miscellaneous factZ

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. 10/10. A very, very great novel, a work of genius, more than comparable to War and Peace or any other of the epics. Only a Russian novel, one feels, could both have such a title and live up to it — what it is about Russian culture that enables it bring forth such rich fruit, so epic in scope, so detailed in description and characterisation and contending with such vast themes of freedom and oppression, life and meaning, love and loss.

While the novel is anchored by the battle of Stalingrad its true preoccupation is freedom — what it is, its importance and the ways it is can be both asserted and destroyed. This is one of the greatest works about freedom. In particular Grossman shows, through the many interweaving stories, how oppression destroys not simply those directly in its path, whether via imprisonment, torture, extermination or war, but also all those who must deform themselves to the monstrosity of the system, who compromise their integrity in order to survive, or their humanity in order to succeed.

This point can be illustrated by two separate strands of the novel (the book is broken into a variety of separate stories joined more or less strongly by common characters and relationships). The first, in terms of space, is fairly minor and enters only once while the second, which revolves around the Shaposhnikov family, is one of the largest of the entire work.

This first ‘thema’, deals with Abarchuk a devout Bolshevik who has been sent to the Gulag. At the end of the secion he regains his moral self-respect by testifying against one of his fellow prisoners (a common criminal) who has been stealing materials even though this makes it practically certain he will be killed by the criminal gang who control the camp. At the very same time Abarchuk is confronted by an old Bolshevik friend who argues that the Bolshevik’s themselves have destroyed freedom (”No repentance can expiate what we have done. I have to say this … Secondly. We didn’t understand freedom. We crushed it. … Thirdly we go through the camp, we go through the taiga, and yet our faith is stronger than anything. But this faith of ours is our weakness — a means of self-preservation.” p.193) Abarchuk cannot accept this and literally runs away, his own reason, his own survival compromised to the need to find meaning and order in a world which is partly his own creation.

In another thema, Viktor Shtrum, a brilliant physicist, is victimized. He endures a titanic struggle to resist compromising himself (by giving a fake confession of errors) and is ostracized. Suddenly restored to favour (he is an export on nuclear physics and receives a personal telephone call from Stalin) he renders all of his prior efforts worthless by cravenly signing a letter provided by the authorities which supports the execution/imprisonment of various other Soviet Scientists (the letter is drafted in response to allegations in the UK and US press about lack of freedom and oppressive nature of the Soviet state). Able to resist when oppressed, once mollycoddled and comfortable he finds himself unable to save his integrity:

But then, no one had threatened him. It would have been all right if he had signed out of a feeling of animal fear. But he hadn’t signed out of fear. He had signed out of an obscure, almost nauseous, feeling of submissiveness. … [p.837]

…

He had refused to repent when they threw him out of the Institute. How happy, how full of light he had felt. And what joy he had felt in the people he loved! …. But what was he to say now to Marya Ivanovna? … As for his mother, he was afraid even to think of her. He had sinned against her too. He was afraid even to touch that last letter of hers. He realized with sorrow and horror how incapable he was of protecting his own soul. The power that had reduced him to slavery lay inside.

…

Viktor had been so proud of his courage and uprightness; he had laughed at anyone who had shown signs of weakness and fear. And now he too had betrayed people. He was ashamed of himself; he despised himself. The house he lived in, its light and warmth, had crumbled away; nothing was left but dry quicksand. …

…

Why had he committed this terrible sin. Everything in the world was insignificant compared to what he had lost. Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man — even the empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even science itself. [p. 839-841]

Other Quotes

Madyarov at an Evening Gathering in Kazan

Our Russian humanism has always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian. From Avvakum to Lenin our conception of humanity and freedom has always been partisan and fanatical. It has always mercilessly sacrificed the individual to some abstract idea of humanity. Even Tolstoy, with his docrtine of non-resistance to Evil, is intolerant — and his point of departure is not man but God. He wants the idea of goodness to triumph. True believers always want to bring God to man by force; and in Russia they stop at nothing — even murder — to achieve this. [p. 283. It is interesting to see how close these ideas are to those expressed by Isaiah Berlin in relation to the dangers of ‘Monism’.]

The Survival of Freedom

Man innate’s yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for the future. [p. 216]

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Read in 2000, summer vacation.

Notes

[71] Tricon Global Restaurants (corp) owner Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC.

Committee for Employment Opportunities: Lobby group for chain restaurants. Chief lobbyist is Bill Signer. Lobbied, for example, to continue tax credits and subsidies given by US govt for training of workers.

[73] Between 1968 and 1990 the real value of the US minimum wage fell by 40%. However the National Restaurant Association have vehemently opposed any rise in the minimum wage at federal, state or local level. In fact about 60 large food service companies have backed legislation that would effectively eliminate the minimum wage by allowing states to disregard it. In the meantime executive’s pay has gone on going up.

[74-75] In 1997 a jury in Washington State found that Taco Bell had systematically coerced crew workers into working off the clock in order to avoid paying them overtime. Similar cases are now pending in other states, notably Oregon and California.

Macdonalds and Unionisation: Fiercely oppose unionisation. Employs special teams of attorneys and top executives to go to any location where there is suspected unionisation. In 1973 there was a dispute in San Francisco where it turned out Macdonalds were administering polygraph tests to employees suspected of being union members. In 1993 in Montreal the employees of one restaurant attempted to unionise and were stuck in the court for a year. The owners of the restaurant brought in 15 attorneys and when the workers eventually won their battle, the restaurant was immediately closed and the same franchisees opened another one elsewhere in the city.

In the mid 90s the Occupational Safety and Health administration concerned at the level of violence, for example homicides and armed robberies, at fast food restaurants produced a set of guidelines which were strongly opposed by the industry. For example the National Restaurant Association and other groups lobbied more than a hundred congressman to oppose these guidelines.

[100-1] Franchisee abuse.

IFA - Independent Franchisee Association, associated to the fast food industry.

Fast food companies, e.g. burger king, have abused the SBA’s [?] small business administration’s loans for small businesses by using it to fund new franchises which appear to have had a higher than average default rate (it has been suggested that these loans were used particularly to fund the openings in more difficult or riskier areas.)

Trust Us We’re Experts (subtitled: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future), by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.

I haven’t yet read all of this but a couple of interesting items that caught my eye.

The Independence Institute

Many years ago when I first got interested in the Microsoft Antitrust case I remember running across a book entitled Winners, Losers and Microsoft authored by Liebowitz and Margolis and published by the Independence Institute. The book too a very pro-Microsoft line and I wasn’t very convinced by its arguments and I remember wondering who this Independence Institute was and if they had any relation to Microsoft (with a name like that one really had to wonder). And then right on pp. 9-10 I find the answer:

• In 1999 the Independent Institute (of which Microsoft was a member) paid for the publication of an ‘Open Letter to President Clinton from 240 Economists’ as full-page advertisements in the Washington Post and New York Times. At the bottom of the Ad readers were advised to see Winners, Losers and Microsoft for more information.
• “Newsbytes magazine, a computer industry news service, noted that the Independent Institute’s position ’sounds like a brazenly partisan argument for Microsoft’, but checked with a spokesman for the Independent Institute who said that Microsoft did not pay for either the Open Letter advertisements or the publication of Winners, Losers and Microsoft. The spokesman acknowledged that Microsoft was a member of the Institute and ’said membership dues for corporations start at approximately $1000, but he would not comment on how much Microsoft has contributed to the institute over time’, Newsbytes reported.” p. 9
• However in September 1999 a new of documents were leaked and were picked up by Joel Brinkley of the NY Times. These demonstrated that:
  1. During 1999 fiscal year Microsoft had provided 20% of the Independent Institute’s budget
  2. Microsoft had helped pay for the publication of Winners, Losers and Microsoft.
  3. Microsoft had fully funded the advertisements (the President of the II, Paul Theroux had billed Microsoft Attorney John Kelley, $153,868.67 for running the ads and associated expenses).

Of course this does not create a direct line of causation as the authors write:

It would be a little too facile to portray the Independent Institute as a mere mouthpiece for the company [Microsoft]. As Theroux pointed out when its funding sources were uncovered, the institute was on record opposing antitrust laws since 1990, long before Microsoft came under federal scrutiny. And while professors Liebowitz and Margolis have worked on occasion as paid consultants to Microsoft, the positions they espouse in Winners, Losers and Microsoft were likewise developed years before the company became a target of government investigations.

Yet is also ridiculous to pretend the Independent Institute is truly independent. … David Callahan, a writer who has researched the relationship between corporate funders and conservative think tanks, notes that … ” … It is naive to imagine that conservative think tanks aren’t extremely beholden to their funders in the business world or to the corporate leaders on their boards. That is simply the way that the power of the purse works.

Bernays Quote

The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic-proof compartments’, his own absolutism, are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.’

Edward Bernays, *Crystallizing Public Opinion’, New York (NY) 1923. p.122 quoted on p.43.

7.5/10 The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert. Read during my trip to the IIOC. What makes this good (or rather what raises it above the pot-boiler) is precisely those elements that are not science fiction, in particular the examination of different forms of awareness and their affect on our interpretation of the effects of modernity.

Friedrich Hayek, p35, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988:

Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made.

[… discussion of various immaterial property rights invented recently having to do with e.g. literary productions and technological inventions]

The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.

Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents for invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period (Machlup, 1962).

Quotations taken from Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 [Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2006].

The Red Terror

Op cit. p. 87:

In all, the victims of the red terror in the Republican zone during the civil war rose to some 38,000 people, of whom almost half were killed in Madrid (8,815) and in Catalonia (8,352) during the summer of 1936. On the republican side there was strong mixture of feelings when the worst of the rearguard slaughter was over. The majority of republicans were sickened by what had happened. The anarchist intellectual Frederica Montseny referred to a ‘a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men before’. Although La Pasionara intervened on several occasions to save people, other communists took a more fatalistic attitude to the violence. … The dubious rationale that the atrocities had been far worse on the other side was not used until the Republic’s propaganda campaign became effective in 1937. And yet the different patterns of violence were probably even more significant than the exact number of victims.

The White Terror

Op. cit p.94:

In the course of the last ten years, detailed work has been carried out region by region in Spain to establish the number, the identity and the fate of the victims. Accurate statistics have now been compiled on 25 provinces and provisional figures on another four. For just over half of Spain, this comes to a total of 80,000 victims of the nationalists. If one takes into account the deaths which were never registered and allows for the provinces not yet studied, we are probably faced with a total figure for killings and executions by the nationalists during the war and afterwards of around 200,000 people. This figure is not so very far from the threat made by General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to republicans when he promised ‘on my word of honour as a gentelman that for every person that you kill, we will kill at least ten’.

9/10. Though the plot (particularly in its ‘and we lived happily ever after’ conclusion) is a little too ‘romantic’ for my tastes this is a brilliant novel with an amazing prose style: supple, rich and perfectly suited to the nature of the work.

8.5/10. Quite apart from its central (and provocative) ‘decline-of-hollywood’ thesis the endless supply of corruscating anecdote makes this book more than worth the price of admission. Rather than try and cull any samples from the panopoly of possibilities here is one single item which caught my eye because of its insight into the behaviour of decision-makers under extreme uncertainty:

As producer Michael Phillips puts it, “In the 70s the U.S. domestic market accounted for 85 percent of the business. If an executive had a hunch, he would take a shot. It was a seat-of-the-pants business. There was no more than two or three million dollars on the line, and virtually nothing in releasing costs, because it was a pay-as-you-go process. You opened in one or two theaters in each of the major cities, saw how it went. Nurse it along. When the economics started to drive film distrivbution in the direction of thousand-to-two-thousand print releases and big national buys of media and launch costs of ten, thirten milion dollars, the stakes were so high that each decision was fraught with sheer terror. Instead of a seat-of-the-pants process, people were grasping for a rational framework to make decisions, and the only rational process available was precedent and analogy. So the mentality of the sequel or the look-alike emerged in the ’80s. ‘Jaws in Outer Space.’ Movies were designed to be sequelized.”

This is the second volume of Skidelsky’s trilogy and takes Keynes from his resignation from the Treasury up until the publication of the General Theory (1936) and its immediate reception by the public and other economists. Though still excellent I found this a less satisfactory book that its predecessor.

This was for several reasons the most important of which was the necessity of dwelling far more on the economic theory than in the previous volume. Much of this theory can be rather complex and difficult to explain in simple prose (and this is a biography after all so we are going to starting getting diagrams and formulas). Moreover Skildelsky is not just explaining the theory as it eventually became but striving to explain how it was developed and debated. Since Keynes changed his mind regularly, often made erroneous statements and the General Theory is legendary for its impenetrability it is no suprise that parts an be hard going. (E.g. the banana parable about which Skidelsky says on p.325 “Spotting the flaw in Keynes’s banana parable was to occupy both him and his ablest critics for two years or more”. But I never bought the banana parable and never got a clear idea from Skidelsky of what this flaw was that was only discovered after 2 more years of effort).

Even without these handicaps things would be difficult — after all economic theory, even when lucidly explained, is intrinsically less interesting than the ‘life-and-times’ side of things. Nevertheless Skidelsky has done another impressive job and I look forward to the final volume which may resolve some of the more pressing questions of theory (was the General Theory actually any good or was it accepted because of the time at which it appeared) and should also see more of Keynes in his Statesman rather than theorist role.

one starts to be unsure whether on any given point (a) Skidelsky’s summary of Keynes is correct (usually yes I would imagine) (b) w As a result I am not sure he does as good a job as he might of explaining the various disputes that arose or explaining how these shortcomings could be addressed (

7/10. Interesting, its prime feature is an exuberant richness of language that for the whole delights — though perhaps this over-ripeness becomes a little tiring as the tales wends to its close.