Workers of the World Unite, and all that: Capital, by Karl Marx
In the United States of North America every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours' agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California. For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies", the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working day.
I've been grazing in Marx's huge tome since I read the Communist Manifesto in January. And there's a reason the Manifesto is the one people have read. Capital is a thick, serious economic treatise, and the more sexy quotes are about human misery, not liberation.
In fact, there's not much about communism or workers' paradise in here at all, except between the lines, implied in the central thesis that Capitalism necessarily contains the seeds of its own destruction. The book itself is about the process of that inevitable destruction.
Read the introductory chapters, the last part, and if you're a glutton for punishment, the lengthy tenth chapter about the "working day" of the proletariat. Learn the concept of "surplus value" by which the ONLY source of profit for an industrialist is necessarily the direct theft of value from workers; and the concept of concentration of wealth, by which the resources of any given community end up in fewer and fewer hands as time passes, while the have-nots sink into ever-more squalid poverty. Those parts have stood the test of time, and the efforts of Libertarians since Marx's day have failed to refute them.
The part that has been refuted has been Marx's theory that the ONLY result from the increasing concentration of wealth will and must be violent revolution of the proletariat. It has been refuted by the periodic redistribution of wealth in crisis times by governments. When things get bad enough, the state hits a "reset button", seizes wealth from the one percent, and gives it to the starving masses, and the cycle starts again. This is the only known way of preventing violent revolution. Hence the calls by "libertarians" who would otherwise be expected to advocate withholding all money from poor people, to teach them what a mistake they are making by choosing to be so poor--for the counterintuitive (for them) guaranteed income, or negative income tax, or national dividend, or other redistribution mechanisms that go against all their vaunted laissez-faire concepts. It's how they avoid the guillotine.
As I write this, we're hitting a crisis point. the young, especially, are being forced into ever-more squalid living conditions, and people born bourgeoisie, who aspire to becoming aristocrats, are being harshly smacked down to proletariat status. The smart money knows that that is when redistribution MUST happen. Unfortunately, the ignorant money is in charge.
Read the book, and prepare. Interesting times await.
General Disorder: The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated "poor white trash." The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.
I would probably have read President Grant's memoirs a little earlier, if I had known they ended with the Civil War. I had been hoping to find a firsthand account of his Presidency from back in the days when the Republicans were the good guys. I recall getting a distinctly unfavorable impression of Grant as both a general and a President from my conservative-approved "mainstream" childhood education, and I've been exceedingly suspicious as the years have gone by.
I'm also glad I read other civil war histories first, or I'd suspect Grant was exaggerating. Yes, he and the rest of the western front pretty much really did sweep through Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas in pretty much the same time it took the Virginia army to beat the rug
The battles are not particularly vivid, as described by Grant, but the strategy and tactics are explained, with great attention to the logistical problems of the war, and portraits of Sherman, Sheridan, and other generals.
Now, if only I could find a passage or two explaining what he was thinking during Credit Mobilier....
Early Feminist Rant: The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.
A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,—the light which, showing the way, forbids it.
At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.
In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight—perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
If there are earlier novels where the central theme involves women confronting the constraints of traditional gender roles, where the roles and not the protagonists are presented as being at fault, now's your chance to comment with suggestions. My spouse challenges me to read more books by women, which I figure will be easier as my long term reading plan reaches the 20th century and beyond, but it seems to me that The Awakening may be the first book of its kind (I'm limiting myself to fiction here, and deliberately classifying Wollestonecraft, et al., elsewhere)
The book made me acutely aware that I was seeing a not-male vision of things, and it was disorienting. For a goodly part of the book, I misidentified the setting, thinking "Grand Isle" was part of France, when in fact it is on the coast of Louisiana. Edna, the protagonist, is definitely the daughter of a Kentucky Colonel, but it seemed she was living abroad.
Her husband, who she calls "Mr. Pontellier", isn't particularly a bad man. He gives his wife space when she asks for it, even consenting to let her move into a separate house, ignoring other men who think he should assert dominance. He's just...not particularly aware. But then, edna doesn't tell him all that much.
And yes, "the awakening" of the title means her discovery of her sexuality, after having had children. And the implication is that all but one of the other women in her circle are still asleep. She becomes discontented, isolated, enamored of other men and possibly another woman, and the implication at the end is that she commits suicide. But it's not especially spelled out, which may be the point.
The Victorian Murders: Swing, Swing Together; Mad Hatter's Holiday, by Peter Lovesey; The Turkish Gambit, by Boris Akunin; The Valley of Fear, by Arthur Conan Doyle; No Justice, by James D. Brewer; Death on BlackHeath; Angel Court Affair, by Anne Perry
On the one hand, things were going badly; you might even say they could not possibly be any worse. Poor Petya was still languishing under lock and key--after the Plevna bloodbath the noxious Kazanzaki had lost interest in the cryptographer, but the threat of a court-martial remained as real as ever. And the fortunes of war had proved fickle--the golden fish that granted wishes had turned into a prickly scorpion fish and disappeared into the abyss, leaving their hands scratched and bleeding. But on the other hand (this was something Varya was ashamed to admit even to herself) her life had never been so...interesting. That was the word: interesting. That was it exactly.
--from The Turkish Gambit
"A touch! A distinct touch!" cried Holmes. "You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law—and there lie the glory and the wonder of it! The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations—that's the man! But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor—such would be your respective roles! That's genius, Watson. But if I am spared by lesser men, our day will surely come."
--from The Valley of Fear
For more than three hours he'd been chugging along the river in this half-assed shanty boat, pretending to watch the river ahead but stealing a glance at her every chance he got. And it wasn't just a friendly check to see how he was doing. She knew what Gil Nashton wanted and it was only a matter of time before he tried to get it. She was sick of him looking at her that way. He was nasty, and she could smell him from the other end of the boat, where she had moved to keep some distance between them. It'd been a month at least, she figured, since he'd had a bath. Was he crazy? How could he think any woman would find him attractive? She considered waiting in the shack, so he couldn't look at her, but she dared not turn her back. He was liable to drop anchor and come after her. At least out here she would see him coming.
---from No Justice
"It's novices that cause the trouble. They read the book and before they've finished a couple of chapters they're down at Kingston hiring a skiff. They throw in a tent and some meat pies and away they go just like them three duffers in the book. If they survive the first night at Runnymede, they spend the second in the Crown at Marlow--them that can get in--and next morning they come through here looking for the backwater to Wargrave. 'There shouldn't be a lock here', they say. 'What's this lock doing in our way? It isn't in the book.' 'Yes it is,' I say. 'Marsh lock, page 220.' The book is generally open on their knees, so they pick it up and frown into it and sure enough they find it mentioned. The reason why they never see it is that the backwater is mentioned first, even though it's half a mile upriver from here."
--from Swing, Swing Together
"I've had that heppen before and it didn't hurt as much. But I really like him. Annabelle told me afterward that if I had any sense I would agree with boys, because that's what they like, no matter how wrong they are. It isn't right and wrong. It's just being able to think what you want to and talk about it. But what if I do that and nobody ever loves me? Am I going to have to pretend all the time, or be alone for always?"
--from The Angel Court Affair
Like the Sergeant Cribb Books, my local library only has a handful of books in a larger new series I started this month: Boris Akunin and his detective Fandorin. The Turkish Gambit is told from the point of view of a Russian woman leaving home to meet her fiance in the Balkans during the Russo-Turkish war, and the reader is supposed to recognize Fandorin when he first appears as a deceptively innocuous stranger who surprises her with his ability to manipulate, win at fixed games of chance, and fight his way out of a tight spot. The colorful horse-and-cannon battles are richly described, and the complexity of both Balkan politics and Fandorin himself rival last year's series about Yashim the Eunnuch....except that this time, we're looking at Turkey from the outside.
Speaking of Sergeant Cribb, the "character and atmosphere" centered books I read this month center around rowing-excursions up the Thames, made popular by Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, and seaside holidays. Both crimes are nonsensical and not decipherable from clues (even when one has the hindsight of having seen the adaptations 35 years previously; I think they might have changed them for the tube).
James D. Brewer's brief series set on and around Reconstruction-era river boats keeps getting better. The third (of just four books to date) involves a visit from President Grant, some Pinkertons, and a star turn by one of Luke and Masie's friends, a woman who entertains passengers, and whose resourcefulness puts the male protagonists to shame.
The Valley of Fear is maybe the least known of the four Holmes novels, and my least favorite. It begins well enough, with a hint of Moriarty, a code-breaking, and a homicide in a stately old mansion. The second half, giving the backstory of one of the main characters, makes me realize what it might be like to be a Mormon reading A Study in Scarlet. It gets everything wrong. It depicts a radical Labor organization from the Robber Baron era as if they were terrorists who "own the town and have innocent people terrified", with not one word about the horrible treatment of coal miners by the capitalist class, or of the thousands of starving proletariats that the unions helped. There is even a depiction of a mining boss shot in front of an entire contingent of miners, and not only is he not a cruel slave-driver grinding the faces of the workers, but all the miners are shocked and horrified as if he was their friend. And yes, there were some mining companies that treated their employees well, but they weren't the ones who faced the desperate reprisals of the Mollies or the IWW now, were they? Doyle should maybe have stuck with England.
...And there's more Anne Perry.
Don't Hit Me With the Babka!: The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevski
“Do you know there is a limit of ignominy, beyond which man’s consciousness of shame cannot go, and after which begins satisfaction in shame? Well, of course humility is a great force in that sense, I admit that—though not in the sense in which religion accounts humility to be strength!
“Religion!—I admit eternal life—and perhaps I always did admit it.
“Admitted that consciousness is called into existence by the will of a Higher Power; admitted that this consciousness looks out upon the world and says ‘I am;’ and admitted that the Higher Power wills that the consciousness so called into existence, be suddenly extinguished (for so—for some unexplained reason—it is and must be)—still there comes the eternal question—why must I be humble through all this? Is it not enough that I am devoured, without my being expected to bless the power that devours me? Surely—surely I need not suppose that Somebody—there—will be offended because I do not wish to live out the fortnight allowed me? I don’t believe it.
“It is much simpler, and far more likely, to believe that my death is needed—the death of an insignificant atom—in order to fulfill the general harmony of the universe—in order to make even some plus or minus in the sum of existence. Just as every day the death of numbers of beings is necessary because without their annihilation the rest cannot live on—(although we must admit that the idea is not a particularly grand one in itself!)
“However—admit the fact! Admit that without such perpetual devouring of one another the world cannot continue to exist, or could never have been organized—I am ever ready to confess that I cannot understand why this is so—but I’ll tell you what I do know, for certain. If I have once been given to understand and realize that I am—what does it matter to me that the world is organized on a system full of errors and that otherwise it cannot be organized at all? Who will or can judge me after this? Say what you like—the thing is impossible and unjust!
This is one of the murkier of Dostoevski's top tier novels, many of which highlight great mental illnesses in their central characters. The Idiot, it seems to me, stands alone in framing Russian society in general as a mental illness, and the main character as one who suffers greatly by being one of the few who are mostly sane and good-hearted. On the other hand, Raskolnikov and the guy from Notes From Underground also considered themselves as good, sane victims of an insane society, so there may be much that I missed.
The Feminine Mistake: She, by H. Rider Haggard
“Why art thou so frightened, stranger?” asked the sweet voice again—a voice which seemed to draw the heart out of me, like the strains of softest music. “Is there that about me that should affright a man? Then surely are men changed from what they used to be!” And with a little coquettish movement she turned herself, and held up one arm, so as to show all her loveliness and the rich hair of raven blackness that streamed in soft ripples down her snowy robes, almost to her sandalled feet.
“It is thy beauty that makes me fear, oh Queen,” I answered humbly, scarcely knowing what to say, and I thought that as I did so I heard old Billali, who was still lying prostrate on the floor, mutter, “Good, my Baboon, good.”
“I see that men still know how to beguile us women with false words. Ah, stranger,” she answered, with a laugh that sounded like distant silver bells, “thou wast afraid because mine eyes were searching out thine heart, therefore wast thou afraid. Yet being but a woman, I forgive thee for the lie, for it was courteously said"
Omigosh, 19th century adventure stories for manly men were SO problematic. Consider the story of Holly, the smart but ugly hunchback, and Leo, who is handsome as a Greek God but doesn't show much by way of personality, except that Holly as narrator never tires of reminding you how handsome he is. They go to Darkest Africa in search of Leo's mysterious heritage, described on ancient pottery shards, and discover----SHE.
Omigosh, She is a woman! And in charge! How discomforting! Holly matter-of-factly says he has a hard time coping with her authority because he is a misogynist. He actually uses that word, expecting that you, the presumably male reader, are one too, as all English blokes are, and will understand completely.
She--eventually they start using her actual name, Ayesha, though "She Who Must Be Obeyed" is also popular--is white even though we're in undiscovered parts of the African jungle, because having Victorian Englishmen experiencing fear and arousal over a Sub-Saharan African who looked like most Sub-Saharan Africans would be something something garbanzo and one can't have that, wot-wot? The cover art depicts the mysterious ultimate in feminine magic beauty as consistent with 60s-era American Hollywood leading lady in a DeMille epic with flowing white robes and her hands raised incantationishly over flames. Ayesha is thousands of years old, magical, and still in mourning for Leo's ancient look-alike ancestor who died sometime sometime kalamata.
And people once took this stuff seriously.
Oh, all right. This was before Tolkein, even, and the fantasy genre had to start somewhere. But whoo boy.
Man Levels Up: The Riddle of the Universe, by Ernst Heackel
The best and most plausible ground for athanatism is found in the hope that immortality will reunite us to the beloved friends who have been prematurely taken from us by some grim mischance. But even this supposed good fortune proves to be an illusion on closer inquiry; and in any case it would be greatly marred by the prospect of meeting the less agreeable acquaintances and the enemies who have troubled our existence here below. Even the closest family ties would involve many a difficulty. There are plenty of men who would gladly sacrifice all the glories of Paradise if it meant the eternal companionship of their “better half” and their mother-in-law. It is more than questionable whether Henry VIII. would like the prospect of living eternally with his six wives; or Augustus the Strong of Poland, who had a hundred mistresses and three hundred and fifty-two children. As he was on good terms with the Vicar of Christ, he must be assumed to be in Paradise, in spite of his sins, and in spite of the fact that his mad military ventures cost the lives of more than a hundred thousand Saxons.
Another insoluble difficulty faces the athanatist when he asks in what stage of their individual development the disembodied souls will spend their eternal life. Will the new-born infant develop its psychic powers in heaven under the same hard conditions of the “struggle for life” which educate man here on earth? Will the talented youth who has fallen in the wholesale murder of war unfold his rich, unused mental powers in Walhalla? Will the feeble, childish old man, who has filled the world with the fame of his deeds in the ripeness of his age, live forever in mental[Pg 209] decay? Or will he return to an earlier stage of development? If the immortal souls in Olympus are to live in a condition of rejuvenescence and perfectness, then both the stimulus to the formation of, and the interest in, personality disappear for them.
Well...that was a bit of a surprise.
I found the book in the religion section and was expecting more churchy bullshit. Instead, I found a celebration of how science and philosophy have erased the idiotic superstitions forced upon a victimized mankind by the church.
It looks at evolution, not only of biology, but of geology and the cosmos, and eventually, of the human mind, classifying various areas of knowledge like Francis Bacon did hundreds of years earlier, and treating religious dogma with a burning sarcasm that would have gotten an author Inquisitioned in earlier days. And Haeckel's relish in doing so is marvelous to read. Highly recommended.
Historical Curmudgeon: The Historical Romances (The Prince and the Pauper; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc), by Mark Twain
These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families—including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families—including his own .
They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. I said I had seen one—and that it would last until it had an Established Church.
---from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Omigosh, Twain makes me so happy. Never mind Huckleberry Finn for now (I'll be reading that one next month and maybe eating my words); the Connecticut Yankee is, for my money, Twain's true masterpiece. As Don Quixote has come to be a brilliant satire, not only of medieval romance, but of the morals and manners of Cervantes's time as well, the Connecticut Yankee shines a magnifying glass intentionally on the prejudices of chivalry and unintentionally on 19th century American capitalism as well.
The protagonist finds himself in a "romantic" kingdom, that is quickly unmasked as a barbaric, imperialist, educationally backward hellhole in which the codes of art and honor are weapons for grinding the faces of most of the people, and in which the church is more hypocritical, cruel, and dangerous than even a military horde. Trope after trope is unhorsed and lands, clanking, on its ass. I loved every page of it.
And then...but just read it. I don't want to spoil it.
And after doing all that, Twain takes the life of Joan of arc, an actual saint, and treats religion with actual compassion, as real virtue is shown belabored by church and state alike for its own purposes.
And the child's story of the prince and the pauper, salted with the kind of wisdom that children are likely to miss on a first reading and adults might too.
There's a lot of "humor" that I found very much not funny, such as the 'whipping boy" who begs the prince to continue to be naughty so that he can continue to have a job being beaten in punishment for the prince's wrongs. And a lot of themse showing where Twain's sympathies lie and mine do too. All three books have plot elements involving royalty putting on peasant garb for an experiment and then being unable to reassert itself and being mocked and threatened with violence for seeming "uppity". All three have clever, meritorious low-borns unable to rise to where they deserve to be, and horse's-ass high-borns doing incredible harm through being awarded, as their due, power above their worth.
Very highest recommendations.
The Opposite of Christianity: Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Chilo had done him the most terrible wrong that one man could do another. At the very thought of how he would act with a man who killed Lygia, for instance, the heart of Vinicius seethed up, as does water in a caldron; there were no torments which he would not inflict in his vengeance! But Glaucus had forgiven; Ursus, too, had forgiven,—Ursus, who might in fact kill whomever he wished in Rome with perfect impunity, for all he needed was to kill the king of the grove in Nemi, and take his place. Could the gladiator holding that office to which he had succeeded only by killing the previous “king,” resist the man whom Croton could not resist? There was only one answer to all these questions: that they refrained from killing him through a goodness so great that the like of it had not been in the world up to that time, and through an unbounded love of man, which commands to forget one’s self, one’s wrongs, one’s happiness and misfortune, and live for others. What reward those people were to receive for this, Vinicius heard in Ostrianum, but he could not understand it. He felt, however, that the earthly life connected with the duty of renouncing everything good and rich for the benefit of others must be wretched. So in what he thought of the Christians at that moment, besides the greatest astonishment, there was pity, and as it were a shade of contempt. It seemed to him that they were sheep which earlier or later must be eaten by wolves; his Roman nature could yield no recognition to people who let themselves be devoured. This one thing struck him, however,—that after Chilo’s departure the faces of all were bright with a certain deep joy. The Apostle approached Glaucus, placed his hand on his head, and said,—“In thee Christ has triumphed.”
This book, set in the time of Emperor Nero, is one of the oddest books I've read in a while. Imagine a great empire suffering under the rule of a half-mad tyrant given to abominable appetites, surrounded by incompetent and brutal sycophants, a ruler who continually makes a ghastly and ridiculous spectacle of himself every time he stands on his hind legs and speaks, but at whom few people dare laugh because he is so cruel. Are you with me so far?
That part may be easy to imagine, in this day and age. But now imagine that the Christians in this empire do NOT make up the incompetent tyrant's main base of support; that they do NOT hold him up as a role model for all that Christ stands for; that they do NOT celebrate lust, greed, envy, rage, gluttony, vanity and sloth as their sacraments; do NOT goad him toward bigger outrages against human decency than ever; and that they are in fact among his most persecuted opponents, whose most effective defensive weapons against him consist of displays of virtue and forgiveness, even when cruelly used to the extreme. That when one of their own is murdered viciously, they do NOT loudly express hope that their oppressor is forced to share a cell with a gigantic Ethiop with perverse sexual appetites, and that when a Jew is at their mercy, they let him go with sweet words of encouragement.
This bizarro world confused me completely until I remembered that this was european christianity and not American Christianity; that Nero was the forerunner of American-style Christianity and that the Europeans actually lived by tenets of the Gospels instead of condemning practitioners thereof as socialists, libtards, and enemies of the state.
Cleverly, Sienkiewicz made most of his protagonists slaves from the land that eventually became his native Poland, managed to redeem one of the slimiest villains in literature convincingly, and gave a part to a verbose cynic (Petronius, author of the Satyricon) that warmed the cockles of this cynic's heart.
You may have noticed, I have little use for churchy stuff, but this one actually moved me, with a display of what religion *could* be, if those who professed it took the doctrines of love and of being a spark in the darkness seriously, instead of, as is almost universal in America, pretending to believe in a God as an excuse to indulge one's appetite for cruelty.
Best Intro Ever: The History of Civilization in England, by Thomas H. Buckle
It would be easy to conduct this argument further, and to prove how, by an increasing love of intellectual pursuits, the military service necessarily declines, not only in reputation, but likewise in ability. In a backward state of society men of distinguished talents crowd to the army, and are proud to enroll themselves in its ranks. But, as society advances, new sources of activity are opened, and new professions arise, which, being essentially mental, offer to genius opportunities for success more rapid than any formerly known. The consequence is, that in England, where these opportunities are more numerous than elsewhere, it nearly always happens that if a father has a son whose faculties are remarkable, he brings him up to one of the lay professions, where intellect, when accompanied by industry, is sure to be rewarded. If, however, the inferiority of the boy is obvious, a suitable remedy is at hand: he is made either a soldier or a clergyman; he is sent into the army, or hidden in the church. And this, as we shall hereafter see, is one of the reasons why, as society advances, the ecclesiastical spirit and the military spirit never fail to decline. As soon as eminent men grow unwilling to enter any profession, the lustre of that profession will be tarnished:[199] first its reputation will be lessened, and then its power will be abridged. This is the process through which Europe is actually passing, in regard both to the church and to the army
All right...where to begin?
This is why I read hundreds of relatively obscure books on lists of "great western books", including mountains of deadly dull material. Every so often, I discover someone like Henry Thomas Buckle, and all the sawdust without butter is suddenly worth it.
Despite the title, Buckle's masterwork is NOT a history of civilization in England. It is a two-volume INTRODUCTION to the history of civilization in England that he planned to write and never got past the introduction. He just kept on introducing and introducing, intending to get around to England by way of hundreds of pages on the history of civilization in France, Spain, and Scotland. He also intended to summarize Germany, Ireland and the United states of America, but stopped or died or something before getting around to that, either. The finished work would have filled a shelf of encyclopedias and, by my literary tastes, it would have been worth it to read the whole monstrous set.
The two volumes of introduction that exist are for my money the best history since Gibbon, and more readable and educational than half the contents of the Great Books and Harvard Classics set. There is greatness on every other page, and I don't say this because I agree with him. Among other things, Buckle is an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, but he is wrong for the right reason.
Despite his capitalism, buckle would be denounced by modern Republicans as a snooty cultural elitist, because his central thesis is about the importance of education in the advance of civilization. Again and again, Buckle tells us that MORAL knowledge is stagnant (If anyone can identify any great moral truth that was unknown hundreds of years ago, please speak up. Buckle's ghost and I will thank you) but that INTELLECTUAL advances are constantly expanding, and that therefore the advance or decline of civilization is dependent on the degree to which people apply intellect, especially in abstract and applies sciences.
Not surprisingly, churches and those governments that repress thought come in for vast quantities of colorful sarcasm and other abuse, particularly in the passages describing the history of Spain--a country dominated by churches and resistant to progress, where the collective mind has/had been utterly, utterly stultified, failing o prosper even by those technologies dropped into its lap by other nations. Or of France, whose fortunes fluctuated based on the varying degrees in which it ignored or succumbed to Catholicism over the centuries.
And as I write this, I live in a once-great nation whose fortunes have appreciably sunk as the populace has sunk into religious dogmatism and the government has been replaced by one which openly wages war against knowledge and learning; where science is abused, teachers are openly treated with contempt, and commerce and great minds flee like rats from a sinking ship. All through my reading of buckle, I could hear him railing at the Republicans: "Good God, what are you thinking?"
Very highest recommendations.
Literary Buckle: By the Open Sea, by August Strindberg
Borg had, in a couple of years, so ordered his affairs that he was a member of most of the learned societies of Europe. He was the holder of the Italian Order of the Crown, the French Instruction Publique, Te Austrian Order of Leopold, and the Russian Order of St. Anna, second class. But nothing helped with those about him. their scorn increased with every distinction, though these were founded on merit. If they could not deny the fact, they minimised its value, or pretended to be unaware of what was going on. This did not prevent them from using for their own hunting the track that he had beaten.
And right when I'm reading Buckle about how we need intellectual advances to progress as a civilization, along comes Strindberg with a dark tale about a man sent to rescue a fishing village from backwardness and scorned and laughed at by families that know better than he because their fathers always did it the old way. Echoes of that other great Scandinavian work, An Enemy of the People.
Spanish Flies: Fortunata and Jacinta, by Benito Perez Galdes
In the tertulias held in the cafe there are always two kinds of members: the ones who make the underbrush of a conversation by telling absurd news or gross jokes, and the ones who have the last word on whatever is being debated. The latter deliver doctoral judgments, thus bringing the jokes and nonsense down to their real level. Wherever there are men there is authority, and these cafe authorities who sometimes define, sometimes predict, and always influence the crowd because their opinions are apparently sound, constitute a sort of consensus that usually ends up in the press, where the consensus probably wasn't based on anything better.
And again...I happened to pick up Spain's biggest 19th century novel right when I was reading Buckle bagging on the Spaniards as backwards peasants hobbled by superstition and unable to better themselves, and sure enough, here was Galdes treating the people of Madrid, though with much more kind feeling than Buckle, as not much more advanced than in the days of Cervantes. Churchy stuff everywhere. People doing things the same way their grandparents did them.
The main male character is a womanizing jerk who is involved with both of the title characters. He loves the working-class, Amazonian Fortunata, but gets tired of her and leaves her pregnant. His family arranges his marriage to a cousin, Jacinta, who very much wants children. He doesn't impregnate her. He keeps impregnating Fortunata. several times, Fortunata begins to move on and have a life of her own with some other guy, and Juanito gets jealous and sabotages the relationship so that he can get back to cheating on her, but gets tired of her and leaves her again. Other men are undersized runts and shamed for it as less than masculine, especially by Fortunata.
There is so very much that is wrong with this story. And yet, the Spanish apparently revere it, except that when the Nobel committee considered making Galdes a laureate, it was Spaniards who protested that he wasn't worthy, and so they gave the prize to someone else. Buckle would have nodded and pointed and said, "See?"
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