Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; b
Single Quote Counter-Review:
Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
Gaddis proposes to show the nitty-gritty of history writing - the blueprints of how a historian constructs his structures, and promises to use an overGaddis proposes to show the nitty-gritty of history writing - the blueprints of how a historian constructs his structures, and promises to use an over-abundance of crazy metaphors to do this. Who can resist that proposal? The aim of the book is to look at the process of creating and comprehending history - as an act of creation, with its own processes, flaws and compromises. To illustrate this Gaddis suggests two contrasting positions for the historian - if you think of the past as a kind of landscape, then the historian (standing over the historical landscape like The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog in Friedrich’s 1818 painting) is always caught between these positions: of the simultaneous sense of significance and insignificance, of detachment and engagement, of mastery and humility, of the personal and the general. Being suspended between these polarities, and being aware of it, to Gaddis, is what historical consciousness is all about.
The various chapters focus one by one on how the historian can go about achieving that state of suspension: the manipulation of time, space, and scale; the derivation of past processes from surviving structures; the particularization of generalization; the integration of randomness with regularity; the differentiation of causes; the obligation to get inside the mind of another person, or another age, but then to find your way out again.
But the best part of the book is that through all of this Gaddis never disappoints on the promise he makes early on in the book - that the historian should indulge in metaphors, because much of history is about comparison and metaphors are the best aids to comparison and hence comprehension that we have. Outrageous metaphors abound, with time machines, fractals, never-ending coast lines, Roman roads and what not littering the pages, but always used as a means of pushing the readers into looking at some familiar issues in unfamiliar ways. He also dedicates a lot of time to how history, the sciences and the rest of the social sciences have tracked their methods over time and takes pride in the dogged subjective stance adopted by history throughout - and it makes us realise that it is in fact true - historian seem to be the one bunch of scholars who have admirable resisted physics envy and stuck to their guns. Kudos to them! The biggest insight from this discussion is to observe how history tracks closer to the non-laboratory sciences like geology and cosmology in having to "imagine" processes to account for observed structures/results.
After establishing, quite nicely I must say, the historical process and the limitations as well as the strengths of it, Gaddis finally turns from the What and How of history to the Why of history, and here the book disappoints. He only inverts the driving metaphor of the book - Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog - and invites the reader to make an immediate shift in perspective - of seeing the painting not as the historian looking out across the past shrouded in fog, but at the future. It might have sounded poignant and grand when writing it, but after reading through a couple of hundred pages to arrive at a rhetorical conclusion, I have to report it doesn't sound as grand in the reading. Nevertheless, a must read for students of history....more
Pretty much the same thesis and treatment as in Vol 1, proving that not too much changed across the centuries. Romesh Chunder keeps laying out the plaPretty much the same thesis and treatment as in Vol 1, proving that not too much changed across the centuries. Romesh Chunder keeps laying out the plain facts of the economic situation in India. Given these conditions, he says, any fertile, industrious, peaceful country in the world would be what India is today. If manufactures were crippled, agriculture overtaxed, and a third of the revenue remitted out of the country, any nation on earth would suffer from permanent poverty and recurring famines. Economic laws are the same in Asia as in Europe. If India is poor today, it is through the operation of economic causes. If India were prosperous under these circumstances, it would be an economic miracle. Science knows no miracles. Economic laws are constant and unvarying in their operation.
"The Government of a people by itself," he quotes John Stuart Mill in full flourish, "has a meaning and a reality, but such a thing as government of one people by another does not, and cannot exist. One people may keep another for its Own use, a place to make money in, a human cattle farm for the profits of its own inhabitants."
His prescription for what can be done comes out of this assessment as well. The evils suggest their own remedies, he says: The Excise tax on Indian mill industry should be withdrawn; the Indian Government should boldly help Indian industries, for the good of the Indian people, as every civilised Government on earth helps the industries of its own country. All taxes on the soil in addition to the Land Revenue should be repealed; and the Land Revenue should be moderated and regulated in its operation. The Public Debt, unjustly created in the first instance, is now an accomplished fact: but an Imperial Guarantee would reduce the rate of interest; and a Sinking Fund would gradually reduce its volume. Civil and Military Charges, incurred in England, should be borne, or at least shared, by Great Britain, as she shares them in the case of her Colonies. Civil charges in India should be reduced by a larger employment of Indians; military charges in India should be repressed with a strong hand; and India should pay for an army only as needed for her own requirements. All further extension of railways from State-Loans, or under guarantee of interest from the taxes, should be prohibited. Irrigation works should be extended, as far as possible, from the ordinary revenues. The annual Economic Drain from India should be steadily reduced; and in carrying out these fiscal reforms, representatives of the people of India, - of the taxpayers who are alone interested in Retrenchment in all countries,- should be called upon to take their share, and offer their assistance.
And the funny thing to us today is that this was not a prescription for how India should be run by the Indians once free, but a prescription aimed at the British empire. The book’s intended audience is two fold - the intelligentsia of India so that they put the right kind of pressure, but even more, the real audience is the enlightened audience of the Isle. He exhorts them (very presciently it turns out) that it is certainly true, in a very real sense, that England's destiny hangs on the destiny of India. A prosperous India will help England's trade, and a constitutional India will strengthen England's Empire. Impoverished India starves England's trade, and a despotic form of government in India spells England's decline....more
The task of conquests and annexations was easy enough in India, Romesh Chunder Dutt says, when disciplined troops faced undisciplined hordes in the fiThe task of conquests and annexations was easy enough in India, Romesh Chunder Dutt says, when disciplined troops faced undisciplined hordes in the field of battle. But the story of such conquests is not the history of India; the story of the administration, and of the condition of the people under the new rule, is the true history of the country.
And this is the history Romesh Chunder tries to trace out, primarily relying on the copious British correspondences and administrative data. The essential focus of the work is to highlight three things: 1. Misgovernment and lax administration that ruined Internal Trade and Agriculture in India 2. The “Drain of Wealth” that was effected through the deliberately unfavourable Trade Policy, “Home Charges” and the structuring of the company debt. 3. All of which takes us to the central thesis repeated throughout the book: The history of British rule in India repeats the lesson which history has taught us, that it is impossible to govern a country in the interests of the people without bestowing on that people some degree of self-government and representation.
Even with the many limitations the author operates from (with the book being written and published in 1902) it offers a very interesting perspective of the issues that occupied the intelligentsia back then. The bulk of the book is devoted to detailing out how oppressive the Land tax system is and the effect of this on Agriculture and in turn on the economic life of the majority of Indians. The author also tries to showcase the effects of transit charges on internal trade and its effects along with the effects of the trade policy that favoured British goods imported to India and converted India into a mere supplier of raw materials. And along with all this, the drain of wealth ensure that the surplus that accumulated from trade with or within India always flowed to the Isles to build wealth there. However, the major focus remains on Agriculture and the changing attempts at Land Settlement with the changing administrations, through which the author tries to drive home the central theses that even an “Enlightened Economy” like Britain can never create prosperity as long as there is no “skin in the game”, so to speak.
Effectively this overriding focus makes the book more a history of Land Settlement or land taxation in India than an Economic History that tries to isolate economic forces that drove changes. It is more about the effect of the changes wrought than about the cause of the changes - but then, the whole idea of historical writing based on deep causes and effects is perhaps only possible if agency as well as incidence lies with the same people…...more
The audacious first act, Sapiens, ended with a wild and apocalyptic prophesy - that the Sapiens were cooking up the next epochal revolutHomo Obsoletus
The audacious first act, Sapiens, ended with a wild and apocalyptic prophesy - that the Sapiens were cooking up the next epochal revolution that will overshadow the previous three: the cognitive, agricultural and scientific/industrial revolutions. Home Deus, the second act, is the full exploration of that prophesy.
Both Sapiens and Homo Deus are compulsory reading in my book, even though the macro-history presented is plenty vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. But then, it might be better to think of these as works of philosophy and not of history. Just like Sapiens is not a History, Home Deus is not a prophesy, both are explorations.
This line can be taken as the transition line that links the first book with the second one: “Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
The old enemies of mankind— plague, famine and war—are now under control. Except for the potentially restrictive energy constraint, Sapiens has very little standing in our way now. The result is that the Sapiens are becoming more and more God-like, Harari says, and one is forced to pause and reflect: by any previous standards of our history, are we not already Gods? Have we not already exceeded most wild power fantasies? Well yes, but even more God-like attributes are coming: cheating death and creating new life being primary.
And along with this march towards the godlike we are marching towards being machine-like too, as we outsource more and more of our internal algorithms to better data-based external algorithms. And the march is relentless, Homo Deus is taking birth before our eyes. The tomorrow is already upon us, and so forth.
However, just like the previous three revolutions that infused the Sapiens with power, this revolution too will come at a price, the price of a ratcheting up of inequality. The new Gods will be the techno-super-rich. BTW, reading Harari is good motivation to work on getting rich faster: he hints at a possibility that anyone who is rich enough to afford it, some 50 years into the future, should be able to buy proxy-immortality. And it will probably be a window that closes quickly, since the super-rich would soon take over the monopoly on immortality. So if you are rich enough at the right point in time, then you can be part of Olympus too. That might not be a deal many would want to miss out on…
There is one more catch: as technology takes over most of the functions, even the godlike sapiens will find themselves stuck in a universe devoid of real meaning. Bulk of humanity will have no economic, social or cultural purpose since anything we can do our new creations would be able to do even better. “Organisms are algorithms,” and the new algorithms will be so much better than the imperfect ones we are made of. As Bill Gates asked in his article about the book, “What If People Run Out of Things to Do?” We will be stuck in an immortal meaninglessness, our own creations clearly our betters. We will need a new religion to make sense of all this, since the powerful combo of Humanism+Science will not work in world where the sanctity of being Human has lost meaning. Harari feels that “Dataism” will be the religion that will fill the avoid left by Humanism.
The whole of Humanity, the Earth, and maybe the entire Universe will become servants to data - a huge data-processing system, the eternal all-knowing Atman. And serving this goal will be the only meaningful pursuit left for us.
Immortal, All-powerful, Obsolete: this is the future of the Sapiens....more
Intended to be a narrative of Empire told from the viewpoint of the merchants, soldiers and officers - the supposed “cosmopolitans”of the era - to higIntended to be a narrative of Empire told from the viewpoint of the merchants, soldiers and officers - the supposed “cosmopolitans”of the era - to highlight how the empire progressed through a mechanism of a weak English state and lack of experience to its emissaries gradually figuring out a hostile world, becoming cosmopolitan+educated first, thus learning to survive, and gradually learning to rule. If we envision the empire to be built akin to a hub-and-spokes model, with London at the center and the colonies at the rim, then these emissaries form the spokes that connected the two and their story can throw interesting light on the period overall. As far as a premise for a narrative history work goes, this is pretty alright.
However, it is my sad duty to report that it put me to sleep two days in a row and I struggled through the last 100 pages, skimming a bit here and there. The chapters feel loosely organized, the narrative flow is barely there, and most importantly the motley cast of characters never comes alive. For a book with a catchy title, cool cover and good premise, this is a disappointing end result....more
Shakespeare was not always the unquestionable genius that he has been for the past few centuries. It would surprisShakespeare: The Invention of Genius
Shakespeare was not always the unquestionable genius that he has been for the past few centuries. It would surprise most literature students to be told that few people thought highly of Shakespeare back in the 17th C, based on what evidence we have (though we can conjecture that he always had good entertainment value). He might have been the [insert objectionable writer/director] of his age.
Of course, to most literature students that bit of information would be more of a condemnation on the entire time period than any reflection upon Shakespeare.
Despite this obvious dismissal of the idea, wouldn’t it be interesting to consider this - if he was not so appreciated back then, how did it come to be that such a Shakespeare eventually became the Shakespeare of today.
His reputation, by some weird alchemy, kept growing throughout the century - though even towards the end of it, he was a crowd favorite but nowhere close to a critics favorite, his reputation lagging behind the likes of Ben Johnson and John Fletcher.
Much later, Shakespeare’s curious afterlife gradually converted him into a genius. How? We cannot be sure and to me this book fails to explain it in any meaningful way, because it leaves out the critical phase of Shakespeare being accepted as Great - mainly because there are no clear records that illustrate this. Probably it was too dispersed a process, greatness accreting over decades or centuries.
My conjecture? It was born out of sustained popularity.
There are these popular works that comes along sometimes the critics don’t really understand - that they feel are just flashes in the pan and explain as mere fickleness of the audience. But once those works remain favorites for 50 odd years the critics have to grudgingly accept them as classics, “Great” becomes an acceptable term to utter in the same breath. And if they refuse to die down in popularity well past a century or so, the term genius has to be dragged out even more grudgingly, but with reservations. Once the genius stays current and happening much longer the reservations disappear - because the rules have to be rewritten to account for this phenomenon, and the work eventually becomes a standard for judging other genius-aspirants.
Shakespearean criticism shows some of the hallmarks of this process:
In the beginning he was considered as just a popular author, but as time wove the cloak of genius around him, the critics were still struggling to "tidy up" shakespeare because he flew in the face of what they knew about drama. For two centuries thousands of actors, editors, auditors struggled with his unconventional methods and tried to clean them up into "proper" theater, leaving us many versions that feel throughly wrongheaded to us.
His faults were many, and must have seemed like in obvious need of improvement to the editors of the time: Poorly constructed plots, with no respect for the three unities of time, place and action, as laid down by Aristotle. Too many lame puns. No real sense of poetic justice. A poorly adjusted notion of decorum (wink, wink). And on top of everything else the stamp of being poorly educated (by most accounts) to add to the potential stereotyping that accompanied these faults.
However, the audience reveled in what we today recognize as the true genius of Shakespeare - of being able to go beyond all these rules - and letting his audience look into the depths of the human soul through his amazing characters and plots, somehow weaving a language and imagery that appealed to all levels of society from the royals to the commons, scholarly or unlettered (and secretly perhaps even the critics), making him a perennial favorite everywhere.
For the first two centuries or so of his afterlife the critics struggled with the basics - of Shakespeare ignoring Aristotle's unities, etc. He might be a genius, but he was clearly not perfect - because perfection was defined that way - of abiding by the rules of perfection. - Back then it was high praise to say that a writer followed classical precedents and rules, and an insult to say he deviated in anyway. - Eventually it became an insult to say that a writer was bound by rules, and high praise to say he was a natural prodigy to whom rules did not apply.
Thus, somewhere along the way, the concept of a “Natural genius” first become a possibility and then something to be celebrated.
Shakespeare was merely very good by the standards of his own age. He became great only later. . This is not to bring down Shakespeare. This is to add to his legend - he forced us to redefine what we meant by greatness, by Genius!
Eventually, whatever Shakespeare did poorly were dismissed as unimportant, and the things he did well has come to set the standards for artistic excellence. He was not great because of what he did, whatever he did became great because of him - The rules for literary excellence had changed. And the poor critics wrestling with the inadequacies of Shakespeare pitted against his obvious genius perhaps accounted for a good bit of that change.
Something happened during Shakespeare’s afterlife, something that changed the way the world thought about Genius. He was there at the dawning of the modern romantic idea of “Genius” and he probably helped define a fair share of it. Truly, the biggest testimony to Shakespeare's greatness is maybe that he changed what it meant to be great....more
Marshall could have kept up the initial presentation and analysis throughout the book, but at some point the editors decided to shorten the pages and Marshall could have kept up the initial presentation and analysis throughout the book, but at some point the editors decided to shorten the pages and compress regions together. As a fellow reviewer says, "It is solid stuff, but after some time this geography thing gets a bit repetitive – plains, mountains, rivers, plainsmountainsrivers, portsportsports ..."...more
Loading...
