Category: Books and literature

Discussion of books and other literature

May books

In addition to working on my term paper and PhD proposal, I am reading an interesting collection of books. I am nearly done with Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, which has been very compelling. I am reading Srdja Popovic’s Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, and thinking about how it can be applied to the work of Toronto350.org (it’s trickier to motivate people to take action to reduce fossil fuel use than to organize around existing displeasure about an oppressive government).

I am still working on Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as well as reading relevant chapters from Alfred Rolington’s Strategic Intelligence for the 21st Century: The Mosaic Method, which has some particularly interesting things to say about corporate and police intelligence.

I am also just starting Peter Russell’s Recognizing Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism.

Black Code

Written by Ron Diebert, the director of the Citizen Lab at U of T, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace contains some very interesting information, of importance to anyone concerned with the future of the internet and communication. He discusses the major discoveries made by the lab, including massive criminal malware enterprises, government surveillance and censorship, and the use of cyberweapons like Stuxnet.

The first few chapters may seem basic if you actively follow the news on IT security and surveillance, but the material in the later parts is undeniably novel and interesting. The book is a bit of a lament for the death of the idealistic open internet, and the emergence of control by governments, particularly after the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The stakes here are high: the internet is a critical tool for maintaining democracy in open societies, confronting autocratic regimes, and dealing with global threats. The network is now in real danger of being suffocated by governments fixated on terrorism or maintaining domestic control, or who see it as a promising avenue for attacking their enemies.

Diebert proposes a distributed model for both securing and protecting the internet, while repeatedly underlining how governments are now the major threat to online freedom and political participation. Governments have rebuilt the backbone of the internet in order to achieve their censorship and surveillance objectives. It’s not a problem with a technical solution, from the perspective of citizens, but rather one which requires ongoing political agitation.

Burke on the “first industrial revolution”

The first industrial revolution, centered in Flanders, happened almost entirely because of the arrival from the Arab world of a new, horizontal loom, equipped with foot pedals to lift the warps. This innovation left the weaver’s hands free to throw the shuttle back and forth, which made weaving much faster and more profitable and, above all, made possible the production of long pieces of cloth. Because of their centuries of experience in working wool, the Flemish were the best weavers in thirteenth-century Europe. Flemish cloth was sold everywhere in the known world, and its manufacturers went from the East Indies to the Baltic to obtain their dyes, and to the mines of the Middle East for the alum which was used to fix the dye so as to make their colors fast.

Burke, James. The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible. 1996. p.80 (paperback)

Piketty on inequality

Previously, we discussed whether inequality of wealth or income is a problem in and of itself, or only insofar as it produces other undesirable consequences.

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received a huge amount of attention, and focuses precisely on the question of inequality. He has some interesting things to say on the subject:

In this book, I focus not only on the level of inequality as such but to an even greater extent on the structure of inequality, that is, on the origins of disparities in income and wealth between social groups and on the various systems of economic, social, moral, and political justification that have been invoked to defend or condemn those disparities. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it. (p. 19 hardcover)

…

I belong to a generation that turned eighteen in 1989, which was not only the bicentennial of the French Revolution but also the year when the Berlin Wall fell. I belong to a generation that came of age listening to news of the collapse of the Communist dictatorships and never felt the slightest affection or nostalgia for those regimes or for the Soviet Union. I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism, some of which simply ignored the historic failure of Communism and much of which turned its back on the intellectual means necessary to push beyond it. I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se – especially since social inequalities are not in themselves a problem as long as they are justified, that is, “founded upon common utility,” as article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen proclaims… I would like to see justice achieved effectively and efficiently under the rule of law, which should apply equally to all and derive from universally understood statues subject to democratic debate. (p. 31)

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer) 2014.

Piketty defends the social sciences

Given this dialogue of the deaf [between experts with opposing views about inequality], in which each camp justifies its own intellectual laziness by pointing to the laziness of the other, there is a role for research that is at least systematic and methodical if not fully scientific. Expert analysis will never put an end to the violent political conflict that inequality inevitably instigates. Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to refine the terms of the debate, unmask certain preconceived and fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it – a signal privilege).

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer) 2014. p. (hardcover)

A couple of thoughts on Tolkien’s writing

One neat thing about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is the way in which the story is set within multiple frames. The Hobbit, for instance, is sometimes presented as the account written of his adventures by Bilbo Baggins. It is also presented as part of the Red Book of Westmarch: a fictional collection of hobbit-written texts.

There are times, however, when another level of narration is introduced. An all-knowing narrator hints about events that will happen long in the future (for instance, speaking of Bilbo and the eagles: “Bilbo never saw them again – except high and far off in the battle of Five Armies. But as that comes in at the end of this tale we will say no more about it just now.”), or comments about the ways in which characters have misunderstood their situation (as when Bilbo climbs one of the shorter trees at the bottom of a valley and mistakingly concludes that Mirkwood forest extends great distances all around him). One way in which this narrator jumps out is in terms of using modern metaphors quite out of place in Middle Earth – talking about trains, gunpowder, and telescopes.

This higher-level narrator, I would say, is Tolkien himself, speaking directly to the reader. The relationship is a playful one, as well as one that frequently tries to create sympathy. The reader is often reminded of places where characters are not at their best because of hunger, fear, fatigue, and the like.

All told, it’s an enjoyable and useful element in Tolkien’s masterful style of storytelling.

Another aspect of the books which I appreciate (and which was quite lost in Peter Jackson’s films) is that Tolkien never makes the enemies encountered by the protagonists into pure mindless monsters. We hear orcs talking to one another – sometimes complaining about how little they enjoy servitude to Sauron. Even the giant spiders in The Hobbit speak with one another before Bilbo starts to provoke them. Such character development contrasts positively with the film version of the orcs, who are simply incompetent sword-swingers lined up in the thousands to be slaughtered by the heroes in excessive battle scenes.

McKibben on managing our descent

The trouble with obsessing over collapse, though, is that it keeps you from considering other possibilities.

…

The rest of this book will be devoted to another possibility – that we might choose instead to try to manage our descent. That we might aim for a relatively graceful decline. That instead of trying to fly the plane higher when the engines start to fail, or just letting it crash into the nearest block of apartments, we might start looking for a smooth stretch of river to put it down in. Forget John Glenn; Sully Sullenberger, ditching his US Airways flight in the Hudson in January 2009, is the kind of hero we need (and so much the better that he turned out to be quiet and self-effacing). Yes, we’ve foreclosed lots of options; as the founder of the Club of Rome put it, “The future is no longer what it was thought to be, or what it might have been if humans had known how to use their brains and their opportunities more effectively.” But we’re not entirely out of possibilities. Like someone lost in the woods, we need to stop running, sit down, see what’s in our pockets that might be of use, and start figuring out what steps to take.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 2010. p. 99 (softcover, italics in original)