Morning conference
8:30am, Provence, June
Quote of the Day
“If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving definitely isn’t for you”
- Steven Wright
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Soave sia il vento | Così fan tutte
Beautiful and so, so cynical. From the 2006 Glyndebourne performance. I’ve often thought that this would make great going-out music for one’s funeral.
Long Read of the Day
Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast
Background: This is a beautiful essay by the great social scientist James Scott, looking back on his intellectual development in which, instead of him leaving his original discipline of political science, political science left him. After I learned of his death, I wrote a little piece about him in last Wednesday’s edition in which I mentioned how generative his book Seeing Like a State had been — in the sense that it triggered a lot of productive thinking in its readers.
As if on cue, a really thoughtful post about Scott popped into my inbox the other day. It’s by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) and his essay is an insightful meditation on the significance of Scott’s work, and worth reading just for that. But for me it had an added delight — of alerting me to Scott’s own reflection on his intellectual development.
A pivotal movement in his life was a decision to spend a year and a half living in a remote Malay village with 75 inhabitants in order to understand how real people lived rather than doing statistical surveys of the kind beloved by political scientists. One of the ideas that emerged from that experience was an understanding of what he called ‘below-the-radar-resistance’ by powerless peasants or political dissidents in authoritarian regimes.
One example of this kind of resistance that he cites comes from Poland during the period of martial law.
When the Solidarity Movement was strong at the end of martial law in Poland, there were forms of symbolic protest that drove the government crazy. The government news broadcast took place at 6:00 PM and people decided by the hundreds of thousands to leave their houses. The moment the news broadcast began, they took a walk in the street for a half hour, until the news broadcast was over, with their hats on backwards. There was no law against taking a walk, and there was, of course, no law about wearing your hat backwards. You could understand, however, that this was a huge morale booster for much of the Polish opposition to martial law.
The government responded by forcing a curfew at exactly 6:00 that would require people to be in their houses during the news broadcast. Within a few days, the Polish opposition had discovered a workaround. Since they could no longer be in the street during the news broadcast, what they did was to take their television set, put it on the windowsill, and blare out the news broadcast—which they considered to be largely lies—to the security forces, who were the only people in the street. This, as you can imagine, was also a huge morale booster and a symbolic victory for the opposition to martial law, even though it did not change the power dynamic in the short run.
Well worth a read. Even though it’s an academic article, it’s open-access. Go to the link and click on the “PDF” button.
Books, etc.
Feeling pessimistic: why not try reading a book?
Lovely essay by Henry Oliver.
According to the Pew Centre, back in the 1970s, when news coverage wasn’t so pessimistic, only 8% of Americans reported not having read a book in the last year. That figure now stands at 23%. A new survey from the Reading Agency shows that only 50% of UK adults are regular readers. 35% are “lapsed”. And 15% have never been regular readers. In 2015, 58% of adults were regular readers. And only 8% of adults were non-readers back then. The figures for the 16-24 bracket suggest these figures will continue to decline.
Many reasons are given for this decline: distraction of social media, lack of ability to focus, and feeling bored or uninterested by the reading material. Those who did read reported better mental health, improved sleep and concentration, and better understanding of other people’s feelings. Readers have better life satisfaction.
The reason, I think, is that reading is a solitary activity. Reading requires us to leave the world of arguments, ideologies, news coverage, and TikTok feeds and to exist inside our imaginations for a while. Many solutions are sought to the wide-spread mood of dissatisfaction, not least the prevalence of therapy. But this keeps us focussed on what is making us miserable: our own lives, our own problems, the people around us.
It does, because misery is contagious. And listening to music and reading books are two antidotes to it. Which partly explains the structure of this little newsletter.
Errata
Apologies to the inimitable Heather Cox Richardson for renaming her ‘Helen’ in Wednesday’s edition. Usual culprits: Apple autocorrect and slack proofreading by a sleepy blogger. And thanks to Andrew Brown for pointing it out so tactfully.
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!