to throw up more Greta Thunbergs and see what following such prophetic leaders might actually accomplish. Hickel's degrowth ideas are surely totally on track. Perhaps one day Thunberg or some other young environmental leader will invite him onto their global advisory committee. ...more |
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