Ok! I will preface my earlier thoughts with this my final review. That way it's jarringly out of order, disjoint, and not worth the investment of atteOk! I will preface my earlier thoughts with this my final review. That way it's jarringly out of order, disjoint, and not worth the investment of attention required to follow. It's cute stylistic trick though, that will whitewash my lack of content. You find you can't look away because my review is an interlocking set of cliffhangers like this: (view spoiler)[ nothin' here: psych!! (hide spoiler)] one." (heh.)
At the same time perhaps this book is wonderful? Certainly it aspires to greatness, and not a few would agree, but I am not be among them. It's definitely clever and precocious, the way a surprising eleventh grader can give off waves of potential, while still not achieving greatness. It's tricky, and there are flashes of brilliance enough to make me wonder if I'm missing it, if I'm just some inches away from grasping it, and so I have an "Emperor's new Clothes" sort of fear of witholding the last stars and exposing my inability to see the beauty of it all. So be it: must blunder on.
A good friend told me that Italian engineering was 90% perfection and 10% inane stupidity. He told me this as we rode a subway around the subterranean conical ascent of a volcano in Naples, the cars clean and bright, electronic kiosk indicating the next stop, stylish design (yes, even the subways) and yet, screeching like the damned since the trucks hadn't been designed with clearance to match the track's curvature. That's where the last 10% gets you.
Calvino's book is 90% genius too. It's execution is flawed, and though some will forgive it that for the sake of the genius, it almost made me quit. Kaleidoscopic, Escherial, Beethovenian, recursive and yet ponderous, its individual chapters have each to carry you along entirely, (lamentably they can't) because the thread of continuity is mostly sacrificed for the sake of the cute tricks of voice and style that make you think of nested russian dolls, going down the rabbit hole and (insert your favorite reality warping metaphor here).
There were a few beautiful, laugh-your-ass-off moments that may have made the whole thing worthwhile and which I can barely refrain from spilling. As Williwaw exhorted, hang in there, and maybe you will hear the music of the spheres, but if you're like me, it will be accompanied by the screech of a railroad train forced through a knothole. The pleasure will not be unalloyed.
---- original review, after I was just 1/2 way through... ---
This book felt like the first dozen moves in as many chess games, much less satisfying than playing a single one through to the end. Now, I didn't stick it out, so maybe it will snowball to feel more and more connected along the way if I just keep after it, so I'll plod doggedly on!
It's dangerous to revisit your heroes, and Fiona's a hero. I don't want to ever get over how she buried an unsuspecting Steve Castor at Trump's impeacIt's dangerous to revisit your heroes, and Fiona's a hero. I don't want to ever get over how she buried an unsuspecting Steve Castor at Trump's impeachment inquiry. He came after her and when she started off with an admission of getting emotional, he fed her rope as fast as she could suck it up, nodding along and never suspecting his opponent might be much smarter than he, and able to use that rope to truss up his argument like a thanksgiving turkey. Which she did. It was the verbal equivalent of getting hit in the face by Serena Williams' backhand.
After that, her poor book didn't have a chance to stand up to the legend. It's like making the kids watch Aliens - neither they nor you will recreate the stark power of the original experience. Still this was worth it for a few reasons. First, you get a fly-on-the-wall's view of the stupid, grafty thoughtless inner workings of the White House under Trump. Yes, it's as bad as you thought.
Second, Hill does a creditable job explaining how the chips really are stacked up in your favor, if you're an advantaged white male, and otherwise, not. She starts by eviscerating the class society of Great Britain in unemotional factual anecd0tes, many of which happened to her. It's fundamentally credible and one gets an appropriately disappointed view of our allies. (If you know me, you know I think America gets poor marks on avoiding self-perpetuating privilege. So it was really something to see that the famously class-stratified British society really deserves the gold medal in that event.) Then she shows how it's the same in Russia, and the US too! ...with fundamentally no differences except more race and less inheritance in the equation, as the discriminating factor. One powerful chapter ended by reminding us that creating the apparatus of opportunity is everyone's job, a cumulative result of some structural biases, yes, but also the product of a thousand little individual efforts. This frankly pushed me to be more aggressive in my own hiring, knowing the people I'm evaluating have swimming upstream their whole lives.
Last, I got the audio book, because I liked her accent, and wanted to hear the thoughts from the author. This worked out well, entertained me on a month of commuting, but I did find the book slow. It's hard for me to pay attention when I'm consuming at a listening pace and I'm sure that were I reading, it would have had more impact....more
Beginning this as part of a new book club, yay! I've always gotten more from a book when I had to review it, and heard others' thoughts as well. This Beginning this as part of a new book club, yay! I've always gotten more from a book when I had to review it, and heard others' thoughts as well. This time's no exception.
I began wondering whether the title is a double entendre, revealing a loss of faith, but no. Heart on sleeve, Dr. Pagels' tragedy prohibits any thought of joke or insincerity, though maybe desperate hope is on the menu. Further study of Pagels' work clears any doubt; she is an evangelical scholar and proponent of Gnosticism, the crunchy Naropa outreach of Christianity. Obviously well researched, this is a companion volume to the Gnostic Gospels, which reads like an Indiana Jones script with intrigue, shadowy forces, craven looters and museum professors showing unsuspected guile and muscle. The time when this all "hit" the western world was around 1960, doubtless creating an effervescent atmosphere in the religious history department of all the ivyed colleges where young future professors like Elaine were starting their spiritual careers off with a buried jar of heretical bible treasures. That no doubt made it exciting and she tells some stories, in online talks, about her ignited interest in cabinets full of alternate gospels. That they're sort of reserved for the confirmed inner circle of monks, not suitable for mention on Easter Sunday or indeed from the pulpit On Any Sunday. I imagine this made religion seem refreshlingly less dogmatic: these gospels directly contradict, with at least equal historical bona fides, the canon of today's religion, exposing it all as a business, tuning its product for mass appeal. It seems to me that seeing the hand of Man working behind the scenes to shape and spin the official public facing image of God erodes much of the credibility and magic from the whole enterprise. Like the President or Beyonce, the Talent is just the public facing image of the business, a spokesmodel. For me this is damning. Is it somehow reconcilable for Beyonce's inner circle? ...for Jesus's?
In picking and choosing whole chapters to decide which best fit the mission and public image of the business, are not the Holy Catholic Church admitting, at least to themselves, that it is a franchise, perpetuating itself for the sake of the stakeowners? With these facts in sight, I don't understand how insiders can remain honestly devout.
In summary, the discovery of the Gnostic gospels, while creating excitement and new scholarship contain a poison pill that suffuses a scent of capitalism and manipulation across the Bible, revealing it to be crafted, not divine. Is there any divinity left?
Reading some of the work closely, I am struck that the form of the text is poetry. I don't mean that it rhymes, but that the word choice is indirect and metaphoric, even (seemingly) wrong and perhaps purposely so. Pagels uses a sharp analytical knife to show space between Thomas, Luke and John, arguing that Jesus was God descended to become man in one case, or maybe man elevated to God in the other or (by Thomas) that we are all God. The words don't seem that clear to me. They seem designed not to be clear. Also, I have some other references with which to compare, where grand, oblique writing makes word choices that leave meaning, _and proof_ as an exercise for the user, where the wrong word makes a mystery of intent, or leaves a frisson of intrique as to what the author may have meant.
Is Thomas just confirming Judaism? ...the postulate that God is in you and Jesus just a teacher? I'm off to the internet to ask that quesiton now.
Maybe much of this can be put down to the difficulty of translation and time. Numerous authors are rewriting from the original, changing language as they go, and making semantic choices along the way. One can say those were bad or slipped out of style somewhere, and that careful scholarshop can put them back in place: Pagels one time identifies Jesus as a rabbi, noting the author uses words that would have been associated with "teacher" in the time and culture of their writing. This example is common in erudite academic analysis of the bible. Knowing what a word meant can give a more exact, and credible (at least to me) alternate interpretation of the text today. (find and cite one?) but when elucidated, these examples do not usually add confidence but rather, erode it.
In the very end of a talk she gave on this, Pagels said, "The creed creates an institution which claims to be the only way of salvation. ... There's good reason, maybe, why in the second century they battened down the hatches and created an institutional structure because these other visionary teachings and spiritual searches might not have created that (structure) but I just wonder, now, (that we are grown wise and can handle some controversy without losing faith?) whether you think they can add to our understanding, or whether ...they ought to be thrown out."
Hofer's wonderful quote, /quotes/9183471, highlights that our stodgy religions were once argued over. Maybe the Nicene Creed and definition of the trinity was a moment of nailing things down, when our dogma coagulated from sap, leaving some things out.
Another quote, apocryphal, is that the church is surely right because what survives must be so. This views religion as a Darwinian meme which, like much of evolution is hard to argue against. "What's most survivable survives," is a tightl little tautology that can maybe explain why anything IS. But my goodness, that doesn't mean it's right!
A last note, the poem, _Thunder: Perfect Mind_ is a good thing to look at....more
He should have called it triple X-Events, because this book is disaster porn. If you want to be titillated by what might go wrong, this is the book foHe should have called it triple X-Events, because this book is disaster porn. If you want to be titillated by what might go wrong, this is the book for you. It's neatly organized into a "thoughtful" introduction and classification section, then the bulk of the book is a deep dive into different disaster scenarios, and finally some proposals and suggestions how to go forward.
It's sweet stuff but thin, and the analysis is bald assertions and garbage.
First, a definition: an X-event is really bad, and more likely than you think. That about covers it. Casti though, covers it in a dozen pages capped off with a horrifically flawed mathematical concept aimed at the fat tail of a non-Gaussian distribution motivated by an impossible plot. I'm ok if people don't understand math but if they pretend to, that's wrong. Casti's degree and history says otherwise, so maybe he just overdid the dumbing-it-down.
The first chapter goes out of its way to invent jargon. Now, jargon's not bad. It provides shorthand to call into context a large section of background technical information. A great example is "strain" which means different things to civilians and mechanical engineers. While strikingly similar in general idea you and I think of, (it's a word well chosen) strain has very precise and valuable meaning to the engineer. Jargon is used gratuitously here, making up terminology that doesn't meaningfully add to words we already know.
Tthere are even categories defined for the jargon. Casti defines Principles, Severity and Likelihood as three dimensions of X-events. The definitions are just the noodling you do to decide what to write, unfortunately elevated to prose and put in the book so we have to wade through it. But what the hell, if you like that kind of thing, maybe it's foreplay!
On the severity axis, X-events are further categorized into Extinction Events, Global Catastrophes and Global Disasters. Always with the capitals because we are not using words here but defining new concepts, inventing intellectual property, forging forward towards our next PhD. More precisely we are fabricating complexity out of thin air because that's what you do when you don't understand your subject, you chop it up into bits and put them in cubbies and hope that atomic inspection will yield broader insight. Nope. (Sigh.)
The principals are worse, here is a grab bag of fun but unrelated concepts are other people's precious memes kidnapped and shrink wrapped for later exploitation. Here, forced cohabitation of these diverse and unrelated memes is unseemly.
Better, enjoy these ideas in their source material. If you're unfamiliar with Goldilox zone, Red Queen Hypothesis, Incompleteness Theorem or the Butterfly Effect, then you've got some really some great books to look forward to, instead of this one. Start with Richard Dawkins, James Gleick and David Foster Wallace.
It occurs now that I'm complaining about the front matter, when after all if you're here for the porn. You can just fast forward through all that plot setup after all. It's not very good.
Closing, I'll compare this book to two others he cites, each of which I loved.
The book presaging this one was Cat's Cradle. What an opus! Vonnegut reminds us all we need to know about the certain danger of trusting hairless monkeys with the keys to disaster-level technology: once you've made Pandora's box, somebody's definitely gonna knock it over with their elbow at a party when they put on the fast music and poof, we're all dead. Vonnegut can make that sentence poignant and funny and ominous all at the same time, and he did.
Another great read is Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. It's this same book without the jargon, and treating things that've happened already instead of those that might. Tainter to his credit does not claim to solve the problem, but rather works to tease out a theme of eventually insupportable complexity. He never quite motivates why it wouldn't level off in a phenomenon of diminishing returns though he tries mightily.
There's still hope for X-Events. Just don't forget it's only porn. The titillating part of course is that this could all happen to you!...more
Fun and breezy, with echoes of Cryptonomicon, (a favorite and now worth a re-read), as we have multiple story lines jumping across timelines. In this Fun and breezy, with echoes of Cryptonomicon, (a favorite and now worth a re-read), as we have multiple story lines jumping across timelines. In this case, literally so, but you can learn about that from all the other reviews.
I'm trying instead to give you the feel of it, and it's a whiff of Elizabethan steampunk (is that a thing?), gritty but elegant, like the Flying Cloud, not entirely madcap as with airships and other Jules Verne machinery. Ok, there're time machines but every SciFi book needs one prop to start it spinning. So what's going on, why all the stars?
Well, it's an excellent period piece that appeals to me directly: the mashup of tech and Shakespeare and witchery and conspiracy and the military industrial complex. All familiar turf!
How so? Well I'm writing from the teak parlour of Pelican V, afloat somewhere in the bobbing clutter of fishing trawlers, moss covered houseboats, chrome mega-yachts and vast hulking iron machinery pushed to nameless deeds in the dark of night by equally vast and hulking tugs. Later, at sunrise, a cold mist will settle and plastic water-bugs with human muscles will ghost by, silent but for the clunks of their oarlocks. My internet trickles over an old cell phone which policy I terminated but inexplicably retained data services, decrepit but reliable. Perhaps the bills still go somewhere. Heat flickers from a diesel furnace in the corner, fed by some faintly yammering pump below. A decades newer Italian contraption on the shelf conjures espresso by magic and tech. The bookcase is full of fantastical literature, restrained from falling in bumpy weather by webwork of parachute cords in all the colors of gelato. I'm proud of them; Bowditch, China's Wings, Marine Diesel Engines, Cryptonomicon, Once a Runner, Six Frigates, a fat wad of college notes with "Astrodynamics" written on the spine, Strang and Gelb and, just out of reach but waiting like a promise or maybe like a coiled rattlesnake, Drela. All the books I've written about for you, excepting the odious Blood Meridian which I will respect but not tolerate. I have a spice rack to shame a witch, and a rocking chair covered with a colorful Afghan hand-knit by somebody else's grandmother, an old-world grandfather clock made in China. The place fairly seethes witchery.
So, I have apparently written myself into a Stephenson novel, on some alternate thread of time. That means this book was compelling to me from the first scene, when we meet our heroine, an Indiana Jones type, and her evil supervising professor and off we go, whipped into a 21st century Elizabethan smoothie.
There are a lot of people you know in this book, starting with Tristan, who, though he's a bit flat, you can't help wanting to BE. Next is a frustratingly powerful bureaucrat Blevins wielding a mean powerpoint, but you knew that from the name already. There're idiot Generals, women sly and wise, and that one asshole you knew was bad at first sight. One false note for me, Neal's got nerd and geek (AKA "tool" in my vernacular) separated by a good haircut and welding prowess as well as other desirable characteristics. This is personally a bit threatening since I aspire (don't we all?) to see myself somewhere in the pantheon, and I'm not sure I've got the requisite welding skills, a shortcoming I acknowledge in utter seriousness. In all good moral novels, you have to stare your own personality right in the mirror and ask "who's That guy, in this book?"
I should mention I've not finished it yet, managing, barely, to put it down at the end to have something to look forward to. Now, so do you....more
Authorative scholarship, and so exciting this happened In My Lifetime! One thinks of religion as being as old as European cathedrals. Yet it's weatherAuthorative scholarship, and so exciting this happened In My Lifetime! One thinks of religion as being as old as European cathedrals. Yet it's weathered recent storms. With archaeological care and forthright candor, we get an explanation of some of the forces and likely causes of suppression of branches deemed heretical at the outset. I read this as history. With strong religious conviction, you might call it subversive. I wrote this review as part of a writing assignment for my "book club" and it's a bit much: you're better off just to read Pagels' excellent book.
I鈥檓 writing about the Gnostic Gospels, a book written in 1979 by Elaine Pagels. It is hard to know where to start.
We all have religious backgrounds of some sort, For my part, I was an altar boy, took confirmation, was acutely aware of my pulling away from the church. It was an unwanted separation but inexorable, because I couldn鈥檛 reconcile their stories with reality.
As a young adult, I learned an influential uncle was a religious professor and also something I'd call a mystic. His view of religion is unconventional, though he was deeply established in the Lutheran faith. 鈥淗ow could they accept such a radical,鈥� I wondered? I came to believe there is religion for everyone, sliced not only into silos of differing faiths, but also into strata of growing complexity and decreasing literal adherence to dogma. That seems frankly a little bit insincere to me, that the priests don鈥檛 drink the same kool-aid as the faithful, but they鈥檝e got organizations to run, eh? It also just seems crazy to both call it "truth" and allow that it's malleable, a "roll your own" enterprise. Well, we find out in this book that the Lutherans weren't the first with that take. Let鈥檚 look at the strata, from a coarse perspective.
Here I will suggest the world has a three-tiered view of religion ranging from: 1) It鈥檚 real. God is up there, watching, answering prayers, throwing the occasional lightning bolt. (That usually goes with 鈥渕y religion is right and yours is wrong,鈥� too.) 2) Spinoza鈥檚 god with a match: the universe is wonderful beyond belief, but there鈥檚 no reason to believe in or need to hypothesize anyBODY up there performing realtime interventions since all the clockwork runs on physics & math. 3) The big bang isn鈥檛 miraculous, it just Is. Stop looking for magic.
I鈥檓 in the second camp, amazed that math works, thrilled that we (meat!) can understand it. Lately I have an even more astounded view: why is there ANYTHING, at all? I mean it鈥檚 crazy enough that gravity is weak and atoms make chemistry, and of course it鈥檚 obvious that the earth is just the right distance from the sun 鈥榗ause otherwise we鈥檇 be living somewhere else, where it was but why should there be a universe or universes or whatever we think these days? It is too easy to call that a stupid question and move on. Krauss said the universe is a net zero and therefore it could erupt from nothing because of some quantum instability. (Hmm, did he say that first or just popularize it? Dunno.) Ok, well that is thoroughly deeply amazing too. I feel like we, as 鈥渕odern鈥� educated monkeys are still as susceptible to wonder as were the bronze age people. Only, just like a driving a 4x4, we can get further before we get stuck. In that case maybe conventional religion is just a hangover left from the era of ignorance, but founded on the same existential wonder we still feel.
Enough introduction. Let鈥檚 discuss 鈥渕odern Christianity鈥� now, which adds parental supervision to all that scientific wonder. ...and let鈥檚 begin with math. Do we invent it or discover it? Is it possible to have a nuanced answer? Mine is that we discover it inasmuch as it matches the world, because the world was there first.
How about religion: is it invented or discovered? This is the fundamental difference between Gnostics and the orthodoxy. Way back in the day, there were struggles, often political struggles, to create and craft the Christian religion. This was the birth of the 鈥渙ne holy Catholic and Apostolic faith鈥� which lives on today. An easy assumption (and I鈥檒l make it) is that we see now the results of a 2000 year process of evolution which has produced some robust and stable cultural memes such as the nation-state, Catholicism, the family and Monday Night Football. You might argue thgat these are all just different examples of tribes, which is our species鈥� ur-invention and even so, just an upgrade to the wolfpack idea, a favorite chapter in the evolutionary playbook. The point here is that there are plenty of other social structures, and plenty of other religions which were more or less stable and fecund, and these have found less (or more) success over generations. So Christianity is a 鈥済ood one鈥� by that measure and others that you haven鈥檛 heard of because they鈥檙e dead now, weren鈥檛. How did we arrive at this 200 proof religion?
In 1959, the first, still embargoed, almost secret copies of the scrolls from Nag Hammadi in Egypt were shared with America. These contained Coptic translations of Greek scriptures dating to 180AD, gospels of Jesus鈥� contemporaries which have for millennia been suppressed as heresy. In short summary they contain a wider array of characters, and gods, and a more personalized more eastern and self-authored version of Christianity. Pagels suggests these were just different sects, of variable (but clearly lesser) success than other versions we know today. Some examples are: the gospels of Truth (a woman) the Apocryphon of John, Hypostasis of the Archons, and the poem, Thunder, Perfect Mind. These are some good names! How this didn't upend orthodox Christianity during my childhood, I don't know.
It is interesting to consider the structures and ligaments of a successful religious construct from the hindsight afforded to us today. For instance, the choice of a single line of legitimate authority deriving from apostles and then to the pope in unbroken lineage is clearly more stable than the more artistic and spiritual 鈥渉eresy of the pneumatics鈥� version espoused by the Gnostics. That phrase came from Tertullian, and by pneumatic he meant spiritual: the mystical and grass roots authorship of religion as opposed to the literal, physical (鈥渢his is my flesh鈥�) and unalterable dogma of the Mother Church, which was handed down and studied to discover meaning, but certainly not created by man. Discovery means there鈥檚 one truth, authoring or inventing is something you can do in your basement, without tithing: heresy indeed!
Among the things handed down by the orthodoxy (not fabricated mind you, but gospel truth) is the physical resurrection of Christ, which miracle is basically explained by the gnostics as metaphor. In a textbook foreshadowing of recent republican philosophy, Tertullian argues back, 鈥渋t must be believed, because it is absurd.鈥� (my emphasis) This is not a joke but a serious argument I鈥檝e previously read in other authoritative religious texts. If you wanted to fool people, they say, the very last thing you鈥檇 do is come up with incredible alternative facts (sic) like, 鈥渘ailed to a stake until dead, buried three days, then came back to life.鈥� The very audacity and improbability of the claim gives it鈥檚 proponent some credibility; why would anyone float such a fib? Again, I am not kidding, this is an argument people make. Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est.
Then there鈥檚 the Apocryphon of John. In this book, we get an alternate genesis including Sophia (the big boss) sending her daughter Zoe (Eve, to you) to create Adam. A nice turn-about. Also the whole serpent & tree of life thing is turned into a pun on Hewya (serpent), hawa (to instruct) and Hawah (Eve). The idea of god is demoted one notch to a 鈥渄emiurge鈥� who is just the interlocutor between you and The Eternal, which is IN you and which you might be able to commune with directly, bypassing the whole liturgical hierarchy.
The field is rife with delicious vocabulary and rules and sayings, a sort of proto-legal prescription for obedience. There are competing creeds and recipes and threats and inducements. One sees humanity casting about to find a structure for itself, and for empowering and maintaining the oligarchy. Meanwhile the gnostic tradition offered to extend and author new-minted religion after arduous study under a master, just as musicians would hope, after long apprenticeship eventually to compose their own transcendent works. The very idea that people might create their own artisinal version religion of course presented a threat to the burgeoning power structure, which they suppressed murderously.
I especially like the clarification this book provides, the illumination that religion is a complex, political, historically observable invention of man, highlighting the irony of people who today begin a sentence with 鈥淚 believe鈥� (when about to cite dogma or even better their own personal differences with it) not realizing the arrogation of galactic power needful in presuming to define the very structure of the universe according to Their Will. THEIRS! You get how that means we are ourselves God. Some will say "yes, that's the point," but I think if somebody says that and means it, they've devolved and devalued their worldview into proletarian chaos. It's a seductive take, but too prideful by half. ...more
Both unfinished, and great. That unfinished bit is a shortcoming on my part, I'm just not putting out the stamina these days. Has television finally tBoth unfinished, and great. That unfinished bit is a shortcoming on my part, I'm just not putting out the stamina these days. Has television finally torn me down? Maybe. But this book is good even if you only get most of the way, and read the afterword, as StephX recommended.
The text is biblical in its vistas and actuarial detail making it easy to imagine the authors were working to thoroughly document history while giving it immortality through drama: mission accomplished. The legendary status of our heroes was achieved by precisely this rendering and one imagines that's what they wanted, this immortality, indeed what they died for. And yet they are legion. Though individually glorious, stacked chock-a-block in paragraphs of blood, the repetitive feat of getting killed becomes banal. "...the son of Atreus struck Scaramandrious. [personal anecdote: his resume of feats, but...] the spear caught him between the shoulder blades and emerged from his chest. The hero fell forward and his armor thundered down upon him." For paragraphs in both directions it goes on: victor's name, vanquished name, resume, stage directions blocking the blow and the fall, and then "darkness enveloped or fate descended or teeth biting the cold bronze." It's well written but rote, wholesale, unremarkable. Spears can only plunge through, blood spurt, eyes close in so many ways, after all. Modern cinema knows better, to pick only half a dozen protagonists, and succeeds by limiting the focus in creating an aura of heroism. As the spotlight shines on Moses it fails to convey the loss of each separate fall. An Iliad does not fail; you can feel the waste. Every man a story woven through history's fabric until cut off as whole bolts are shorn, each thread turned into an economical paragraph and done. This is biblical, and like the bible, quaint. We take ourselves so seriously, during our brief spasms of action. Let's write it all down! He was a mighty hunter. She was very beautiful. Remember forever. Slice, Spurt. Darkness.
In this telling, the gods' incessant prattling and meddling have been removed, leaving the humans responsible. Alessandro notes, "if the gods are banished, what remains is not so much a godless and inexplicable world as a very human story in which men live out their destiny as if fluent in a ciphered language whose code they know" I imagine this deletion is an improvement, as well as an artifice to achieve brevity, needed because this was and is performed at the Romaeuropa festival, like Handel's Messiah is at Christmas, and the brilliant afterword tells us why.
The Iliad is a celebration of the beauty of war, a tragic glory we cannot look away from. "From some depths that we thought were sealed, the whole atrocious and shining armamentarium that from time immemorial has been the escort of mankind at war has returned to the surface." ...in our politics, our news, our treatment of each other. When there is not enough war, we stir things up until we bring it back. Alessandro closes with a hopeful note that we shall finally overcome our propensity to fly into the flame but I don't believe it, and I don't think he does, either....more
If your historical education is weak, as mine is, you鈥檙e sure to enjoy Madeleine Albright鈥檚 Fascism, a Warning. You may enjoy it either way. Mostly i If your historical education is weak, as mine is, you鈥檙e sure to enjoy Madeleine Albright鈥檚 Fascism, a Warning. You may enjoy it either way. Mostly it鈥檚 a trip through 20th century history of dictators, starting with the original self-proclaimed and somewhat cuddly fascist, Benito Mussolini. I didn鈥檛 know it was a symbol he invented, a sort of avatar for his political ideology. Trying to define fascism ahead of time, we had some difficulty, and I think Albright does too. The reason is that it鈥檚 a slippery concept in the first place, hindered by a wrongheaded wish that all these words would separate themselves into handy disjoint meanings, precisely categorizing the adherents. No such luck. When you鈥檙e trying to define a culture, aggregate power, unite a people, your symbols are emotional, multivalent, maybe contradictory. Who cares, it鈥檚 just about power. There are sure elements though: against communism鈥檚 disavowal of religion, fascism was spiritual, against fat-cats it was populist, to create unity it defined outsiders through racism. Fascism has a healthy does of nationalism too, but what political movement does not? So Mussolini was a pious racist nationalist? Maybe he was all those things, but only casually, like costumes put on for effect. What he really was though was an opportunist, trying out whatever worked to aggrandize himself and gather power. He began as an atheist socialist, but he was always a bully, a compelling orator and an easy liar. This is a personality type, and by now a familiar one. Albright doesn鈥檛 shy away from pointing out the parallels, either; one of the first thing Il Duce did was "drenare la palude (drain the swamp) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants" and it goes on like that with plenty more examples obvious enough not to require any explanation. While stopping just short of calling Trump out as the fascist of our times, she makes clear that he certainly is. After Benito, we get Hitler, Chavez, McCarthy, Erdogan and of course, Putin. These men are all disingenuous tricksters with deadly intent. Erdogan especially is a cautionary tale, in that internal forces of democracy decided to depose him and, failing, provided a rationale for more extreme totalitarian consolidation, murders reprisals, stripping the courts and so forth. Machiavelli said, "men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge."
Of another book (Tribe) we can take a theme that the occasional autocrat is probably a good thing for organizing the tribe. Once, evolution could harmlessly create these petty dictators to good effect, for circumstances of low accumulated wealth, limited span of control and lifetime would limit a psychopath鈥檚 potential damage in migrant societies, but no longer. In today鈥檚 modern world their grasp can match their reach. So we face a sort of special human recipe that鈥檚 designed to rule us. It works out good for them, and (this is the seductive part) we sort of gravitate to an alpha ape we think will protect us from the scary stuff out there. (When there isn鈥檛 anything scary, they make something up.) This is not a good trade in a world where machines manufacture almost limitless largess, and we find ourselves somehow still bent to our plows so that a few dukes and barons, and the occasional king, can lord over us. That rise of a dictator is what we are up against right now, and Albright holds our noses to it. She remains a devout advocate for the power of democracy to wake up and save the world, but I can鈥檛 share that quaint hope. I feel humanity will end up in harness to elite humanity, a poor showing of our political savvy in comparison to our astounding progress in science and industry over the last thousand years. ...more
Ahh, this was a tough go. Couldn't finish: it just seemed unremarkable. Interesting side note though, I heard a long podcast with the author on "EcontAhh, this was a tough go. Couldn't finish: it just seemed unremarkable. Interesting side note though, I heard a long podcast with the author on "Econtalk" and loved every minute of it. Junger is a compelling, thoughtful guy in person and I feel I got much of the essence of the book from the excellent discussion on that podcast. Maybe that spoiled the book for me? Anyway, it didn't seem there was any content beyond what they'd been able to cover in the podcast....more
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