Tag Archives: Society

Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol

“But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.”

“Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.”

In Gogol’s satirical look at Russian society, Dead Souls refers both to serfs who have died but not yet been recognized as dead by the Census, and the natures of his characters, all of them flawed or caricatures in some way. Gogol’s goal was to capture the flaws and faults of the Russian character, and then in Book 2 provide some insight into solutions. Unfortunately, Gogol was unhappy with Book 2 and burnt it shortly before he died, leaving Book 1 to end mid-sentence: what that says about the Russian character I leave to the reader.

Dead Souls is about a rather untraditional con artist, one attempting to buy dead serfs. In Czarist Russia, the count of serfs under each landowner was established by the census, and if one died between one census and the next, then the landowner has left with a deed of ownership and not much else. Chichikov, our hero, strikes on the idea to buy these dead souls for a pittance and mortgage them for a vast amount of money, then leave with it. Unlike today, when we are lucky enough to have a modern middle class with enough money to be worth stealing from, that meant going to the large rural landowners in search of ones with dead souls to sell. Fortunately, people with dead souls are in abundant supply in Gogol’s epic. Chichikov’s odyssey, and the parallel is intentional, involves repeated, cyclical stops in small town Russia, where he encounters, and indeed personifies, the Russian concept of poshlost: a moral and spiritual vulgarity.

Comedy is a tremendously difficult thing to translate well: jokes rely so much on context and subtle meaning that they almost always fall flat in translation. This translation, the Robert Maguire, very much suffers for it, and I’m not sure if another translation could do better: lacking the background Gogol expected of his readers, much of the satire is lost on me. Still, the book has strengths, and if not replete with laugh out loud moments, there remain some great insights into human nature, always a Russian virtue. I wouldn’t take it over a Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn, but if you like the Russian authors (and I very much do!), he provides a nice change from the better known ones.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace – John Maynard Keynes

“The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable – abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe.”

Keynes wrote the Economic Consequences in 1919, and it played a critical role in turning public opinion against the Treaty of Versailles as too harsh and unfair to Germany. In it, he argues that France’s desire to punish Germany and unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for the war has led to reparations wildly beyond Germany’s ability to pay, and worries about the future of Europe after a crippling peace treaty and continuing instability.

Keynes is fun to read because he’s ridiculously clever, and this book is no exception. He’s witty, he’s insightful, and he’s entertaining. Conveniently, history has also judged him right, with the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty contributing to the outbreak of World War 2. Being Keynes, though, he also had opinions on a wide variety of other topics.

On History

“The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.

On Poverty and Inequality

“Men will not always die quietly, for starvation, which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual.”

“Then a man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air.”

On inflation

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.”

On the Modern World

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep…The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life.”

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

“Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

Madame Bovary craves beauty, wealth, passion, and love, measuring her life against the great epics about which she would read. Dissatisfied, she turns to extramarital affairs, to spending she cannot afford, always reaching farther for her idols only to find them covered in gilt. Her life, empty and dissatisfied as it is, is made vivid by the depth of detail and realism as it is told, culminating in the destruction of the lives of those around her and her own self-destruction.

Flaubert would spend 12 hours a day at his desk, painstakingly attending to detail and always searching for le mot juste, the right word. He believed prose should be as perfect as poetry in its word choice, and sought in every sentence to perfectly capture the mood, the atmosphere, and the exact detail of the scene. In doing so, he created an entire literary genre, realist narration, and he is justly considered one of the greatest Western novelists for his influence on authors as diverse as Kafka, Coetzee, and Sartre.

What makes Madame Bovary so good is that attention to detail. The story was begun by Flaubert at the urging of his friends, who hoped to cure his realism by giving him the dreariest subject they could think of. Not, I would observe, the most successful stratagem I’ve heard. Yet he does meet their request: little that is out of the ordinary happens in the book, and yet the narrative is compelling as Emma Bovary pursues a downward spiral of vanity and delusion. I don’t tend to read this kind of fiction, preferring Bildungsromanic stories of self-actualization to stories of the fall, but as a story of the costs of obsession with material comforts and status, a Stoic would struggle to do better.

Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

“Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at least came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…”

“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! Not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

Whaling is an activity that has persisted since prehistoric times, peaking in the 1800s with the harvesting of oil from sperm whales, with their population falling from over a million before commercial sperm whaling to less than a third of that by the time whaling was banned by a moratorium in 1982. In 1842, however, a young man would abandon the whaling ship he was working on to live among reputed cannibals and pursue love affairs with local girls. He would recount these events in bestselling books when he returned home, before destroying his career with a book that received almost universally scathing reviews: Moby-Dick, now listed among the Great American Novels, even called the best book ever written.

At its best, Moby-Dick is excellent: it’s moving, it’s insightful, and it very much captures the sense of the sacred, the spiritual relationship of crew to whale or man to obsession. It can also be fascinating in its detail: entire chapters are devoted to the anatomy of the whale, the symbolism of the colour white, or the role of the whale in art and history. Phrases like “Call me Ishmael” are some of the best known of any book, even among people who haven’t read the original source: it is but one of many unforgettable phrases. Though broadly pro-whaling, it also even has some sympathy with the whales, confronting the fact that the activity necessarily involves tormenting the animals.

For all that, let me confess I found it a little boring, philistine as that may make me. I’m not one to quail at historical detail given my passion for history, and those parts I enjoyed, but particularly the first half I found slow, long descriptive sections filling space between more interesting parts. The book has some great sections and some great lines, but I wouldn’t have minded were it considerably shorter. Still, as a reflection on the personality of man and the necessities of the energy industry, it has much to tell us today: the oil we burn, though not literally in lamps and candles, can still cost blood.

Moral Clarity: a guide for grown-up idealists – Susan Neiman

“If you’re committed to the Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.” – Neiman

“Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we look upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” – Kant

Consider a man who cannot resist temptation: every time he passes a brothel, for example, he succumbs, risking his marriage, his dignity, and his health. What if that man knew he would be hanged if he entered? We all conclude he would resist: the desire for life is a preeminent human motivation, and all else pales before it, no matter how tempting.

What if, however, an unjust ruler seeks to kill someone, and orders the man to give false testimony to condemn the other to death? If the man refuses, he will himself be put to death. Now we hesitate: we aren’t sure what the man would do, or indeed what we would do in those circumstances. Kant (from whom the thought experiment is taken), says this shows there are limits to knowledge; it is difficult to know in advance what we would do. Many would agree we should refuse to testify, and we all agree we could: we are simply not sure if we will. There, Kant argues, lies freedom: it is not pleasure but justice that can move humans to overcome the love of life itself.

Moral Clarity is an attempt to understand the foundations of reason and idealism in the Enlightenment, and to use those ideas to clarify our own often muddy conceptions of politics and morality. The 18th century left, she points out, believed in universal ideals to which reality should be compared (Kant, Rousseau): the right believed that such ideals were dangerous and deceptive, and gained value only from their similarity to reality (Hume, Burke). From modern terrorism to traditional religion, she uses Enlightenment ideas to help understand the modern world, and argues that the Enlightenment belief in the power of ideas is an essential tool for progressive movements everywhere.

Neiman is an expert on Kant, and her philosophy is excellent; clear and insightful, she quotes widely and deeply and is extremely impressive. Unfortunately, at least for me her applications to policy are far weaker: it reads as a series of jabs at Republicans with no particularly new insights or understandings to provide. If you can get to the meat of the book, however, it provides a clear and compelling argument for morality and ideals in the public sphere, concepts that we are today too often uncomfortable or even unfamiliar with.

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

“Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

To many of us, Lilliput is the children’s story of small people tying down a bigger person, with some mumbling about horses or political philosophy in the background. In truth, however, it is that and more: a mockery of traditional travel literature, a satirical view of government and religion, a study of human nature and corruption, even a questioning of the ethos of scientific progress and development.

Lilliput is wracked with civil strife between two parties, those who wear high heels and those who wear low heels. Neither side trusts the crown prince, of course; he wears one of each. They are also at war with another country, because one likes to break its eggs from the big end, and the other from the small: the dispute stems from a religious text which says people should break their eggs from the appropriate end, only neither side agrees which end is appropriate. A conflict reminiscent of religious feuds in his time, or political ones in ours, perhaps.

Though Lilliput, the land of little people, is the best known, the book actually covers four broad journeys: first Gulliver is relatively big, then small, then wise, then ignorant. Each country he visits has different forms of government, perceives humanity in a different light, and is flawed in their own way; in Laputa Gulliver finds a society fixated on science but unable to use it for practical ends, while with the Houyhnhnms he finds a society of horses ruled by reason and ruling the human equivalents, called Yahoos. All of them are entertaining, and readers will likely find their own favourites. For myself, I think I enjoyed most the acute observations by other societies about our own: nothing like an external perspective, whether six inches or sixty feet high, to lend objectivity.

Oh, and the egg breaking wars. “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”

The Knowledge – Lewis Dartnell

If you were one of the few survivors of some sort of global apocalypse, what sort of knowledge would you need to rebuild a functioning society? Building an iphone isn’t exactly easy, and I think most of us would struggle with even more basic things like a lens (for science), a bike (for transportation), or a system of crop rotation that would keep sufficient nitrogen in the fields (essential for food), never mind something like a pottery kiln or steam engine.

The Knowledge has two goals. One, to teach future survivors how to rebuild a technologically advanced civilization, ideally advancing them as far as possible without creating things too difficult to repair or maintain (there’s no point in jets if you can’t repair jet engines). Two, to examine the fundamentals of science and technology that are very remote from most of us. To do so, Dartnell covers the basics of food, shelter, and water plus some more ambitious projects, explaining to the reader how to get an arc furnace going to work metals; recover antibiotics, X-rays, steam engines, and photography; and reproduce electricity and cement, trying to strike a balance between useful detail for the survivor and overwhelming a casual reader.

The book is interesting even given the low odds of an apocalypse (depending on time scale – just ask this documentary produced by Stephen Hawking), and it’s even better as a way to provoke a thought experiment on what you think should be passed on. Theory of atoms? Evolution? How to make cement or grow food? Chemistry? As a social scientist myself, something I wondered is the role of social invention in all this. Are there social technologies that should be passed on? The Knowledge mentions only physical tech, but what about how to design a democracy, the importance of trade, or a la Steven Pinker, how to restrain violence? Overall, though sometimes a bit heavy into the detail of engineering that I must confess I skimmed, the basics of the technologies that underpin our society have shaped the way we live, the way we talk, and the way we think. Dartnell does an excellent job highlighting all of these, from how we say o’clock to show we mean clock time, not solar time, to the advantages of golf cart batteries over car batteries. Read it to learn more about the basic technologies we use, but whether you read it or not it’s interesting to think about what you would want to pass on.

Disclosure: I read The Knowledge as a free advance reader copy – it is released on April 3rd. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). You never know when such knowledge might be handy!

Out of the Ashes – David Lammy

“The riots spell out a fundamental challenge in British politics: to replace a culture in which people simply take what they want with an ethic of give and take, reciprocity, something for something.”

The Economist reviewed this book not so long ago, so I decided I’d pick it up. David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham, an area of London central to the riots in 2011, and in Out of the Ashes he “explores why they happened, what [he] think[s] they tell us about Britain, and where we should go from here.”

In brief, he suggests the reason is an over-focus on individualism in modern culture. People don’t have a stake in society, and so they feel no sense of responsibility towards others. Unemployment is corrosive to our sense of who we are and what we stand for; businesses fail and we stop feeling like we’re part of a community or that we owe the community anything, least of all respect. Even in prison, the UK isolates their prisoners and prevents them from forming or keeping communities, unlike the Scandinavian model that focuses on giving prisoners social ties, to the extent of creating couples wings in prisons.

Books written by standing politicians are generally terrible, for the simple reason they want to be elected, not inform. This one is better: he still indulges in the periodic unrealistic suggestion or political haymaking to establish his credentials (I’m unconvinced of the value of giving football clubs to the people, but I’m sure it wins votes), but parts of the book are insightful. He writes well about his concerns about our modern focus on human rights, for example: they bring considerable benefits, of course, but they’ve also lead to a modern discourse where we focus on what we can do by right, instead of trying to decide the right thing to do.

Ironically, this is in some ways a small-c conservative argument, with a focus on community and group rights, though I suspect he’d disagree with that. Regardless, I enjoyed it, and it’s a nice expression of feelings I think a lot of people in the UK share about the riots. Most of the policies aren’t new, but he argues well for them, whether requiring young people to help care for the elderly, reforming prisons, or a guaranteed minimum income (also known as a negative income tax). If you’re willing to wade through some standard fluff and electioneering, it’s one of the better books available about the London riots.

The Roman Experience – L.P. Wilkinson

“Baths, sex, and wine our bodies undermine; /

Yet what is life but baths and sex and wine?”

-Roman jingle

 I can remember visiting Palmyra and hearing the story of some poor Roman engineer having a fit over the Arabic and therefore angled central street, making elaborate architectural efforts to conceal the bend. For Romans, main roads had to be straight. It has always captured our shared humanity for me: I can well picture a modern engineer going to similar lengths to ensure elegance. Such minor details help humanize ancient cultures, and remind us that human nature has changed little in the intervening thousand years.

In some ways, we know a surprisingly large amount about the Romans. We can say what they ate for breakfast (bread, oil, and sometimes cheese); that moralists condemned shellfish, central heating, hothouse flowers, and out of season roses; that they worried that eating meat was immoral (probably not due to carbon emissions); that they invited guests to parties in sets of 9, because that’s how many people would fit around couches on three sides of a table; and that they laughed at a man’s taste when a joke made the rounds that he threatened his shipping agents that any works of art from Corinth damaged in transit would have to be replaced by replicas just as good. In other ways, we know almost nothing: all of the above, for example, refers only to a narrow subset of elites, not to the plebian Roman citizen.

Wilkinson has written a book to attempt to tell us how the Romans lived; not what they did or who they conquered, but what their everyday lives were like. It’s a noble effort; historians often seem to focus on political and military history exclusively, and though I enjoy both those forms of history, I’d be the first to admit they’re hardly the whole story. Unfortunately, it faces the standard problem; there simply isn’t information about what everyday Romans did or thought. What we have, and we have a lot, is almost exclusively from the Senatorial or upper class, or later the Emperors themselves.

The book is appealing: the personal detail of everyday life in Rome is interesting, and it humanizes the Romans. The book does, however, require knowledge of history of the Empire in order to piece it all together, a fact for which the author is unapologetic.  Still, it would have been nice to see a book capture both the broad themes of Roman history as well as provide some of the quotidian detail. Failing that, I can’t deny that it’s fun to relish some of the everyday tasks and troubles of Romans, even given the incomplete picture we have.

Strange Fruits: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate – Kenan Malik

“As the rise of the politics of difference has turned the assertion of group identity into a progressive demand, so racialisation is no longer viewed as a purely negative phenomenon. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities…The concept of race is irrational. The practice of antiracism has become so. We need to challenge both, in the name of humanism and of reason.”

The idea of race has what I find a surprisingly short history. For much of humanity’s past, it was group membership of things like socioeconomic status, citizenship, or faith which mattered. As late as 1881, the King of Hawaii was given precedence over the Crown Prince of Germany; social rank mattered more than race.

Race then had its heyday, but post WW2 it for good reasons became unacceptable. Malik worries in “Strange Fruits” that it is returning in popularity in the guise of culture and under the auspices of antiracism. The right, he argues, uses human diversity as an argument to exclude the different; the modern left uses human diversity as a reason that people must be treated differently. Both, he suggests, rely on race and emphasize differences between people. Often it is culture that the left argues must be preserved: but that he suggests is too often used as a proxy for race, and one’s membership in a culture is defined by who one’s ancestors were. When museums restrict access to certain exhibits for cultural reasons, as they do in Australia and elsewhere, genetics and descent is the gatekeeper to knowledge.

In the end, race explains an insignificant 3-5% of human variation. Its categories are almost entirely arbitrary, and impossible to define over a constantly changing humanity. If science wishes to use it as a pragmatic way of grouping people, Malik argues, as when the FDA approved a drug targeting African-Americans, then fine; but it is the use of a social construct for convenience without the specificity to be anything more, and should be treated as such, not as a fixed dividing line between groups. Antiracists on the left who argue that cultures/races must be treated differently because they are different, he suggests, should remember the same: celebrating racial differences requires the same assumptions about race as those held by racists, an unscientific and unfounded philosophy.

To find out more, you can pick up a copy here (or just read the reviews) – or in the UK or Canada.