Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 19 June 2021 Happy Juneteenth to All!

 

Doom

Niall Ferguson

This illustrated the central point of this book—that all disasters are at some level man-made political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens. Politics explained why World War II killed twenty-five times as many Germans as Americans. Politics explains why COVID-19 has thus far killed eighteen times as many Americans as Germans.

N.B. I suggest that if you prefer, you can substitute human "choices," "actions," or "thought" for politics as they are, per Collingwood & Arendt (and others), more or less the same. I don't believe that NF would disagree much. 

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

The top 10% of America owns almost 70% of the total wealth of the country—from houses and cars to stocks and bonds—while the bottom 50% own just 1.5% of assets. Back in the 1980s, Reagan’s heady vision seemed to promise that America could grow its way out of addressing poverty and inequity. In 2020, growth—at least in developed countries like the US—looks likely to stay sluggish, as it has for two decades.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The hard right’s vote comes from many sources: first-time voters, disgruntled left-wing voters, and, for the most part, disgruntled conservatives. They are socially mixed and some are economically distressed, but one marker of the typical hard-right voter is the lack of a higher degree.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

Chronicle, then, is the past as merely believed upon testimony but not historically known. And this belief is a mere act of will: the will to preserve certain statements which we do not understand. If we did understand them, they would be history. Every history becomes chronicle when related by a person who cannot relive the experiences of its characters: the history of philosophy, for example, as written or read by people who do not understand the thoughts of the philosophers in question.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Humanity had not suffered some mass collapse of creative energy or business acumen any more than it had been engulfed by a sudden international unwillingness to work for a reasonable wage. Economic underperformance, whatever its original cause, had created an investment market that now assumed chronic underperformance to be the norm—and was perfectly capable of fulfilling its own prophecy.

A Writer's Coach

Jack R. Hart

[A] principal “obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking.”

Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction by Jack Hart

The art of telling an effective story, whether as a matter of fiction or of non-fiction, has become increasingly celebrated and promoted as the most effective means of communicating a message. Wherever we turn for advice about communicating effectively, we're told about the power of story—or narrative, if you prefer the more hifalutin term. The reasoning is simple: we seem programmed to remember stories, tales across time involving characters who engage us in their pursuits. 

Jack Hart is a professional journalist who describes the skills needed to write an effective non-fiction story for a newspaper or magazine. The book provides many tips and explanations about how good stories are written. He also discusses the usefulness of ways of communicating other than by narrative, such as by explanation or report. But the award-winning stories that Hart's colleagues have written about all sorts of topics have enhanced their effectiveness (and one assumes their readership) by using narrative. The elements, when you reflect upon them, seem almost self-evident: characters (persons that we can care about and understand); a conflict or obstacle that presents the protagonist with a challenge; change through time (a narrative arc); carefully considered facts necessary to give life to the scenes. Like lawyers, journalists have a professional ethical obligation to "tell the truth," as problematic as that obligation is. Both professions require us to ground our narrative in some sense in "what really happened," perhaps easier for journalists because they don't (or least shouldn't) work for self-interested clients. One of Hart's main concerns is the ethics of truth-telling, including an exploration of those boundaries. 

Who might enjoy this book? Anyone who might want to tell a story, fiction or non-fiction. (The fundamentals of the two genres are not so different, and Hart draws on numerous sources that were written about fiction and playwriting.) However, I read Hart's book from the perspective of an attorney, an advocate. I’m convinced more and more that the first job of an advocate is to learn and then tell our clients’ stories in a comprehensible and engaging manner. In some cases, the law as written may prove an insurmountable road block to a remedy. But in most cases, especially in those that require a judge or a jury to resolve, making the client and the client’s plight as sympathetic as possible is an essential component of successful advocacy. Lawyers don’t write essays about “why my client should win in 500 words or less," but our briefs come close to allowing us to do that. As advocates, attorneys need to become as literate in telling a story as we are in forming an argument (which also may incorporate storytelling). Many attorneys face challenges with younger jurors and lawyers who possess a native mastery of visual storytelling that older, more logocentric persons like me lack. But I suspect that whether the story is told only in print, many of the same principles apply in visual mediums. If the book has one weakness, it’s that it's limited to exploring narratives only via the written word. Oral and visual storytelling must gain a place in the advocate’s arsenal in addition to the written word. 

But make no mistake: this is an outstanding book, well considered and well written, even if it's not written as a narrative!  Anyone with any occasion to consider writing a narrative will benefit greatly from this book