Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Book Review: "The Mysteries" by Bill Watterson and John Kascht

The Mysteries (2023)
Bill Watterson and John Kascht
72 pages

Scientists and science writers face a particular challenge when communicating to the public about the risks of environmental degradation and devastation: a reader’s everyday lived experience tends to unconsciously trump any data and descriptions of a problem. Global climate change, toxins in drinking water, a massive plastic garbage patch in the ocean – these and other such disasters seem distant and somehow inconsequential if they don’t affect our lives directly, aren’t impacting our immediate health or what we see outside our door from one day to the next.

Fiction, however, has the power to break through such failures of our imagination. By carrying us beyond our immediate experience and inducing a visceral reaction, a well-told story can make evident what even a well-explained set of data does not.

Bill Watterson – of Calvin and Hobbes fame – provides such an experience in his slender tale The Mysteries, created in collaboration with the artist John Kascht. Through a parable of human fear of the unknown within the natural world, the pair explore not only how such fearfulness can constrain our lives, but also the human drive to overcome it, to uncover and explain what we do not understand. And, crucially for our present-day world, they reflect on what happens when we do finally come to resolve such mysteries. Does humankind only properly respect that before which it trembles in ignorance?

The story has a poetic flow to it, with just a sentence or two per page. Each facing page contains an extraordinary illustration; and, while the words give sense to the accompanying illustrations, these exquisite images created by Watterson and Kascht generate the profound emotional power of the tale. They have an eerie quality – scenes that are at once familiar and yet alien, captivating yet frightening in their intensity.

Watterson and Kascht’s work in The Mysteries forces us to confront the separation from the natural world, whether through fearful ignorance or familiar contempt, that we have allowed to corrupt our world, and our lives.


Other notes and information:

A New York Times article here, provides fascinating background into what was apparently the fraught collaboration between Watterson and Kascht in developing the artwork.

For a brilliant prose reflection on the impact our separation from nature has on “our world, and our lives,” I strongly recommend Richard Powers’ The Overstory, my review linked to at right.


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Book Review: "Twilight of Democracy" by Anne Applebaum

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020)
Anne Applebaum (1964)
206 pages

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will. (14)

Such a statement would have seemed outlandish in the early 1990’s, with the West celebrating victory in the Cold War as an end of history moment, certain that liberal democracy had demonstrated itself to be the final word in civilization’s political, economic, and social evolution. Since the mid-to-late 2000’s, however, those earlier, halcyon days have given way to first concern, and then despair, as increasing polarization and partisanship have fractured public discourse and come to weaken support for democratic principles. In this environment, extreme political movements on both the right and left have exhibited strong tendencies toward autocratic rule, even in many long-established Western democracies.

While much has been written and said about these growing challenges, the focus of such arguments has generally been at a societal level. By contrast, in Twilight of Democracy, journalist and historian Anne Applebaum takes a more personal, intimate approach; through the political schisms she has experienced with several of her friends and colleagues over the past two decades, she captures the essence of what has happened these last years, revealing what her subtitle refers to as The Lure of Authoritarianism.

She opens by describing a party that she and her husband gave on New Years Eve at the turn of the millennium, at their home in Poland. As an American journalist having worked in various capitals in Europe, and with her husband a member of the Polish government, the wide variety of local and international friends and acquaintances who attended included journalists, diplomats, and others in the cultural elite. Politically, Applebaum writes,

you could have lumped the majority of us, roughly, in the general category of what Poles call the right – the conservatives, the anti-Communists. But at that moment of history, you might also have called most of us liberals. Free-market liberals, classical liberals … [who] did believe in democracy, in the rule of law, in checks and balances. (2)

In the years following that party, however, Applebaum found that a not insignificant number of these friends shifted to the extreme political right. More fundamentally, she observes, they abandoned classical, liberal democratic values, and began aligning themselves with organizations and political parties that emphasize loyalty to party ideology over meritocratic and democratic principles. In her book, she explores the political evolution of these former friends as a basis for describing what she finds to be a broader shift toward authoritarianism in the West.

Though she mentions at the outset that she “will not offer either a grand theory or a universal solution,” (14) she does reference the work of a behavioral economist, Karen Stenner, who she cites as claiming 

that about a third of the population in any country has … an authoritarian predisposition … that favors homogeneity and order [as opposed to] its opposite, a “libertarian” predisposition, one that favors diversity and difference. (16) 

For Stenner, the issue is not a political one of left versus right, but rather that “authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity.” (16) This framing, of intolerance to complexity, struck a deep chord with me: as readers of other of my reviews may have discovered, one of my favorite New York Times front page headlines is Lost in Abortion Noise – Nuance, since it seems a fitting, generic headline that could be used for any fill-in-the blank topic in these days of disagreements filled with strident over-simplification.

Applebaum argues, however, that the mere presence of a nuance-averse portion of the population –those with an authoritarian predisposition – does not on its own make autocracy inevitable. To animate this group, a dictator requires the support of those “who can use sophisticated legal language, people who can argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do … [that is] members of the intellectual and educated elite.” These “fallen intellectuals,” as she refers to them, will willingly “launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite, even if that includes their university classmates, their colleagues, and their friends,” to support and curry favor with an autocratic leader. (17-18)

To understand the motivations of this group, she tells the stories of several of her own former classmates, colleagues, and friends who had attended her New Years Eve party in 1999, and with whom she has since become politically estranged. She finds them to have felt marginalized in one way or another in the existing liberal democratic regimes in their countries; and so, seeking the influence they felt was their due, they have aligned themselves with populist, authoritarian political parties and leaders, and often thereby earning the positions of power they craved.

Having made a convincing case for the rise of these “fallen intellectuals,” Applebaum turns to the question of how a sizeable segment of the population has come to align with them. Here, she seems to offer a mixed message, before settling on a particular answer.

Initially, she makes an argument based on economic realities, noting that

democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. The losers of these competitions were always, sooner or later, going to challenge the value of competition itself. (59) 

Later, however, she backtracks a bit, arguing that: 

“The economy” or “inequality” does not explain why, at that exact moment [in 2015-2018], everybody got very angry. … This is not to say that immigration and economic pain are irrelevant to the current crisis: clearly they are genuine sources of anger, distress, discomfort, and division. But as a complete explanation for political change – as an explanation for the emergence of whole new classes of political actors – they are insufficient. (108-9)

Instead of anger with the economy, she finds the decisive factor to lie in the segment of the population with the authoritarian predisposition described by Stenner. The fallen intellectuals, in their work, target those intolerant of complexity, knowing that “the noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement … can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative.” (109) Using newly available information tools, they 

invent memes, create videos, conjure up slogans designed to appeal precisely to the fear and anger caused by this massive international wave of cacophony. [They] can even start the cacophony and create the chaos … knowing full well that some people will be frightened by it. (118) 

Through such methods, these intellectuals “persuade a chunk of voters to vote for someone who promises a new and more orderly order.” (116)

Applebaum also notes that the foundational conditions for such populist anger form a latent part of the present-day world:
When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule – who is the elite – is never over. (158-9)
The essayist Pankaj Mishra makes just such a claim the central theme of his book Age of Anger. (My review linked to at right.)  Mishra argues that coming out of the Enlightenment people embraced the idea of liberty and equality for all, with the unanticipated consequence that

power lacking theological foundations or transcendent authority, and conceived as power over other competing individuals, [is] inherently unstable … [and] condemned the rich and poor alike to a constant state of [resentment] and anxiety. (327, Mishra) 

Thus, he observes, civilization finds itself enveloped in an anger whose level may wax and wane, but that never completely disappears.

Applebaum’s view of the shift to autocracy as largely driven from the top down has instructive similarities, but also important differences, with the arguments of economist Martin Wolf, in The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. (My review linked to at right)  Wolf identifies similar current challenges to Western democracies, but points to a somewhat different, if not wholly unrelated, culprit. Describing democracy and capitalism as “complimentary opposites,” and “always fragile,” he argues that if independence between them is not maintained, “the delicate balance between politics and market can be destroyed,” which can bring down the entire project of democratic capitalism.

For Wolf, the current crisis has originated as a result of those with economic power using their wealth to acquire political power, and so pervert the system to their benefit. This has led to a rise in frustration and anger, as significant numbers of people decide that the system is rigged against them, and that they are “losing control over their livelihoods, status, and even country.” (85, Wolf) The consequence, he argues, is a disillusionment with democracy that leads people to embrace an authoritarian leader who promises them the return of what they have lost. Thus, Wolf gets to the same result as Applebaum – authoritarianism – but by a different path.

And yet, perhaps the deeper answer is that both forces are present, and self-reinforcing. Wolf’s wealthy business owners co-opt the political system, thereby creating increasing inequality, which leaves people frustrated and angry, and looking for ways to fight back. Applebaum’s fallen intellectuals enflame this disillusioned public through conspiracy theory, hyperbolic exaggerations, and outright lies, in order to empower a populist dictator who they hope will give them the positions of power they feel they deserve. And, not surprisingly, business owners generously fund the efforts of such autocrat-supporting intellectuals, in a symbiotic relationship that each hopes will benefit their own interests.

In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum argues that embittered members of the intellectual elite have pursued positions of power by exploiting those who find the siren call of authoritarianism seductive when faced with the challenging and often raucous debates present in democracies. She makes a convincing – and bracing – case for the danger these fallen intellectuals pose, by leveraging personal stories of friends and colleagues who have come to take up the work of supporting autocratic elements and regimes in Western democracies. Her palpable disquiet at how these former friends have abandoned liberal democratic values to aggressively support demagogues and authoritarians makes evident her view of the depth of the danger it poses.

Of course, as history has made eminently clear, demagogues can be difficult to control, and can turn to wield their power against even supporters – when one destroys the system, it becomes notoriously difficult to control the end point. In that sense, given the dark and disturbing portrait Applebaum paints of both our present and our immediate future, one can hardly help but latch on tightly to the thin sliver of hope she offers late in her essay:

No political victory is even permanent, no definition of “the nation” is guaranteed to last, and no elite of any kind, whether so-called “populist” or so-called “liberal” or so-called “aristocratic,” rules forever. The history of ancient Egypt looks, from a great distance in time, like a monotonous story of interchangeable pharaohs. But on closer examination, it includes periods of cultural lightness and eras of despotic gloom. Our history will someday look that way too. (186)


Other notes and information:

More quotes from this book


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Saturday, January 20, 2024

Book Review: "A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto" by China Miéville

A Spectre, Haunting (2022)
China Miéville (1972)
291 pages

In A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, China Miéville provides an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s famous pamphlet. Although best known as a writer of novels, Miéville certainly has the bona fides for undertaking this work, having earned a master’s degree and PhD from the London School of Economics and published several nonfiction books and essays; his writing here reflects these various aspects of his background: from his work as a novelist, engaging prose in which he makes his points clearly and effectively; from his economics scholarship, a well-researched and thoroughly documented study of the text’s content.

After opening with a reminder of how the style of communication assumed by a manifesto differs from, say, a scholarly paper or book, Miéville methodically works through his analysis of Marx and Engels’s publication. In successive chapters, he places the work into the context of the time in which it was written, provides an overview summarizing its content, evaluates Marx and Engels’s intent as expressed in the text and their other work, addresses criticisms that have been leveled against it, and explores its present-day relevance. Having included the text of the Manifesto as an appendix, he frequently references it in his analysis, tying his comments concretely to the words of Marx and Engels; throughout, he also references a wide variety of other sources, both critical and supportive of the Manifesto.

His intent with this work, for himself and his readers, is perhaps best summarized as that the effort he put into researching and writing it represents his answer to a question he poses late in the book:

What does it mean to find motivation in – to have fidelity to – the Manifesto today? To read generously enough to gain what we can from its pages, critically enough to see its blind spots and failures, to criticize it rigorously and sensitively? (136)

In his analysis, Miéville consistently manages to achieve this delicate balance of providing both a generous and critical examination of the Manifesto, ultimately making a convincing case for its continued relevance.

I first read the Manifesto itself early last year, in an edition with an extended introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones (my review linked to at right).  In his essay, Stedman Jones focuses largely on the philosophers and philosophic traditions that led up to and heavily influenced the communist movement in general, and Marx and Engels in particular. Although, like Miéville, he has points of criticism with the text, the two seem fully in agreement about its continued importance; as Stedman Jones notes, it remains a “still compelling vision,” and critique, of capitalism. (10, Stedman Jones)

Particularly striking about Miéville’s analysis of the Manifesto is his convincing review of how Marx and Engels’s mid-19th century observations and criticisms of capitalism have been borne out by events of the 20th, and now 21st, centuries. Noting that some of the specific claims in the Manifesto about the capitalist system may now appear dated, Miéville argues that a present-day reader should not become distracted by those who nit-pick over such details. Instead, one’s focus should remain on

the fundamental dynamics with which the Manifesto is concerned. Those are of profit-extraction by a minority, though the exploitation of the labor of a majority, in the context of competitive accumulation. (82) 

For Miéville, Marx and Engels’s trenchant description of the devastating consequences and ineluctable unsustainability that arise from these fundamental dynamics forms the core message of their work.

And, despite the rosy predictions of those arguing that capitalism can be tamed, bourgeois society – as constituted by and for the owners of the means of production – remains, as Miéville notes (and an even cursory glance around our present-day world makes clear), “resistant to any change that might put profit maximization in jeopardy or threaten the stability on which profit and power relies.” (18) In Marx and Engels’s presentation in the Manifesto, he detects, in fact,

a certain bleak admiration in their vision of modern capitalism as so voracious, total, and totalizing a system that it cannot be made liveable with. This doesn’t imply impregnability or seamlessness – communist political strategy is predicated on working at the cracks. But it understands capitalism’s logic as predicated on exploitation and oppression, such that it can never exist without them, such that whatever reforms can be effected will always be inadequate, opposed ferociously by the bourgeoisie, always embattled. This is why capitalism cannot be accommodated. (84)


The fundamental reason for this inability to successfully reform capitalism, to make it liveable with, comes down to what economist Martin Wolf observes, in his sobering book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, as

“the rise of rentier capitalism, in which a relatively small proportion of the population has successfully captured rents from the economy and uses the resources it has acquired to control the political and even legal systems, especially in the US, the world’s most important standard bearer of democracy. (173, Wolf, my review linked to at right)

Despite finding capitalism and democracy to be fundamentally co-dependent – Wolf argues that you can’t have one without the other – his analysis makes clear the ease with which capitalism can destroy democracy, by enabling those with economic wealth to capture political power and then use it to protect and expand their wealth at the expense of the broader population.

One can learn how this process proceeded in the US in Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway in-depth analysis in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (my review at right).  The two historians document the successful propaganda campaign waged by US business in the 20th century to convince Americans to become free market fundamentalists through precisely the transformation of economic advantage into social and political power that Wolf identifies, an effort that has inevitably led to the destabilizing outcomes Miéville notes as described in the Manifesto.

After a “quick dismissal of a few exhausted anti-communist bromides” (98), Miéville delves into what he finds to be some of the more thought-provoking critiques of the text, including the accusation of it having “systemic blind spots on race.” (116) He argues that the discussion of race is unavoidably connected to that of class, and, citing the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, notes that racism has been

a project of generating cross-class solidarity among whites to the overwhelming benefit of the (white) ruling class, and for the downgrading of class itself as a perceived social schism, and its replacement with [what Du Bois referred to as] “the color line.” (124-5)


A century and a half after the Manifesto, such use of racism against class solidarity remains a fundamental part of the capitalist playbook, as described in comprehensive and enlightening detail by Heather McGhee, an expert in economic and social policy. In her book The Sum of Us, which explores the many ways that racism impacts not only Blacks but also society at large, she includes a chapter on corporate anti-union efforts that continue to focus on replacing class consciousness with race consciousness. Exploring in detail a specific case, she notes that

Nissan plant workers [in Mississippi] were getting a bad deal compared to unionized autoworkers …. But the white workers … were still getting … a better deal than someone. The company was able to redraw the lines of allegiance [by making clear for] a white worker … that he could get promoted to a ‘cushier’ job [by] not signing a union card. … They could be satisfied with a slightly better job that set them just above the Black guys on the line, more satisfied by a taste of status than they were hungry for a real pension, better healthcare or better wages for everyone. (120, McGhee) 

(Interestingly, although McGhee never references Marx or the Manifesto or communism in her critique of US race relations and class, she has a quote from Du Bois that overlaps with one Miéville also uses; again, though the details and methods of capitalism may vary, the fundamental concerns endure.)

In the final section of his work, Miéville explores the relevance of the Manifesto in our present-day world. While its critique of capitalism continues to ring true, he notes that the text’s tone of inevitability regarding the downfall of the capitalist system has proven false, at least up to now. Miéville argues that this is a consequence of the fact that, as has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past two centuries:

Capitalism can be awesomely elastic and adaptable … includ[ing] metabolizing aspects of society that were there before capitalism and even seem to stand against it, as well as those newly thrown up, even seemingly in opposition to it. … Mild reforms and radical moments are purposed and contested and opposed and co-opted and deployed, sometimes simultaneously, by those committed to capitalism’s maintenance, as well as by its enemies. (141)


One can gain an understanding of how this adaptability has played out in the US from historian Howard Zinn’s brilliant book A People’s History of the United States. Focusing, as the title indicates, at the level of life for the masses in the US – as opposed to only the leaders – he documents a pattern over the past couple of centuries of significant riots and uprisings among the US population leading to business and political leaders grudgingly giving in on a minimal subset of demands sufficient to just quell the violence, only for the process repeat itself again some few years later. (Compared to the sanitized version of US history presented in American schools, I found it eye-opening, as I read Zinn’s book, how frequently in American history uprisings and riots have occurred.)

Miéville, too, gives examples of these pressure points, such as the fight against child labor and for reduced work hours. This latter question, he notes, made evident to Marx a critical element of capitalism’s adaptability, and the challenge it presents those looking to replace it:

In Capital, [Marx noted] the [British Factory] Acts’ limitations on the working day as simultaneously against the inclinations and immediate profits of individual capitalist concerns, while also being in capital’s collective interest. (142, italics in original)

Thus, at critical moments, as Zinn also described, politicians have overcome the lobbying of business owners focused on their short-term bottom line, to act in the longer-term interest of maintaining the capitalist system.

Of course, as Martin Wolf points out in his book referenced above, the fundamental challenge of democratic capitalism is that this regulatory activity by a political class focused on the long-term can too easily be undermined. This happens when those with economic power use their wealth to gain political power and so push through laws that support their immediate profits – even if, as happened during the Gilded Age of the late 1800’s and again over the past decades in the US, it leads to a significant rise in inequality, one that begins to destabilize the system and so put capital’s longer-term interests at risk.

Whatever the level of corruption of the political class, however, Miéville notes the challenge that the reform-of-capitalism path also represents for groups intent on initiating a transition away from the system. If such groups support reforms that ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism, the result is to tend to prolong capitalism’s hold and so leave in place the fundamental system and the problems it creates. But, to not support such reforms leaves swaths of the working class worse off than they could be. Marx came to recognize this also, in the years after writing the Manifesto, but came to recognize that such reforms would not only benefit the working class in a day-to-day sense, but also “can be understood as increasing working class power and room for maneuvers overall.” (144) Not surprisingly, as Marx realized, people struggling just to survive will have little social or economic space within which to work for broader reform of the system.

The larger question, however, may be whether the apparent necessity of this repeated cycle of agitation and uprising to achieve reform is the only path to ameliorating the excesses of capitalism, or even moving beyond it to something better and more sustainable. A bracingly pessimistic, if persuasive, answer to this question is given by economist Thomas Piketty in his wonderful book A Brief History of Equality (my review linked to at right), in which he writes: 

Long-term movement toward equality [since the end of the 18th century] … is a consequence of conflicts and revolts against injustice that have made it possible to transform power relationships and overthrow institutions supported by dominant classes, which seek to structure social inequality in a way that benefits them, and to replace them with new institutions and new social, economic, and political rules that are more equitable and emancipatory for the majority. Generally speaking, the most fundamental transformations seen in the history of inegalitarian regimes involve social conflicts and large-scale political crises. (10)

Thus, it seems, the cycle of uprising and reform that Zinn documented as being a central part of US history will likely have to recur in the future as efforts continue to overcome the economic and social injustices that arise out of the fundamental dynamics of capitalism.

Nevertheless, as Miéville seeks to convince us in A Spectre, Haunting, we must carry-on this pursuit of justice, and not be held back by the seeming entrenchment of the capitalist system, for: “how many times has the utter impossibility of change been proved, only for change to rock the world and throw up everything we thought we knew?” (171) In clear and effective prose, he argues that the Manifesto – over a century and a half after its publication – continues to have much to tell us about the damaging shortcomings of capitalism, providing a compelling analysis that fairly demands of us a response, implicating us in the need to work to find a better path forward.


Other notes and information:

More quotes from this book


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Book Review: "Upstream" by Mary Oliver

Upstream (2019)
Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
178 pages

Recently, my sister-in-law recommended Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars to me. She mentioned that she had read The Little Prince a number of times over the years, but reading it this past summer to a nephew had prompted her to seek out other of Saint-Exupéry’s works, leading her to discover that wonderful collection of essays. When I told her that I had already read it, she asked for my review of it.

It turns out, however, I read it many years ago, long before I started writing these blog reviews. But, I told her, I do remember being deeply moved by it and, after rereading some of the quotes from it that I had noted down, that I recall finding in Saint-Exupéry’s writings, here and in his other work, a reminder of how to live as a part of nature rather than separate from it – how to open one’s eyes and heart to the wonder of the world, to its moments of transcendent beauty as well as unsparing harshness.

In one of those serendipitous moments that animate a reader’s life, I had just started into Mary Oliver’s selection of essays Upstream. At first glance, Saint-Exupéry and Oliver could hardly be more different: the former a life-long pilot who flew throughout Europe, northern Africa and the Americas before serving France in World War II; the latter, a poet and teacher, apparently never happier than when meandering through the landscape near her home in quiet observation and contemplation. Both, however, demonstrate in their writings a profound wonder about the world, a seemingly inexhaustible desire to explore and experience nature, and an openness to accept what they encountered, in all its variations.

Oliver found inspiration in her engagement with the natural world as it presented itself in her immediate surroundings. Thus, in Swoon, she writes about watching a spider in her house as it finishes its web. What shines through in the essay is not just the facts Oliver learns about the spider or the wonder of its ways, but rather the patience and intensity she brings to observing this small piece of life she clearly finds remarkable:

All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery in which I am, truly, Copernicus. (125)


This passion for engaging deeply with a subject, whether a spider on the cellar stairs, an owl or fox in the surrounding woods, or a favorite poet or writer whose work she had read and reread, runs through all the essays here. Already in the opening section of pieces, as Oliver touches on her childhood up through young adulthood, it becomes evident that she has always been powerfully drawn to the natural world.

But she also found in nature an escape from a world of adults and peers that she obliquely hints at as being too often an environment of “sorrow and mischance and rage.” (14) In an essay on Edgar Allan Poe, she makes a connection to this desire to escape, finding in one of his stories “sleep as Poe most sought and valued it – not for the sake of rest, but for escape. Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world,” (89)   And here that word, swoon, again – her longing to lose herself into the natural world.

Before coming to this collection, I read a book of Oliver’s poems (my review linked to at right).  The essays here are very much a kind of prose version of her poetry. In both, Oliver’s engagement with and wonder at the natural world shine through, profoundly effecting in a reader the desire to go out and explore, and so discover the world outside their door.



Other notes and information:


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Book Review: "Terrible Worlds: Revolutions" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Terrible Revolutions: Worlds (2023)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)
445 pages

Apocalyptic novels and movies have been all the rage in recent years, portraying various catastrophic ends for civilization, whether asteroid impacts, zombie infections, or alien invasions. Climate change, the COVID pandemic, and wars that threaten to turn nuclear have apparently left many people fearing the worst – and fully prepared to indulge in fantasies reflecting that.

Perhaps, however, rather than anticipating existential risks from some unlikely source, humankind should more fear a future in which civilization survives, but in the form of an enduring dystopia run by an elite few.

It is precisely such dark visions of civilization gone awry that the brilliantly creative storyteller Adrian Tchaikovsky explores in Terrible Worlds: Revolutions. In each of the three novellas of this mind-bending collection, he extrapolates present-day concerns and challenges into disturbing, if all too plausible, futures – just at the point when people finally rise up against what has been imposed upon them.

As I began the lead story, Ironclads, I felt a kind of déjà vu, though not to another work of fiction. Rather, the future civilization Tchaikovsky depicts seems to follow all too inevitably from the description of our present-day reality laid out in a recent book of history and political science. In The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (my review linked to at right), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway demonstrate how business groups, over the course of the 20th century, engaged in a successful propaganda effort to convince the American public to become free market fundamentalists. At the heart of this campaign lies a rejection of any regulation, any tax, any government involvement in the economy at all, as these groups

transmogrify a self-serving argument for business privilege into a seemingly virtuous defense of cherished American values … embedding it in the bedrock of American culture, to the point where the myth would be mistaken for age-old truth. (119, The Big Myth)


 In Ironclads, Tchaikovsky carries this present-day myth forward into a future in which free market fundamentalism has become the American religion – a denomination referred to as “Church of Christ Libertarian.” Corporations dominate power in the country, effectively controlling the government (even more than they do today), with corporate leaders and their families being, as one character sardonically describes it 

the Deserving. These groups were rich because it was God’s plan, just like if any of us got rich, that would be God’s plan too. Just like any of us might get rich somehow. We could be president too. Everyone said so. We just had to work hard and wait our turn. (17)


 In order to grow their market in this future world, these American corporations have moved beyond their present-day propaganda and lobbying efforts, banding together to instigate a violent crusade against countries that don’t accept the truth of free market fundamentalism. Along with the masses of expendable grunts fighting these wars, the scions of corporate leaders also join the fight, but from inside indestructible mechanical bodies, ironclads: playing at war, without risking their lives. As the story opens, three soldiers are sent on a mission to find out what has happened to one such ironclad, who has disappeared in Sweden while fighting. What they discover about the global corporations’ tenuous allegiance to nationalism or national governments, will shock even these soldiers’ cynical outlook.

Links to earlier reading also appeared for me in the final two stories, in particular to historian Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, in which he anticipates future “biotech” and “infotech” revolutions that create benefits affordable only for a wealthy elite. As a consequence, he warns, inequality will rise to such unprecedented levels that the current social compacts – already fragile – collapse completely as the super-rich isolate themselves ever more completely from the rest of humanity. (My review of his book linked to at right.)

And so it goes in Firewalkers, which is set several generations in our future, with climate change making life increasingly difficult across the world, but especially in a steadily expanding band of desertification spreading from the equator. The wealthy elite have begun the construction of space stations, with robots on-board to serve their needs, planning to leave behind the world to those who have become (to borrow Harari’s word) irrelevant.

In a small town which has sprung up near a complex from which a space elevator rises up to one such space station, the townspeople scratch out a living by supporting the needs of the wealthy who arrive to stay at the complex’s hotel for a few days, waiting to be taken up to the space station to live. Among the townspeople are the firewalkers, young adults who earn their livelihood by going out into the inhospitable, surrounding desert to fix issues with the solar arrays critical to maintaining the amenities that make the rich comfortable as they wait at the complex. As the story opens, one such group ventures out on a mission, and comes to discover that they are not the only ones angry about being left behind.

In the final story, Ogres, a different response by the wealthy elite to environmental degradation and social upheaval has played out. Over the course of several generations, bioengineered genetic changes have been deployed to create a master class, a small but significant group of people with increased size, strength and aggressiveness relative to the rest of a now diminished – in number, and physical and mental stature – population. Referred to as ogres, these elite have imposed a feudal society, in which they are a kind of modern nobility, with the rest of the population a downtrodden working class. When an unusual man born in a farming village defies, and eventually comes to threaten, the social order, however, it becomes clear that, to borrow the phrase, life finds a way.

Tchaikovsky excels not only in his imagination of these scarily plausible futures for our present-day civilization, but also in the world building he does. The characters he creates and the worlds they inhabit fairly crackle off the page. It was, in fact, this amazing feat of world building which I first encountered in his novel Elder Race (my review linked to at right), and that had me looking for more of his work.

In Terrible Worlds: Revolutions, Tchaikovsky extrapolates our present reality into disturbing potential dystopias. But, the outcomes of his stories here leave some hope: although the elite may exploit their advantage to the point of creating such hellish futures, their mastery will never be absolute; however robust the systems of control they impose, revolution still, eventually, comes for them.


Other notes and information:


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Book Review: "The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism" by Martin Wolf

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023)
Martin Wolf (1946)
474 pages

“Almost a quarter of respondents in a new [October 2023] poll say American politics have gotten so far off track that “patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the United States … [including] one-third of Republicans surveyed … 13 percent of Democrats … and twenty-two percent of independents.”

These recent polling results make manifest the disturbing depth of the political and social divisiveness that has spread in the US since at least the Great Recession of the late 2000’s. Antipathy, and increasingly even anger towards those with whom one disagrees politically has not only deepened distrust in government institutions fundamental to the stability of the country, but indeed fostered violent attacks against them.

Liberal democracies globally face similar challenges, notes economist Martin Wolf in his timely book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. The heady days of the early 1990’s, when the West celebrated its victory in the Cold War as an end of history moment in which the combination of liberal democratic politics and free-market capitalist economics had seemed to prove itself successful, feel like a distant memory. Instead, we now face an internal crisis, one that Wolf argues has arisen not from outside threats, such as alternative political-economic regimes, but rather due to inherent characteristics of democratic capitalism itself:

The health of our societies depends on sustaining a delicate balance between the economic and the political, the individual and the collective, the national and the global. But that balance is broken. Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. (xix)

It is this delicate balance between the economic and the political in democratic capitalism that Wolf explores in his book: how it first emerged; what has destabilized it in our present moment; and, finally, which reforms could help reestablish an equilibrium.

He opens with the observation that throughout history politics and economics have been deeply intertwined as “symbiotic twins.” This remains true for democracy and capitalism, he notes, but with the additional characteristic that the two systems are fundamentally dependent on one another: “capitalism cannot survive in the long run without a democratic polity, and democracy cannot survive in the long run without a market economy.” (13)

To demonstrate this profound interdependence, he notes that a key element in the development of capitalism was the shift to permitting individuals to participate in a marketplace in which they could sell their labor for money. This led to “an economic and social revolution that … was brutal and exploitative, [but] also transformative” (22): as ever larger groups were allowed to participate in the marketplace, it became politically untenable to withhold suffrage from them. Admittedly, it was a slow process; the shift to universal suffrage took well over a century in Western democracies, and particularly long in the US: “when George Washington was elected president, only 6 percent of the population of the United States could vote” and more than a dozen countries granted universal suffrage before “the US in 1965.” (42-43)

The emergence of democratic political systems in turn supported capitalism, by establishing and maintaining a rule of law that enabled a market economy to thrive. Wolf argues that a capitalist economic system can, in fact, only survive in conjunction – symbiosis – with a democratic governing system. So dependent are the two systems on one another that “democratic capitalism … is the only form of democracy we are likely to see.” (31)

Even as democracy and capitalism play critical roles in each other’s success, however, they exist as “complimentary opposites” in a marriage Wolf describes as “always fragile”. If independence between the systems is not maintained, the “delicate balance between politics and market can be destroyed, [through either] state control over the economy [or] capitalist control over the state.” (29)

In his elucidation of this delicate balance, and the risks to maintaining it, Wolf highlights a crucial point: the profound symbiosis between the two systems “does not mean that economic and political freedoms are the same: the freedom to transact is different from the freedom to act politically.” (31) Historians Naomi Orestes and Erik M. Conway explore this critical distinction in depth in The Big Myth, describing how wealthy US business owners waged a decades long propaganda campaign in the 20th century to dissolve it, attempting to persuade Americans to believe that the two freedoms are indeed the same – that any loss of economic freedom inherently leads to a loss of political freedom. Business’s goal was to tilt the playing field in its favor, by having the country adopt a free market fundamentalist belief that viewed any kind of regulation on business as a step toward socialism or communism. (My review of their book linked to at right.)

Orestes and Conway document the ultimate success of this campaign, and how it has led since the 1980’s to precisely the outcome Wolf describes in his book as:

the rise of rentier capitalism, in which a relatively small proportion of the population has successfully captured rents from the economy and uses the resources it has acquired to control the political and even legal systems, especially in the US, the world’s most important standard-bearer of democracy. (173) 

Referencing one of market fundamentalism’s own heroes, Wolf notes that “a good part of what has gone wrong is what Adam Smith warned us against – the tendency of the powerful to rig the economic and political systems against the rest of society.” (119) (In The Big Myth, Oreskes and Conway expose the selective editing market fundamentalists have done with Smith’s work, to make it appear that he supports their extreme interpretation of the free market.)

Wolf presents a range of economic indicators that make evident the destabilizing rise in inequality in recent decades, but the following observation perhaps best crystalizes the situation:

The ratio between average chief executive pay and employee pay in the UK was 129 to 1 in 2016, an increase from 48 to 1 in 1998. In the US, the corresponding ratio was 347 to 1 in 2016, up from 42 to 1 in 1980. (90) 

For a more in-depth examination of how the US and other Western democracies have recently returned to levels of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, French economist Thomas Piketty provides a detailed and engaging account in both Capital in the 21st Century and A Brief History of Equality. (My reviews of these works linked to at right.)

This increasing inequality has fueled the recent rise in populism in the US, Britain, France, and other high-income democracies, according to Wolf, which autocrats have then exploited to justify disregarding and eventually dismantling democratic institutions, helping tip democratic capitalism, in the US and elsewhere, toward authoritarian capitalism. Although autocrats focus popular attention on issues such as trade, immigration and globalization, Wolf concludes that these are not the true culprits in the rise of populism; for example, he notes, “the dominant cause of the decline in the share of industry in employment has been rising productivity, not [global] trade.” (94) Instead, he claims, the driving force of populist anger comes from people feeling that they have been “losing control over their livelihoods, status, and even country,” (85) disrespected and ignored by the wealthy elite.

The essayist Pankaj Mishra makes a similar case for the origins of populist frustration in his book Age of Anger. (My review linked to at right.)  Mishra argues that large segments of the global population have come to feel that a successful elite has rigged the system against them, resulting in

their natural rights to life, liberty and security[,] already challenged by deep-rooted inequality, [now further] threatened by political dysfunction and economic stagnation, [leading to] an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, … [which] poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism. (14, Age of Anger)

Mishra’s argument is that such frustration did not exist in feudal or other earlier political-economic societies, since people, essentially, knew their place. This changed in the 18th century, as Enlightenment philosophers argued for rationalist reforms, and for a shift from aristocratic hierarchies to a meritocratic society. This laid the groundwork for the rise of capitalism, which planted the seeds of frustration, Mishra argues, leading to “the most fateful event of human history: the rise of an industrial and materialist civilization, which … ushered in a new era of global consciousness” (50-51, Age of Anger) in which each individual felt that they had as much right to wealth and power as anyone else; and, when they found it denied them by an elite few, they not surprisingly became frustrated and angry.

In one sense, the distinction between the arguments of Wolf and Mishra could be considered slight, with Wolf’s fragility of democratic capitalism due to the ever-present tendency toward increasing inequality leading to the frustration that Mishra makes clear is poisoning civil society. However, there remains a fundamental and critical difference between the two: while Mishra provides no path out of our civilization’s current predicament – the frustration and anger may recede for periods, only to return because it’s a fundamental characteristic of our economic system – Wolf claims that a fragile balance can be reestablished that allows democracy and capitalism to coexist successfully.

In the final portion of his book, Wolf makes the case for how to restore this balance, offering a string of recommendations for, as he titles the section, Renewing Democratic Capitalism. He presents ideas for both our economic and political systems, and they certainly all seem quite reasonable. But even Wolf acknowledges that “the obstacle to any of this is the power that corporations and wealthy people have over governments, not the inability of governments to get their way … if they wanted to” (309) This, however, is precisely the rub, and what makes it difficult not to lean toward Mishra’s view.

Yes, capitalism has lifted many across the globe out of abject poverty; yes, it has driven innovation on many fronts, including medications and technologies that make life easier; yes, a competitive, market-based economy seems so much more effective than the other forms that have been tried over the past several centuries. And, to all that, one can add Wolf’s argument that capitalism played a central role in getting us to universal suffrage democracy.

But.

Even in the moments when Wolf’s fragile balance has been achieved, this success appears to have come at great cost. One could consider, for example, the 1950’s as such a period, and even argue that the resulting economic stability allowed the civil rights movement of the 1960’s to gather just enough support to be successful legislatively (as Wolf’s argument for capitalist economics supporting universal suffrage suggests.) But, at what cost? The effective – stabilizing – regulatory and tax structure in the 1950’s grew out of reaction to Gilded Age excesses and the pain of the Great Depression, as Wolf notes, but also the financial needs of governments to fight World War I and World War II, and the subsequent rebuilding, as Piketty describes in Capital in the 21st Century. And even then, stability was relatively short-lived: beginning in the 1980’s, after an extended period of relative peace, the regulatory infrastructure and progressive tax rates instrumental to maintaining Wolf’s fragile balance were dismantled, enabling the rising inequality, and crisis of democratic capitalism now apparent.

Even if we could implement some number of Wolf’s suggestions, and so renew democratic capitalism’s stability, the very nature of capitalism is to create wealth for a few, and human nature then tends to lead those economic elite to want to corrupt the political system to their will, to legislate a regime in which they can further increase their wealth. Can the long arc of history continue to bend toward periods of increasing justice in the presence of a capitalist system that actively undermines it? How many times can we oscillate through this cycle between fragile stability and wild excess before populist anger explodes in a revolution that destroys the system completely?

Perhaps, however, if we believe democratic capitalism is indeed the best political-economic system for our civilization, as Wolf clearly does, occasional populist violence is simply the risk we must abide. Because, to give Thomas Piketty the last word, the history of the past two centuries has shown that significantly reducing inequality in our current system will likely take a revolution:

Long-term movement toward equality [since the end of the 18th century] … is a consequence of conflicts and revolts against injustice that have made it possible to transform power relationships and overthrow institutions supported by dominant classes, which seek to structure social inequality in a way that benefits them, and to replace them with new institutions and new social, economic, and political rules that are more equitable and emancipatory for the majority. Generally speaking, the most fundamental transformations seen in the history of inegalitarian regimes involve social conflicts and large-scale political crises. (10, A Brief History of Equality)



Other notes and information:

More quotes from this book


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Saturday, October 28, 2023

Book Review: "The Nature of the Chinese Character" by Barbara Aria

The Nature of the Chinese Character (1991)
Barbara Aria
Calligraphy by Russell Eng Gon
Illustrations by Lesley Ehlers

96 pages

I have long enjoyed the puzzle aspect of languages, in particular the etymology and construction of words. In German, famous for its many compound words, a simple example would be that the word Stift means ‘writing instrument’ and Blei means ‘lead’ (the ore), and they came together at some point in history to form the word for ‘pencil’: Bleistift: a lead writing instrument. I recall a native German teacher warning our class to not try and create such compound words ourselves – that it’s not a free for all – but the temptation is indeed hard to resist.

Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising then, that when I discovered author Barbara Aria’s book The Nature of the Chinese Character, I couldn’t resist reading it. Aria’s text, with calligraphy by Russell Eng Gon and illustrations by Lesley Ehlers, goes right to the heart of my interest. As someone who only knows perhaps a half dozen Chinese characters, and a (different) half-dozen or so words, I have long been intrigued by the apparent connection of at least some Chinese characters to objects in the natural world.

In the book, Aria presents forty Chinese characters, exploring for each its origins and evolution. Although apparently only a small portion of the Chinese written language has pictographic origins, her intimate and thoughtful prose paints lovely portraits of the history of a selection of such characters. The word nature in her title in fact serves double duty: the characters she includes all relate to the natural world, and, through her descriptions of their origins and evolution, she introduces us to the nature of the Chinese language more generally.

For anyone fascinated by Chinese characters and the artistry of their earliest origins, Aria and her collaborators provide a gorgeous introduction.


Other notes and information:


Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf