Night lights

Walking through Upper River Court in St John’s on Monday night on my way to a lecture by Marietje Schaake I pulled out my iPhone to see how it would handle the lighting. Fairly well is my verdict. But what struck me most was how peaceful the scene was, even though it’s right in the middle of a busy town. Kids who are able to live and study in places like this have the luck of the devil.

Quote of the Day

”Rationality is leverage — a strong man lifts a block, but a clever man invents a pulley. It’s how Socratic nerds defeat Homeric jocks.”

• Zohar Atkins, poet, rabbi and theologian

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder | 2:10 Train | Rising Sons

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How It Went

John Gruber is one of the Elders of the Web. His Daring Fireball blog is something I read every day because he’s such an acute observer of the tech world, and in particular anything to do with Apple. With the late (and much lamented) Aaron Swartz, he created the Markdown language in which (and many thousands of others) write every bit of text I produce (including this blog).

Last Friday, though, his blog was about something else, and it turned out to be an entrancing and moving essay in which a personal story was interwoven with reflections on Election night and its aftermath.

Here’s how it opens:

My mom died at the end of June this year.

I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim: months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.

Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity, courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but they laid ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No suffering. The whole dreadful grind of battling cancer never came. It’s such a cliché but clichés are often true: given what she faced, it was a blessing she died how and when she did. She never wanted to suffer and she didn’t. I loved her and I miss her.

Like I said, it was all OK, in the end — the way and how and when my mom died.

But my dad…

Do read on. It’s long, but I don’t think you’ll regret it.

My commonplace booklet

As long-time (long-suffering?) readers know, I’ve been a keen photographer since I was a teenager. (Full story of how I became addicted is here, if you’re interested.) For much of that time I’ve used Leica cameras — rangefinder cameras with interchangeable lenses. This year is the 70th anniversary of the company’s ‘M’ range — the bigger cameras with a bayonet mount for the lenses.

These cameras are a prime example of German engineering excellence. They’re outrageously expensive, have terrific lenses, are amazingly strong, solid and heavy. (One of my friends used to say they were made from melted-down WW1 battleships, but he was just jealous because I had one and he didn’t.) But some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century relied on them. (Henri Cartier-Bresson was never seen without one, for example.)

Two Leicas. On the left is a M4-P film model which I bought in 1980; on the right a 2022 M10 Monocrom with a digital black-and-white sensor. Both devices feel the same in use, and accept all the lenses that Leica offer. 

But the most remarkable thing about Leica cameras was that they are all ‘backwards-compatible’: the newest lenses will fit every M camera, and so will the oldest. For example, I have a 60-year-old 135mm Elmar lens which fits on the 2022 digital camera body and works perfectly (though it’s not as sharp as newer lenses).

It’s this consistent quality and backwards-compatibility that seemed (to me, anyway) what was quintessentially German about these cameras. And I naively imagined that in that sense they were paradigmatic of the society in which they were made.

But now comes a shocking book by Wolfgang Münchau which suggests that my view of German enterprise may need updating. At any rate he paints a picture of (as an FT review puts it) “an economy, political system, and society dysfunctional to the point of being terminally broken, i.e. kaput. Germany faces a choice, but is unable to summon the political and intellectual resources to make any decisive response”.

I’ll have to get the book to see how Münchau makes his case, but there are some corroborating straws in the wind. In particular, the German car industry seems to be in trouble. VW, the country’s biggest auto manufacturer, recently announced that it was closing some plants and laying off workers. Given how important the car industry to the image of German invincibility, maybe Münchau is reading too much into it. We’ll see.

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Walking the planks

On a boardwalk in an RSPB reserve, yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it.It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the professional: precise, restrained — and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dali (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing — and cupidity — of Damien Hurst.”

• Tony Judt, in The Memory Chalet

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Taj Mahal Ry Cooder | Statesboro Blues

Link

Ry Cooder (Lead Guitar), Buddy Miller (Guitar), Don Was (Bass), Joachim Cooder(Drums), Tim Lauer(Piano), Taj Mahal (Vocals)

Long Read of the Day

The night after the election before 

I woke up in the middle of Wednesday night and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up and started scribbling. Here’s the result. It’s long, so if you’re not interested in this stuff, feel free to skip it. After all, I’m no expert, just an interested spectator (aka blogger).

=====

Trump’s victory is being billed the greatest comeback since Lazarus and accordingly he is being retrospectively canonised by the new realists, including the high-class savants of the Hoover Institution, the Economist, the so-called ‘serious’ newspapers, etc. They may, of course, be holding their noses as they do it, but they all regard his election as a pivotal event, which it undoubtably is. Accordingly, the party line of the ‘new realism’ is that we all have to adjust to that reality. Trump may be a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he’s our SOB. (Which remains to be seen. To me he looks like his own SOB: the rest of us don’t figure in his narcissistic universe.)

More worrying is the fact that he is now being feted as a political genius — the guy who intuited the ‘real’ nature of the’ real’ Americans: white racists, misogynists and authoritarians. Cue Adolf Hitler. But whereas Hitler reshaped the German people into the master-race Herrenvolk, Trump merely intuited what his’ Volk’ were like and celebrated (and exploited) it.

The inescapable conclusion I had reached from watching videos of some of his rallies was that Trumpism had most of the hallmarks of a cult. He’s the leader who can do no wrong – except to those defined as the “enemies of the people”. So, to his followers, Trump has many of the qualities of a prophet who will lead his people into the promised land.

His comeback triggers some uncomfortable thoughts. Here are a few:

• The election result reveals how chronically dysfunctional American’ democracy’ has become – and in particular how the vaunted founding principles of the ‘checks and balances’ ensured by the separation of powers between the Executive branch, the two houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, has broken down. Trump now controls all four. Game over.
• Also, we have learned from his first term as President that the unwritten conventions that lubricate the working of functioning democracies are useless in the face of an authoritarian who chooses to ignore them. Peter Hennessy’s ‘Good chap theory of government’ no longer applies.
• Trump’s success confirms what critics like Thomas Frank pointed out decades ago – that the Democrats had lost touch with the people whom the party ostensibly represented – and became instead an enabler of the elites who were the beneficiaries of a neoliberal society. In that sense Hilary Clinton was the most inappropriate candidate imaginable in 2016, and Kamala Harris had some of the same disabilities in 2024.
• There’s something in the theory that Joe Biden’s cussedness in wanting to run again made Harris’s task impossible. But my hunch is that even if the Democrats had had a ‘normal’ process with primaries etc. they might not have beaten Trump. In any event, that’s now just an interesting but irrelevant counterfactual.
• All the passionate, grief-stricken expressions of determination to ‘restore’ or ‘rescue’ democracy in America are doomed to fail without a recognition that Trump’s win was actually a ‘democratic’one. It seems to have been a fair and legally-sound election. (I read somewhere that the alt-right sites which had been incessantly relaying the charge that the election would be ‘stolen’ by the Democrats suddenly went quiet when it became clear that Trump was going to win!)
• The underlying problem – the reason why Trump’s campaigning rhetoric fell on such fertile ground – lies deeper. It is that American democracy has been twisted out of recognition by the economic system to which it is in thrall. The fact that the neoliberal thinking — to which Western governments have been addicted for decades — produces gross social inequality is not an externality; it’s what the system is designed to do. Or, as geeks say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
• In that context the British economic sage Martin Wolf published an interesting book a few years ago based on a metaphor: that the relationship between democracy and capitalism is a marriage – and, like all marriages, it has its ups and downs. In the decades since 1970, it’s been mostly downs. In fact the marriage has become a chronically abusive one, with democracy being bent out of shape to facilitate the needs and priorities of the exploitative partner. Which is why bleating about ‘restoring’ the ‘democracy’ that Trump now threatens is just that – bleating. Much more fundamental change is needed.
• The big question, therefore, is whether this latest dramatic lurch into authoritarianism by the world’s most important democracy can be reversed. We need to adjust to the unpalatable thought that Trumpism may be a longer-term phenomenon than we think. Although he’s ageing and displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decay, so we should be paying more attention to J.D. Vance, who is hale and hearty and may be president sooner than we think.
• Can liberal democracy be saved? In principle, maybe. But it would require pretty radical changes to revitalise democracies that have been hollowed out by capitalism. And democracies are slow-moving beasts, as David Runciman pointed out years ago. More ominously, though, history suggests that fundamental social change happens only through two processes — revolution or war. The explosion in liberal democracies that we have grown up with was a reaction to the cataclysmic horrors of the Second World War, as Tony Judt demonstrated so vividly in his book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. It has become our ‘normal’, something to be taken for granted. But what we are now discovering is that it’s much more fragile than we realised. And it may not last.
• Which leads to a really nightmarish thought. If humans endure for another millennium, might future historians looking back at our period see the post-war proliferation of liberal democracies not as an enduring phenomenon, but as a statistical blip in the history of governance? So might it be time to begin re-reading Thomas Hobbes?
• The fevered speculation about what Trump will do when he takes office in January is already in overdrive. He has said really wild things during the campaign — including proposing to round up and deport 20 million ‘illegal’ immigrants, prosecuting and imprisoning Joe Biden and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, firing tens of thousands of civil servants and so on. Some people have taken comfort from the thought that much of this stuff is too wild to be realistic. After all, as a friend put it to me, “last time he wasn’t able even to build that bloody wall!”.
• As Francis Fukuyama put it in the FT at the weekend, “The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to carry out what he threatens.” It would require, for example, “years of investment in the infrastructure necessary to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and so on.” And then I open the Sunday Times yesterday and find the front page story on how the guy Trump proposes to put in charge of the operation describes his plans for carrying it out. And then I remember from reading Richard Evans’s fascinating new book that the original Nazi idea in the 1930s was to force Jews to emigrate, and it was only when that proved slow and inefficient that they built an infrastructure for achieving the same objective by different means.
• Predicting how Trump’s second term will play out is a mug’s game, but there is one racing certainty: there will be tariff wars which will have predictable consequences, most of them bad. And interestingly, this is not because Trump — as Will Dunn puts it in the New Statesman — has “bought a copy of Eighteenth-Century Mercantilism For Dummies” but because just about the only issue on which he has been consistent since he first broke cover in the 1980s is… tariffs. “This is the thread”, wrote Janan Ganesh in the FT, “that runs through his more than four decades on the public record: an intense belief that to run a current account deficit with another nation is to ‘lose’ to it.” And now he believes that by imposing much higher tariffs on imports he can force companies to return manufacturing jobs to the US — which is bad news for the UK, whose biggest single trading partner happens to be the US. (The EU is, of course more important, but that’s a trading bloc.)

Er, that’s it. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Those images of Spain’s floods that went viral

Yesterday’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by a striking photograph in the most recent edition of Charles Arthur’s Substack newsletter Social Warming. It shows a narrow street in the aftermath of the “rain bomb” that devastated the region of Valencia in Spain. A year’s worth of rain fell in a single day, and in some towns more than 490 litres a square metre fell in eight hours. Water is very heavy, so if there’s a gradient it will flow downhill with the kind of force that can pick up a heavy SUV and toss it around like a toy. And if it channels down a narrow urban street, it will throw parked cars around like King Kong in a bad mood.

The photograph in Arthur’s article showed what had happened in a particular street. Taken with a telephoto lens from an upper storey of a building, it showed a chaotic and almost surreal scene: about 70 vehicles of all sizes jumbled up and scattered at crazy angles along the length of the street.

It was an astonishing image which really stopped me in my tracks. Not surprisingly, it also went viral on social media. And then came the reaction: “AI image, fake news.”

Read on

My commonplace booklet

The Berlin Wall Never Fell

We (me included) often use the phrase “after the Berlin Wall came down” as shorthand when writing about Gorbachev, the end of communism, the collapse of the USSR, etc. So this blog post by the historian Timothy Snyder comes as an embarrassing reproof.

In summer and autumn 1989, amidst Gorbachev’s perestroika and reforms and gestures among neighboring communist countries, East Germans were finding ways to visit or to emigrate to West Germany. The East German regime, in turmoil itself amid protests, was trying to formulate a new set of rules for the border. Amidst a great deal of confusion, a regime spokesman seemed to announce, in response to a question by an Italian journalist, that the border posts at the wall would allow East Germans to depart for the West.

That was on November 9th, 1989. The Berlin Wall did not topple over because of that press conference. What happened was that tens of thousands of East Berliners took advantage of the pronouncement and crowded the border checkpoints, one of which eventually opened. People rushed through to forbidden West Berlin, where they were greeted with champagne and flowers. It was a night that changed the history of Germany, which would unify less than a year later.

But no wall actually fell. People eventually clambered on it, and chipped off pieces of it…

They did, and I have a piece of it on the window-sill of my study as I write this. It was given to me by a journalistic colleague who had been sent to Berlin by our newspaper to report on the story. Sigh.

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Wheels within Wheels

Quote of the Day

”The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

• Flannery O’Connor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | How cold the wind doth blow | Ellen Leslie, soprano

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are

This remarkable essay by Carlos Ozada appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday. It captures the central, unpalatable message of the Trump victory, which is that the America the readers of the NYT live in is not the real America. The piece is behind the Times paywall but the link is a gift one, so it should work for most readers. If it doesn’t, you can find the text on Robert Reich’s Substack.

It’s a perceptive piece, worth reading in full. But here’s the nub of it:

The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris reminded us, likening him to the crooks and predators she’d battled as a California prosecutor. She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies — to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments — as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.

It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it. His critics have long argued that he is just conning his voters — making them feel that he’s fighting for them when he’s just in it for himself and his wealthy allies — but part of Trump’s appeal is that his supporters recognize the con, that they feel that they’re in on it.

Books, etc.

After Trump won in 2016 this book was the most interesting thing I read. It’s a searing critique of the Democratic Party in which Frank argues that, in failing to curb growing economic inequality, the left in America had abandoned its roots to pursue a new class of supporter — college-educated elite professionals.

That lesson failed to land. But people had noticed that the people Obama — a Democratic president — reached for in 2008 to rescue the banks were the self-same elite professionals who had caused the crisis. And maybe then they started to wonder whose side the Democrats were on.

My commonplace booklet

What happens if Americans claim asylum from a Trump regime?

A sobering post by Chris Bertram on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog.

Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it could turn out, very soon, that some US citizens will find themselves outside of their country, with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and on the territory of a state signatory of the Convention. Some of those states will also be allies of the US through NATO and other treaties and will have extradition treaties with the US. In which case what might happen?

Bertram then outlines four possibilities for Americans fleeing persecution or prosecution by Trump’s agencies.

The basic pattern, he says, is clear:

Liberal democratic states allied to the US would face a choice between their state interests as allies of the US on the one hand and upholding the right to asylum and defending liberal democratic values on the other. Nobody can be confident about what would happen in practice. If I were a US dissident, I would choose my place of asylum carefully.

Although it’s not a parallel, the case of Julian Assange comes immediately to mind.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Watch SpaceX Catch A Starship Booster In Air An astonishing video of a SpaceX booster rocket returning to its nest. (The ‘boosting’ in this case is providing propulsion of a rocket into space, not boosting Musk into the Trump administration.)

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Presidential doodles

Dwight Eisenhower (34th President of the US) seems to have been quite a good artist, as the nice detail in this doodle suggests.

(From Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles and Scrawls from the Oval Office.)

Quote of the Day

“LLMs are quite good at reproducing culture, but not so good at introducing cultural variation.”

• Alison Gopnik

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Link

Seems prescient when listened to 62 years after it was first recorded.

Long Read of the Day

What comes after Moore’s Law? Why, Huang’s Law, of course…

…and why that might not be such good news.

Last Sunday’s Observer column:

Although Moore’s “law” was bound to run out of steam eventually, it shaped an entire industry and – more importantly – changed the way we thought about computing. In particular, it fostered a hubristic mindset: confidence that if a problem could be solved by computing, if today’s machines weren’t powerful enough, Moore’s law guaranteed that it would be soluble really soon.

As the ancient Greeks knew only too well, after hubris comes nemesis. In the computing world it came in the computational needs of machine learning, which were orders of magnitude greater than those of more conventional serial processing – computing in sequence, one thing at a time (albeit at astonishing speeds). In one of those happy accidents, there was a part of the computer industry – gaming, which needed processors that could do several calculations simultaneously, or “in parallel” – to ensure that fast-changing scenes could be rendered realistically. And one particular company, Nvidia, was a prominent caterer to this esoteric requirement by providing what became known as graphics processing units (GPUs).

At some point, Jensen Huang, a smart cookie who is the founder and chief executive of Nvidia, realised that his company had the technology that the burgeoning new field of machine learning (afterwards rebranded AI) needed, and he pivoted his entire company to focus on it. The rest, as they say, is history. Irrational exuberance about AI took over the tech industry, fuelling a gold rush in which Huang was the premier supplier of picks and shovels, and his company is now the second most valuable corporation on the planet, just behind Apple…

Read on

Books, etc.

On glutinous prose

Julian Barnes has a lovely review of Adam D. Zientek’s book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front, in the current edition of theLRB. His review contains the following passage:

Zientek is a professor of history with a strong sociological approach. His preface contains this forbidding statement of intent: ‘The model I propose to elaborate below is this: the alcohol supplied by the French army generated shared interoceptive and affective sensations that were then interpreted through culturally learned and contextually bound intoxication concepts, making for distinct and entraining emotional experience and group behaviours that tended to bolster the war effort.’ It’s tempting (if facetious) to rephrase this as: ‘French soldiers liked to get pissed with their mates, and it was good for morale.’

The book, says Barnes, “features tracts of prose as glutinous as Flanders mud”. And it makes one wonder why Humanities scholars write such constipated prose in a book ostensibly aimed at the general reader (what academics disdainfully call “trade books”).

Many years ago, I succeeded Julian as the Observer’s TV critic. Reading this review (or indeed anything he writes), you can see what a hard act he was to follow.

My commonplace booklet

Darwin and Dawkins: a tale of two biologists

The Economist has an informative review (probably paywalled) of Richard Dawkins’s intriguing new book — his 19th!

Its working hypothesis is that modern organisms are, indeed, like books, but of a particular, peculiar, variety. Dr Dawkins uses the analogy of palimpsests: the parchments scraped and reused by medieval scribes that accidentally preserved enough traces of their previous content for the older text to be discerned.

At the moment, only fragments of the overwritten messages of these biological palimpsests can be parsed. A human genome, for example, contains many “pseudogenes” that once encoded proteins related to the sense of smell, but which have now been disabled because, presumably, they are no longer needed in an animal whose dominant sense is vision. Similarly (and more familiarly), a human spine’s ancestral role as a suspension bridge from which the body hangs, rather than as a pillar that holds it upright, is clear from the compromises in its modern structure.

Dr Dawkins’s contention is that, by proper scrutiny of genetics and anatomy, a scientist armed with the tools of the future will be able to draw far more sophisticated and connected inferences than these. This will then illuminate parts of evolutionary history that are currently invisible.

As an analogy, describing organisms as palimpsests is a bit of a stretch. A palimpsest’s original text is unrelated to its new one, rather than being an earlier version of it, so it can tell you nothing about how the later text was composed. But that quibble aside, the tantalising idea is that reading genomes for their history is an endeavour that may form the basis of a new science.

What I like about Dawkins is his fearlessness, which I guess is why someone once described him as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, and echo of the soubriquet given to TH Huxley of “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Rolls Royce has finally given up on internal combustion and gone electric. Its new ‘Sceptre’ EV will set you back $420,000 without extras, and on a good day you’ll get up to 266 miles from its 102kWh battery.

The Verge was granted an audience with the beast. Here’s a sample from the review.

It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.

Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.

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American options

Screenshot

This is a flow-chart that the economist and blogger John Quiggin drew up on the Crooked Timber blog to help him think about the various possible paths that the US could follow after tomorrow’s presidential election. The diamonds denote decision nodes — points in the process where things could go either way — and the numbers on the arrows coming out of the nodes represent the probability of that outcome happening. I’m not sure about the logic behind the numbers in bold type beside the various destination boxes. Quiggin says they are the (cumulative) probability of reaching that box. The numbers next to arrows coming out of decision nodes (diamonds) are the probability of that decision.

The chart doesn’t include all the possible decision-nodes that might emerge. But it’s an interesting way of thinking about what could happen. And the only unproblematic path is the vertical one on the left.

Quote of the Day

”If history has a lesson, it is that we don’t learn from it.”

• Stephen Bush, FT, 19/20 October, 2024

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dvorak | Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” | 3rd movement | Wiener Phil and Karajan

Link

Long Read of the Day

Rituals of Childhood 

A remarkable (and sobering) essay by Kieran Healy which explains why one might not want to bring up children in the US now.

Sociologists like me often highlight these rituals of childhood in our writing and teaching. One of the founders of our field, Émile Durkheim, made them the centerpiece of his work. Institutions, he argued, are rituals that bind people to one another as a group. In a ritual, each person finds their place and does their part, and expects everyone else to do the same. Crucially, those involved all see one another participating in the event. By doing so, they enact their collective life in view of one another, demonstrating its reality, expressing its meaning, and feeling its pulse in their veins. That, Durkheim thought, is at root what a society is.

In any given week in America, you can watch as a different ritual of childhood plays itself out. Perhaps it will be in El Paso, at a shopping mall; or in Gilroy, at a food festival; or in Denver, at a school. Having heard gunshots, and been lucky enough to survive, children emerge to be shepherded to safety by their parents, their teachers, or heavily-armed police officers…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

We were talking about the power of nostalgia in contemporary politics and my friend Gerard told me about this novel which won the Booker Prize in 2023. The blurb is intriguing. Here’s an excerpt:

An enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

It seems timely. One reviewer wrote that “Gospodinov’s vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake”. That struck a chord with me. As the first videos of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began to appear, my first thought was they they were reminiscent of the celluloid newsreels of 1940 — shattered buildings, rubble-strewn streets, shell-shocked people — except this time the ‘newsreels’ were in colour. And I remember thinking that Europe’s long post-war holiday from history is over.

So, of course, I’ve ordered a copy.

My commonplace booklet

Last week Andrew Sullivan asked “Does Liberal Democracy End Next Week?” — and came up with a definite maybe.

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Autumn bouquet

What an imaginative gardener can rustle up in a few minutes, just before dinner guests arrive.

Quote of the Day

”Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s not what governments do. Democracy is what people do.”

• Robert Reich

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | Symphony no. 5 in D. 3rd movement | “Romanza”

Link

Sometimes, in times like this, you just need music like this to wash over you. It was premiered in 1943, in the middle of wartime, in the Albert Hall. I can imagine the impact it must have had on an audience traumatised by war.

Long Read of the Day

Elon Musk is not the only tech bro to worry about

My OpEd in the Observer of Sunday 20 October.

Way back in the 1960s “the personal is political” was a powerful slogan capturing the reality of power dynamics within marriages. Today, an equally meaningful slogan might be that “the technological is political”, to reflect the way that a small number of global corporations have acquired political clout within liberal democracies. If anyone doubted that, then the recent appearance of Elon Musk alongside Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania provided useful confirmation of how technology has moved centre-stage in American politics. Musk may be a manchild with a bad tweeting habit, but he also owns the company that is providing internet connectivity to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield; and his rocket has been chosen by Nasa to be the vehicle to land the next Americans on the moon…

Read on

Later Having seen how Musk has gone all-in for Trump, though, I now think he’s the most dangerous tech mogul in history.

Books, etc.

I’ve just finished reading Pauline Terreehörst’s riveting book on what she discovered in — and from — a vintage Gucci suitcase she bought at Sotheby’s in 2016. I’m hosting an event in my college (Wolfson) on Friday evening to celebrate the publication of the English edition, in which Pauline will be in conversation with Nicci Gerrard, the co-author of the Nicci French series of psychological thrillers. If you’re in Cambridge on Friday why not come along? To register, just click here.

My commonplace booklet

On a subject that’s of perennial interest — not just to me, but to some readers and colleagues — namely how to focus on what needs to be done when there are innumerable items clamouring for attention. I’m a fan of Dave Allen’s bible Getting Things Done — to the extent that I even bought and use a software package called Omnifocus which implements the Allen method on all my (Apple) devices.

I first heard about him from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve), who is the most productive person I’ve ever met. So when I saw a recent blog post by him about a trick he has invented for keeping track of things that the Allen method doesn’t really help with, I jumped to attention. Cory calls it “Keeping a Suspense File.

While good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else’s contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.

That’s where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you’re waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they’re sometimes called “suspense files”) made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I’d just gone back to this habit earlier.

My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well…

Smart idea. I’ve shamelessly copied it.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow When I saw this headline in The Register I thought it must be a spoof. But no. See the video for yourself.

Errata

Apologies for the various errors in Monday’s edition, and thanks to those who spotted them quickly.

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Westward Ho!

Donegal coast, Ireland.

Quote of the Day

Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”

• Michel Foucault

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bird Song | The Wailin’ Jennys

Link

Long Read of the Day

Back to the Thirties

Way back in 2015, David Runciman and I had a small research project in Cambridge on “technology and democracy” which was about trying to figure out what the implications of digital technology might be for democracy. (Spoiler alert: the prospects were not good.) This little project was the inspiration for the Minderoo Centre for Technology that I co-founded with Steve Connor in 2020; but another major outcome was David’s book, How Democracy Ends, which came out in 2019.

In it, David argued that liberal democracy will end eventually, but when we think about how it might end we shouldn’t assume that the failure mode will be like earlier periods of failure — military coups, revolutions etc. When it fails, he argued, democracy will fail forward in novel and unexpected ways. For that reason, it was no good looking back to the past for lessons — say to Germany in the 1930s, as many people were doing after Trump won in 2016.

At the time, I found that reassuring, but now I don’t. The reason? I’ve been reading Richard Evans’s new book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich which is on the one hand spellbinding and on the other hand alarming because of the eerie echoes of it that one hears in what is currently going on in the US. A while back I saw the beginnings of an odious parallel between the way tech titans were starting to cosy up to Trump, and how the corporate giants of inter-war Germany started to line up behind Hitler. (I wrote an OpEd about this in the Observer on October 20.)

Then on Saturday morning I wake up to discover that both the Washington Post and the LA Times have decided that they will not endorse a candidate in the upcoming election. I find that really chilling; it means that two powerful and wealthy newspaper proprietors are second-guessing the outcome of the election; they think that Trump might win and don’t want to be on the wrong side of him when he does.

Like the directors of I.G. Farben and its corporate ilk in the 1930s, these folks have skin in the game. The owner of the Post, for example, is Jeff Bezos, who has a spacecraft business and hopes to suck on the teats of the federal government in that context. He is probably incensed that a rival spacecraft hustler, Elon Musk, (who has been sucking on the aforesaid teats for some years) has now gone the whole hog and is vigorously campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, the state that could well decide the outcome of the election. Characteristically, though, Musk currently sees Trump as a kind of useful idiot (aka Trojan horse) for his own imperial delusions — just like von Papen and others in the 1930s thought that Hitler could be their idiot.

The historian Tim Snyder, who — like Richard Evans — is an expert on Nazi Germany. On Saturday he posted a sobering short video about the newspapers’ decision on his blog. It’s four minutes long and worth watching, but if you’re stretched for time, here’s a lightly-edited transcript:

I’m thinking today about the First lesson of On Tyranny, which is: do not obey in advance. The reason why that’s the first lesson is that, for me, it’s the first thing that we should be remembering, the first thing we should be learning from the horrors of the 20th century, that each of us does have some responsibility, and perhaps the wealthy and the powerful, maybe just a tiny bit more.

The reason why this is the lesson of the 20/20 century, the reason why it’s the first lesson in On Tyranny, is this: those who work on the Nazi period, the period of the Nazi takeover, know that much of Hitler’s rise to power had to do with people making adjustments in 1933 and 1934 — people anticipating what he would want from them and then going halfway.

A very similar lesson was drawn by the anti-communist dissidents of the 1970s who realized that every little thing that we do has consequences for those around us. They counselled as well, not to obey in advance, but to instead live as if we were free.

I have all this in mind, of course, because of these decisions by newspapers owned by very wealthy Americans not to endorse a presidential candidate. I gotta say, this strikes me as ignoring the essential thing that we were supposed to have learned from the 20th century — which is, in circumstances like these, do not obey in advance. If what you do is based on your anticipation — as it so obviously is — that an authoritarian might be about to come to power, and what you are doing is making it more likely that that authoritarian will come to power, and since you have already made concessions before he came to power, you’re preparing yourself for making more concessions after he comes to power.

And what’s worse, if you’re in a position of wealth and power yourself, you’re discouraging all the other people who are less wealthy and less powerful; and aside from being politically wrong and morally outrageous this is just simply unfair, because it puts the burden on taking action to those who are less fortunate than you, puts them in the position of having to be more courageous than you. And of course, what it really means when someone who’s wealthy and powerful makes adjustments, obeys in advance, what it really means is that they think, “Well, I’m going to be fine when democracy dies in darkness, I’m going to enjoy the shadows”. That’s what it really means.

So for all these reasons, this is outrageous. I hope these decisions will be changed, and regardless of that, I hope that the rest of us will keep in mind that we ought not to be obeying in advance. What we do always matters. What we do in the next few days matters a great deal, and the fact that people are obeying in advance is just a sign of how great the threat, really is. So, let’s all do what we can again.

Tim Snyder 25 October 1024, Oklahoma City.

The aphrodisiac effect of obscene wealth

The megalomaniacs who control X and Facebook are only able to pollute the public sphere and undermine democracy because of our deference to money

Yesterday’s Observer column:

There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as toothsome yet was doted upon by a host of glamorous women.

The other powerful aphrodisiac is immense wealth. This has all kinds of effects. It makes people (even journalists who should know better) deferential, presumably because they subscribe to the delusion that if someone is rich then they must be clever. But its effects on the rich person are more profound: it cuts them off from reality. When they travel, writes Jack Self in an absorbing essay: “The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer)… The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see.”

Mr Self estimates that there are currently 2,781 of these gilded creatures in the world. He divides them into two kinds: “self-made” and “second gen”…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From Nicholas Harris, writing in this week’s New Statesman:

”A sort of Weimar without the sex”, was how Christopher Hitchens unimprovably described joyless Britain in the late 1970s. The country has returned to a similar condition of bleak, stagnant ungovernability over the past few years. The least we might have expected is a debauched youth subculture to accompany it – even if not quite to the degeneracy of 1920s Berlin. Instead, the old dynamic has recurred, and even by English standards the nation seems locked in a condition of anti-festivity.

This week, new findings from the Night Time Industries Association found that clubbing could be “extinct” by end of the 2020s, with 37 per cent of venues having permanently shut since March 2020.”

Don’t you just love the idea of a ‘Night Time Industries Association’? It’s a bit like the Amalgamated Union of Underwater Basket-Weavers and Muff Divers, one of my favourite trade unions.

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Picture at an exhibition

At the terrific Paris 1924 exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

And Moussorgsky was nowhere to be seen.

Quote of the Day

“In a nutshell: companies are artificial social constructs that offload all their externalities onto the state they are embedded in.”

• Charlie Stross (Whom God Preserve)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mike Oldfield | She Moved Through the Fair

Link

Interesting take on a venerable Irish tune.

Long Read of the Day

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

Perceptive and thought-provoking Noema essay by Shannon Vallor.

Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines and quotes trumpeting our triumph or doom in an era of superhuman AI are the refrain of a fast-growing, dangerous and powerful ideology. Whether used to get us to embrace AI with unquestioning enthusiasm or to paint a picture of AI as a terrifying specter before which we must tremble, the underlying ideology of “superhuman” AI fosters the growing devaluation of human agency and autonomy and collapses the distinction between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.

Today’s powerful AI systems lack even the most basic features of human minds; they do not share with humans what we call consciousness or sentience, the related capacity to feel things like pain, joy, fear and love. Nor do they have the slightest sense of their place and role in this world, much less the ability to experience it. They can answer the questions we choose to ask, paint us pretty pictures, generate deepfake videos and more. But an AI tool is dark inside…

This is a refreshing perspective on the current ballyhoo about ‘super intelligence’. Shannon is pointing out that the tech industry’s conception of a’ human’ — as in ‘superhuman’ — is basically that of a faceless operative who is currently a sub-optimal performer in the ‘efficiency’ stakes. The goal of the AGI evangelists is simply to build machines that match or outperform us on a vast array of economically valuable tasks.

Books, etc.

Further to the above… Shannon Valor has an interesting new book out — which I’m currently reading.

My commonplace booklet

Many years ago, when the only computer to which I had access was a DEC Vax (of beloved memory) I thought that I would know that ‘AI’ had really arrived when a machine could write plausible excuses. Little did I know that one of Alan Turing’s colleagues, Christopher Strachey, had long ago written a program that wrote love-letters. The code is still on Github, but you can try it out here. So I did.

Hmmm… Room for improvement, as my headmaster would have said. But apparently Turing and Strachey would print these out and leave them around the Lab just to see what would happen.

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L’Eau potable

Provence, 2008.

Quote of the Day

”Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”

• Adam Przeworski

He should have added “and accept that they have lost” when they have.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Trumpet Concerto in Eb, 1st movement (Allegro) | Alison Balsom

Link

Long Read of the Day

What Elon Musk Really Wants

Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic.

Basically, Trump is his Trojan horse.

In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century.

Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.

Musk’s pursuit of this dream clearly transcends billionaire hobbyism…

It does. Read on. Once upon a time, technology had nothing much to do with politics. No longer.

Books, etc.

The death of the book, again

John Quiggin ponders a hoary old question.

We’re in another round of concern about the “death of the book”, and, in particular, the claimed inability or unwillingness of young people to read full-length books. I’m not going to push too far on the argument that this complaint is ancient, but I can’t resist mentioning the response of my younger brother, who, when asked if he wanted a book for Christmas, answered “thanks, but I already have one”). That was around 50 years ago, and he went on to a very successful legal career.

Fifty years ago, the main competitors for books were TV and radio. Critics at the time decried the passive mode of consuming these broadcast media, compared to the active engagement required by reading. Now, in many respects, the complaint is the opposite. The various services available on the Internet are interactive, and engrossing, finely tuned to keep our attention…

Maybe this is a recurrent moral panic. On the one hand, academics — especially in US universities — are raising the alarm about freshmen (and women) in Humanities courses who have trouble reading a book a week. On the other hand, the bookshops around where I live and work seem to be thriving. And the number of new books being published shows no signs of diminishing, at least judging by my email traffic.

My commonplace booklet

Fresh from a video conversation with our granddaughter and her parents in Sydney, I read this in a blog post by Henry Oliver:

”The Admiralty was shrouded in fog. The messenger arrived at one a.m. He had ridden 31 horses and post-carriages over 271 miles since landing in Falmouth two days earlier. Lieutenant Lapenotière saw the First Secretary of the Admiralty just a few minutes after his arrival. He was carrying the dispatch of Admiral Collingwood, which contained the news from the Battle of Trafalgar. It was 6th November, 1805, sixteen days after the battle.”

I’m always struck by the differences in speeds of travel and communications between now and the distant past. And by the distances that our ancestors were able to cover. A couple of years ago my wife and I visited Derrynane House in Kerry, which was the home of the great Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell. For a time, he was one of the most influential politicians in the British Parliament and as we walked around I began to reflect on the journeys he had to make regularly from Derrynane to London. First a day (or two) on horseback to reach a point where he could catch a stage-coach (changing horses every 25 miles). Then maybe two days on the road to Dublin, followed by a crossing of the Irish Sea by mailboat to Holyhead, and then several days on a coach to London.

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What — or of what — is he thinking?

Quote of the Day

“A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.”

• Agnes Callard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alec Finn and Mary Bergin | Two jigs

Link

Tunes are (I think) Kitty’s Rambles and Pádraig O’Keefe’s

Long Read of the Day

Lady Baker and the source of the Nile

Sarah Harkness’s Literature for the People, the story of the two Macmillan brothers who built a publishing empire (and bought Alice in Wonderland to the world), came out in May (with a paperback edition coming next March), but she is constantly digging in archives of the Victorian period and coming up with gems. This essay “Lady Baker and the source of the Nile” is the latest one.

This is how it opens…

Among the thousands and thousands of handwritten letters preserved in the British Library from the pen of the Victorian publisher Alexander Macmillan, one in particular piqued my interest: written to the heroic explorer of the sources of the Nile, Sir Samuel Baker, on 4 May 1866:

”There is a terrible defect in your summing up. You should say something about Mrs Baker. It may be as slight as you please, very little more than you most tender and delicate allusion at starting, but indeed something should be said. … It struck me as strange to a degree. Of course I understand your feeling of not wearing your heart upon your sleeve, but I do think people would wonder.”“ The book in question, still in draft at this stage, was Samuel Baker’s classic tale of adventure Albert-Nyanza: Great Basin of the Nile, a title that Alexander Macmillan had gone to great lengths, and considerable expense, to secure. The publisher was determined that nothing should be lost in the promotion of a story that was fascinating the Victorian public…

You can guess why Baker was reticent, but the explanation is fascinating.

The Internet holds up a mirror to human nature — alas.

Yesterday’s Observer column

This column comes to you as a break from listening to a riveting podcast series called ‘Kill List’. It’s about a secret website that journalist and author Carl Miller discovered on the dark web, the slimy underbelly of the internet. The site essentially runs what one might call an “assassination market” or a murder-for-hire service. Customers identify and profile someone whom they wish to have killed and pay (in bitcoin, natch) for the service they require. Hence the title of the podcast series.

The story starts in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic lockdown when a gifted IT expert and hacker, Chris Monteiro, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that, once exploited, gave him complete access to it. Inside, he found a “kill list”, rather like an Excel spreadsheet, of 175 people all over the world whom clients wanted murdered. For each target, there was usually lots of detailed information – address, photographs, habits, routes regularly travelled etc. It looked, I guess, superficially mundane – until you read the “instructions” attached for each one. “How much bitcoin should I pay?” “Tell me the execution time in advance – I can’t be there.” “I would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all.” You get the idea…

Read on

Books, etc.

Maria Tippett RIP

I was dismayed to learn on Thursday last that Maria Tippett had passed away in August — and even more dejected that I hadn’t known of her death. She was a great cultural critic and a formidable writer (see the list of her books on her Wikipedia page). But she was also a warm and sympathetic friend over many years. She lived for part of the year in a wonderful house on an island off Vancouver, but also regularly spent a few months every year in Cambridge (where she was a Fellow of Churchill College). She — and her husband, the historian Peter Clarke — were wonderfully supportive of me and my young children after my wife Sue died in 2002.

Maria wrote a fine biography of Yousuf Karsh, the celebrated portrait photographer.

As a photographer, I remember feeling jealous when she told me about the project. But the book of hers that I really loved was her memoir, Becoming Myself, a copy of which she gave to Sue and me in 1996.

May she rest in peace.

My commonplace booklet

In response to my complaint in Friday’s edition that “I spend too much time doing email and too little time doing the things I ought to be doing”, Joe Dunne emailed to say that he tries to follow Carl Jung’s advice: “Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”

But…

The challenge is this: For example, if the next most important thing will take a day to complete, the 2nd most important thing an hour and the 3rd most important 5 minutes, the temptation is to work them in reverse order. There’s great satisfaction to be had by completing tasks in the most important order and this can become a habit!

I’ve come to the conclusion that the best/only source of wisdom in this ‘personal productivity’ lark is Dave Allen, whose Getting Things Done is a sacred text for some of my most productive friends. Time to re-launch Omnifocus maybe.

Errata

Apologies for the typos in Friday’s edition, the product (as usual) of rushed proofreading at the end of a busy day.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!