Thoughts: 15 Nov 2021

A 2020 publication but very today. 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Seneca emphasized the close association of hope with fear. “Both,” he wrote, “belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

Trust and the Competition Delusion - Griffith Review

griffithreview.com

We’re falling for the ‘competition delusion’ by which I mean this: in our embrace of private competition as a goal, we mostly pass over a prior issue – which is the terms on which that competition takes place. This is undermining trust in a remarkably wide range of institutions in our economic and public life.

Cooperation and competition are polarities they create energy via the exchanges between them. Fruitful competitions are bounded in cooperation. Like athletic games, markets prosper only when properly bounded by rules and rule enforcement. "All competition all the time" creates chaos and leads to self-destruction.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The irreconcilable clashes in American politics reflected a polarization between those who affirmed the many transformations America has undergone since the tumultuous 1960s and had done well out of those changes and those who hankered after a return to the 1950s, or at least their vision of that bygone era. Trump had satisfied that craving, and though he lost the national vote, red-state America had not repudiated him. He gained more votes than in 2016. Indeed, he gained more votes than any presidential candidate before him in history, other than Biden. And Trump, being Trump, thought he had won.

I question the insinuation that Trump voters are led by nostalgia; more recent developments--the relative decline in many regions of the country--are more causal. The nostalgia is a symptom, not a cause.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The advantage of the reality-based community is not that it catches every error immediately, but that it catches most errors eventually, and many errors very quickly. No other regime can make that claim, or come anywhere close.

Crucial.

On Revolution

Hannah Arendt

A theory of war or a theory of revolution, therefore, can only deal with the justification of violence because this justification constitutes its political limitation; if, instead, it arrives at a glorification or justification of violence as such, it is no longer political but antipolitical.

Arendt is the anti-Clauswitz in this particular: war isn't the continuation of politics ("by other means") but the cessation of politics.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Biology and economics form our basic Western model. Ideas of soul, of individual character, and the influence of awareness on life processes have become accessory decorations to lighten the despair and disguise the “real truth” about old age.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[Henry] Kissinger begins this part of [Kissinger's book] Diplomacy with the most unequivocal of declarations: “Hitler’s advent to power marked one of the greatest calamities in the history of the world.” Few would disagree. Still, in recent years many writers on the Nazis have tried to achieve a kind of “objective” distance by stepping away from stressing that Hitler was one of humankind’s great monsters to a more analytic posture—not, one must hasten to say, to rehabilitate him (though some have undeniably moved in that direction) but to be able to “historicize” the Third Reich and understand it in context.

In the preface to his expansive study The Coming of the Third Reich, the historian Richard J. Evans writes, “It seems to me inappropriate for a work of history to indulge in the luxury of moral judgment. For one thing, it is unhistorical; for another, it is arrogant and presumptuous. I cannot know how I would have behaved if I had lived under the Third Reich.” Commendably, Evans is not so self-righteous as to assume that he would have been among the small minority of Germans who were immune to Hitler’s appeal. But unlike Evans, a Jewish German might indeed “indulge in the luxury of moral judgment.” As someone driven out of Germany, Kissinger does not and cannot share Evans’s doubts or qualms, either his well-intentioned modesty or, as it were, his over-evenhandedness. Kissinger belongs to the old school of moral history and lets his emotions do the talking. His words for Hitler are “demonic” and “psychotic.”

This quote raises a fascinating issue: should we pass moral judgment on persons in the past? In one sense, we certainly do and should. If one isn't morally outraged by Hitler, then one should fear for one's moral bearings. On the other hand, Hitler is dead. Our condemnation can't change him or more specifically, his position and behavior. Thus, shouldn't history be more concerned with understanding the man and his actions? In the end, both attitudes--of moral judgment and understanding--have their place. We must beware because moral judgment can be cheap, while understanding is almost alaways dear.

In Defense of History by Richard J. Evans

It’s not often that I read a book that’s written by a character in a movie, but I did so when I read Sir Richard Evans’s In Defense of History (1998). Sir Richard, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, is no swashbuckling character.  He was portrayed the movie Denial (my review) about the libel trial of Irving v. Lipstadt in which he served as an expert witness for Lipstadt as she proved the truth of the Holocaust against the falsehood of Irving’s denialism. Evans is an expert on modern German history, and he wrote a three-volume history of the Third Reich. But in this book, he’s not writing history; he’s writing about history.

The lineage of this undertaking is a long and venerable one. Evans notes predecessors like E.H. Carr (What is History?) and Sir Geoffrey Elton, among others, and he mentions Collingwood only in passing and not in a flattering way. But Evans’s primary project in this book isn’t to argue with his well-known predecessors, but with his contemporizes, especially those who fly the flag of postmodernism. But in doing so, Evans isn’t out to pull them down so much as to pull them back. Evans, like other critics of postmodernism (Ken Wilber pops to mind), do not argue that they’re all wrong, but that they take some fundamental insights and run them to an extreme that collapses under the weight of logic. Postmodernism and relativism (of which postmodernism is the current incarnation) collapse in a performative contradiction when it’s insights are pushed to their logical conclusions. But Evans is not acting like an old curmudgeon here. In fact, he welcomes many of the insights provided by postmodernism and other innovative approaches to history, including its subject-matter, its way of investigating and knowing the past, and how history is written.

I’ll keep my review short, as many on Goodreads have shared the same insights. But before closing, this book deserves a place alongside the works of E.H. Carr and Sir Geoffrey Elton, and yes, even R.G. Collingwood, Evans’s ill-considered dis notwithstanding. It’s a thorough and persuasive appraisal of the historical profession and what it can hope to achieve, and it’s an excellent guide to (relatively) contemporary thinking about history. 

Richard Evans: In Defense of History

I completed Richard Evans's In Defense of History (1999, 272 p.). Evans writes on the topics that historians must always deal with, either up front and in the back of their minds: issues of causation, facts, sources, choice of topics, and the like. Much of this can seem mundane, but it can also become quite controversial. Evans treats it all with an even hand. His most significant contribution comes from his critique of more radical notions of post-modernism. He welcomes new ideas of perspective and topics, but he rejects the extreme relativism that some promote as a part of this movement. As does Ken Wilber, among others, he points to the performative contradiction at the heart of extreme relativism. Evans is persuasive about this, and I think he take history to a very solid philosophical (in the broadest sense) footing. A find book well considered, and a pleasure to read.