Tag Archives: Politics

The Uses of Pessimism – Roger Scruton

“The knowledge we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions, and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it.”

Envision your perfect world, of justice tempered with mercy, of wealth and compassion for all. Is it obtainable? And if so, to what lengths would you be willing to go to achieve it? This, argues Scruton, is the key danger of unconstrained optimism: if all we do is focus on the best possible outcome, then almost any action is justified in achieving it, whether muzzling the media or violating civil rights. Better, instead, to be pessimistic: to worry about what happens if things go wrong, as well as if they go right.

Regular readers will know I like to complain about the appropriation of words like liberal and conservative to parties that have very little to do with their traditional roots. Scruton is an exception: he is a classic small-c conservative, so much so that had The Uses of Pessimism been written by Burke, it would likely say very similar things. He argues that conservatism is about understanding that the world is difficult and complicated, and that sometimes our best hopes are not always what is realized: that instead, we must be scrupulous optimists, carefully weighing out costs and benefits using history as a guide.

The book is an insightful one, if not particularly revolutionary (shockingly). As a thoughtful look at conservatism, however, it does very well. Perhaps most surprising is how poorly it correlates to modern political parties: the conservatism Scruton paints is neither Democrat nor Republican, not even Tory or Liberal. It worries about global warming, but believes radical solutions can bring their own dangers: dislikes inequality, but doesn’t believe centralizing power in the government can solve it. Readers will vary in how appealing they find these arguments, of course: they very clearly represent only one side of a discourse. They are, however, a sometimes underrepresented side, due to a modern right that often seems as focused on optimism as anyone else.

The Face of Battle – John Keegan

“Battle, therefore…is essentially a moral conflict. It requires, if it is to take place, a mutual and sustained act of will by two contending parties and, if it is to result in a decision, the moral collapse of one of them.”

Much of military history has typically focused on battles, particularly the decisions of the generals or kings and their strategic goals. Keegan doesn’t mind the focus on battle: battle, after all, is to some extent what a military is for. What he objects to is the focus on leaders. As he points out, in a battle a general and a soldier may have very different, even hostile, goals.

The Face of Battle is therefore a study of the psychology of warfare, from the perspective of the individual combatant. What drives a soldier to risk death? A general might think of soldiers as members of their army, but it turns out most soldiers think of themselves as equals within a small group of 6 or 7 fellows: they fight for personal survival and out of fear of incurring the contempt of the rest of the group. Indeed, in the last century, modern armies have been reorganized around just that principle.

At its heart, The Face of Battle argues that battle is a psychological conflict. Until modern wars, most casualties were incurred when an army broke and ran; that was when truly horrific losses could be inflicted. As long as an army kept fighting, however, there limits to the damage weapons could do. Indeed, when a story describes one army as colliding with another, that almost never happens: one will almost inevitably flinch, even flee, the psychological impact rather than the physical one determining the outcome of a battle. Rarely was an army that had not yet fled truly unable to keep fighting – rather, once it had broken psychologically, so much damage could be done it lost its ability to fight.

The question of battle psychology is clearly an interesting one. Killing others, and risking death yourself, puts enormous psychological strain on most people, with effects we still don’t entirely understand. As usual with Keegan, I find his style a bit dense, but the book’s focus on three major battles – Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme – helps make it clearer by imposing more of a narrative structure on much of the book. An interesting and insightful reflection on the nature of war.

Controlling the Message – Victoria A. Farrer-Myers and Justin S. Vaughn

“In a system in which any person can share his or her viewpoint given the low entry cost into the social media marketplace of ideas, [can] too much information be detrimental to the American form of democracy?”

The top five most viewed YouTube videos relating to the 2012 American election were all music videos: Obama’s words assembled into Call Me Maybe, an Obama vs. Romney Rap, Obama’s words into Sexy and I Know It, “Mitt Romney Style”, and Obama’s words into Born this Way. Is this boosting political outreach to non-traditional constituencies, or reflective of a broad disinterest and apathy by the electorate? What does it mean that a picture of Obama hugging his wife after the election was the most liked Facebook post ever, or the most re-tweeted photo of all time? Are social networks advancing democratic discourse and citizen engagement, or making us effectively voiceless?

These are the questions Controlling the Message engages with in a series of essays by different authors looking at the effect of technology on America’s 2012 presidential election. The essays vary in quality: some advance interesting ideas or studies, such as one that looks at comment forums and finds the number of negative comments is no more than in normal political conversation. Another explains that in 2012, Obama’s campaign messaged their supporters asking them to urge a particular friend of theirs to vote, register, or volunteer; a carefully organized and minutely targeted campaign to reach the most valuable voters, using social networks.

Others are weaker. Some advance non-falsifiable hypotheses, meaning their findings are basically just circular reasoning: one seemed to treat social networks as a foreign land, making me wonder whether an author who has clearly never used Facebook has a lot to give in terms of understanding its effect on politics.

The general finding is that social media does not fundamentally change either political campaigns or reporting. It does, however, make a difference in reaching 5-10% of voters. Since those are the voters that decide elections, that means it is important, but perhaps not revolutionary.

The bottom line: Controlling the Message asks great questions, and for that alone it’s worth considering. Unfortunately, it may be just too early to come up with clear answers to them.

Disclosure: I read this as an Advance Reader Copy: it is released April 14th. You can see details on Controlling the Message on Amazon.

Rome: An Empire’s Story – Greg Woolf

What, you might wonder, is the future fate of America? Americans, of course, consider their country different from any other, and with some justification. It was explicitly founded, however, in the shadow of an earlier empire: Rome. To understand the fate and evolution of empires, it pays to try to understand those that occurred in the past.

Rome: An Empire’s Story asks just that. How did the Roman empire survive so long, and do so well, and what lessons does it hold for other empires?

A few key lessons: hybridization is essential. Ideally, empires arise on the margins of another civilization, able to draw lessons from many places while forced to survive. Macedonia was on the edge of Greece: Rome at the margins of Etruscan land. Even the New World was on the fringes of the old. Rome’s key early advantage, though, was institutional: the novelty of imposing obligations on defeated enemies, and then expanding citizenship, helped consolidate their power. Citizens of Rome genuinely identified with Rome, in a way that our nationalist modern world struggles to understand – even after the fall of the West, societies we don’t typically identify with the Romans identified as such and sought to recreate the empire.

Woolf, though, doesn’t believe empires can still work. Constantine, he argued, adopted Christianity in an effort to hold the empire together: as ties to being Roman weakened, he thought adopting a single religion could provide an alternative. Unfortunately, it divided the empire even further, particularly given the incessant squabbling within Christianity. He thus points to the rise of universal religions as the end of the age of empire: it may not have destroyed Rome directly, but it made empires less feasible by creating a new tie to individual loyalty. IS, take note.

The story is not a new one: Gibbon would have agreed. It’s also almost certainly a vast oversimplification – Empires are complicated things, and trying to draw lessons from one for all empires is suspiciously close to anecdotal evidence. Religion and other ethnic, nationalist, and group loyalties do matter, though, and certainly play a role in events today, whether in the Middle East or Russia.

Empire’s Story alternates chapters about the history of Rome with thematic ones on things like slavery and empire, imperical ecology, and other topics. For that reason, it can be tough going unless you already have a background in Roman history: trying to cover so much content means he is necessarily brief on many issues. The issue of what led to the success and stability of the Roman Empire qua empire is an interesting one, but the book doesn’t always deliver on its promise.

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell

“The Essays is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigneand all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of ‘How did he know all that about me?’”

Regular readers know I think Montaigne is excellent, and highly recommend him. For some variety, though, I thought I’d try a biography of him. Our writing is shaped by our lives, after all, and so placing an author in the context of his or her life is often useful. For a man like Montaigne, who was fascinated by the world around him, it becomes even more important.

Following Gustave Flaubert’s advice on Montaigne (“Don’t read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live.”), Bakewell tries to extract lessons for how to live from both Montaigne’s writings and his life. He lived in a tumultuous time, with frequent civil wars between Catholics and Protestants in France, and Bakewell does well to provide background information that helps deepen and extend Montaigne.

That said, I think the book faces an almost insurmountable challenge: since Montaigne already seeks to explain how to live, the book can often feel like a lesser shadow of the original text. Montaigne’s prose is generally clear and careful already, and so interpretation can feel superfluous. How to Life is well written and interesting, but is unavoidably inferior to the Essays themselves. For a lover of Montaigne, and interesting read, but probably best to read it after, not before, you’ve read Montaigne himself.

Shopping for Votes: How politicians choose us and we choose them – Susan Delacourt

“Where politicians once made church basements the fixture of their campaign road trips, the refreshment-stop of choice is no the ubiquitous Tim Hortons…Canadian politics no longer bears much resemblance to the church (except maybe the occasional sermon) but our marketing politicians seem right at home among sales posters, advertising and cash registers.”

Reading the newspaper, it would be easy to believe that politicians make judgments based on polls: 42% support for X, 27% support for Y. The truth, argues Shopping for Votes, is significantly more complicated.

As technology has improved and politicians have gotten better at identifying individual voters, the ability of political parties to target messages more precisely has also increased. Parties now divide voters into archetypes: Zoe, the yoga-loving left wing younger condo owner, or Dougie, a single tradesman who liked to hunt (both archetypes are drawn from the 2006 Conservative strategy in Canada). Zoe would never vote for the Conservatives, so could be safely ignored – Dougie was a potential supporter, and so a key target. In the event, the Conservatives managed to identify 500,000 individual voters they needed to convince to vote Conservative: the millions of others were either already voting Conservative, unlikely to ever vote Conservative, or in non-marginal constituencies. National polls of average support become totally irrelevant, even if everyday voters follow them closely.

The danger, argues Delacourt, is that as a result politics is more polarized than ever. Politicians don’t look for broad, uniting policies: they look for ones that will target their key groups, ignoring the impact or effect on others. The result is that as consumers increasingly shop for the best party, choosing not to identify with any one group, parties also shop for the right voters, offering finely tuned products to different groups. The government is no longer the home of bold national projects or grand ideas, but rather small, carefully targeted ones. As a result, creating a national brand often falls to the private sector. In Canada, that has mean Tim Hortons and Molson ad campaigns are responsible for nationalism, not the government.

It’s a powerful – and interesting – message, and one that I suspect resonates with a lot of voters. The book is a great insight into how political hacks, as opposed to voters, think about elections, and how elections are being changed by trends like big data and better econometrics. An important and useful read, and if nominally targeted towards Canada, relevant to most electoral systems.

The Rise of Rome – Anthony Everitt

“From Edward Gibbon onward, historians have pondered the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But how was the empire won? What was it that enabled a small Italian market town by a ford on the river Tiber to conquer the known world?”

Rome, you might have heard, did pretty well for itself. The Western Roman Empire lasted just over a millennia (including the earlier Republic), while the Eastern managed closer to two. To put that in perspective, the Americans have so far managed about 250 years, and as a nation they’re not exactly bursting with youthful vigour. So how, you might ask, did the Romans manage it?

Everitt doesn’t answer this question directly, but he does tell the story of the early years of Rome, from its beginnings as an early hill town, overshadowed by nearby Greek and Etruscan settlements, to its climactic struggles with Carthage that would catapult it to world-power status. Rome saw its strength as government: they could not compete with the Greeks for poetry or culture, they argued, but they argued their ability to govern and organize a state was second to none. What makes it interesting, though, is the malleability of that government. In early Rome, there were no tribunes, no aediles – laws were kept secret, as holy books. It would be centuries before the Roman government became recognizable in its better-known form, the product of an ongoing struggle between different factions. Cicero would claim that was its strength: Greek cities could be ruled by one great man, but Rome was ruled by generations of wise ones. I’m not sure any country today could say the same, but then the Roman Republic did turn into a dictatorial empire, so it isn’t all role model.

Everitt’s strength is in the small details that help bring the ancient world to life. The Romans were helped in building a fleet, for example, because a Carthaginian ship was shipwrecked on Italy: building a replica was made easier because the Carthaginians used to mark all their warship pieces with different letters, so they could ship the pieces as a flatpack and then easily assemble them in port. For all that, I have to admit Everitt’s not to my taste. He tends to hold strong opinions, and cast judgment quickly on his subjects: I’m sure that suits some readers, but for me when there is no evidence, I prefer humility over unprovable claims and ambiguous judgments. Still, it’s a fascinating question, and if its one you’re interested in, the book provides a wealth of detail and information.

Business Adventures – John Brooks

“The [Tax] Code, a document longer than “War and Peace,” is phrased – inevitably, perhaps – in the sort of jargon that stuns the mind and disheartens the spirit; a fairly typical sentence, dealing with the definition of the word “employment,” starts near the bottom of page 564, includes more than a thousand words, nineteen semicolons, forty-two simple parentheses, three parentheses within parentheses, and even one unaccountable interstitial period, and comes to a gasping end, with a definitive period, near the top of page 567.”

Any book that is the favourite of both Bill Gates and Warren Buffet is self-recommending, and I feel a little second-rate saying I really liked it as well. Nevermind. Business Adventures is a great book!

What distinguishes Business Adventures from other business books is the quality of the writing. It’s a collection of New Yorker articles by John Brooks from the golden age of print journalism, and it shows. Topics include the rise and fall of Xerox (invented by accident – they just kept adding elements from the periodic table to their ink till they found one that worked, and had no idea why), the Ford Edsel (a brutal failure of a car design for Ford), income tax, cornering a market in order to destroy short sellers (sadly now illegal, which might be why short selling is so popular), the first supermarket (Piggly Wiggly Stores – the owner would become a millionaire and then go bankrupt several times), the manager of the Tennessee Valley Authority, currency crises, and a vast scope of other subjects.

It’s a hard book to find these days, but Amazon has it on Kindle. It’s tremendous, and I recommend it. For the quality of the writing, for the quality of the stories, and even for the insight. It won’t teach you to be a modern investment banker, but it will teach you about the fundamental concepts businesses and businesspeople need to think about, concepts that can often feel obscured in a haze of electronic trading and hedge funds today. As the real estate crash in the US showed, however, technology and advanced degrees are no substitute for understanding the classical principles of business.

Rebellion: The history of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution – Peter Ackroyd

Rebellion: a beautifully written, compellingly organized tale of a century that would shape much of England’s history to come.

The 17th century laid the foundations for much of the English history that followed. Agricultural and Industrial revolutions were driven by Francis Bacon and Newton’s devotion to empirical science, as well as the study of greats like Christopher Wren, Halley, and Robert Hooke; religion was fundamentally shaped by the civil war in England as well as the release of the King James Bible; the seeds of empire were sown with the establishment of colonies in North America and the West Indies, while merchants visited ports in Africa, Asia, and America; Cromwell would score some of England’s greatest military victories, including conquering Scotland, which no English king had managed, as well as disabling Spain’s naval power and assuring English dominance of the high seas; and writers would shape English literature, including Milton (private secretary to Cromwell), John Bunyan, Pepys, and Hobbes. Even national holidays would be given a kickstart with Fawkes’ attempt to blow up parliament, odd as the English national fetish about that is.

It was a busy century. Peter Ackroyd tells its story, one focused around the civil and religious war that would end in the beheading of Charles I and the elevation of Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration that would bring back Charles II as king. The book’s greatest strength is that Ackroyd truly does tell its story: he presents a narrative that is as interesting as any novel. Much of the book focuses on the lives of kings, but chapters do also examine things like the role of women in society, literature, and other topics, giving the book a breadth it would not otherwise have.

The book is the third of six planned volumes on English history. Its fault, perhaps, is that it ends not with a bang but a whimper: having covered the glories of Restoration, the book can drag a bit as it ends with the politicking of Charles II that would lead to the Glorious Revolution. That aside, Ackroyd is a fascinating writer of history, and for quality of writing as well as depth of knowledge, Rebellion appeals. Newcomers looking for an introduction to an important but under-known period of history and experts should be equally delighted.

Disclosure: I read Rebellion as an advance reader copy. It is released October 21st.

Lament for a Nation – George Grant

“Like most other human beings, Canadians want it both ways. We want through formal nationalism to escape the disadvantages of the American dream; yet we also want to the benefits of junior membership in the empire.”

In light of the recent Scottish referendum, Lament for a Nation seemed somewhat appropriate, a Canadian classic on fears about cultural hegemony. It’s written by one of the foremost Canadian political philosophers (confession: that isn’t a large comparison group, but he’s still very good), and in Lament George Grant worries about the future of Canada and its possible end as a sovereign state due to US cultural encroachment.

His thesis is that with technology, cultural differences are almost impossible to maintain: economies must modernize to participate in the world, but as you modernize education and culture, you lose what makes you distinct. Even worse, he argues, early capitalism had restraint because of cultural restrictions: a Protestant work ethic, a British sense of self-restraint. In the age of technology such restraints disappear, and capitalism goes unchecked. Modern conservatives are thus doomed because to be popular they must accept technology, but to do so, they are no longer conservatives.

It’s a classic of small-c conservatism. In some ways, it’s interesting because that voice is diminished in modern politics, where the choice can often be between social liberals and economic liberals (in the traditional sense of liberal, not the American left-wing sense). Though Canada has to some extent preserved its culture, current Middle Eastern politics are in some sense a response to the same feelings of insecurity against American cultural hegemony. There may, of course, be things we like about American culture, such as human rights or individual freedom, but the question of how to encourage their adoption without making cultures feel attacked is fundamental, at both an individual and social level.