Grand unified books thread

[Savonarola]

I read V. S. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River" and learned that spitting on that thang with a hock tua does not work on women.  And people say there's no value in reading literature.

 

While a lot of critics that I read compare him to Conrad, it reminded me more of Kipling especially Kim.  The book is evocative and rich in detail, much like Kipling.  Also the protagonist is an outsider caught between two worlds, wholly belonging to neither and able to navigate both.  Unlike Kim, this presents a bleak view of the setting (Central Africa in this case).  I thought it was a good read (outside the mistress-beating scene, that was a little rough for me.)

[Razgovory]

Is Cliodynamics legit?  Reading stuff by Peter Turchin and It's a bit difficult.  It's like if DGuller wrote history.

[Savonarola]

I read "Providence Lost" by Paul Lay which was a history of the Protectorate in Britain.  While I'll acknowledge that the Cavaliers were "Wrong but wromantic"; as the Protectorate goes on the Roundheads seem less "Right but repulsive", and instead just flat out repulsive.

I learned that Richard Cromwell was the most long lived British head of state until Elizabeth II.  Also I found it interesting how the Protectorate ties into US/American history.  Some of Cromwell's soldiers and advisors had come from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and William Penn, the admiral who lead the Protectorate's failed attack on Hispaniola was the father of William Penn the founder of Pennsylvania.

Naturally we look at the past through the lens of the present day; still the following passage about the concept of "Providence" amused me:

"The concept of a tirelessly interventionist and inescapable God might be compared to modern social media, resulting in comparable levels of anxiety and paranoia.  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are realms of round-the-clock surveillance, where one's thoughts and actions, believes and appearances are posted and preserved for all to see and subjected to constant comparison and judgement.  On occasion, the shame, vindictiveness and piety that social media generates would not have felt out of place among seventeenth-century Puritans."
-Page 122

As did this parallel between Oliver Cromwell and Margaret Thatcher:

"Consider this: an East Anglian, nonconformist, philosemite, suspicious of, though not fundamentally opposed to, monarchy; a unionist uncomprehending of Ireland, a courageous advocate of military action who left considerable problems of successions to those who came after them?  It appears that Margaret Thatcher was cut from similar cloth to the Protector.  And it may take just as long for a statue near Parliament to be raised to her."
-Page 220

Anyhow the book is a page turner with a lot of wry observations.  It may not be an in depth scholarly work, but it was a fun read.

Edit:  Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 and the statue was completed in 1899 so 241 years.  So that would be 2254 for Margaret Thatcher.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I think the connection of the English Puritans and that era of politics with the way the states develops is really interesting. I believe Cromwell almost moved to New England in the 1630s.

Thatcher has a statue in Parliament - but it may be a while before she gets one outside too (especially as it's already been attacked a few times).

I plan to read that book but your description makes me suspect of the author's politics already

Just finished the International Booker longlist. I think the winner, Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, was very deserving. A fantastic collection of short stories primarily about the lives of women and girls largely in Muslim communities in Southern India - she's apparently a leading light in a movement of progressive literature criticising caste, class and religious power over people's lives.

I also really enjoyed Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. While it's not about me and I don't have the life described I've never felt so personally attacked by a book - it's a fantastic re-working of Georges Perec's Things: A Story of the Sixties for millenials. The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem was also very good - I don't know how you'd describe this, perhaps speculative fiction, but basically one day all the Palestinians in Israel disappear. The stories responding to that are interspersed with the diary/record of an Arab Israeli recounting his grandmother's memories of Jaffa.

In another slightly speculative vein, I enjoyed On the Calculation of Volume I and will read the next part too (I think there's seven novels now in Danish). It's one of those infinite timeloop situations - a woman realises that she is trapped in November 18. The day keeps recurring. She can move and each 18 November starts from where she was on the previous 18 November. So she starts in Paris but decides to return home to the North of France. As the book goes on (which I think will be a growing theme) she realises that her consumption is also carried over into the next 18 November - so supermarket shelves start to go bare after over 300 of the same days. Very coolly written and uncanny.

[garbon]

Is Cliodynamics legit?  Reading stuff by Peter Turchin and It's a bit difficult.  It's like if DGuller wrote history.

Quick look (particularly on Turchin) seems to be that it depends on something we don't really have a lot of, accurate and detailed data across the last few millenia. Turchin also appears to love to use his stuff to make predictions.  Timmy's favourite historian who often talks about games seems to despise it.

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-2021/

[The Minsky Moment]

He's trying to be to history what Kondratiev was to economics.  Wacky Russians and their Big Idea theories.

The problem is that the only way to really test it while controlling for the massive amounts of confounding variables would to experimentally re-run history hundreds of times.

[Sheilbh]

Started reading a collection of Leszek Kolakowski essays - never read anything by him before and the first section is largely his criticism of communism. There was an alarming amount I recognised of some things going on in politics now

Also, funnily enough given Raz's take in the other thread, there was also an essay on quite how communism managed to have such an appeal culturally to intellectuals (the working class appeal being a given ).

[Sheilbh]

Finished the Communist section and now into the Christian section.

But one thought - which I think I've wondered about before (especially when reading Tony Judt's contrasting the 68 of Western and Eastern Europe).

Why is it that the moments when Communism and Communist regimes enjoyed their highest prestige, participation from intellectuals in the West and sometimes actual membership, were also the moments that those regimes were actually at their most repressive?

I was thinking about it with the 30s and late 60s specifically. I get there's the Soviets as anti-fascist force but I think it pre-dates that in the 30s and also includes the "social fascism" phase of Soviet policy. But it still seems striking given that it's at the point of the Holodomor (Duranty notwithstanding) and the great purges. The late 40s makes more sense given Soviet prestige after the war but is still a little odd. But then also the enthusiasm among student movements and with intellectuals (Goddard etc) for Mao at exactly the point that in China he's launching the Cultural Revolution.

It just seems weird - while intellectual fascination/support declines when it's just boring Khrushchev or Brezhnev or Deng. I'm not sure why. I sort of wonder if part of it is that exactly the gap between the reality and belief makes it more important to believe - a system engaging in even minimal self-criticism attracts less wilful credulity because you don't need to be so wilful? But no idea - anyone have any thoughts (or book recommendations on it as I'm sure there's some theory on it)? There's no great project or faith to display?

[The Minsky Moment]

Western interest in Communism and other systemic alternatives peaked in the 1930s and late 60s for reasons that probably have a lot more to do with internal dynamics in Western societies at that time as opposed to what was actually going on in the Communist world.  The prison grey can look greener from the other side.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I just think it's more that it's not Communism generically or "it's never been correctly implemented" Communism (I suppose in the thirties there was a fairly big Trot contingent around the world) - but people enthusiastically backing the Stalinist and Maoist experiments at exactly the point that they were at their most violent. I'm wondering if and not totally sure that's purely coincidental.

[Jacob]

Finished the Communist section and now into the Christian section.

But one thought - which I think I've wondered about before (especially when reading Tony Judt's contrasting the 68 of Western and Eastern Europe).

Why is it that the moments when Communism and Communist regimes enjoyed their highest prestige, participation from intellectuals in the West and sometimes actual membership, were also the moments that those regimes were actually at their most repressive?

I was thinking about it with the 30s and late 60s specifically. I get there's the Soviets as anti-fascist force but I think it pre-dates that in the 30s and also includes the "social fascism" phase of Soviet policy. But it still seems striking given that it's at the point of the Holodomor (Duranty notwithstanding) and the great purges. The late 40s makes more sense given Soviet prestige after the war but is still a little odd. But then also the enthusiasm among student movements and with intellectuals (Goddard etc) for Mao at exactly the point that in China he's launching the Cultural Revolution.

It just seems weird - while intellectual fascination/support declines when it's just boring Khrushchev or Brezhnev or Deng. I'm not sure why. I sort of wonder if part of it is that exactly the gap between the reality and belief makes it more important to believe - a system engaging in even minimal self-criticism attracts less wilful credulity because you don't need to be so wilful? But no idea - anyone have any thoughts (or book recommendations on it as I'm sure there's some theory on it)? There's no great project or faith to display?

I have a hypothesis that I'm working with right now. I don't enjoy it at all, given how left wing I was raised and given my general left-of-centre sympathies, nor given my preference for democracy and for power to derive from the people rather than the elites, but still...

The hypothesis is that uncomfortably large number of social and popular movements owe a significant deal of their success to one of two things:

• The backing of oligarchs (or oligarch equivalents) exerting influence through whatever is the popular media of the day; or
• Foreign state security services channelling resources into movements in countries to create instability or otherwise influence their domestic politics.

If the hypothesis is true, it explains why Soviet and China sympathies were at their heights during the repressive phases, because it coincides with periods in which especially the Soviets were putting effort into supporting and sustaining left-wing movements in the West.

It also explains why the left has gotten increasingly listless after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when that support completely vanished. The rise of the reactionary right in the West similarly coincides with explicit support from Russian intelligence, and increasing support from domestic oligarchs.

It's just a hypothesis, of course.

The hypothesis might also explain why liberal rules-based democracy is on its backfoot in the US (and elsewhere) - because few resources at the government or oligarch level have been dedicated to preserving it in recent times. It was just sort of taken for granted that it would prosper, whereas previously they had been actively defended as a counter to various forms of leftist ideologies (which threatened the interests of capital).

The reactionary right came looking to take over, well-funded, and well-organized. The radical left has had no funding and little organization for while, and the traditional centrist democrats relied on their point of view to be a reflection of the natural order and let the basis of power atrophy.

But I repeat myself.

Separately and orthogonal from that hypothesis, I also think that atrocities happening overseas can easily be seen as "necessary and admirable decisive action" when viewed through a lens of "we need decisive action to fix our own problems". This is especially true when you're already inclined to view the perpetrator of the atrocities positively and when you can avoid examining the gruesome consequences of the atrocities too closely. Something I think still remains true.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting.

Definitely agree on the last point. It's not exclusive to the left but I think there is an uncomfortable trend for people who are radical on distant causes, safely from the comfort of nice homes in wealthy Western cities (I always think this about Corbyn for example and his sympathies with the IRA not the SDLP, not with the ANC but with more radical groups etc) It always feels there's a vicarious thrill in radical violence elsewhere - which I think often just looks like carelessness with other people's blood.

Whenever I see it I always slightly wonder if it's because they're the type of people assuming they'd be holding the cosh, or if it's almost that the tolerance for the violence demonstrates commitment to the cause.

[Jacob]

Interesting.

Thanks.

Like I said, I don't really want it to be correct, so I'm looking to falsify the hypothesis. But on casual examination at least it seems to hold up alright.

Definitely agree on the last point. It's not exclusive to the left but I think there is an uncomfortable trend for people who are radical on distant causes, safely from the comfort of nice homes in wealthy Western cities (I always think this about Corbyn for example and his sympathies with the IRA not the SDLP, not with the ANC but with more radical groups etc) It always feels there's a vicarious thrill in radical violence elsewhere - which I think often just looks like carelessness with other people's blood.

It's definitely not exclusive to any particular point of the political spectrum, I don't think.

Whenever I see it I always slightly wonder if it's because they're the type of people assuming they'd be holding the cosh, or if it's almost that the tolerance for the violence demonstrates commitment to the cause.

I think both of those are reasonable explanation for individual cases, but I suspect there are many other causes as well. I genuinely think that mechanism is pretty fundamental to human nature.

[The Brain]

People who like A tend to prefer more A to less A. Though there are certainly exceptions.