Category Archives: History

While Canada Slept – Andrew Cohen

What’s the role of a foreign service in a world in which world leaders can just pick up a phone and call each other, or even send emails? Are they integral parts of a country’s presence, representing their interests and ideas at international conferences, summits, and meetings? Or a force of declining importance?

Though not actually about that question, While Canada Slept is influenced by it everywhere. The book laments a decline in the quality of Canada’s international presence, its military, its aid programs, and its diplomacy. To my reading, however, it begged the question of what the role of a foreign service today actually is.

In an increasingly globalized and small world, is there as large a role for representatives? Of course, there’s clearly some role for diplomats, on smaller issues or on subjects when the leaders either do not wish to speak in person, or should not. Still, is it possible to attract the top tier of talent to a profession where for any serious decision, you consult your boss in real time, thus stripping you of much of your autonomy? There is simply more oversight possible of diplomats than has been true historically, and with that may come a reduction in its appeal.

Does that mean foreign services are declining in importance? I doubt it. If anything, in a globalized world, countries have more interactions than ever, and having good representation is critical. I’m sure the foreign service will continue to get many applicants, too. Without the prestige and autonomy of the past, however, the foreign service may struggle to attract the talent it used to.

While Canada Slept is perhaps of importance largely to Canadians, focusing as it does on Canada’s role in the world and how it can best participate. Still, the questions beneath it are interesting ones, and if you find yourself interested in Canada’s role in the world, you can read further here (or in the UK or Canada).

Cicero: A Turbulent Life – Anthony Everitt

“We follow the narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic through the excited, anxious eyes of a participant who twice held the reins of power – and who did not know how the story would end…In Cicero’s correspondence, noble Romans are flesh and blood, not marble.”

Cicero is one of the most influential figures of antiquity, in large part because so many of his writings survive. We have hundreds of letters, some of them written on a daily basis, several books, and large numbers of speeches from his time as an advocate and in various political roles, including as Consul during which time he suppressed an attempted coup and was awarded the title of Father of his Country by the Senate. He also coined several words which serve as the base of words we use today; moral, quality, essence, and swan song, among others.

Perhaps above all, Cicero was a great speaker, likely the greatest of his day. Even without Latin, that brilliance carries through translation; his quick wit gets him both in and out of trouble. In one case, Cicero prosecuted a former governor of Sicily for corruption, and the defending lawyer was paid with an ivory sphinx that had been stolen from Sicily. The defending lawyer at one point claimed he didn’t understand Cicero’s riddles, and Cicero whipped back “Oh, really? In spite of having a sphinx at home?”

At heart, Everitt is a Cicero apologist. Cicero’s reputation today is mixed; by his peers at the time he was seen as cowardly and indecisive (though a genius), and that perception has to some extent continued today. Everitt argues that the truth is much more positive. To be blunt, I’m not sure I buy it. Renaming indecisiveness “tactical suppleness” doesn’t make it so, and the book can sometimes feel like a hagiography, not a biography. As a result, the strength of the book is its history of the 1^st century BCE, as seen through Cicero’s eyes, not biography.

To defend Cicero and focus on the good, the book unfortunately misses opportunities for insight into his full character. In the end, Cicero is perhaps best captured by Julius Caesar, who remarked that Cicero had won greater laurels than a general, because it meant more to have extended the frontiers of Roman genius than her empire. Cicero, and the first century BCE, are topics critical to antiquity: of the two, Cicero does a better job capturing the latter, and to my mind, a worse job capturing the former.

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The Prize – Daniel Yergin

“[W]e should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the Navy: better ships, better crews, high economies, more intense forms of war power – mastery itself was the prize of the venture.” – Winston Churchill, talking of his decision to switch the British fleet to oil power in 1911

The Prize is one of the few books I’ve read I would describe as definitive. In it, Daniel Yergin tackles the history of the oil industry, and in scope, scale, and command of the subject he is unparalleled. It well deserved its Pulitzer.

Interpreting the history of the last 150 years through the importance of oil is somewhat disturbingly effective, a fact that Yergin makes the most of. World War 2, for example, he argues was won and lost due to the difference in oil supplies, forcing a German invasion of Russia and, in the Battle of the Bulge, leading to German tanks literally running out of fuel and grinding to a halt. The general lesson is perhaps that oil supplies have affected international policy for almost every nation state in the modern era, and almost no major event in the last century is left untouched by Yergin’s, as it were, oily hands.

The book is an impossible one to summarize in a few paragraphs, and I don’t propose to try. From Greek Fire, a mix of lime and petroleum used by the Ancient Greeks as an unquenchable war machine, to the first oil well, drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859 in order to make medicines and kerosene, through the breakup of Standard Oil and the world wars, to OPEC oil politics and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Yergin explains history while exploiting his historian’s gift for finding interesting or amusing anecdotes in everything. I wasn’t aware, for example, that it took 1-3 kamikaze planes to destroy an aircraft carrier, or that President Carter referred to energy conservation as the moral equivalent of war (a quote from WIlliam James). Somewhat less grandly, I also wasn’t aware that the first motels were rented as often as 16 times per night (I leave to the imagination a nocturnal activity requiring 1/16th of the night), as they were valued for their convenient, by-the-highway location.

At 895 pages and seven years in the making, the book is hardly a light read. Nothing of its scope could be. It is however a fascinating read, and for anyone interested in the history of energy or global geopolitics, it is essential reading.

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From Democrats to Kings – Michael Scott

“From Democrats to Kings is a story not just of Athens at the height of its power and Alexander at his, but of the turbulent times of transition in between these two powerful extremes.”

Is the European Union better off as a united whole or individual nations? Would the US be better off if it had a stronger president, one that could break congressional deadlocks? Countries today are immersed in arguments over the benefits of centralized or decentralized power.

As Michael Scott dryly points out, however, the past is just like now, only earlier. In From Democrats to Kings, he covers a relatively understudied period of Greek history: the period of transition between what we often see at the height of Athenian democracy, the 500s, and when it was taken over by Philip and Alexander the Great, often seen as the end of their democracy.

The book is perhaps slightly easier to read if you already know about the periods immediately before and after its setting, but it’s fun either way. Over a single generation, Athens goes from a democracy to a dictatorship, and Greece goes from a collection of warring cities to a unified whole, one that would eventually be a part of the enormous land empire of Alexander the great. For that generation, Athens would be wracked with indecision between divisive democracy and dictatorial unity, even putting Socrates on trial for supporting dictatorships.

Today, we often see Alexander as the death of Greek democracy (partly due to Athenian propaganda), but Scott points out that Athens actually benefited enormously during his reign. Their GDP doubled, huge public investment was begun in religious sanctuaries, stadiums, theatres, and public works, statues stolen 150 years previous by the Persians were returned by Alexander, and Athens entered the longest period of prosperity it had enjoyed in a century. Unification, even under a dictator, was not all bad for Athens, nor for Greece, though it came at the cost of liberty.

The period is an interesting one, and the book is even more so. As well as a professor at Cambridge, Scott is a presenter of BBC documentaries, and that style comes through in the book with his eagerness to share tidbits of knowledge as well as explain his larger theme. I will guiltily admit I have a passion for classical history anyway, but even if you don’t the book is interesting, providing a clear understanding of events and carefully putting it into modern context. Though few democracies today are faced with a choice between democrats and kings, the optimal level of centralization remains an interesting, and contentious, issue.

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The Public Intellectual in Canada – Nelson Wiseman

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” – Albert Camus

Something of a specialist post this week, and not everyone is interested in the state of public intellectuals in Canada, I realize. But, I think it’s interesting, and I get to pick. So there.

According to the philosopher Julien Benda, because intellectuals existed, “humanity did evil for 2000 years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” A fairly intellectual way to look at it, of course, and it reflects an irony in asking public intellectuals to contribute to a collection of essays about public intellectuals. How public intellectuals see themselves and each other does not exactly capture all possible viewpoints.

The Public Intellectual in Canada is a collection of essays on, as can be guessed from the title, the role of the public intellectual in Canada, whether as public policy wonk, media don, professional pundit, or perhaps simply as thorn in the side of power. Canadian thought and thought-leaders can sometimes feel a bit overshadowed by our much larger neighbour to the South, a fact reflected by several essays, as is our somewhat unique cultural divide into English and French Canada. In other ways, however, our public intellectuals struggle with much the same issues as anyone else, and insight into the need for public opinion polls as a way for individuals to learn about themselves in the context of society, the history of public thought, the changing nature of universities and their expectations of academics, and perhaps most of all the role of slow deliberation to mediate the deluge of information from a 24 hour news cycle, is welcome – and applicable – anywhere.

Many of the essays are Canadian centric, and I suspect would have little interest beyond Canadians. One, for example, focuses on the history of Le Devoir, a Québécois publication, while another discusses the benefits of a larger population for Canada. Others have broader appeal; some individuals discuss their own experiences as public intellectuals, while others reflect on the role of an intellectual more broadly. Most of all, however, Wiseman has assembled a selection of essays both left and right, data-driven and qualitative, on how knowledge is constructed and ideas disseminated, and for someone interested in Canada, it is a great read.

Want more? Get the Public Intellectual in Canada from the U of T publisher. Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right for regular updates! Disclosure: I read The Public Intellectual in Canada as a free advance reader copy.

Stranger Magic – Marina Warner

“Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act.”

In Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Marina Warner examines the presence of enchantment and magic in everyday culture, and the reasons for its continued persistence despite its difficult co-existence with science. To do so, she studies how the perception of magic and imagination has evolved over history in the context of the Arabian Nights, and worries magic has been made more comfortable for Western audiences through the exoticisation of Oriental material.

She begins each chapter with a chosen story from the Arabian Nights, and analyzes it in detail before moving on to its larger implications. For me, this was actually the highlight of the book: I haven’t read the Arabian Nights in years, and having someone explain the context of the stories was fascinating. She covers Shahrazad’s gradual move from stories of men wronged by women to stories portraying women as victims, eventually earning the Sultan’s forgiveness for all women and his agreement to stop executing one per day.

Arabian Nights was enormously popular in Europe when it was translated, so much so that many of the classic tales we associate with it, like Aladdin or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, were actually additions by European translators. Warner argues that the Arabian Nights were one of the first major popularisers of flights of fancy in Western European thought. They have provoked imagination and ideas ever since, and it is imagination that is key to knowledge, key to ethics, and key to humanity. The Enlightenment may have been the Age of Reason, but it also required imagination, and it is fiction and magic that allow for imagination to grow. Unfortunately, she suggests, since then magic has become perceived as exotic and foreign, diminishing cultural exchange and cultural understanding, not just of reason and imagination, but of East and West.

The book, however, is almost impossible to take good notes on: she moves directly from Mongolian Shamanism to Obama’s Dreams from my Father, all in the context of understanding dreams. Such tangled webs make for interesting reading, though some chapters seem to lack relevance. That said, her thesis on the importance of imagination is one I am sympathetic to, and the framing of the issue in Arabian Nights is excellent. All of us might be better off if we were a little more willing, even in this rational world, to indulge in magic, both strange and everyday.

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Violence Declining? Better Angels of our Nature

“It is a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die” – Steven Pinker

Listening to the media today, one could be forgiven for assuming that human society is incurably and irredeemably violent. Nonsense, says Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, and he has the statistics to back it up.

The UK, for example, had 20 times as many homicides in the 1300s as in the 1900s. Murder rates as a percentage of population were higher in many traditional hunter-gather societies, like the Inuit or the !Kung, than in even the most violent US decade. Even rates of death in war were higher in historical New Guinea than in Germany in the 20^th century. In fact, you are less likely to die from violence today than at any time in history.

Over time, Pinker argues, humans have undergone a “humanitarian revolution”, actually caring about the welfare of others. The ability to read, for example, allows us to empathize with people we’ve never met by putting us in their place, while modernity has expanded our circles of acquaintance to include those with very different backgrounds. We’ve also begun a “civilizing process”, adopting norms that forbid violence, and in so doing have created governments with a monopoly on law enforcement, helping us avoid a Hobbesian trap. Government is not enough, however. To truly reduce homicide rates to 1 or 2 per 100,000, he argues, there must be faith in the rule of law. It is places with limited belief in the ability of government to enforce justice that see increased rates of violence. In particular, some Southern U.S. states have both little faith in government enforcement and homicide rates close to that of Central and South America, and Pinker suggests this is no coincidence.

Better Angels is a comprehensive book, spanning 800 pages and psychology, history, economics, sociology, criminology, statistics, biology, and a dozen other fields. On the way, it asks whether human nature is good or bad, whether society is progressing, and whether we should be optimistic about our common future. Better yet, it’s engaging, entertaining, and intelligent. To be blunt, it’s among the most interesting books I’ve read in years, and well worth the time. The decline of violence is a macro-trend we too often fail to appreciate, and understanding it is a key step to continuing it.

Want more enlightenment? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).