The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History




OUP - NJFTB The good news is that we’re all doomed. Humankind has made such a hash of the stewardship of creation that God looks like a chump for entrusting it to us. Most of the biosphere would be better off without us. If we don’t self-immolate or exhaust our resources, Peter Frankopan warns us, the planet will take its own revenge in some seismic rupture; or outer space, which we have strewn with the detritus of satellites and probes, may in return bombard us with asteroids or electromagnetic storms. If the good news is that we are doomed, the better news is that we can’t do much about it. Frankopan points to the arrogance of talk of the ‘Anthropocene’, an age in which humans have replaced nature as the big influence on Earth. Not only does the name resonate with the self-congratulation of a bully, improperly proud of unprincipled power, but it also misleads us by making us think that we have the means of reversing our misconduct. Even if we adhered to the Paris protocols, global warming would be slowed but not arrested. If the sun doesn’t fry us, a new ice age may surprise us. Even if we stopped aggravating illness through our pathological lifestyles, we would remain at the mercy of microbial evolution. One day the ‘coming plague’ may overtake our response to it. Technology might save us, but so far every technological advance has provoked new problems. Agriculture helped people survive climate change ten thousand years ago, but the results included malnutrition, disease, intensified warfare and political tyranny. Industrialisation met the energy crisis of the 19th century – an episode of which Frankopan seems strangely unaware – but poisoned the biosphere and exacerbated wealth gaps. The Green Revolution saved millions from starvation but encumbered the Earth and impoverished farmers. If we can overleap boundaries that seem untraversable at present, we might deflect the sun’s rays, switch to wholly renewable energy, desalinate enough water to survive and stock our larders with edible bacteria for when familiar foods run out. ‘A historian’, Frankopan concludes at the end of his survey of the last four and a half billion years, ‘would not bet on it.’ In the circumstances, environmental history is necessarily minatory. Frankopan’s is not genuinely ‘an untold history’. Recent books have approached the subject by focusing on energy, classifying material by biomes, picking a way through the tale by highlighting disasters, examining the relationship between environment and empire, quantifying ‘collapse’ and even presenting old-fashioned chronological narratives. In monographs and journals, however, new data – frequently contradictory – accumulates almost daily. Frankopan is a consummate, up-to-the-minute synthesiser who crams in a surprising amount of other people’s research. He aims to eschew over-generalisation by looking at every documented or suggested environmental change he can master and reconsidering political – and sometimes social and cultural – changes accordingly. It is an admirable ambition, but because the author does not distinguish climate from weather and pays less attention to other elements of the environment, the picture is hard to grasp and no trend seems sustained for long enough to make sense of its links to other trends. Usually, in reviewing the scholarship, Frankopan summarises without taking sides. When he does adjudicate, he is sometimes right. He is sceptical, for instance, about claims that major anthropogenic change began thousands of years ago, though he slips his guard to state that ‘reconfigurations of the environment … were primarily driven by one motor: the desires and needs of human beings’. He says, with the species arrogance he elsewhere decries, that human emergence was the ‘most important development in the history of the planet.’ Invalid claims sometimes seduce him: he accepts, for instance, unreliable recent computations of the effects of solar irradiation. No work on such a vast scale can be error-free, but some of Frankopan’s utterances are just odd. He thinks that the peopling of the planet was a response to warming, whereas it happened in an era of cold. He invents a non-existent Portuguese king to explain 15th-century exploration. He antedates the origins of farming so as to make them rationally unintelligible and accuses farmers of ‘lay[ing] the seed’ of inequality (clichés come easily to him), though he knows that palaeolithic societies had their privileged and their poor. His account of the origins of agriculture omits consideration of soil properties and hydrography. He demotes the crisis of the Bronze Age to ‘a time of considerable disruption’. He seems to believe the Buddhist professions of the murderous Indian emperor Ashoka. He fails to notice how cold favoured the Black Death bacillus. His dating of the ‘Little Ice Age’ is idiosyncratic. His account of racism (briefly, Islam got it from the West) is tendentious, and woke drivel seems to have misled him into thinking that Native Americans resisted ‘the first Europeans’ they met. The Maya temple of El Mirador is slightly taller than Temple IV at Tikal, which Frankopan calls ‘the tallest building in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans’. In musing on Europeans’ late colonisation of west Africa, Frankopan ignores the contrast with the colonisation of other tropical regions and overlooks the importance of palm oil in the 19th century. At different times we learn that colonialism ‘denuded’ the Americas and that it extended forests. Frankopan can also write abominably slack sentences: ‘In antiquity, nomads came on to the radar’; ‘the additional hurdle … could also act as an Achilles heel.’ This book’s virtues, however, balance and perhaps outweigh its defects. Frankopan is unafraid to risk accusations of presentism, continually drawing attention to the lessons of history, at times cleverly – for instance, making Amartya Sen seem relevant to the environmental threats of c 2,200 BC. He has a vivid eye for evidence: almost every quotation is expertly chosen. He juggles deftly vast amounts of data from numerous cultures – though sometimes the facts seem to squirm and shift uncontrollably and paragraphs bulge bafflingly, like bags of contentious ferrets. He can keep much in mind simultaneously and often impresses with suggestive cross-references and comparisons. Readers will find it useful to have so much packed between one pair of covers. I learned a lot from the tenacious last chapters: that in 2020 ‘nearly 4 billion packages were shipped as a result of Singles’ Day’ (I am sorry to know that there is such a thing); that ‘plant-based emulsifiers’ could replace eggs in mayonnaise; and that ‘researchers at Michigan State University have made composite resin for turbine blades that can be … recycled into gummy bears’. Frankopan’s main conclusion is valid, though it hardly needs 650 pages of justification: ‘climate and the natural environment … should be central to the way we think about the past [and] … for how we understand the present and the future.’ The real untold (or under-told) story is of uncontrollably accelerating consumption – irreversible, partly because we do not understand why it happens, partly because electorates dislike austerity and partly because, in an unfair world, those of us who have wallowed in consumerism in the past cannot deny it now to the poor and underprivileged, who cannot wait to make it worse.

Letter from another America: Justin Webb on Alistair Cooke

Letter from another America: Justin Webb on Alistair Cooke Letter from another America: Justin Webb on Alistair Cooke theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/25/letter-from-america-justin-webb-alistair-cooke David SmithMarch 25, 2023 Alistair Cooke poses in his home in New York in 1972. Alistair Cooke poses in his home in New York in 1972. Photograph: AP Alistair Cooke poses in his home in New York in 1972. Photograph: AP The BBC host, once a foreign correspondent in the US, hopes to introduce a great predecessor to a new audience – warts and all In his final Letter from America, Alistair Cooke mused on the impact of the Iraq war on the 2004 presidential election. He finished with a quotation from the Democratic nominee, John Kerry: “George Bush must be driven from the White House and I’m the man to do it.” Review: Reporting America by Alistair Cooke Read more It was the end of the world’s longest-running speech radio programme. Over 2,869 broadcasts and 58 years, Cooke offered wry, piercing observations of American society to Britons via the BBC. “Radio 4 is a national monument,” its former controller Michael Green declared. “And Alistair Cooke is one of its best-known gargoyles.” Cooke died a few weeks after his last broadcast, aged 95. Having reported on the second world war, witnessed the assassination of Robert Kennedy, followed Watergate and been in New York on 9/11, he might have been forgiven for thinking America had few surprises left up its sleeve. So much for the end of history. Cooke never got to see America elect its first Black president, Barack Obama, then lurch to its first president without political or military experience. He did not see Donald Trump fumble a pandemic and spur an insurrection. What would Cooke, who bashed out his letter on a typewriter every Thursday, have made of Trump, a carnival barker and demagogue reminiscent of 1930s Europe? “He would have been fascinating about him because he would have broadened the conversation,” says Justin Webb of the BBC, who has written a foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of the book Alistair Cooke’s America. “He would have been enormously sympathetic not to Trump but to Trump’s supporters. He would have grasped absolutely and clearly the things that led decent, ordinary Americans who had voted for Barack Obama then to vote for Donald Trump. “He would have explained to people in Britain the multiple reasons why there was such disillusionment and he would have understood the kind of brutal, undiplomatic and un-PC language that saw Trump through the election that he won and thrilled so many people in distressed previously industrial places, in particular the north-east of America, and made them think, ‘He’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch.’ “They didn’t particularly view him as a nice person but he articulated something. All of that, Cooke would have been thrilled by.” At first it might seem hard to picture Cooke, a patrician figure who entertained celebrities in his 15th-floor Manhattan apartment, amid the rusting factories of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But Webb, 62 and a former BBC Washington correspondent, insists Cooke would have been more in touch with so-called Trump country than the elites of today. Justin Webb, seen at the Hay Festival in 2022. Justin Webb, seen at the Hay Festival in 2022. Photograph: SHP/Alamy “He would have seen it coming more than a lot of journalists who regard themselves as less patrician but in the modern era are sealed off from reality. Yes, Alistair Cooke was patrician. Yes, he lived in New York. Yes, he flitted between the coasts and a lot of the book is written from the point of view of those coasts. “America and journalism was different in those days. You could, and he did, go by train. You could, and he did, make road trips. American journalists of great status in the modern era, the TV icons, just don’t and they’re so wealthy they’re completely sealed off from society. “Since Cooke’s time, people in positions of journalistic power and power generally – the professional managerial upper classes – have sealed themselves off from ordinary life. For all that he was a patrician and quite snooty about the diners, he would have understood and he probably would have still gone to them because, in those days, there wasn’t that huge gap between that sealed-off upper class and the rest.” ‘I’d put him right of centre’ Cooke was born in Salford in northern England in 1908. After graduating from Cambridge and studying theatre at Yale and Harvard, he worked in Hollywood for Charlie Chaplin, broadcast letters from London for the American network NBC in 1936 and moved to New York in 1937, first as a correspondent for the Times and then for the Guardian for 25 years. He was most familiar to US TV audiences as host of Omnibus and Masterpiece Theatre. He received acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic for his 13-part BBC series America: A Personal History of the United States, which concluded: “America is a country in which I see the most persistent idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.” The accompanying book sold more than 2m copies and is now reissued by Amberley and Quiller. In its new foreword, Webb, presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme and a host of the podcast Americast, says Cooke would have been dismayed by both major political parties in 2023. He writes: “Identity politics, so beloved now of so many Democrats, he would see as a psychological weakness, an aspect of the decadence he so feared.” Speaking from Camberwell, south London, Webb elaborates: “He was a great believer, however huge its problems were, in the unique enterprise of America, this bringing together of everyone, this genuine melting pot, albeit a hugely imperfect one. He saw the struggle between the dignity of America and its meretriciousness. He saw it walking this tightrope between the hopelessness and uselessness of the place and the glory of its sense of purpose. “Reading the book again, it struck me he has an awareness of that tightrope which is still walked today. Nothing in that has changed hugely since the days he was talking about. He’d be very leery about the modern progressive left. I don’t think he’d think much of AOC [Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and her pals. But he’d be absolutely disgusted by Trump: the meretriciousness, the boastfulness.” Joe Biden is fond of saying this is not your father’s Republican party. It’s not Cooke’s either. “I don’t think [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis would have necessarily charmed Alistair Cooke. That whole illiberal democracy [Viktor] Orbán approach would not hugely have impressed him because he was a broader, more inclusive figure and he naturally cleaved towards people who followed norms. “He was a country club guy when it came to the Republicans and the modern party would really distress him. He was a conservative with a small ‘c’. Just reading the book, you get the sense that this man felt probably safer in what used to be Republican white picket fence America, although he liked and admired some Democrats. I’d put him to the right of centre. Alistair Cooke's America. Alistair Cooke's America. Photograph: Amberley Publishing. “But when you look at people involved in January 6 and the way they got involved, he would have found that absolutely beyond the pale. I don’t think he would have had any truck with them at all. He would have been coruscating about the way in which senior Republicans in Congress failed to stand up to them and failed in the days since to stand up to them. “What would he have made of Kari Lake in Arizona? Not much. He would have used his typewriter most destructively when it came to all those people.” ‘He was too pessimistic’ Cooke had blind spots. In his Guardian days he was taken to task by the then editor, Alastair Hetherington, for underplaying race in the south. Alistair Cooke’s America contains phrases that do his legacy no favours: “The question of what to do with the Blacks is one of the oldest and guiltiest of America’s problems”; “Our confusion about what the Blacks want and what they are likely to get may not be praiseworthy, but it is understandable.” Webb argues that Cooke’s bleakly pessimistic view of racial integration has not aged well. He says: “I didn’t remember any of that and I thought it was fascinating to read and it brings you up short because it’s so different from the ultra-cautious, right-on writing about race that there is in this day and age. He just told it as he saw it with no thought that he might be cancelled or there would be any kind of blowback at all. That’s the positive side of it. “The negative side is he was genuinely wrong. As I say in the foreword, it’s one of the areas where he was too pessimistic. He saw America in racial lumps, particularly white people. He saw it as a zero-sum game with white people necessarily losing if Black people had a better life. That is a pretty fundamental error because that’s not the way society works. It is genuinely possible, without being Panglossian about it, to say if all racial groups succeed, then absolutely everyone is living in a happier society. “I’m not going to be over-positive about the way things are at the moment but I do think that America is a much more racially homogenised society, and a society much more at ease with itself, than Alistair Cooke thought it was going to be in the 1970s. Which is an interesting thing when you think of all the angst about race at the moment post-George Floyd and the sense among some of the progressive left that America is a fundamentally racist enterprise and the New York Times’s 1619 Project and that sense of it being set up as a project to protect one race. “But actually what you have is most people still hoping, however imperfectly, that the cosmopolitan mixed society Alistair Cooke thought was impossible can still be achieved. I don’t think Alistair quite captured that. I don’t think in the early 70s he quite saw that happening.” Cooke signs a book in 1979. Cooke signs a book in 1979. Photograph: PA Although Cooke became a US citizen in 1941, critics of his book may regard it as a vintage case of the white male journalist as anthropologist explaining weird and wonderful foreigners to the homeland. Such a conceit is deeply unfashionable at a moment that seeks to empower people and cultures to tell their own stories. Last year Justin Smith, co-founder of the media startup Semafor, declared the era of the foreign correspondent over, explaining: “The idea that you send some well-educated young graduate from the Ivy League to Mumbai to tell us about what’s going on in Mumbai in 2022 is sort of insane.” Webb says: “The whole shtick is of another era. You’d have all sorts of complaints now. You’d have people saying: ‘Well, if it’s about America, why isn’t he American?’ But at the deeper level I’m not sure people in the Twitter era are ready to engage with other places with that kind of degree of empathy and forgiveness of opinions that you might not agree with. “You’ve got the whole range with Alastair. You’ve got his snobbishness about some aspects of American life; you’ve got his priggishness about decent behaviour. But you’ve also got an amazing insight into what it is like to be an American. “I fear that in the modern world too many people hear one thing that they don’t agree with and they’d be straight on to Twitter and say, ‘I turned off Letter from America. I don’t listen to that any more.’ It’s not just that the programme doesn’t exist any more but I don’t think the listeners exist any more. In a sad kind of a way, I don’t think the audience is there.” In short, Cooke would have been cancelled? “He would have been so cancelled!” ‘It’s relatively recent history’ Alistair Cooke’s America is unlikely to change hearts and minds. To Webb, that’s part of the point: the book is a time capsule not only of the US but its inescapably white, privileged narrator. Its very datedness is the source of its appeal. Imagine what Alistair Cooke would have to say about Donald Trump | Tim Adams Read more “He was absolutely 100% right not to change it and we’re 100% right to see it as a historical document about a time and a place and a certain sort of reporter. It’s not just about America. It’s also about what ‘gentleman journalism’ was like. All of those things are fascinating but they’re of their time and you either engage with that with a smile and enjoyment or you’re not willing to.” He adds: “Although it’s history, it’s relatively recent history and it also informs in all sorts of interesting ways the present. It’s like the best history: it tells us something about the times but the way we regard it also tells us something about ourselves in good ways and bad. We’ve made some progress and we’ve also slid downhill in some respects and reading this book brings plenty of those things home to us.” Much ink has been spilled about the special relationship and its cultural manifestations, including American-British romances in Richard Curtis films and, on TV, the arrival of coach Ted Lasso in the Premier League. Webb has long held the view that Britain gets something wrong about America: why it is so successful. “We spend endless hours either carping about it or quite properly noticing its many faults. We spend much less time looking under the hood – as Americans would say – and examining what it is that makes pretty much everyone in the world still want to live there, that makes it such a cultural superpower, that makes it so attractive. “One of the things that impressed me about America is they genuinely think things can be improved, whereas most of us Brits just think everything’s falling apart: we just need to fall apart as gently as we can. “That sense of the ability of human beings to do stuff and make things better. You go all the way to Graham Greene and The Quiet American: quite often it has awful consequences. But when you see it up close in America itself, it’s fascinating as a cultural difference. I always felt that about the States and I still feel it now.” Alistair Cooke’s America: the 50th Anniversary Edition is published by Amberley Publishing Topics Books Powered by PrintFriendly.com Privacy

Eleusinian Mysteries

Eleusinian Mysteries Eleusinian Mysteries lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/march/eleusinian-mysteries 29 March 2023 The bay of Elefsina. Photo © Davide Mauro The bay of Elefsina. Photo © Davide Mauro The old road from Athens to Elefsina – the modern name for Eleusis – is still called the Sacred Way, though there is also a modern highway that does the trick. In ancient times, the initiated, or those wanting to become initiated, would travel the ten-odd miles from Athens to experience the ‘Eleusinian Mysteries’: well-guarded secret rites that seem to have involved re-enacting the abduction of Persephone by Hades, the god of the underworld, and her recovery by her mother, Demeter, the goddess of the earth. There was an annual festival in the ancient month of Anthesterion (the Month of Flowers) – late February for us – and a larger one every four years at harvest time. The mysteries were open to men and women, enslaved and free, Greek and foreigner alike; the only people excluded from seeking enlightenment were murderers and Barbarians (that is, non-Greek-speakers). In the intervening centuries, Elefsina has lost its allure. Christianity held out stronger promises, not to mention outright persecution of pagan rites. Eleusis became a sleepy village of fewer than a thousand residents, an Athenian ex-urb. Roald Dahl was briefly based there in 1941 with the No. 80Squadron RAF: ‘The aerodrome I had landed on,’ he wrote in Going Solo, ‘was no more than a grassy field and wildflowers were blossoming in blue and yellow and red in their millions all around me.’ But even by Dahl’s time, Elefsina was well into the process of a steep degradation, a polluted industrial zone, with massive soap, cement and steel factories, and huge oil refineries. What was once idyllic become an eye-sore, of rusted-out ships in the bay, chimneys of abandoned factories, and the plutonian flames of fossil fuel distillation licking the blue sky with their scarlet tongues and oily iridescent breath. Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, and the town makes some appearances in modern Greek poetry: Angelos Sikelianos wrote about the Sacred Way, and Cavafy about Demeter’s interrupted attempt to make a mortal infant immortal. But it would take Nikos Gatsos (1911-92) to write about the contemporary decline of Elefsina in ‘The Nightmare of Persephone’ (set as a song in 1976 by Manos Hatzidakis): There where the pennyroyal and wild mint grew, And the earth put forth her first cyclamen, Now the villagers haggle over cement And the birds fall dead into the factory furnace. The poem goes on to describe tourists tossing cigarette butts, and the oil refinery. The refrain is no cheerfuller: Sleep, Persephone, in the earth’s embrace And do not come out ever again onto the world’s balcony. But a revival of Elefsina may be at hand. The town has been selected as a 2023 European Capital of Culture: a counterintuitive choice but also an appropriate one. As the need to turn away from fossil fuels becomes ever more urgent, could Eleusis become a symbol once again of nature’s rejuvenescent cycles and the soul’s rebirth? On a Sunday in Anthesterion, with the early flowers in abundance (mostly stars of Bethlehem, chamomile and daisies), my husband and I, our 13-year-old daughter and my ninety-something mother-in-law took a day trip to Elefsina. It was the height of Apokries, Greek carnival, and the town was full of children dressed as Spider-Man, Batman, Elsa and other princesses, kings, lions, ninjas, pirates, cops and robbers, clowns and monsters of all stripes. Loud music drifted over the archaeological site from the town’s main drag, traditional Greek songs giving way to ‘The Macarena’. The renovated museum was closed until the end of the month so we made do with exploring the site, impressive in the size of the ruined elements and its extent. My mother-in-law made her way carefully over the uneven rocks on the arm of my husband (her dancer’s balance has served her well); my daughter, of an age perhaps with Persephone, scampered and climbed ahead, plucking flowers. The original temple complex was burned down by the Persians in 484 BC, and a new one was built by the architect of the Parthenon, Ictinus, in gleaming Pentelic marble, and with pedimental sculptures depicting the story of Persephone, Hades and Demeter. That was just the beginning, though. The Romans added a triumphal arch and temples to the empresses Faustina and Sabina, among other outbuildings. We saw where piglets – the usual offering to Demeter – were sacrificed and roasted on the sacred Eschara. (From the town, the aroma of pork cooking on the grill – the skara – drifted over on the breeze.) Gigantic column drums lay toppled, monumental Latin inscriptions tumbled among the smaller dedications of the Greeks. Outside the main temple complex, with a retaining wall to separate it, is the Ploutonion, an entrance to the Underworld and a precinct sacred to Hades, in the shadow of a great concave rock, with little lunette holes behind which the darkness of an actual cave glooms. In the pit in front of the rock were the scattered remains of several smashed pomegranates. A few bouquets of anemones and other wildflowers had been placed at the windows to the cave. My daughter was intrigued by these contemporary offerings to the god of the dead. Tourists or locals? The previous day had been a Psychosabbato – Soul Saturday, when the souls of the unburied or the recently departed are consoled by the living with offerings – usually koluva, a traditional (if not ancient?) and very Persephonic mixture of pomegranate arils, boiled wheat, nuts and parsley, topped with powdered sugar. Climbing up through the site we saw plaques with images of excavated objects that were now in the museum. One that I had particularly wanted to see was the colossal head of one of the Elefsina caryatids, balancing her sacred basket. I had recently visited her twin at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. According to the plaque the twin was ‘stolen’ by E.D. Clarke, a Cambridge mineralogist, in 1801 – incidentally, or not, the same year that removals were begun by Elgin’s agents on the Parthenon. But the case of the Caryatid is different. Her abduction was unequivocally legal – Clarke had obtained clear permission from the authorities for her removal – but also entirely immoral. Clarke didn’t have Elgin’s theoretical (if disputed) claim to archaeological altruism, rescuing a neglected monument from the depredations or indifference of the locals; the locals revered the statue, piling dung about her to bless their fields, crowning her with flowers, lighting candles before her. And as her face is eroded featureless, there could be zero claim to artistic value. He wanted her because she was hard to get. In his own words: I found the goddess in a dunghill buried to her ears. The Eleusinian peasants, at the very mention of moving her regarded me as one who would bring the moon from her orbit. What would become of their corn, they said, if the old lady with her basket was removed! I went to Athens and made application to the Pasha, aiding my request by letting an English telescope glide between his fingers. The business was done. Locally she had been known as ‘St Demetra’, a saint not otherwise attested in Orthodoxy – it is entirely possible the statue was once the ‘oldest continually venerated object from the ancient world’. It was only when I visited the Fitzwilliam a few weeks ago that I realised how massive she is (Clarke reckoned she weighed two tons), and how huge the undertaking. Though she only survives from the midriff up, she is taller than a man, and of solid marble. It took nine hours with ropes and rollers to get her to the sea (a distance of perhaps three hundred yards), and then the quay had to be repaired for loading. Yet somehow Clarke not only got her to the ship, but salvaged her when the ship was later wrecked off Beachy Head. (He appears not to have been completely without compunction – he later returned to Elefsina to confirm that the crops did still continue to grow.) With Elefsina a cultural capital this year, it occurs to me that returning the Caryatid – kept high in an alcove in the Fitzwilliam where few visitors even look up to see her – would be a splendid gesture. I suggested this to a friend who teaches Classics at Cambridge. Though somewhat sympathetic to the idea, he pointed out that moving it back would be no easy matter – like dragging the moon from her orbit. When the Fitzwilliam was renovated, the one thing that had to remain in place was the Caryatid. Has Elefsina even asked for her back – does the museum even want her? She is no Parthenon frieze. But I am haunted by the idea that, as she represented the forces of regeneration in the fields, she might be a (symbolic) catalyst in returning Eleusis from a rusted-out industrial zone to a place where nature is revered again. Leaving the archaeological site, we drove down Persephone Street back to the Sacred Way in search of a late lunch, then to the seaside for a coffee. Seagulls swarmed overhead, pecking at old loaves of bread someone had dumped into the sea. A large ship rusted at anchor a little way off. But the water was still intensely blue, the islands across the water green. On the quayside stands a modern monument in honor of Cynaegirus, Aeschylus’ brother, one of the fiercest fighters to fall at Marathon. The inscription on the monument quotes Herodotus and the relief shows the moment when ‘Cynaegirus … gripped with his hand the poop of one of the ships and had his hand chopped off with an axe and so died.’ His is one of the few individual deaths described by Herodotus in his record of the momentous battle. It’s a reminder, on the post-industrial seaside, of the centrality Eleusis once had to Athens, and maybe to the world. And, from the distant past, perhaps it puts us in mind of the dark mysteries of the future, and our souls that we have given away with our getting and spending, in need of a rebirth. Comments Login or register to post a comment 29 March 2023 at 5:36pm ChrisK says: "Her abduction was unequivocally legal – Clarke had obtained clear permission from the authorities for her removal – but also entirely immoral." [E.D. Clarke]"I went to Athens and made application to the Pasha, aiding my request by letting an English telescope glide between his fingers. The business was done." Puzzled a bit by the "unequivocally legal" part - if I let something glide into the hands of Sadiq Khan today and got his permission, could I legally take a monument from London with me? Isn't the state required to give its permission in such cases, instead of some local administrator/ruler? And even if at the time it wasn't required for the state to give its permission (somehow doubt it), isn't the self-admission of bribery enough to cast at least some doubt ("unequivocally"?) to the legality of the act? 29 March 2023 at 6:19pm Alex Hacker says: Fascinating read, thank you. I would like to point out, however, that the description of Clarke's removal of the caryatid seems at moments to almost exonerate him and casts doubt on the conception of that removal as theft. There is surely no need to attribute the idea that the caryatid was stolen to the plaque in the museum, and even less of a need for the quotation marks on the word. The caryatid was stolen, period. There is nothing "unequivocally legal" about obtaining permission by bribing a state official. That Clarke could write about his actions so openly and unabashedly is testament to a blind cultural arrogance, and the telescope used as currency for the bribe is a fitting symbol of the technological superiority that fuels such attitudes, even today. His attempts to check on the growth of the crops were obviously far too early. The return of the caryatid would indeed be a splendid gesture, and one of necessary atonement, no matter how difficult. Powered

To Understand Anti-vaxxers, Consider Aristotle

To Understand Anti-vaxxers, Consider Aristotle To Understand Anti-vaxxers, Consider Aristotle theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/covid-vaccine-hesitancy-anti-vaxxer-history/673522/ March 28, 2023 Science Science denialism reaches back centuries. By Gary Simon Cartoon of a marble bust wearing a medical mask over the upper half of its face Matt Chase / The Atlantic. Source: Getty. March 28, 2023, 12:49 PM ET Saved Stories Among the many difficulties imposed upon America by the pandemic, the scourge of anti-vaccine sentiment—and the preventable deaths caused as result—ranks among the most frustrating, especially for infectious-disease doctors like me. People who are hospitalized with COVID-19 rarely refuse therapy, but acceptance of vaccines to help prevent infection has been considerably more limited. Seventy percent of Americans have received the initial complement of vaccine injections, and many fewer have received the boosters designed to address viral variants and confer additional protection. Why are so many people resistant to this potentially lifesaving treatment? Some explanations are unique to our era—the awful weaponization of science in a deeply partisan political environment during the age of social media, for instance. But the concept of vaccine hesitancy is not new. Such hesitancy is, in a larger sense, a rejection of science—a phenomenon that far predates the existence of vaccines. One of the earliest documented controversies in science denialism comes from the field of astronomy. In the third century B.C., the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model of the universe. The idea that the Earth and planets might revolve around the sun, rather than the other way around, was shocking at the time, and Aristarchus’s theory was quickly rejected in favor of models such as those put forth by Aristotle and Ptolemy, both of whom insisted that the Earth was the center of the universe. The fact that Aristotle and Ptolemy remain better known today than Aristarchus shows the force of the rejection. It would be some 2,000 years before the notion was seriously reconsidered. In the 1530s, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus developed his own heliocentric model based on astronomical observations. Copernicus is remembered today primarily for this perspective-changing discovery. But it’s worth noting that he delayed publication of his findings until 1543, the year of his death, perhaps for fear of scorn or religious objections. In the early 17th century, Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer known as the “father of modern astronomy,” recognized that explaining the celestial changes in the position of stars and sun over time required that the Earth revolve around the sun. Galileo fully and publicly supported the Copernican theory of a heliocentric universe, and condemnation from the Vatican was swift and harsh. He was tried by the Inquisition and threatened with excommunication if he did not recant. Rather than incur the wrath of the pope, he finally agreed that he was wrong. He spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. It would be another 180 years before the Church admitted that Galileo was right. Rejections of scientific advances are found throughout the history of medicine. There have been four great advances in medicine over the past 200 years: anesthesia, antisepsis, antibiotics, and immunization. Not every advance was met with resistance. When the benefits of the advance have been obvious, there has tended to be little hesitation. Anesthesia and its cousin, analgesia, for instance, were rapidly accepted; they relieved pain, and the advantages were readily appreciated. Antisepsis had a stormier path to public acceptance. In the 19th century, English and Irish physicians recognized that puerperal sepsis (a dangerous infection in a mother after delivery of a baby) was likely a contagious condition that was spread from patient to patient either by the medical staff or the local environment. They suggested that improving hygiene would reduce the high rates of mortality that puerperal sepsis caused. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a physician (and one of The Atlantic’s founders), presented a paper to the Boston Society for Medical Improvement titled “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” Holmes suggested that unwashed hands among the medical and nursing staff were responsible for transmitting puerperal fever. This did not sit well with the establishment. A prestigious Philadelphia obstetrician, Charles D. Meigs, declared Holmes’s findings to be nonsense and suggested that an increased number of cases associated with any physician was just bad luck. The physician who is most frequently recognized with establishing the contagious nature of this infection is a Hungarian obstetrician, Ignaz Semmelweis. He noted that patients in the Vienna General Hospital who were cared for by physicians had a higher incidence of postpartum sepsis than those who were cared for by midwives. Semmelweis realized that physicians performed autopsies, whereas midwives did not, and that physicians did not wash their hands or clothing before moving from an autopsy to a delivery. (It was routine for them to attend deliveries in their bloodstained clothing, having come directly from the autopsy suite.) When he suggested simple hygiene measures such as handwashing, he was derided and eventually run out of town. The medical establishment was unwilling to accept that physicians—rather than bad air or host weaknesses—were responsible for spreading infections and harming patients. Science denialism can work in the other direction too. When antibiotics, especially penicillin, were first introduced, they were rightly appreciated as miracle drugs. In the pre-antibiotic era, the leading cause of death among children was infectious diseases. The use of antibiotics was astoundingly successful against many, but not all, childhood diseases. The downside for this enthusiasm for treatment came when patients demanded antibiotics for conditions—such as viruses—that didn’t actually necessitate them. Fifty years ago, telling a patient that they had a virus and that penicillin was therefore of no use led to disappointment, disbelief, and even arguments from patients requesting antibiotics for simple colds. Many doctors gave in because it was simpler than spending time fighting with a patient. A consequence of the more indiscriminate use of antibiotics—which represents its own mini-genre of science denialism—has been increased bacterial resistance. But of the four great advances, none has so broadly helped humanity, or suffered more from science denialism, than immunization. Most, but not all, of the vaccines that scientists have developed since the first immunizations in the 18th century have been developed against viruses. Of all viral infections, the most feared may well have been smallpox. Over the course of the 20th century alone, an estimated 300 million people died of smallpox. Smallpox is highly contagious and spares no age group or class. Its common form has an estimated overall mortality of roughly 30 percent, but the mortality of hemorrhagic smallpox—a more severe form of the disease—approaches 100 percent. Smallpox is also wildly contagious, a characteristic that is most evident when a previously unexposed population is exposed. Smallpox was unknown in the Americas before European explorers brought cases to the New World. The disease decimated the Indigenous populations of North America and South America as a result. The early concept of immunization to prevent smallpox may have begun more than 1,000 years ago, in China. The history is contested, but some documents show that children would be made to inhale material from a ground-up, mature smallpox lesion scraped off of the body of the infected—a level of exposure that could trigger a person’s immune response to smallpox without causing a full-blown infection. A later technique, which involved scratching the skin of an uninfected individual with material from another person’s lesion, was observed by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul, who then brought this procedure to Europe. She was so impressed that she had her children immunized. Subsequently, an experiment was done in which six prisoners in London were immunized. Despite exposure to smallpox, none of them became ill. Like many advances in medicine, smallpox immunization was met with some resistance, including worry that immunization might inadvertently spread the disease to others. This was an understandable reaction; the live smallpox virus was used, and a small percentage of inoculated individuals did develop full-blown disease and die. In 1721, there was an outbreak of smallpox in Boston. The writer and clergyman Cotton Mather urged widespread immunization but had only moderate success because of resistance from the local population. (History complicates even the views of those who embrace science: Mather was also an ardent defender of the Salem witch trials.) Years later, a well-known case of immunization resistance occurred in Philadelphia. During an outbreak of smallpox in 1736, Benjamin Franklin’s 4-year-old son, Francis, became infected and died. Francis had not been immunized despite an opportunity to do so, and Franklin said he regretted the decision for the rest of his life. In the generations that followed, scientists built off of these earlier methods and eventually developed a stable and widely available smallpox vaccine. The global eradication of smallpox as a result remains one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of medicine. The last case of naturally occurring smallpox was reported more than 40 years ago. Even so, vaccine hesitancy has persisted. In America, new vaccines for other diseases have continued to prompt their own waves of skepticism and hostility. And although science denialism is not pervasive in the way it once was centuries ago, it still rears its ugly head. The arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines brought pernicious vaccine sentiments into the spotlight. The reasons for this vehemence are many. For instance, some people who might accept the efficacy of a vaccine have such a fear of injections that they simply avoid seeking medical care until absolutely necessary. But this represents a minority of those who reject the vaccines. A more common—and more insidious—force that pushes people away from lifesaving vaccines appears to be swelling distrust in expertise, which is both a political and cultural phenomenon. Vaccine resistance can be peddled by influential people in both liberal and conservative circles, but throughout the pandemic, right-wing anti-government organizations and television personalities in particular have promoted a stew of outrageous conspiracy theories about vaccines. Run-of-the-mill misinformation remains a problem too. Some people continue to believe that the COVID-19 vaccine will infect you and make you sick—this is not the case. Finally, of course, there are concerns about known and unknown side effects from the vaccination. Like many vaccines, the COVID shots are linked to serious health effects in extremely rare circumstances; for instance, Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA shots are associated with a very small risk of heart inflammation. It is virtually impossible to prove that some side effect will not ever occur. But hundreds of millions of people have safely received the COVID vaccine in the United States alone. Perhaps the greatest disservice to vaccination has been the fraudulent claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. This claim was originally published in an otherwise respected medical journal in the 1990s, and has since been fully retracted. (The author lost his medical license.) Nevertheless, many people still believe this and have put their children at risk for serious illness as a result. Our advances in science over the past two centuries have truly been extraordinary, but our society still suffers from the forces that reject reason and prevent our ability to take full advantage of discoveries that protect us all. And we need to push back against those who endanger others because they see opportunities for fame or profit in spreading dangerous disinformation. Until that happens, our species will continue to understand the world around us in fits and starts—with too many people dying, even when we know how to save them. Powered by PrintFriendly.com Privacy

Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language

Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/26/agatha-christie-novels-reworked-to-remove-potentially-offensive-language Rachel HallMarch 26, 2023 The updated Agatha Christie novels follow reworkings of books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race. The updated Agatha Christie novels follow reworkings of books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images The updated Agatha Christie novels follow reworkings of books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have passages edited by sensitivity readers for latest HarperCollins editions Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity. Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries written between 1920 and 1976 have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins to strip them of language and descriptions that modern audiences find offensive, especially those involving the characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK. Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported. The updates follow edits made to books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race in a bid to preserve their relevance to modern readers. The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as “of black marble” and a judge’s “Indian temper”, and removed terms such as “Oriental” and the N-word. The word “natives” has also been replaced with the word “local”. Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”. This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.” In the new edition of the 1964 Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s musing that a hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, the newspaper added. Sensitivity readers are a comparatively recent phenomenon in publishing that have gained widespread attention in the past two years. They vet both new publications and older works for potentially offensive language and descriptions, and aim to improve diversity in the publishing industry – though some are paid extremely low wages. Though this is not the first time the content of Christie’s novels has been changed, her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term, which was last published under that name in 1977, and included this word repeatedly in the story. Agatha Christie Limited, a company run by the author’s great-grandson James Prichard, is understood to handle licensing for her literary and film rights. The company and HarperCollins have been contacted for comment. Other midcentury authors whose works have been revised Roald Dahl Dahl’s publisher, Puffin, hired sensitivity readers to rewrite substantial parts of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”; however, it will also continue to print the original editions. On the chopping block were offensive descriptions of characters’ physical appearances, such as the words “fat” and “ugly”, as well as antisemitic references, for instance to the characters’ big noses in The Witches. Gender-neutral terms were also added – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People. Ian Fleming To mark 70 years since Casino Royale, Fleming’s first book featuring the British spy James Bond, was published, a full set of the thrillers will be reissued. This time, they will contain the disclaimer: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.” Many changes are to remove racist language. In Live and Let Die, Bond’s comment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” has been changed to “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought”. Others are to remove sexist language; for example a scene where Bond visits a nightclub in Harlem, and a reference to the “audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough” has been changed to “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room”.

Nature Timespiral: The Evolution of Earth from the Big Bang

Nature Timespiral: The Evolution of Earth from the Big Bang Nature Timespiral: The Evolution of Earth from the Big Bang visualcapitalist.com/cp/nature-timespiral-the-evolution-of-earth-from-the-big-bang This spiral timeline shows the events that led us to our modern world, from the Big Bang to the present. Since the dawn of humanity, we have looked questioningly to the heavens with great interest and awe. We’ve called on the stars to guide us, and have made some of humanity’s most interesting discoveries based on those observations. This also led us to question our existence and how we came to be in this moment in time. That journey began some 14 billion years ago, when the Big Bang led to the universe emerging from a hot, dense sea of matter and energy. As the cosmos expanded and cooled, they spawned galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually, life. In the above visualization, Pablo Carlos Buddassi illustrates this journey of epic proportions in the intricately designed Nature Timespiral, depicting the various eras that the Earth has gone through since the inception of the universe itself. Evolutionary Timeline of the World Not much is known about what came before the Big Bang, but we do know that it launched a sequence of events that gave rise to the universal laws of physics and the chemical elements that make up matter. How the Earth came about, and life subsequently followed, is a wondrous story of time and change. Let’s look at what transpired after the Big Bang to trace our journey through the cosmos. The Big Bang and Hadean Eon The Big Bang formed the entire universe that we know, including the elements, forces, stars, and planets. Hydrogen and massive dissipation of heat dominated the initial stages of the universe. During a time span known as the Hadean eon, our Solar System formed within a large cloud of gas and dust. The Sun’s gravitational pull brought together spatial particles to create the Earth and other planets, but they would take a long time to reach their modern forms. Archean Eon (4 – 2.5 billion years ago) After its initial formation, the surface of the Earth was extremely hot and entirely liquid. This subsequent eon saw the planet cool down massively, solidifying some of the liquid surface and giving rise to oceans and continents, as well as the first recorded history of rocks. Early in this time frame, known as the Archean eon, life appeared on Earth. The oldest discovered fossils, consisting of tiny, preserved microorganisms, date to this eon roughly 3.5 billion years ago. Paleoproterozoic Era (2.5 – 1.6 billion years ago) The first era of the Proterozoic Eon, the Paleoproterozoic, was the longest in Earth’s geological history. Tectonic plates arose and landmasses shifted across the globe—it was the beginning of the formation of the Earth we know today. Cyanobacteria, the first organisms using photosynthesis, also appeared during this period. Their photosynthetic activity brought about a rapid upsurge in atmospheric oxygen, resulting in the Great Oxidation Event. This killed off many primordial anaerobic bacterial groups but paved the way for multicellular life to grow and flourish. Mesoproterozoic Era (1.6 – 1 billion years ago) The Mesoproterozoic occurred during what is known as the “boring billion” stage of Earth’s history. That is due to a lack of widespread geochemical activity and the relative stability of the ocean carbon reservoirs. But this era did see the break-up of the supercontinents and the formation of new continents. This period also saw the first noted case of sexual reproduction among organisms and the probable appearance of multicellular organisms and green plants. Neoproterozoic Era (1 billion – 542.0 million years ago) In some respects, the Neoproterozoic era is one of the most profound time periods in Earth’s history. It bookends two major moments in the planet’s evolutionary timeline, with predominantly microbial life on one side, and the introduction of diverse, multicellular organisms on the other. At the same time, Earth also experienced severe glaciations known as the Cryogenian Period and its first ice age, also known as Snowball Earth. The era saw the formation of the ozone layer and the earliest evidence of multicellular life, including the emergence of the first hard-shelled animals, such as trilobites and archaeocyathids. Paleozoic Era (541 million – 252 million years ago) The Paleozoic is best known for ushering in an explosion of life on Earth, with two of the most critical events in the history of animal life. At its beginning, multicellular animals underwent a dramatic Cambrian explosion in aquatic diversity, and almost all living animals appeared within a few millions of years. At the other end of the Paleozoic, the largest mass extinction in history resulted in 96% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial life dying out. Halfway between these events, animals, fungi, and plants colonized the land, and the insects took to the air. Mesozoic Era (252 million – 66 million years ago) The Mesozoic was the Age of Reptiles. Dinosaurs, crocodiles, and pterosaurs ruled the land and air. This era can be subdivided into three periods of time: Triassic (252 to 201.3 million years ago) Jurassic (201.3 to 145 million years ago) Cretaceous (145 to 66 million years ago) The rise of the dinosaurs began at the end of the Triassic Period. A fossil of one of the earliest-known dinosaurs, a two-legged omnivore roughly three feet long-named Eoraptor, is dated all the way back to this time. Scientists believe the Eoraptor (and a few other early dinosaurs still being discovered today) evolved into the many species of well-known dinosaurs that would dominate the planet during the Jurassic period. They would continue to flourish well into the Cretaceous period, when it is widely accepted that the Chicxulub impactor, the plummeting asteroid that crashed into Earth off the coast of Mexico, brought about the end of the Age of Reptiles. Cenozoic Era (66 million – Present Day) After the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, this era saw massive adaptations by natural flora and fauna to survive. The plants and animals that formed during this era look most like those on Earth today. The earliest forms of modern mammals, amphibians, birds, and reptiles can be traced back to the Cenozoic. Human history is entirely contained within this period, as apes developed through evolutionary pressure and gave rise to the present-day human being or Homo sapiens. Compared to the evolutionary timeline of the world, human history has risen quite rapidly and dramatically. Going from our first stone tools and the Age of the Kings to concrete jungles with modern technology

Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs | The Spectator

Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs | The Spectator Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs spectator.co.uk/article/fragments-of-a-life-janet-malcolm-meditates-on-old-family-photographs February 14, 2023 Sarah Watling The biographer and journalist was always reluctant to write about herself, and this posthumously published memoir is hemmed in by what she kept locked away From magazine issue: 18 February 2023 Grandmother Klara with her two daughters. Janet Malcolm’s mother, Hanna, is on the left. [photograph courtesy of the author] Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory Janet Malcolm Granta, pp. 176, £14 Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation’s great practitioners – one might say agitators – of journalism and biography. She was a master of studies that are ostensibly about one thing, but are actually of a depth and range the reader is never entirely prepared for. Whatever topic she had in hand, you find her nudging at its limits, questioning its practices and accepted norms, turning what could, tediously, be described as a ‘gimlet eye’ on the irrational, emotional investment we have in those norms. A hallmark of her work is an extraordinary ability to (seem to) work her subjects out. There is something chilling about this gimlet-eyedness, something that makes you feel for the unsuspecting subjects who speak gamely into her tape recorder, confident in their control over the narrative. Malcolm seems to reach the door to the room where the difficult things are kept – and then turn back There is also an outsider air to Malcolm’s work – a kind of refusal of professional loyalties that saw her famously describe journalistic practice as ‘morally indefensible’ and admit to the ‘voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike’. Her dry humour can be as easy to miss as some of her takedowns, since all are delivered with a crushing matter-of-factness. There is, then, something a little disconcerting about reading Still Pictures, which is described as a memoir and is composed of meditations prompted by photographs – many of them from Malcolm’s own family collections. It’s as if a professor you had hopelessly admired from the back of the lecture hall suddenly invited you for a drink and started telling you about their childhood. There is something thrilling about it (after all, you have daydreamed about just such an encounter), but you’re not exactly having the scholarly conversation you’d imagined, and actually the intimidating distance of the pedestal was perhaps more comfortable. It is slightly disorienting when a master of elegant, controlled prose and cool provocation suddenly starts telling you about ‘Daddy’. Malcolm was clearly uncomfortable about the enterprise herself. In The Silent Woman, one of her best books, she claimed that ‘the writer, like the murderer, needs a motive’. A good example of her tendency to phrase her provocations as snappy one-liners, it also hints at her trouble with autobiography. She wasn’t convinced there was a good reason to write it. In an essay for the New York Review of Books, she detailed several self-deprecating reasons for abandoning a previous attempt, including boredom with the subject and an inability to conjure the required memories. Yet her resistance is perhaps best explained by the distinction she drew between herself and creative writers whose material came from within. ‘Poets and novelists and playwrights,’ she wrote in The Silent Woman, ‘give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.’ Still Pictures demonstrates how unfounded most of her concerns were. It is far from boring. Malcolm has surfaced some vivid and fascinating recollections, but they are hemmed in by all that she has, perceptibly, kept safely locked away. Most popular Panda La Terriere Why Gen Z is turning against woke culture She was born in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1934. Photo number two in Still Pictures shows her at a train window with her parents, leaving Prague five years later. In Hamburg, the family boarded one of the last civilian ships to depart for the USA before war broke out. ‘We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray,’ she writes, in a statement that contains both her characteristic skill with similes (an often underestimated device) and her conspicuous refusal of sentiment. Her parents left behind a life of cultured sophistication tinged with bohemianism; in America, they lost a context for their sense of humour and erudition. Malcolm revisits the misery of joining a kindergarten in Brooklyn speaking almost no English, and the awkward suppressions of a 1950s adolescence. She grew up among Czech émigrés in New York (a milieu she evokes compellingly and with something of a child’s candour; far from tragic or heroic, many of them seemed dull or embarrassing to her), and went on to have a long and distinguished career at the New Yorker. She touches on this in a piercing account of preparing for the second trial in a case brought against her by Jeffrey Masson, the disgruntled subject of one of her profiles. Throughout, Malcolm observes the moral boundaries she so often saw herself and others transgressing in the writing of biography. When it comes to her father, she refuses to go into anything involving ‘conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification’ – her prerogative, of course; but it’s a position that scrapes the meat off the bones of family memoir. Ambivalence and interrogation are twin themes of Malcolm’s work (‘lowering’ and ‘misprision’ are two favourite words), and perhaps the most disconcerting thing about reading Still Pictures is watching a writer such as Malcolm reach the door to the room where the difficult things are kept – and turn back. CLAIM She voices commonplace regrets (remembering her youthful callousness towards her mother, she asks ‘What would it have cost me to tell her that I loved her?’) but keeps anything truly wounding, or cherished, to herself. She does this in full knowledge of the effects, and faithfully documents the tussle: she ‘would rather flunk a writing test’, she defiantly admits, than expose herself. For several years in the 1970s, Malcolm wrote a photography column for the New Yorker. She had a way of taking the art world seriously that brilliantly exposed its absurdities and insularity. In an afterword, her daughter Anne notes that Malcolm had planned to finish Still Pictures with a piece on ‘her own lifelong interest in taking pictures’, which might have framed things differently. As it is, the book feels inevitably fragmentary. Far from a nostalgiafest, it is like a family album annotated to an unusually high intellectual standard. Even with the suffusing sense of reluctance, Malcolm is more observant and insightful than most. Written by Sarah Watling Topics in this article

Conspiracies are the price of freedom - UnHerd

Conspiracies are the price of freedom - UnHerd Conspiracies are the price of freedom unherd.com/2023/02/conspiracies-are-the-price-of-freedom Terry Eagleton17 February 2023 Here’s a conspiracy theory of my own invention. Why did Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald? Readers under the age of 80 may need to know that Jack Ruby was a Dallas bar owner and small-time crook who shot dead Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Nobody has ever thought that Ruby did this out of patriotic indignation. Somebody wanted to silence Oswald for good, and Ruby was the instrument they chose to do so. But who? There’s evidence that Ruby was a low-level sidekick of the Mafia, so maybe it was the Mafia who shot Kennedy. But why kill Oswald as well? It’s here that my devilishly ingenious theory comes in. There’s no real evidence that the Mob killed the President, but they might have been incensed that someone else had. Not because they had any love for their leader, but because they had intended to assassinate him themselves. After all, they threatened the lives of both Kennedy brothers several times. Before they could get round to it, however, a private entrepreneur called Oswald stepped in and did it instead. By having Oswald bumped off by a known associate of theirs, the Mafia made it look as though Oswald, had he lived, could have revealed their guilt. My theory, then, is that the Mob bumped Oswald off because they didn’t kill Kennedy. They just wanted people to think they had. Like what you’re reading? Get the free UnHerd daily email Already registered? Sign in Is this true? Probably not. When it comes to the death of JFK, the hardest question is who didn’t do it. There’s a comically long list of possible candidates: Oswald, the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s driver or his bodyguard, Right-wing Cubans, the Teamsters Union, perhaps (who knows?) a 21-year-old Harrison Ford. Members of QAnon probably believe they were all in it together. As with equality and diversity programmes, genuine conspiracies must leave nobody out. One shouldn’t be too cynical about conspiracies. After all, as new UnHerd polling has shown, more people in Britain are conspiratorially-minded than aren’t. But it’s true that there isn’t One Big Conspiracy, largely because there doesn’t need to be; it’s also true that people regularly gather together in private to plot the downfall of their enemies. On the whole, however, liberal capitalist states, like dishwashers, work all by themselves (when they work at all). They don’t depend on people meeting in missile-proof bunkers to plot how to stay in power. Modern societies don’t rely on some kind of collective consciousness to keep themselves afloat, partly because modern citizens are atomised rather than collective. In fact, consciousness or belief hardly comes into it. As long as you don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe pretty much what you like. This is known as liberalism. Besides, the more individuals are in the know, the more fragile a conspiracy becomes. One reason why the US moon-landing wasn’t a put-up job is that it would have involved too many people, any one of whom could have blown the gaff. And if the truth (as conspirators see it) had got out, the United States would have suffered the most calamitous loss of credibility in its history. Its reputation would have been trashed beyond repair. Fear of being discovered is a primary reason why some events can’t be faked, just as one reason why most politicians try not to lie is not because they are more angelic beings than the rest of us, but because the consequences of being found out mean that it just isn’t worth it. If great masses of people maintain a certain belief over long periods of time, one can be fairly sure that there is something in it. This doesn’t mean that the belief in question is true, but it’s unlikely to be complete nonsense either. Myths tend to have a core of truth. For many centuries, everybody thought that the Sun moved around the Earth, which isn’t true; but it was a rational belief all the same, because the evidence seemed to support it. Much the same goes for paranoia. It isn’t true that creatures from Saturn have placed a secret device in your skull to beam your every thought to a control centre in the Glastonbury Tor, but it’s true that a mighty amount of surveillance goes on, much of it secret. Or to put the point more pithily, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you. No civilisation in history has ever spied on itself so relentlessly. Those who genuinely go off the deep end are those who imagine that we live our lives in private. The idea that what we do is covertly directed by a cabal of obscenely wealthy paedophiles is a delusion — but if you drop the “covertly” and “paedophiles”, it us not far from the truth. We are indeed governed by an elite, but there’s nothing particularly secretive about it. You can see them strolling around Davos or read about them in the newspapers. The phrase “Masters of the Universe” isn’t just a piece of flashy science fiction. There is a sovereign superpower whose presence can be felt in every nook and cranny of the globe, but its name is capital, not the Knights Templar. Like all power, what it needs to sustain itself is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just what is conveyed in seminars, but priceless stuff which people are prepared to kill for. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that everything hangs together, which is indeed a symptom of paranoia. For the paranoid, nothing happens by chance. Even a gust of wind is secretly intended. The fact that the Prime Minister has five letters in both his first name and surname must surely be trying to tell us something. Freud thought that the nearest thing to paranoia was philosophy, because philosophers (he was thinking of the Hegelian type) also see connections between apparently unrelated items. There must be some way in which my left foot and the Vatican are secretly interrelated. Suggested reading How the Davos elite took back control By Thomas Fazi Once again, this isn’t complete nonsense. Even the most trivial of our actions send ripple effects through the thick mesh of social existence, breeding unexpected consequences in unpredictable places. None of our acts is purely our own. Reading this essay may cause you to tear great clumps of hair from your head, thus making you look too frightful to attend the dinner this evening at which you would have been offered the Governorship of the Bank of England. And don’t just blame me: blame the editors, sub-editors, technical assistants and so on. We all had a hand in tearing your hair out. It was a conspiracy, but not a conscious one. These ripple effects are random. None of them needed to happen, or to happen in exactly the way they did. And this is where they differ from conspiracies. For the conspiratorial mind, nothing whatsoever is random, any more than it is for the paranoid. This is an alarming thought in one sense but a consoling one in another. A world of chance and contingency is a bewildering one, upending our schemes and thwarting our purposes. Far better to imagine that there’s a plot to it all, in both senses of the word, than accept the fact that a lot of things just happen, without any particular rhyme or reason, and that this is part of the price we pay for freedom. This was presumably what Harold Macmillan had in mind when he remarked to a reporter that the hardest thing about trying to run the country was “events, dear boy, events”. Ironically, however, American conspiracy theorists are lovers of freedom. “Liberty or death!” ranks among their slogans, and by refusing to wear masks during the Covid pandemic some of them ended up with both. Among other things, conspiracies are symptoms of the anxiety which comes from freedom — from living in the precarious, unpredictable world of late modernity. They are antidotes to the open-endedness of history. Those who spin these yarns are for the most part on the wrong side of that history — those washed up by so-called modernisation, men and women who need someone to blame for their lousy living conditions but who point an accusing finger at fantasises of their own creation. Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent. Because these myths spring from insecurity, which in turn breeds hatred, the grand narrative in question is almost always a sinister one. Anyone with an eye to how the world is going will have no quarrel with that, even if they don’t believe that Nancy Pelosi is a North Korean spy. They will have no quarrel either with the central assumption of the QAnonites and their ilk — that behind the surfaces of social life there lurks some exceedingly nasty realities, and that the official story is rarely the whole truth of the matter. What you see is most definitely not what you get. The good news is that no conspiracy can be entirely successful, since if it were we wouldn’t know about it.

On One of the Most Influential Essays of the 21st Century: Of Snark and Smarm ‹ Literary Hub

On One of the Most Influential Essays of the 21st Century: Of Snark and Smarm ‹ Literary Hub On One of the Most Influential Essays of the 21st Century: Of Snark and Smarm lithub.com/on-one-of-the-most-influential-essays-of-the-21st-century-of-snark-and-smarm Stephen MarcheFebruary 14, 2023 Ten years ago, Gawker published Tom Scocca’s “On Smarm.” Gawker died but “On Smarm” lives. For an essay whose material was negligible even at the time of publication—tone and manner in New York media circles in the early 2000s—its relevance has been out of all proportion to its subject. “On Smarm” has been, with the possible exception of Between the World and Me, the most influential essay of its period, and certainly among writers. Many careers, whole online networks, have been directly inspired by it. And its penumbral influence has been even wider. “On Smarm” is the kind of piece that hovers in the background, framing debates, determining styles, fixing approaches and assumptions even in readers who reject its premises or have never read it. Every critic, every cultural commentator, pro or con, highbrow or lowbrow, fancy or scuzzy, has been shaped by the debates over snark and smarm that came to a head in Scocca’s piece a decade ago. In a sense, “On Smarm” matters more now than it did when it was published. 2013 was an anomalous moment. Media and literary institutions were feeling the death grip of social media but hadn’t yet been swallowed. The scars from the 2008 crash were forming but the wound hadn’t yet healed. The Boomers, given the greatest institutions the world has ever known, had squandered them out of obliviousness and greed. The Obama years, its walls plastered with posters of hope, had revealed that there was no going back. And in the immediate aftermath of the Obama-Romney election, it was possible, just possible, to imagine that American political discourse was too civil. 2016 changed the valence of snark and smarm. Much has been written about media failures during the Trump years, mostly from those who stress the virtuous social functions of journalism. If only the press had visited more diners in the American heartland or stopped visiting diners in the American heartland, if only they’d taken Trump more seriously or ignored him altogether, if they’d used the right words or not used the wrong words, if they’d taken sides earlier or never taken sides, then the whole Trump fiasco could have been avoided. People blame the press when they don’t have the guts to blame the people. Still, there was a glaring absence in American media during the Trump years. Gawker was the only publication that could have reckoned with Trump on his own terms. Gawker alone understood the power of celebrity, the unchecked rise of the tech lords, the new contours of the social media landscape and where they were trending. “On Smarm” was a kind of misbegotten mission statement of that aborted understanding. Incredible as it may seem, in the beginning, the argument against snark was a defense of joy in art, tied neither to the establishment nor to its opponents. While the historical context behind “On Smarm” has shifted unrecognizably in a decade, the question it faced with admirable clarity—the relationship between power and style—remains unresolved. The question of tone still rules. Look at the current mess on Twitter, look at any op-ed page struggling with wokeness and anti-wokeness, look at stand-up comedy, look at political advertising, look at the Oscars. We are still trying to decide how nasty to be, or how nice, on whose terms and by what methods and under what justifications. We are still trying to figure out what nastiness and niceness mean, what their ultimate effects are, who benefits, who loses. The current state of public discourse, if it’s even worthy of that name, is a strange fusion where smarm and snark wrestle and embrace one another in vicious shadowy vacuums. It is less clear than ever which side is winning. * The contemporary debate over the use of the word snark began in 2003, so “On Smarm” was itself responding to an essay that was ten years old at the time of publication. In the inaugural issue of The Believer, Heidi Julavits defined snark as “a scornful, knowing tone frequently employed to mask an actual lack of information.” At the time, I knew just what she was talking about. I remember a friend who was a philosophy professor submitted a book for review; the reviewers described it as “the book of a sneaker-wearing philosophy professor,” and that’s who he was ever after. It genuinely seemed like it mattered at the time: critics judging books by their author photos rather than the writing inside. Maybe it still does, even if there’s nothing that can be done about it. Snark was upstart criticism, an at least half-honest despair, a recognition of a basic systematic collapse. Julavits’s original essay presented a nuanced, somewhat fraught response to the institutions of criticism. There was a long section on James Wood, who loomed then like a dour, penny-pinching headmaster over all the kid writers; Julavits admired Wood’s faith in literature but not the judgment that accompanied his faith. In Wood’s famous essay against “hysterical realism,” then still fresh in mind, Wood had articulated a passionate repression. He liked his sentences standing rigidly at attention, with their beds made and their shoes polished, but he was no snarkist; he knew what he was talking about and he didn’t judge writers by their choice of footwear. Incredible as it may seem, in the beginning, the argument against snark was a defense of joy in art, tied neither to the establishment nor to its opponents. The title of Julavits’s piece was “Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” Three exclamation marks in a single title. It was a different time. “She’d probably hate Gawker,” Gawker wrote in response. Gawker had a slightly different definition of snark than Julavits’s: “righteously indignant but comically defeated, sighing in unison with an audience that believed nothing was as it seemed and nothing would ever really change.” Snark was upstart criticism, an at least half-honest despair, a recognition of a basic systematic collapse. Snark and smarm had a more explicitly institutional framework for Gawker: It was the outsider internet response to unworthy legacy insiders. David Denby’s 2009 book Snark was the most direct, most acute establishment response to snark. I must say this book holds up much better than I remember. Denby sorts the morass of snark into a manageable pattern, with a lightness of touch and a historical distance that is illuminating in a way nobody else has managed. There are problems, to be sure. Some snark Denby likes—Jon Stewart and Juvenal—and some snark he dislikes—people who hate The New Yorker—and the double standard requires elaborate intellectual gymnastics. Still, the essayist has a task and Denby fulfilled it: He placed his finger on the fulcrum of the moment. “This is an essay about a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation—a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid of print, television, radio and the Internet,” he wrote in the introduction. “It’s an essay about style and also, I suppose, grace. Anyone who speaks of grace—so spiritual a word—in connection with our raucous culture risks sounding like a genteel idiot.” The sadness of those lines, from the current moment, is the assumptions ingrained in them. How casually Denby could throw around the phrases “national conversation” and “our culture” as if his audience would know what he meant, as if they did not immediately demand answers to the questions “whose nation?” and “which us?” Tom Scocca’s “On Smarm” resonated on a totally different level than Denby’s book or Julavits’s essay. Snark is whimsical. “Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” is practically the whimsicality manifesto. “On Smarm” is self-serious in a way they are not, composed with precision and dispassion. There’s no name-calling, no scabrous rollicking assaults, no snark at all. The piece is toreador criticism. The bull rushes by, there’s a flash of red, and the dagger has stuck. The tone of virtue is the heart of smarm: “It is a civilization that says ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ rather than making sure it does not do evil.” A decade of time has led to some mild embarrassments. There’s a full-throated defense of Edward Snowden, which is now at least somewhat complicated by his status as a Putin trophy. Scocca was also pro-Twitter. “New media and social media have an immense and cruel leveling power, for people accustomed to old systems of status and prestige,” he wrote. “On Twitter, the only answer to ‘Do you know who I am?’ is ‘One more person with 140 characters to use.’” But such mistakes are inevitable, inherent to the timeliness of the writing. They’re not even mistakes. In 2013, social media could have democratized discourse rather than devolving into a plaything for tech barons. It wasn’t impossible. The core of Scocca’s argument remains largely in place. Or rather the several distinct strands interwoven at the core of Scocca’s argument remain largely in place, the first of which is 1. “Everyone’s a publicist.” The social analysis in Scocca’s argument is entirely accurate, beyond debate at this point. The triumph of image over substance was then and is now a general trend, diffuse and ubiquitous. “The key to making it in the new era, Tom Peters explained to the readers of Fast Company in ‘The Brand Called You,’ was to manage impressions, just like commercial brands do—‘don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.’ It was the dawn of a new credentialism, on the authority of the self and the money that the self could hustle,” Scocca writes. “On Smarm” is one of the great essays describing the new mode of self-curation born out of the internet and social media, and the consequent rise of celebrity, personal branding, and toxic narcissism. The fake-it-till-you-make-it spirit was already in full force in literary circles before then. There had already been Jonah Lehrer, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, JT LeRoy, more than enough evidence that literary and journalistic institutions were, at the very least, deeply gullible. The new technologies would exacerbate and expand those fraudulent tendencies beyond recognition. Scocca could see it coming. But what upset Scocca, what was the uniquely appropriate subject for snark, was not necessarily fraud itself but a fraudulent tone, particularly among writers. “Ideas of ‘authorship’ and ‘Brooklyn’ are being acted out by people, as a bulwark against insecurity,” Scocca wrote. “We have a whole word here at Gawker, ‘writering,’ to describe the tribe of writers whose principal writerly concern is being writerly, and who spend all their time congratulating one another on their writing and promulgating correct rules for writing.” Lying offended Scocca less than posing, which led to the second core argument of “On Smarm”: 2. “Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance.” The tone of virtue is the heart of smarm: “It is a civilization that says ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ rather than making sure it does not do evil.” The examples of smarmy performances Scocca chooses to dissect are Michael Bloomberg and Dave Eggers. A revealing couple. On the level of substance any comparison between Michael Bloomberg and Dave Eggers doesn’t make much sense. You have a rigid billionaire mayor and a Brooklyn novelist, a right winger and a left winger, a powerbroker and a literary journal founder. I mean, they don’t have much in common except they’ve both appeared at galas. And that’s the point. They were successes. One dumbed-down, extrapolated version of the smarm-snark debates was the discourse of punching up and punching down. “The idea of success, or of successfulness, hangs over the whole subject of smarm,” Scocca writes. “It is not true, after all, that the crisis of postmodernity has left us without any functioning system of shared values. What currently fills the space left by the waning or absence of traditional authority, for the most part, is the ideology and logic of the market.” It’s the old story that the great film noir The Big Clock put so well: “It’s always the wrong people who have money.” The structures of authority give success. The structures of authority are unfair. Therefore success is invalid. Smarm is the cover for the illegitimacy of the world. Smarm exists to prove that “what thrives deserves to thrive,” and “what fails deserves to have failed.” Snark exists to tear down the phony self-justifications of the world’s successes. And here we arrive at an absence, an absence at the crux of the essay. Scocca doesn’t articulate another value outside of the market or institutional validation. He doesn’t offer a way to value people or writing that doesn’t involve money or fame. He can only demonstrate that the money and the fame are illegitimate. Scocca has only his weariness to offer, and he circles the emptiness like water down a drain, drawn and pulled down by the nothingness that motivates him. Scocca finds himself in a void—obsessed with success but convinced of its invalidity. And the only response is anger. That’s his third point. 3. “Anger is upsetting to smarm—real anger, not umbrage.” Ten years ago you could argue with a straight face that there wasn’t enough anger in American discourse, that what the United States and the internet needed were more anger. * The main line of argument in “On Smarm” is simple enough: In a time defined by image management, the successes are self-justifying frauds, and the only correct response is rage. But “On Smarm” was a mood more than an argument, a celebration of intellectual brutality, a focus on celebrity and its nascent power, the mistrust of winners as such. That mood was more influential than the argument ever could be. It would be silly to blame defenses of snark, in any articulation, for the hateful social media communities or the outrage economy that followed. At the same time it is true that plenty of admirers used “On Smarm” to justify their own viciousness and laziness. If they attacked people in power (they defined who fell in that category) and were wrong about it, they could still argue they were serving a social function: railing against the powers that be. “On Smarm” naturally fell into the journalistic tradition of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Saint Orwell, from his niche in the cathedral, bestows upon us the venerable lesson that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The snarkists would agree. But Orwell didn’t have an inbox full of death threats, like every journalist I know. Orwell was never swatted. One dumbed-down, extrapolated version of the smarm-snark debates was the discourse of punching up and punching down which started as a debate among stand up comedians but spread to anyone making cultural commentary. Here “On Smarm” is a key to understanding the whole approach. The only equivalence of Dave Eggers and Michael Bloomberg is that they’re successes, they’re “up,” or they were then. For that reason alone, they were valid targets. Trump was the absolute consummation of both snark and smarm, cynicism in theory and practice. The man was pure snark and pure smarm. Punching up and punching down has a huge advantage over traditional criticism. It is easy, and therefore efficient. “When I started the site posted about 40 items per day, and I was responsible for 12 of them,” Emily Gould wrote in a description of her early years at Gawker. If you are responsible for a dozen posts a day, you don’t have time to consider the merits of your subjects. You need a basic approach, and snark is basic. Snark doesn’t require, say, deciding on the quality of a piece of writing or unpacking the consequences of a policy. All you have to do is figure up who’s up and who’s down, and punch accordingly, as hard as you can. But who is up and who is down, as the past ten years have shown, is a question of perspective. The discourse of punching up and punching down began on the left: One should punch up at those above you in the structures of power not punch down at those below you in the structures of power. But the right has an extraordinary capacity to overtake, for its own ends, any rhetorical strategy created by the left, and with incredible speed. Fake news began as a way to describe Fox News. It soon became how Trump described The New York Times. The program of trying to force libraries to remove dangerous books began as progressive censorship for a better tomorrow through less distorted young minds. The right has taken the program over completely, eviscerating intellectual and academic institutions with the same justification from the other side. The most substantial failure of Scocca’s “On Smarm” is, oddly enough, its naivete. 4. “Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism. The practice of cynicism is smarm.” Scocca no doubt intended this as a vital distinction. He missed the obvious: Theory and practice are complementary. Trump was the absolute consummation of both snark and smarm, cynicism in theory and practice. The man was pure snark: He railed on the powers that be. He was pure smarm: He floated entirely free of substance in a constant state of self-uplift. He said that he knew the system was rigged because he used the rigging. He also understood that everybody thinks they’re down. Every last body. The number one correlate of voting for Trump in the 2016 election was being in a state of physical pain. The worse a community’s health, the more likely it voted for Trump. Trumpists reveled in snark. They called their victory celebrations deploraballs. They reveled in their opposition to “the performance of virtue.” It’s hard to think of a greater embodiment of smarm, as Scocca defines it, than Hilary Clinton. Recently, Dave Chappelle brought out Elon Musk to one of his comedy shows, and the crowd booed. Chappelle, the ultimate outsider comic, found himself defending the richest man on earth against the viciousness of the crowd. Who is snark and who is smarm in this scenario? Was the crowd performing virtue? Or was Chappelle justifying the world’s richest man by way of his own virtue? Who is “successful” in this matrix? It’s good to remember one of Saint Orwell’s less preachy maxims: “Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Snark is crude, intentionally so. The human experience is subtle, growing subtler. * There is a punk sensibility to “On Smarm,” a nostalgia for authenticity in an era completely overwhelmed by inauthenticity. It had that “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” energy. It was, in part, registering that the usual exchange between snark and smarm had been terminally disrupted by the 2008 crisis and the subsequent decline of legacy media. In the old days, there was a way to toggle profitably between snark and smarm: First you run Spy magazine then you run Vanity Fair. “I am everything I once despised,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Gawker. “When I was 25, I used to write these incredible snotty, hostile articles attacking big-name nonfiction journalists. Now I read them and I’m like ‘Oh my God, they’re doing a me on me!” Indeed, the pattern of attacking then being attacked goes back much farther. Snark is willed impotence; its origins are world-weariness and a sense of inevitable failure. Any capacity to change anything dissipates on contact with the world. “In literature young men usually begin their careers by being judges, and as wisdom and old experience arrive they reach the dignity of standing as culprits at the bar before new young bloods who have in their turn sprung up in the judgment-seat,” Thomas Hardy wrote in 1877. “On Smarm” didn’t ride these backroads because they had been closed off. It was authentically adolescent and anarchic in spirit because there was no longer a way to sell out. As such, “On Smarm” is one of the definitive essays of Generation X. Its motto may as well be the line from Richard Linklater quoted in REM’s “What’s the Frequency Kenneth?”: “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.” “On Smarm” reflects a generational failure. We shit all over the Boomers, and they deserve it. They left us in a mess. But it is also time to face the fact that we have been and are totally incapable of facing the challenge of our moment, intellectually, politically, stylistically. We hate the old values but we refuse to articulate others. We have withdrawn. You can blame our withdrawal on laziness or you can blame it on exhaustion. (The past ten years have been exhausting.) The result is the same. Snark is willed impotence; its origins are world-weariness and a sense of inevitable failure. Any capacity to change anything dissipates on contact with the world. Snark makes it impossible to run an institution. It hollows the power of criticism: Whether you’re punching up or punching down, however you define up or down, all you’re doing is punching. If you attack people simply because they’re successful, you’re letting them off the hook. Whether their actions are righteous, whether a policy is good or bad, whether their writing is good in and of itself doesn’t matter. You’re going to attack them because of who they are anyway. Ten years is long enough to learn that automatic negativity, like automatic positivity, is stupid because it’s automatic. “On Smarm” is the most refined, most articulate intellectual expression of the thumbsucking adolescent atavism of our cursed generation. It’s time to grow up from this high school who’s-mean-who’s-nice nonsense. The world doesn’t demand snark or smarm. The world, as always, demands clarity and compassion. ___________________________________ Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure is available from Biblioasis. Stephen Marche

The Enlightenment as reading project | David Wootton | The Critic Magazine

The Enlightenment as reading project | David Wootton | The Critic Magazine The Enlightenment as reading project thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2023/the-enlightenment-as-reading-project Alexander Lee15 February 2023 This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. “What is Enlightenment?” Kant’s 1784 answer to the question, that the Enlightenment “dares to know”, is famous and paradoxical. Enlightenment, he maintains, requires freedom of the press, but only an authoritarian regime can allow unchecked debate: thus the Prussia of Frederick the Great is the only state where people can “dare to know”. The Books that Made the European Enlightenment: A History in 12 Case Studies, Gary Kates (Bloomsbury, £75; pb £24.99) Above all, the freedom that matters to Kant is the freedom to question religious authorities on matters of faith. Kant’s Enlightenment thus strengthens secular authority in order to create the space required for a critique of religious authority. Enlightenment is inseparable from despotism. Gary Kates’s important book offers a new answer to Kant’s question by interrogating a dozen 18th century bestsellers, from Fenelon to Smith. The importance of the book can best be conveyed by comparing it to the work of two scholars who made their reputations in the 1970s: Robert Darnton and Quentin Skinner. Darnton mined the records of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) to understand the trade in illegal books from the inside. Out of this he wrote a fine book, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of pre-Revolutionary France (1995). Darnton’s study was based on one (admittedly important) publisher in the period 1769–1789, however. STN handled only 34 copies of Mme de Graffigny’s Letters of a Peruvian Woman (1747), which went through 95 editions, partly because after 1751 the book was legal in France, and they specialised in banned books. Kates thus extends his range beyond Darnton’s forbidden bestsellers: his authors are British as well as French (but not Italian, Dutch or German — Beccaria would seem the most obvious omission), and not all his books ran into trouble, even with the French authorities. Kates isn’t interested in getting Rousseau on the phone Darnton approached the history of the book through the publishing trade. Kates, by contrast, is a Trinitarian not a Unitarian. His history depends on giving almost equal weight to authors, publishers and readers. His books are written, printed and read: each element has to be given proper recognition. This brings us to his second important innovation. What is often called the Cambridge school of intellectual history, represented above all by Quentin Skinner, treats books as attempted acts of communication: the author says something which he intends the reader to understand. Obviously, if readers misunderstand, the natural thing for an author to do is set them straight. I remember, many years ago, sitting mystified through a seminar where the leading lights of English philosophy gathered in Oxford to discuss John Rawls’s newly published Theory of Justice. There was radical disagreement as to what Rawls meant to say. The answer seemed to me (a young Skinnerian) obvious: why not phone him up and ask him? Kates isn’t interested in getting Rousseau on the phone. Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of this book is to bring out how readings of these bestsellers differed between radicals and conservatives, Christians and pagans, shifting over time. Some of these books were obviously written to be open to divergent interpretations (Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, for example), but in the case of Letters of a Peruvian Woman publishers happily published revised texts giving the story the ending that readers wanted. The result of Kates’s trinitarian approach is that his book is not a history of ideas, nor book history, nor cultural history, nor a study in reception. It is, in parts, all of these, but much more than the sum of its parts. After all, authors and publishers are also readers; and readers, as they write letters and compile commonplace books, are also authors, not to mention the source of publishers’ profits. Only a Trinitarian approach can grasp the complexity of the book as written, printed and read. I hope no future historian of ideas will write about a book printed before the Industrial Revolution without asking how many copies were printed, how much they cost and who actually owned them. I think Kates’s fundamental perception, that the Enlightenment can be thought of as a programme of reading a set of books that writers and readers had in common, is sound. The figure who emerges as the most important representative of the Enlightenment on this approach is Montesquieu: his Persian Letters are presented as the model for Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters, Richardson’s Pamela and Graffigny’s Letters of a Peruvian Woman, whilst The Spirit of the Laws is taken to lie at the origin of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Rousseau’s Emile and Raynal’s History of the Two Indies. This is not Kant’s Enlightenment: none of these authors favour despotism. Nevertheless an obvious criticism of Kates’s book is that it is skewed away from the radicals: the book effectively stops in 1780, so no Godwin or Wollstonecraft. America is present only as a place where people read books, not where they wrote them, so no Common Sense. All Kates’s books were bestsellers, partly because they did not provoke too much hostility from the authorities, so no direct attacks on Christianity, no d’Holbach, no La Mettrie. We have Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters (1734), not his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Kant’s Enlightenment, which was above all an attack on religious doctrine, is visible here primarily in misreadings (as we might see them) — in the accusation, for example, that Montesquieu was a disciple of Spinoza. I write in praise of Kates, but he makes unforced errors Along with this skewing goes a failure (in common with much recent work, which stresses the collaboration between authors and censors in France) to understand the impact of French censorship. It’s not that Kates does not discuss its workings, but that he fails to appreciate its insidious effects. He discusses, for example, lending libraries at length, but fails to notice that there were none in France. One can only assume that this was because the books people would have wanted to borrow could not be legally distributed. “Enlightenment writers,” he claims, “expected any good government to police the press” — apparently he hasn’t read the publisher Elie Luzac’s important defence of unrestricted press freedom (1749), written to justify his printing of La Mettrie’s materialist L’homme machine. Strikingly, Kates’s approach breaks down in the chapter devoted to Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, where he has nothing to say about how readers responded to the book. He describes it as a unique example of a book successfully suppressed by the authorities, which “faded from the scene” after 1739. Yet books were being devoted to its refutation as late as the 1750s. If it was not reprinted after 1739, this is not because censorship succeeded, but because the book had no real unity beyond the praise of all things English. The chapter on Locke was outdated by Voltaire’s letter on the soul and La Mettrie’s Natural History of the Soul; the chapters on Newton by Voltaire’s own book on Newton; the discussion of Shakespeare by Voltaire’s own Shakespearean plays; and the claim that English literature should be taken seriously ceased to be interesting after the enormous success of Pamela and the rise of anglomanie. What continued to matter, right up until the publication of the Dictionnaire philosophique in 1764, was the critique of Pascal. I write in praise of Kates, but he makes unforced errors. The illustrations include mistaken “first editions” of the Lettres philosophiques and L’Esprit des loix. The Montesquieu is the pirated edition printed by Prault, in which the original publisher’s name, Barrillot, is misspelt. The first edition of Montesquieu’s defence of the Spirit of the Laws was not published by Barrillot in Geneva, and it was not a pamphlet of 62 pages: it was 207 pages long and printed in Paris. The Dublin edition of the Letters Concerning the English Nation and the first English printing of the Histoire de Charles XII were not set from manuscript. Voltaire insisted that two editions of Charles XII should be printed simultaneously, but the octavo edition is not “more substantial” than the duodecimo edition; it is exactly the same size but has half as many pages. Thus, despite being an octavo, it is a cut-price edition: which is why Jore, the printer, held it back until he had sold out of the duodecimo edition, by which time other, more attractive, editions were on sale. One can hardly blame Kates for not having held in his hands a copy of the 1731 octavo edition (there are only two copies known, one of which is on my desk as I write); but the unsold sheets were reissued as “second” and “third” editions, copies of which are easy to find. It would be wrong to end on a critical note. Scholars will have much to learn from this book; more importantly, it now represents the best introduction to the Enlightenment. It also (quietly) provides an effective refutation of the widespread postmodern belief that the Enlightenment stands for imperialism, patriarchy and cold-blooded, scientific rationalism. It is already available as a reasonably priced paperback, the modern equivalent of a cheap duodecimo.