miscellaneous factZ

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.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecclesiastes 9:11 (KJV)

Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965, by Taylor Branch, the second volume of the trilogy (finished last week).

This is Skidelsky’s first volume (1983) in his monumental trilogy charting the life and times of the economist-statesman John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). It is an excellent work, not overlong, willing to state judgements but always judicious in doing so, full of surrounding detail but never wandering far from its central theme and, perhaps most importantly, with a fine suppleness of prose that becomes, on occasion, almost aphoristic. While I, personally, would have liked greater detail on, and discussion of, the economics this is, after all, a biography for the general reader so this can hardly be a criticism.

Moore’s Principia Ethica

Skidelsky summarizes:

As we have seen the Apostles were looking for an ethic which could direct attention to ends other than the duties set before the Victorian gentleman. This Moore provided for them. He unshackled contemporary ethics from its connection with social utility and conventional morality by locating its ultimate ends in goods which stood apart from the Victorian scheme of life, and by making ‘ought’ correlative with these goods. By dropping Hedonism and by proclaiming as intrinsically valuable dispositions and states of mind which Mill and Sidgwick had been forced to treat instrumentally he had evaded the problems which wrecked their attempt at coherence. No one serious about achieving Moore’s goods could take Victorian morality entirely seriously again. What Moore had not solved was the problem of how to relate his goods to the practical business of life, most of which had no connection with them. It turned out that Sidgwick’s difficulty of effecting a harmony between the private and public sphere, between the good life and the useful life, had not been overcome by Moore: it had merely been restated in a new way. [pp. 140-141. Emphasis added]

And then returns to the theme:

Leavis’s remarks draw attention to a point already made — that Moore’s philosophy was very much a product of time and place. Two things helped to produce it. The first was the change in circumstances. By the 1890s the Victorian reform movement had run out of steam without making political reaction any more reputable. At the same time recovery from the economic depression of the 1880s and early 1890s had taken the edge of social stress without relieving the emotional stress of Victorian life. The times, as Harrod observed, seemed ripe for new experiments in living rather than new experiments in social order. The second impulse arose out of the dilemmas of moral philosophy itself; specifically from Sidgwick’s failure to reconcile public and private ends, my own good with the world’s. Moore abolished the problem by abolishing the set of ethical goods connected with public life. But anyone whose temperament and upbring was such as to make him take both Moore’s ends (good states of mind) and Sidgwick’s end (general happiness) seriously was bound, sooner or later, to discover that Mooore had not solved Sidgwick’s problem; that the problem of bring them into a logical relation was, in fact, insoluble with the intellectual tools available. Moore’s philosophy was imply a temporary halting-post on the road to the complete disintegration of a unified world view. [Emphasis added]

Keynes’ Early Beliefs

p. 157

He was as timid about his expectations of realising good states of mind on a large scale as he was bold in his expectations about the amount of happiness or utility a government could deliver. In both sides of his moral thinking he gave priority to immediate goals over future ones, reinforced in this by his theory of probability: rational actions were the best possible in the circumstances. The duty of the state was to realise happiness and not ultimate goods, though the latter might follow as an indirect consequence of the former. He was thus both an aesthete and a manager. But he rejected the role of therapist, believing that truth took priority over expediency.

Keynes on Starting Economics

Keynes to Lytton Strachey on 15 November 1905, quoted p. 165:

I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railway or organise a Trust or at least swindle the investing public. It is so easy and fascinating to master the principle of these things.

One imagines this still provides a fairly accurate summary of the reasons for studying economics — at least for the majority of students. This quote also provides a fine example of Harrod’s bowdlerisation as, according to Skidelsky, he cut out the statement on ’swindling the investing public’.

Marshall on mathematics

From a letter to statistician A. L. Bowley (27 Nov 1906) quoted in a fn p. 223 with source A. C. Pigou (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (1925), p.427.

I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics; and I went more and more on the rules — (1) Use mathematics to be a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of enquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I often did.

Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury was particular expression of, and gave direction to, the ‘revolt against the Victorians’. The rejection of conventional sexual morality was one facet, but only one, of the revolt against ‘false values’ in the name of which Victorians had sacrificed the possibility of leading a good life. … They [the members of the Bloomsbury group] were not sexual anarchists but rather creators of anew kind of sexual order inherent in a proper concept of the good life. That is why Bloomsbury was able to undertake the frequent rearrangement of its emotional affairs while remaining so (comparatively) free from sexual jealously.

In these ways, Bloomsberries were cultural and sexual revolutionaries. In other ways they remained rooted in the assumptions of their times. Indeed, the particular form of their ‘revolt against the Victorians’ depended on other aspects of Victorian life remaining in place. Culture was not regarded as a force to reshape social relations, but to reorient the elite to ‘what is good’. … Bloomsbury’s cultural artefacts were highbrow; its propaganda aimed entirely at the (highly) educated middle classes. There was a clearly tension between its cultural ideals and democratic sentiment: civilisation, as Clive Bell put it, always rested on having someone to do the dirty work. Maynard Keynes, as we shall see, attempted to go beyond this contradiction; but it cannot be claimed he got very far. And he, like the rest of the Bloomsberries, depended completely on domestic servants to sustain their own lives [cf. Peter Clarke’s comments in Liberals and Social Democrats]. Bloomsbury was rooted in the class assumptions of the Victorians. Their revision of the Victorian scheme of life tended to take them back to the eighteenth century idea of a cultured aristocracy [1] rather than towards the ideal of a civilized democracy; … [pp. 248-250]

[1] This suggests an interesting parallel with Tietjens inclinations towards a similar vision of the Eighteenth century in Ford Maddox’s Ford Parade’s End.

Reasons for the influence of Bloomsbury and Keynes’ role:

The cultural influence which Bloomsbury eventually acquired was based on the clarity of its vision of its publicists and the mutually supporting achievements of its members. But two further ingredients must be added: its relative financial independence and its power of patronage. Bloomsberries were not rich. But they were never forced into dependence on institutions alien to their spirit. There was just enough inherited wealth to go round to enable them to lead their preferred lives until their own talents could give them an earned independence. … But it [these various factors some of which I have omitted] were not enough [to make Bloomsbury have the influence it did]. Financial backing was needed. Here the role of Maynard Keynes became crucial. He came to give Bloomsbury financial muscle, not just by making money a great deal of money himself, which he spent lavishly on Bloomsbury causes, but by his ability to organise financial backing for their enterprises. [p. 250]

Keynes and Food Rationing

The proximate cause for this gloomy epistle [JMK to his mother at Christmas 1917] was the government’s announcement of food rationing. Like other less reflective members of the middle classess Keynes tended to equate social order with the continuance of his own customary standard of comfort, and take an exaggerated view of the consequences of any diminution of it. To Florence his Christmas visions suggested communal kitchens and the drying of the supply of domestic servants. Maynard’s incipient bolshevism [a reference to a joke in his letter] stopped well short of food rationing, which filled him with horror. … In fact, [contrary to Keynes prognostications] food rationing worked perfectly well in both world wars, and posed no permanent threat to the social order. [p. 346]

The Long Littleness’ of life

[following a dispute over rooms in 46 Gordon Square between Keynes and Bell] But there was still friction. Maynard had commandeered Clive’s bed, substituting one that felt ‘more like the seat of a third-class railway carriage’. As the war’s end approached, Clive wrote to Maynard, ‘I must have my bed back … Nothing could be more easy for you than to get a new one for yourself.’ [Maynard by this point was on 1000 pounds a year] Since Maynard proved in no hurry to oblige, Clive had his own bed moved upstairs. ‘Dear Maynard,’ he wrote from Garsington, ‘I had no notion of leaving you to sleep on the floor.’ He was sending down his third-class railway carriage. ‘As you appear to fuck less than I do it may serve well enough.’ [Maynard had long been without any kind of permanent lover since his separate from Duncan Grant years earlier]

Skidelsky inserts a fascinating footnote here which reads:

Maynard’s was not the only character to wilt under the strain of war. Clive Bell withheld from his parents the knowledge that he was a conscientious objector, preferring them to believe that he was medically unfit, in order, as he put it to Vanessa, ‘to preserve our lien on the Bell millions.’ Vanessa tried to hush up the fact that the daughter she had in 1919 was by Duncan and not Clive, probably for the same reason. Honesty had its limitations for everyone.

9.5/10. One of the greatest works of history I have ever read. The command of primary sources is astounding and allows for any given point to be both grounded in ‘hard’ data and fascinating anecdote — a rare (and heady) combination indeed. This truly is a portrait of an entire world on a canvas that stretches from France to Turkey. While Braudel ‘Annales’ orientation means that there is perhaps a heavier load of statistics and the like than is usual for a historian — something I personally like and putting him someone between History, Geography and Economics — this never prevents the frequent rendering a lapidary judgement or illuminating aside. This is history as I dreamed it could be, vast, sprawling and all-encompassing yet still delivering insight and understanding, reaching, in its vast extent, the very limits of what it is possible for a single mind to achieve.

African Gold (p. 467)

It is probable that gold dust from the Sudan reached North Africa before the tenth century and led, after the year 1000, to the emergence in the South of coherent and spectacular states in the lop of the Niger and in the North, in the Maghreb, to the founding of new towns like Algiers and Oran. …

But Sudanese gold provided more than a basis for the prosperity of North Africa and Moslem Spain, the Western Islamic bloc which its isolation in the twelfth century from the chief trade routes obliged to be self-sufficient. This gold played its part in the history of the Mediterranean as a whole, entering general circulation from the fourteenth century, perhaps after the spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca of Mansa Musa, King of Mali, in 1324. North Africa with its supply of gold gradually became the driving force of the entire Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century it was invaded by Christian merchants who settled without difficulty in Ceuta, Tangier, Fez, Oran, Tlemcen, Bougie, Constantine, and Tunis.

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth (1932), trans. Michael Hofmann [Granta 2003]. 8.5/10. A wonderful and profound elegy for the passing of a world (in the form of the Austro-Hungarian empire). A finely balanced delicacy of description is present throughout (for which much praise must go to Hofmann as well as Roth) which lends the story that combination of immediacy and distance present in an old, but perfectly preserved, photograph.

p. 171:

He took out the doctor’s watch. To his eye, the frail second hand was going round the tiny circle faster than any he had ever seen, and it ticking was noisier than he had ever heard a watch tick. The hands were going nowhere, their ticking was meaningless. Before long, I’ll be able to hear the ticking of Papa’s fob watch, when he leaves it to me. My room will have the portrait of the hero of Solferino hanging on the wall, and Max Denant’s sabre, and some memento of Papa’s. And it will be buried with me. I’m the last of the Trotta’s! He was sufficiently young to derive a bittersweet feeling of delight from his sadness, and a kind of painful dignity from his conviction that he would be the last.

Upon receiving a letter from his son stating that he is considering leaving the army (p. 260):

Everything, everything in the whole world had lost its meaning. The end of the world was at hand! And when the District Commissioner decided, nevertheless, to read the official correspondence, he felt as if he were fulfilling some futile, anonymous and heroic duty, like a telephonist, as it were, on a sinking ship.

The ending of a world (p. 268):

‘My father was responsible for me,’ said the District Commissioner, ‘and my grandfather was for my father.’

‘Things were different then,’ replied Skovronnek. ‘Today not even the Emperor can be responsible for the Monarchy. Yes, it even looks as though God doesn’t want to be responsible for the world any more. It was easier then! Every stone was in its place. The roads of life were properly paved. There were stout roofs on the walls of the houses. Whereas today, District Commissioner, today the stones are lying all over the roads, and in dangerous heaps some of them, and the roofs are full of holes, and the rain falls into the houses, and it’s up to the individual what road he walks, and what house he lives in. When your late father told you you wouldn’t be a farmer but a civil servant, he was right. And you were an exemplary civil servant. But when you told your son he was to be a soldier, you were wrong. And he’s not an exemplary soldier!’

‘I suppose not!’ agreed Herr von Trotta.

‘And that’s why you should let things go, let everything please itself! If my children disobey me, I just try to keep a modicum of dignity. It’s all you can do. I look at them sometimes when they’re asleep. Their faces look strange to me, almost unrecognizable, and I see that they are strangers, from a time that’s yet to come and that I won’t live to see. They’re still so young, my children! One of them is eight, the other ten, and when they’re asleep, they have round rosy faces. And yet there’s cruelty in those sleeping faces. Sometimes I think it’s cruelty of their time, the future, that comes over them. I don’t want to live to see that time.

I have just finished reading Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, the first volume of a trilogy. It is a fascinating book and fittingly for such a sprawling multi-faceted panorama the two most important themes were tangential ones. The first is the degree to which the perception of events, at least as presented in the press or comprehended by those at a distance, is removed from the actual reality. The second is the extent of the abuses committed by the FBI under Hoover (and the collusion of politicians in this corruption of democracy due to the power that Hoover wielded). The genesis of these abuses, and the way in which they continued unchecked for so long, is a salutary warning of the need to be ever wary when claims of national security are used to prevent the monitoring of the activities of the government by the public at large.

From the standpoint of personal injury to King, Robert Kennedy did perhaps his greatest disservice by remaining a caretaker Attorney General for another ten months, when the FBI ran unchecked.

The Bureau wasted no time describing its target as “King’s unholy alliance with the Communist Party, USA,” and King as “an unprincipled opportunistic individual.” Sullivan summoned Agent Nichols and others to Washington for a nine-hour war council, the result of which was a six-point plan to “expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” All the top officials signed a ringing declaration of resolve laced with the usual pledges to proceed “without embarassment to the Bureau.” The underlying hostility did not make the officials that unusual among Americans of their station. Nor was it unusual that an odd man such as Hoover would run aground in his obsession with normalcy. Race, like power, blinds before it corrupts, and Hoover saw not a shred of merit in either King or Levison. Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over forty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials. The hidden spectacle was the more grotesque because King and Levison both in fact were the rarest heroes of freedom, but the undercover state persecution would have violated democratic principles even if they had been common thieves. [p. 919, emphasis added]

Despite its free availability i can’t find one version formatted in a way I actually like. Anyway here’s a link to one of the least bad (it’s plain vanilla html and supposedly a copy of the page Stephenson first posted on his website): http://steak.place.org/dougo/inthebeginning.html

Published in 1999 and though now a little dated this is still a great essay. It’s full of Stephenson’s wit and detailed down-to-earth explanations. My favourite part is the brilliant and hilarious ‘os as car’ metaphor:

The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our situation today.

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles–expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market–and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They’ve been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it’s a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers’ attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”

Bullhorn: “But…”

Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”

Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Evans): 8.5/10. I read this back in the Autumn and greatly enjoyed it. Very victorian and deeply interested in the analysis of motive and feeling — event is most definitely secondary. Ultimately also a heart-warming book which satisfies Miss Prism’s aphorism to a tee: ‘The good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is what fiction means’. However this is no criticism: the plotting is so gently done and accompanied by such delicacy and detail in delineation of character and thought that there is no danger of it fundamentally altering the merits of the book.

A few choice quotes

Mrs Casaubon’s discovery of Will with Rosamond precipitates an outburst from Will (p.778-9)

It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond with his anger. It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting. And yet–how could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her? He was fuming under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was dangerously poised, and Rosamond’s voice now brought the decisive vibration. In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said–

“You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference.”

“Go after her!” he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice. “Do you think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to her again at more than a dirty feather?–Explain! How can a man explain at the expense of a woman?”

“You can tell her what you please,” said Rosamond with more tremor.

“Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you? She is not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable– to believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you.”

He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees prey but cannot reach it. Presently he burst out again–

“I had no hope before–not much–of anything better to come. But I had one certainty–that she believed in me. Whatever people had said or done about me, she believed in me.–That’s gone! She’ll never again think me anything but a paltry pretence– too nice to take heaven except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any devil’s change by the sly. She’ll think of me as an incarnate insult to her, from the first moment we–”

Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must not be thrown and shattered. He found another vent for his rage by snatching up Rosamond’s words again, as if they were reptiles to be throttled and flung off.

“Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.”

Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into some new terrible existence. She had no sense of chill resolute repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under Lydgate’s most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a lash never experienced before. What another nature felt in opposition to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness. When Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery: her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them. If it had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very cheap.

The Narrator essays some thoughts about the pains of gaining a clear awareness of what lies ahead for our future selves (p. 784):

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. Poor Lydgate was inwardly groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it. It seemed to him this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate’s unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

From Genesis the first poem in Geoffrey Hill’s first book of poetry: For the Unfallen (1958).