Books and literature – Page 9 – a sibilant intake of breath

Doldrums of August

Life has suddenly become exceptionally lonely. August is always a trying time in a PhD program. The lack of any real income since spring is naturally biting, and I have always had trouble dealing with the heat. There’s a breakdown of social structure and support, with no classes to teach or take, and friends and colleagues absent or unavailable. Early in the summer, the absence of termtime obligations can feel like an empowering opportunity to make progress on research but, by these late summer days, enthusiasm and intellectual focus have faded.

It’s especially exacerbated for me right now, with close friends on the far side of the country, or newly and permanently outside the city, or otherwise distant. I have no way to use my Hive tiles. On the climate activism front, not only has there been a major personal setback, but the precise nature of it remains unresolved and unknown. This has been a very bad week.

I spent most of today reading. First, Oliver Sacks’ excellent memoir On the Move, which was given to me by a generous friend. I haven’t previously read any of his work, but having devoured half the longish book today I feel like it’s one of the most accessible and interesting autobiographies I have read. Sacks is a great narrator, and has a thoroughly colourful and conceptually provocative life to relate, from thoughts about medicine and drug addiction to motorcycle adventures; the complexities of sex, psychology, and family; sudden death; and the science of the thinking brain. Sacks has an impressive vocabulary, and I have marked down 50+ words to look up in the OED. Charmingly, the hardcover set of the same was how Sacks chose to spend most of the money from a prestigious exam contest which he won at Oxford, half-drunk and only choosing to answer one of the seven questions posed.

In a pile of unwanted goods on the sidewalk of Markham Street, I found Peter Singer’s The President of Good & Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush, which I also half-read. I enjoy the argumentative style of philosophers discussing matters of ethics and much of the book is convincing. At the same time, it seems a bit of a strange undertaking. For one thing, it probably attributes more policy-making power to Bush than he really possessed as president, ignoring forces that were pressuring him to make one decision or another. In the broadest sense, there are broad ideological boundaries which all politically sensitive people perceive; accepting the political program of your supporters and colleagues is driven more by social pressure than logic. Singer’s discussion about whether Bush’s statements were honest also doesn’t account for how U.S. presidents can generally only get things done in cooperation with other American politicians. In the main area where they can act alone – military conflict – Singer is convincingly excoriating.

Reading Sacks has given me a strong desire to write a book (much less plausibly, also to tour North America by motorcycle). Conveniently, that is the purpose and major task remaining in my PhD. The spiritless and solitary days of final August should permit continuing incremental progress, and I am hopeful about a burst of discussion and decision in September. I’m also looking forward hugely to meeting the incoming crop of Massey junior fellows.

The danger of reading the news too often

I have been listening to an audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. It’s full of interesting concepts and engaging writing.

In one passage, Taleb describes the anxiety of the investor who feels the need to constantly check on how well an investment is doing. Has the value risen or fallen over the last month? Day? Minute? Second?

He describes a number of statistical and psychological features of such situations, but one seems possible to apply to estimating the ideal frequency of news-checking.

Taleb argues that with the investment, we generally see smaller jitters in value when we choose to look up the current value more often. Furthermore, and critically, we are likely to suffer more every time we see a drop in value than we are to celebrate when we see a gain — one of the ways in which people are demonstrably not ‘rational’ in the sense of valuing mathematically identical outcomes differently for emotional reasons.

Something similar may accompany the temptation to open a browser window to check Google News, open Twitter on your phone, glance at Facebook, or otherwise deliberately seek a new set of general updates about the broader state of the world. Given additional biases in the media, the odds are probably under 50% that any news story you have not seen before will be ‘positive’, at least for people who prefer a minimum amount of violence and suffering in the world. In particular, because violence is so emotionally salient to us, it tends to both dominate media coverage and draw the most attention when mixed in with other types of news stories.

If we feel the ‘losses’ in human welfare more acutely than the gains, checking for updates too frequently may lead us to develop and maintain an overly discouraged perspective on the world. This becomes even more likely when we take into account the seemingly irrational way in which our brains excessively prioritize what seems to be happening right now. Reading about the ongoing active shooter situation, with new updates coming in all the time, may be fundamentally more traumatizing than reading about the whole incident once it has been resolved (or at least moved to the next stage — the arrest, the trial, the post-massacre political analysis).

Perhaps it makes sense to intentionally curtail time spent following current news in favour (at least) of waiting for the summary (if any) in a weekly news magazine or, even better, working through the pages of a dusty book that has influenced the thinking of many people.

The history of the Arab Spring

The New York Times has published an exceptional long article by Scott Anderson about the history of the Middle East since 2003. It’s an ambitious text to have written, not a trivial task to read, and perhaps a suggestion that print journalism is enduring in its dedication to telling complicated stories, despite ongoing challenges to the business model and staffs of many of the most important print sources. It also includes some remarkable photography by Paolo Pellegrin.

A summary, early in the article, attributes special importance to the post-Ottoman settlement:

Yet one pattern does emerge, and it is striking. While most of the 22 nations that make up the Arab world have been buffeted to some degree by the Arab Spring, the six most profoundly affected — Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen — are all republics, rather than monarchies. And of these six, the three that have disintegrated so completely as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states — Iraq, Syria and Libya — are all members of that small list of Arab countries created by Western imperial powers in the early 20th century. In each, little thought was given to national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions. Certainly, these same internal divisions exist in many of the region’s other republics, as well as in its monarchies, but it would seem undeniable that those two factors operating in concert — the lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity joined to a form of government that supplanted the traditional organizing principle of society — left Iraq, Syria and Libya especially vulnerable when the storms of change descended.

This accords closely to Middle Eastern history as interpreted by many of the sources we read in my Oxford M.Phil. In particular, it reminds me of David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

My new library

Since moving out of Massey College, the great majority of my books have been inside a heap of banker’s boxes, both cluttering my room and impeding access to them for PhD purposes.

A few days ago, I finally received delivery of a custom bookcase from INOVA, designed to fill the largest available space in my room. It’s pretty close to capacity with my existing collection of books, and it greatly improves the visual appeal of my room and ease of reference.

Rhodes on the nature of nuclear war

So much confusion, so much paranoia, so many good intentions, so much hard work, technical genius, cynicism, manipulation, buckpassing, buckpocketing, argument, grandstanding, risk-taking, calculation, theorizing, goodwill and bad, rhetoric and hypocrisy, so much desperation, all point to something intractable behind the problem of how to deploy sufficient and appropriate nuclear arms to protect one’s nation from a nuclear-armed opponent. There was such a beast. It was quite simply the fundamental physical fact of nuclear energy: that such power is relatively cheap to generate and essentially illimitable. Nuclear warheads cost the United States about $250,000 each: less than a fighter-bomber, less than a missile, less than a patrol boat, less than a tank. Each one can destroy a city and kill hundreds of thousands of people. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower concluded. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” It followed, and follows, that there is no military solution to safety in the nuclear age: There are only political solutions. As the Danish physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr summarized the dilemma succinctly for a friend in 1948, “We are in an entirely new situation that cannot be resolved by war.” The impossibility of resolving militarily the new situation that knowledge of how to release nuclear energy imposes on the world is the reason the efforts on both sides look so desperate and irrational: They are built on what philosophers call a category mistake, an assumption that nuclear explosives are military weapons in any meaningful sense of the term, and that a sufficient quantity of such weapons can make us secure. They are not, and they cannot.

Rhodes, Richard. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. p. 101 (hardcover, italics in original)

Let down by Gibson’s The Peripheral

The main storytelling device in William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral is after-the-fact exposition (ATFE), which gives it the feeling of a mystery more than conventional science fiction. Rather than tell you in advance how a world or a technology works, Gibson shows you the results without context and provides the explanation later. This does well for avoiding the tedium which is sometimes mocked in speculative fiction, where books or chapters open with the author describing the parameters of the fiction with a boring lack of tension or mystery. For me, at least, it falls down in the case of this book when the central mysteries are never resolved. In increasing order of importance:

Why is Lower Manhattan underwater due to climate change in the far future (p. 435), but London is apparently untroubled?
What was the point of the “party time” test of character (p. 382)? The woman tested never seems to face an important moral choice later.
Is Aelita actually murdered? If so, why? What do the antagonists who are revealed at the end have to gain from it?
What’s the story with the Chinese server that connects the mid-future with the far-future (p. 189)? What did the people who built it use it for?
What’s the metaphysics of this book? It says that the middle-future in communication with the far-future (p. 185-6) has its timeline changed as a consequence (p. 422). Is this a case of infinitely branching universes where communication pathways can be established between any two? Every time someone far the far-future communicates with the past, do they create a new future timeline starting from there?
Why do people in the far future care what happens in this particular mid-future? A major plot point is one character from the far-future trying to avoid a catastrophe in the mid-future (p. 320-1), but what’s the point if (from the far-future perspective) this is just one branch in a vast number of pasts? Why care so much about this one?
Why is having people from the mid-future drive robots in the far-future useful? They never do anything that remote operators in the far-future couldn’t do without all this time travel communication.

I was also frustrated by how a large part of the book is devoted to people training to pilot these future robots (as well as acquiring specialized weapons), which only end up getting used in a rather disappointing way. In particular, a supposedly evil red cube from a custom universe focused on weapon development never ends up doing anything interesting.

Sometimes the ATFE approach is quite frustrating: especially the habit of opening chapters using only pronouns to describe the person involved, pointlessly leaving the reader unclear about what is being described. When people are murdered, the motive and immediate consequences are often unclear.

Custom bookcase

In the Massey College room where I lived for three years (V:4, best room in the college), there was a sumptuous abundance of shelf space: two shelves extending the entire long axis of the room (probably 20′ of shelving each), plus this shelving unit between the office and bedroom areas.

Now, my generally excellent new third story room near Bloor and Bathurst is cluttered with at least 16 bankers boxes full of books, plus about 100 more books stacked in various piles. To ameliorate the situation, I am ordering a custom-fitted bookshelf from Inova in Toronto — 7’6″ tall, reaching from the floor to the edge of the ceiling moulding, and 5′ wide, stretching from a kink in a radiator pipe to the edge of the radiator itself. Since they are custom building it (in two pieces, to navigate our awkward staircase), it will be about a month until delivery, but it should be a major permanent improvement to the room for me and whoever resides here after.

The case probably won’t offer quite as much shelving as my Massey room, but it will be an enormous improvement visually, in terms of movement within the space, and in terms of access to books which I frequently wish to reference, especially as the development of my thesis continues.

Openness versus effectiveness in activist organizations

Occupy Wall Street comprised the people who responded to the call. Ultimately, however, uncritical openness was Occupy’s downfall: the general assemblies were paralyzed by the inability to distinguish between true and false. Participants who had been with Occupy for a day were given a say equal to that of committed activists who had founded the first encampments. In our fully horizontal social movement, no one had the authority to determine who ought to be expelled for being disruptive. Occupy faced adversaries inside and outside. Half wanted to destroy the movement, and the other half wanted to control it. Occupy never developed a way to vet participants. Anyone (worthy or unworthy) could claim to be an equal spokesperson of the movement. Thus the movement faced both police infiltrators who disrupted our assemblies with belligerence and the 99% Spring, an initiative financed by the progressive Left, that mimicked Occupy in a successful bid to dissipate the movement’s revolutionary momentum into a re-election campaign for President Obama.

White, Michah. The End of Protest. p. 112-3 (paperback)

John Green on his often-banned book

I have written before about banned books.

In this video, a contemporary author discusses the experience of having his novel banned for containing apparently mature content:

His closer — about deferring to librarians to make such judgments – differs from the more common narrative that rejects such curation entirely.

Civilians in intelligence

Donald McLachlan, a journalist who served under Godfrey [head of British naval intelligence] at the Admiralty, afterwards argued that all wartime intelligence departments should be run by civilians in uniform, because they are unburdened by the lifetime prejudices of career soldiers, sailors and airmen: ‘It is the lawyer, the scholar, the traveller, the banker, even the journalist who shows the ability to resist where the career men tend to bend. Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.’ MI6 remained until 1945 under the leadership of its old hands, but most of Britain’s secret war machine passed into the hands of able civilians in uniform who — after an interval of months or in some cases years while they were trained and their skills recognized — progressively improved the quality of intelligence analysis.

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 69 (hardcover)