Links I liked

I had no sooner started a weekly ”Links I Liked” feature than I lost my connection to the blog.

Until then I had dumped any excerpts of useful material I had found on the internet (with the relevant link) in a special folder - and extracted only stuff that I knew I was going to use in a pending blogpost. The result was a file which kept on getting larger but which I rarely looked at. The ”Links I Liked” feature gave me the incentive to go back to the folder and put up useful stuff which is easier to find that rifling through a 200 pages file.....

This past week saw a couple of book reviews

The Boston review is an impressive new find for me – although their review of Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx by  Francesco Boldizzoni was a bit opaque for my liking. It started well

The first four chapters move quickly through a series of proficient and deftly connected capsule summaries of thinkers across a range of fields, from economics to philosophy to sociology.

Although those who have spent more time with these authors may occasionally be frustrated by the glosses of complex arguments, the point is not to cast new light on any one idea, but to show, through volume and range, the many ways that people have thought about capitalism’s end, and the many ways they have gotten it wrong: thus far none of the predictions has proved correct.

And continued with a typology for which I’m always a sucker –

There are, Boldizzoni argues, four kinds of predictions.

-       There are theories of implosion, wherein capitalism collapses because of pressures that arise from the workings of its own logic.

-       There are theories of exhaustion, which predict capitalism will “die of natural causes”—it runs up against environmental limits, or moral advances enable people to move beyond it.

-       There are theories of convergence, wherein capitalism and socialism become more and more alike, appearing as mirror images of modern rationality and bureaucratic organization.

-       Finally, there is “cultural involution,” wherein capitalism kills off the non-economic values that made it work in the first place.

Some of these tendencies seem more significant than others: theories of implosion, for example, recur far more frequently than theories of convergence.....

The trouble is that I don’t know what a ”cultural involution” is when it’s at home! A google query didn’t really help but it did unearth a real gem of a book I will come to in a moment.. But I liked the sound of the Italian’s book – precisely the combination of potted intellectual biographies I like

The second review was a critical one of Rutger Bregman’s latest - Human Nature – a hopeful history - which came out of his previous extraordinarily well-written Utopia for Realists (you can see what I mean by clicking the title since it gives the entire book!)

I also like intellectual history – particularly of countries. So I loved “How the French Think” and consider that Perry Anderson’s The New Old World is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.

So the website Reading the Chinese Dream is a real find – thanks to this review in the New York Review of Books

The web site is 

devoted to the subject of intellectual life in contemporary China, and more particularly to the writings of establishment intellectuals.  What you will find here are essentially translations of Chinese texts that we consider important, together with discussions of related issues 

One of my regrets is that, despite my best intentions, I haven’t been able to access similar sites about European debates eg French let alone German. Eurozine is the only site which gives the occasional glimpse….

European Think Tanks, of course, are very active and many of them – such as the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – offer bilingual material.

Time was when I was a great fan of the New Labour Demos Think Tank - which has become a rather bipartisan outfit these days and, like most London-based think-tanks, focused on England.

Scotland, after all, has had its own parliament for 23 years and therefore its own think-tanks – such as Common Weal which as just produced two interesting documents on Resilience Economics and Resilient Scotland  

Finally a quite remarkable book which came to my attention only today as I searched for a definition of the phrase “cultural involution”. It was published in France in 2004 – before, that is, the global financial collapse which it anticipates along with the ecological one - Convergence of Catastrophes by Guillaume Faye who, on further investigation, turns out to have been the sort of ultra-right winger with whom France has long been familiar

The English translation only saw the light of day in 2012 – which says a lot…..  

Back in the saddle

One of my most active files (almost 200 pages long) bears the title “Lockdown Diary” and consists of the urls of (and excerpts from) articles about the extraordinary and shared experience of the Covid19 pandemic. I draw, of course, on material which is basically in the English language – although both Le Monde and Die Zeit give me feeds (daily in the case of the former; weekly for the latter).

 A few of the articles stand out for the scale and originality of what they attempted just after I went offline viz

- John Gray’s long piece in the New Statesman

- a superb Guardian Long Read;

- Duncan Green’s great overview (in early April) on Covid 19 as a Critical Juncture

- an important article which explored the variety of ways states responded to the pandemic and what this says about public trust 

I find it highly significant that the two countries with the highest death rates are the countries which gave us neoliberalism; pride themselves on their ”exceptionalism”; have adversarial ”first past the post” electoral systems which disdain attempts at consensus; and a transactional approach to business which insists on paring costs down to a bare minimum – regardless, as Paul Collier argues recently, of its possible effects on social resilience. This article by an Italian living in the UK makes a similar point    

The warning bells about the virus started when North Italy started to close its borders in late February. It was March before my blog started to make references to the situation but PC problems meant my posts have had a 2 month gap 

Although we are still only in the first stages of the pandemic, 28 May was the day I felt I was being overwhelmed by the analyses – even if they made for powerful reading.

First Anthony Barnett - who has the gift of smelling “critical junctures”. To Charter 77, constitutional change, Brexit, he now adds Covid with this long piece Out of the Belly of Hell which places the crisis in the context of a 50 years crisis.

And then another paper with a similar time perspective - Shooting the Rapids – Covid19 and the long crisis of globalisation (The Long Crisis 2020)

An introductory summary of "Dispatches to the Next Generation - a bibliograph's notes from the last 50 years"

The last 2 months I;ve had some problems with the internet - and used this as an opportunity to discipline myself to focus on the book I've been working on for the past decade; and to try to give it a shape it has been missing.

Basically I laid the text to one side and tried to identify the narrative of the various musings I had selected as relevant to the theme of "the global crisis" - however defined.

It's come out at some 60 pages and can be found here

Coincidentally the great english journalist Anthony Barnett gave us recently one of his amazing extended essays – Out of the Belly of Hell which, like my book, also takes a long vies of the origins of our crisis 

Apologies for the silence

No, I haven't been ill! But at the very end of March something happened inside the old operational laptop I have where I've been self-isolating to block my access to the internet - and hence to posting
The internet I can still use on another laptop whose keyboard, however, creates a jumble of words instead of text.

After the frustration had subsided, I began to see this as more of a blessing in disguise. My regular posting has perhaps distracted me from the serious business of finishing the 2 books which I've been playing around with for the past decade and more...
So, the past 7 weeks has been devoted almost full-time to that task whose results I hope to share with you all shortly.

This post comes to you as a result of a trip to Bucharest to see my partner - which is now allowed, providing we respect the distancing.
Romania relaxed its restrictions a week ago
I hope to get up to the mountain house next week - and will be able to resume blogging there

Visual and other Links I Liked

1. When enforced isolation makes internet text even more seductive, this article reminds us of the painting treasures which are now so easily available a mere click away. Curiously, it makes no mention of my favourite ArtUK - which teamed up some years back with the BBC to put much of the nation’s paintings online. Here’s a wonderful example from my home town of Greenock. The painting which graces this post is John Knox's famous 19th century view of Ben Lomond just across the river.....

Another site offers a selection of art available on the net

And this is a very instructive art almanac – offering vignettes of key dates in the lives of artists

2. Photography is another visual art – practised by such giants as Cartier-Bresson 

Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand and John Parr (who was part of a superb MOMA exhibition on English photography under Thatcher)

My friend Keith (before and after his retirement) has been a keen mountain walker and photographer - and his blog must by now be the richest source of Scottish mountain-scape photography. If I’m the King of hyperlinks, Keith is the King of Scottish mountain vistas photography

He has been blogging as long as I have – more than a decade – and each post records his every scaling of every Scottish peak over 3000 feet (known as Munros – of which there are 282) – replete with superb photographs which give an amazing sense of the wonderful world at that level which most of us simply don’t see and indeed are not even aware of……And this is a good example of the occasional political comment his blog makes

3. Talking of mountains, the Bergahn journal resource which they have just kindly made available to us all – temporarily of course but in the spirit of “Open Access” - revealed this nice article on the UK and Carpathians 1862-1914 in their Journal of Travel and Travel-writing      

4. And still on painting, I began to read a little book about John Berger by one Andy Merrifield and was sufficiently intrigued by the author’s writing style to want to see more of it – and duly discovered this little cache

One of the essays in that little collection is called Searching for Guy Debord -Debord being the author of the famous The society of the spectacle (1967) which railed – rather more philosophically than Jerry Mander and Neil Postman – against the social and political effects of the entertainment industry…..  

The spectacle has now “spread itself to the point where it permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and universally demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason’s relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe.”

Merrifield is so taken with Debord that he seeks out his widow, still living in the house with the special high wall Debord built to keep the world out. I can’t say I share Merrifiels’s enthusiasm for the book – with its 221 theses  and an equivalent number of explanatory notes which an editor has subsequently (and necessarily) added….It’s not my sort of writing

The integrated spectacle, Debord said, has sinister characteristics: incessant technological renewal; integration of the state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; and an eternal present. Gismos proliferate at unprecedented speeds; commodities outdate themselves almost each week; nobody can step down the same supermarket aisle twice. The commodity is beyond criticism; useless junk nobody really needs assumes a vital life force that everybody apparently wants.

The state and economy have congealed into an undistinguishable unity, managed by spin-doctors, spin-doctored by managers. Everyone is at the mercy of the expert or the specialist, and the most useful expert is he who can best lie. Now, for the first time ever, “no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant.”

For gluttons for punishment Debord added, 21 years later, Comments on the society of the Spectacle

5. Visual Capitalist may not be the best of names but its great use of tables and visual warms my cockles. Here’s a typical example – 24 Cognitive Biases warping Reality

My readers will be bored by my emphasis on the importance of text being visually illustrated….

6. Hold Everything Dear – dispatches on survival and resistance; John Berger (2007)

If you’re looking for an example of the poetic power of John Berger’s writing, read this! It’s a series of short essays sparked off by 9/11. The subtitle brought back memories for me of Albert Camus’ Resistance, rebellion and Death (1960) whose “Letters to a German Friend” moved me greatly when I first read them in the early 60s

7. Last month I posted an updated list of the English-language journals which I had tested with 5 demanding criteria - for having (i) depth of treatment; (ii) breadth of coverage (not just political); (iii) clarity of writing; and being both (iv) cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon); and (v) sceptical in tone. 

The post analysed more than 30 journals - regretting the disappearance in 1990 of Encounter.

This morning an article arrived in my mailbox celebrating that selfsame journal – what it doesn’t tell you is that Encounter’s entire archives can be accessed here – courtesy of the quite amazing UNZ Review – an alternative media selection – “A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media”. 

And if you click “pdf archives” you’ll find a quite wonderful collection of journals inc The New Yorker from the 1930s to 2010!!

Finally, I am no great fan of George Galloway's - but his one saving grace is the clarity of his diction.....and here he is with another great communicator Dr John Campbell 

Critical Masses, Emperors and freebies

The last post ended with a question - picked up by my fellow-blogger Boffy whose reply (posted as a comment on my blog) deserves a spotlight –

It wasn't a conspiracy that led to Salem, and so on. Popular delusions and mass panics have their own dynamic….. Once a critical mass is achieved no one dare say the Emperor has no clothes, as Wobarg says (at the end of the video link)

In the past, I have written about the work of Milgram and others who showed how the natural human desire to conform - natural because it developed as a herd response so as to survive on the ancient grasslands - leads people to simply accept the current meme, no matter how insane. Its why people would accept and go along with the holocaust, or as Milgram showed why they would be prepared to administer fatal electric shocks to other human beings and animals, so long as an authority figure said it was okay for them to do so!

No leading scientist is going to stand out against the crowd in current conditions, because they would be crucified for doing so, and that applies equally to politicians who have been pressed into all channelling into the same course of action, which itself makes it all the more difficult for anyone to reject.

My guess is that, just as with 2008, there will in a couple of years time be plenty, however, who will write important articles in Medical Science and Statistical Journals saying how they were sceptical all along about what was really happening, and had in their own quiet way raised questions, and that if they had only had the grants they had previously asked for to conduct their epistemological studies they could have shown why what by then will be seen to have been a wholly avoidable crisis - both health crisis and economic and financial crisis - was indeed avoidable.

The point is well taken – I’m not a conspiracy theorist either. Actually Boffy’s reply starts on a note of appreciation for the “extensive, rational and supportive” nature of my last post - which had taken the trouble to copy and paste his 5 previous posts on Covid19 and then try to capture their essence. Clearly he has been the subject of some abuse for daring to challenge the prevailing wisdom on the subject.   

I would like to think that “Extensive, rational and supportive” captures the spirit of my blog. Particularly these days, tone matters – so does common decency and treating others with respect. Twitter has inflicted great harm on our discourse.

On a separate matter, Journals are offering some great bargains and freebies these days.

A week or so ago I took advantage of an offer from the famous FAZ newspaper for daily access during the next couple of months for only a dollar a month

World Literature Today showcases the all-too-often unappreciated work of translators and has just come out with a special offer of only 2 dollars a month - and the last 3 years’ archives

The New Yorker is on offer with the same deal and the entire archives - although my PC is having problems which didn’t allow it to take advantage of the offer. But I can access its special coverage of Covid19 which it’s making available free of charge

I had already mentioned that the UK Prospect mag has free access for the next month to its entire 25 year archive

And today I was notified by Bergahn Journals that all of their journals will be free for the entire duration of the shutdown. I’m on their mailing list because of the interest I had expressed in German politics and society and I see now that several other titles are of interest eg

Contributions to the history of concepts

Democratic theory – an interdisciplinary journal

French politics an society

Journal of social protest

Journeys – the international journal of travel and travel-writing

Finally, Dr Campbell’s Friday video starts with a short video clip of a tearful Spanish doctor’s reaction to ventilators for older patients being switched off to emphasise the importance of the over 65s self-isolating

Addendum

I’ve just been reading Chris Grey’s weekly Brexit Blog – which makes a link between “denialists” and

what is reported to have been the PM adviser Dominic Cummings’ initial response to coronavirus and his (and others’) ‘disruptor’ view of Brexit. Both seem to grow out of an idea that any shock to ‘the system’ is to be regarded as desirable simply for being a shock. Adverse consequences are just so much collateral damage to be ignored if not, indeed, welcomed.

That’s not quite the same as the ‘disaster capitalism’ idea, in which massive shocks such as this pandemic represent an opportunity for economic and political exploitation - it’s more a kind of adolescent infatuation with instability as ‘exciting’.

And it links to the wearisomely predictable ‘contrarianism’ of the peculiar, yet peculiarly influential, leftist-libertarian Spiked Online sect who have lashed out against the coronavirus restrictions and who, of course, tend to be ardent Brexiters. One might speculate on the affinities between such an infatuation and the psychology of the “misfits and weirdos” who are Cummings’ preferred hires.

Tim Martin is one of the relatively small number of leading business people who vocally supported Brexit, who has made simplistic pronouncements about the coronavirus crisis. It links no doubt with the deep-rooted English aversion to intellectuals, who make things complex when they need not be, and also to a perhaps related machismo so that Martin is “happy to take his chances” with catching the virus.

The same attitude is evident in the comments of Paul Bullen, former UKIP leader on Cambridgeshire County Council and Brexit Party candidate. He thinks “the majority don’t care” about coronavirus and wants to just “get back to normal”. It might be called a ‘hand washing is for sissies’ mentality (which could have important consequences for coronavirus spread (£) given the higher infection and mortality rates amongst men). Another variant on the same theme is, like Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, to condemn alarm about the virus as “scaremongering” just as she (and countless others) dismissed warnings about Brexit as ‘Project Fear’ (£).

I hold Chris Grey in very high respect but actually clicked the Spiked Online article and found it an eminently sensible piece - as is the Peter Hitchen’s extended analysis in the Daily Mail mentioned by one of the discussants of that piece.

Clearly accusations of exaggeration cut both ways….I don’t think it helps one bit in these times to label a journal a “wearisomely predictable… peculiar…. sect” 

Scepticism and “Moral Panic”

Here in Romania we’re effectively under Martial Law – which, most immediately, means that we have to justify our every journey with a signed form and that I, as someone of pensionable age, can only shop (with ID and that form) for the 2 hours between 11am and 13.00

Quite what the military hardware and soldiers now on the streets are supposed to contribute beats me – presumably the esteemed President assumes that everyone is as lawless as himself and the country would collapse in chaos without them. My partner is in Bucharest and saw no sign of the military in her journey to and from the open market which is still open

But I am deeply concerned by the licence which the military has now been given to ride roughshod over what is left of Romanian (and foreigners’) freedoms – not just of movement but of expression.

I was intending to drive to Lidl tomorrow lunchtime but the car has a Bucharest number plate which gives me a reasonable probability of being stopped - with explanations required for my certificate of residency having a Bucharest address! Under Martial Law the system can do anything to you and you have no redress…..So I may well just stay at home……

For the past 4 weeks, my fellow-blogger Boffy has been one of the very few voices to express some scepticism about what he called, on his Feb 25 post, a “typical moral panic”.

You can see why authorities want to stop the spread of the virus – but…… if 80% of those who contract the virus suffer no serious ill effects, let alone all of those that do not contract it, why on Earth is the global economy, and normal life being brought to a standstill because of it? 

There are likely to be far greater ill effects, and even deaths as a result of bringing the global economy to a standstill, by telling people who have no symptoms to self-isolate…. than there would ever likely be even with a pandemic.

Scepticism has a very honourable tradition – indeed my glossary of weasel words used by the state and politicians – Just Words – usually has that term in its sub-title

But the term has been tarred recently by its use by right-wing denial-ists – such as Trump and Bolsonaro.

Boffy is, however, a proud Marxist and his arguments have made a great deal of sense….namely that, as those of pensionable age were at greatest risk, they should have been strongly encouraged to self-isolate; and that the total shut-down is counter-productive ie could ultimately cause even more deaths if labour shortages lead to loss of power and sanitation….

He’s had some 5-6 good posts over the past 4 weeks – relating to statistical and economic issues for the UK. Let me start with his Covid19 by numbers post

What we know from Italy is that the reason it has such high mortality rates, despite having implemented a closing down of society, is that the virus appears to have got into the health system itself.

This is rather like the spread of MRSA in hospitals, in Britain, some years ago. Because those in hospital, or similarly in care, are, by definition, those already in the high risk groups, if you allow the virus to spread into these environments, you will get much higher mortality rates.

Not only do you get a spread from patient to patient, but you get spread of patient to health or care worker, and from them to other patients, unless the health and social care workers are provided with the adequate personal protective equipment, and every patient is adequately isolated from one another.

This does not appear to have happened in Italy, but we also know that health workers and care workers are not being provided with adequate PPE in Britain either. ….

The comments about Italy are borne out by this article in Open Democracy by an Italian

Last Saturday Boffy’s post dealt with the economic consequences of a total UK shut-down

UK government policy, in relation to COVID19, is leading quickly to economic, financial and social disaster on a scale not seen for at least a century. The UK government is not alone in that; the same is true for the policies being introduced in France and other EU countries, as well as in the US, Canada and elsewhere.

It is a populist response to a mass panic, and as with all such responses, it is ill-thought out, irrational and counter-productive. It is like the moral panics that have arisen in the past, for example, when crops failed or cattle died, which blamed it on witches, or failure to appease the appropriate gods, and thereby led to witch hunts like those at Salem, or led to increasing numbers of human sacrifices to appease the gods. …..

The idiocy of the government policy is that, as production and supply is unnecessarily brought to a halt, and as online deliveries cease, those of us in the 20% of the population who are actually at risk of serious consequences from the virus, and who would, therefore, place a burden on the NHS were we to be contaminated, are being forced to have to break our self isolation, in order to go to the shops to try to find food, and other vital supplies, as our own stock disappears! I have been in a better position than most to have prepared for self isolation, because I did have a stock in advance, but that stock is quickly dwindling. I expect that many pensioners, are already having to break any self isolation they might have wanted to exercise, simply in order to get the food they need to be able to live from day to day. …….

The fact that the NHS is being overwhelmed is not an indication of the particularly rampant nature of COVID19 infections, but is a direct consequence of the fact that the NHS itself is not fit for purpose, and compares badly with the socialised health care systems of much of Europe. It is top heavy, bureaucratic and inefficient with far too much money spent on expensive prestige projects, and not enough spent on primary care, and on medical and nursing staff and equipment, which is being demonstrated now in relation to the lack of ICU beds, of respirators, and of the staff to operate them. It has been made worse by 10 years of austerity, just as the NHS was laid low by 18 years of Tory government in the 1980's and 90's. 

His last long post explored why the UK health system seems to be breaking at the seams…

In any year, we might expect that a part of the average 500,000 deaths are people who die at home, and are not themselves a drain on health services. But, by the nature of mortality, we would expect that the largest part of that 500,000 people are elderly people, or people who have some serious medical condition that eventually leads to their death, either directly or as a result of complications, secondary infections, and so on. Let's say that only half of the 500,000 people who die, were receiving hospital treatment at the time of their death. Then the actual current deaths of 422, represents an increase of 0.17%. That is such a small increase as to be statistically insignificant.

Comment

The obvious question all this raises is – who on earth would have an interest in panicking world leaders and their societies (apart from, for example, pharmaceutical and IT companies and weapons dealers)? 

Or is this an example of the networks I discussed a month or so ago creating something which noone in particular has any control over?

Musical Interlude

Earlier in the week, I shared some of the new musicians of whom I became fond during my travels in Central Europe and Central Asia between 1991 and 2010 – the discoveries being possible simply by virtue of the cheapness of the CDs – a fraction of the price I was used to in the UK.

Gavin Bryers  - composer and performer - was one of these and I offer today for your delectation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-nkOotvOsg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuvuUChHoK4

stirng quartet 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1KmJAbjxMg

string quartet 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhdCrecOryQ

with the Hilliard Ensemble - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySGdLpZsJvA

double bass concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHAeakWz36A

“Jesus’ blood” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quJjqZprGu0

George Scialabba is one of my favourite essayists and has just published a typical piece here – on George Orwell selecting this interesting excerpt 

”In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of “human nature,” which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that “human nature” is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows.

The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press censorship, standardized education, and the secret police have altered everything”.

Other Scialabba material -

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/afraid-of-the-dark-scialabba

https://thenewinquiry.com/an-interview-with-george-scialabba/

http://georgescialabba.net/mtgs/2018/03/slouching-toward-utopia.html

And Dr Campbell’s Thursday video on what’s happening globally on Covid-19 

The next post will explore the question whether the world is in the grip of a “moral panic” and the role of sceptics