This book is a history of mechanical printing from the original Gutenberg invention in 1450 through all the various forms of printing and the institutions to which it gave rise — mass market books, newspapers, pamphlets (political, religious, and otherwise), business forms, not to mention more—if not entirely—standardized written languages, and so on. All of this took time. We became fully emersed in the parentheses when print entirely supplanted scribes—by around 1550—the first institution to be wiped out by the new technology.
In Mr. Jarvis’ opinion, we are now leaving Gutenberg behind. The parentheses are closing. Why? What has changed? Two things. First, what characterized the Gutenberg era was that word impressions were transferred to paper using ink in one way or another. Second, while there came to be many printers, not everybody could become a printer, and eventually, most (never all) printing became consolidated behind large corporate entities that ultimately controlled content. Even where electronics became part of the process (sending photos and text stories by telephone, telegraph, and so on), at the end of the line, again, ink met paper. Mr. Jarvis claims that with the invention of the Web (1992-4), we entered a new era in which communication, text or otherwise, is no longer conveyed by ink on paper. Also, everyone (those with Internet connections) can be a producer in the new era. The mass conveyance of authorial output is no longer dependent on controlling institutions like publishers.
The author believes and advances the argument that the internet age is already eroding what went before (newspapers are being wiped out, for example) while new, emerging institutions—NextDooor?—are beginning to replace it. The reason for replacement is not the same. Printing was much faster than scribes. Except for the loss of some artistic merit to transcribing by hand, Print’s efficiency was what mattered. In the Internet age, newspapers are being wiped out not because the Internet is more efficient but because advertising—which did not exist until 150 years after Gutenberg—has moved over to the Internet, depriving the papers of the income needed to print.
Jarvis believes we are roughly where Guttenberg was thirty years after his invention. He fails to account for technology’s accelerated timelines. We are more like 100 or even 150 years on compared to Gutenberg. That still leaves a long way to go. The institutions that printing spawned did not fully emerge until some 400 years after Gutenberg. New institutions will undoubtedly emerge from the Internet. Some have already been tried and found wanting. The hypertext novel doesn’t work because it is too distracting. The Internet suffers from a problem inverse to the limitations of print: trading limited access to publishing technology for such easy access that the sheer number of voices drowns any one of them out.
Surely, Jarvis is right that there is still more change to come, and we cannot anticipate its details. Printing wiped out the scribe. The Internet will not wipe out the printing business, though it will (and has already) skewed its economics. Ebooks on backlit devices tire the eye faster than paper and ink. Kindles are exceptions, but they also require electricity. Jarvis thinks (implicitly) that electricity will be around forever. Pages printed on cotton rag paper can be read for hundreds (and more) of years. Even quality (wood-based) “acid paper” (not newsprint) will last one hundred years or more. If electricity disappears with modern civilization’s climatological, ecological, and economic unraveling, the Internet and everything written upon it will disappear. More than half of what has been written on the net since 1994 is already gone forever. Technology will not be of much help. Bits can be “permanently” stored on tape or other technologies for ten or even a hundred years. There will soon be “glass storage” technologies that will hold terabytes of data for thousands of years on something about the size of a credit card. Still, access will require electricity (not to mention other advanced technology). Contrastingly, printing the old mechanical way (a la Gutenberg) requires no electricity and only fifteenth-century technology.
Jarvis’ book is a well-written history of printing, often reminding us that books were and are only a part—relatively small—of printing’s products. He is also undoubtedly right that the net will engender new institutions even if it doesn’t entirely eclipse the old, as Gutenberg’s invention did the scribes. Alas, that evolution depends on sustaining our present, highly technological (and for many reasons unsustainable) civilization long enough to serve that gestation.
I write this little review for the sake of my #writer friends on X (formerly Twitter) and because it was a nice book pointing to many helpful writing notions. There are a lot of chapters, but they are all brief. The author’s aim seems to be a general overview of the writing forest, beginning with its soil and nutrients (letters and words), progressing to its more significant structures, tree types, and forest ecology (sentences, paragraphs, dialog, metaphor, and theme). How do you like my forest metaphor?
Clark literally begins with the letters A, B, C, etc. In particular, how some letters have come to function in English. He moves to words: simple words, more complex words, some history, and some observations of their impact, hard, soft, ambivalent, etc. He admonishes writers to watch their spelling. From words, we move to punctuation and sentences. Punctuation books are mostly dull, but not this one. Clark taught me nuances in using commas versus semi-colons or M-dash versus parentheses, which I hadn’t considered before. It turns out that setting off an independent clause is not the only possibility for the lowly semi-colon!
Sentences and paragraphs are the center of the business. Many forms serve particular purposes… Chains of short words are dramatic and hurried. Longer words strung together suggest slower moods. He addresses consistent usage of active and passive voice, present and past tense, uses and abuses of alliteration, and a little about authorial point of view. I like his attitude. Rules are general principles of good usage, but when you show that you know them, you can break them when there is a literary purpose for the exception.
Finally, moving from the soil to the treetops, he looks at the forest from the sky and comments on thematic consistency, metaphor, and the application of all that has gone before to a thread that ties the writing together.
There are a lot of chapters, but as noted above, they are all short, two or three pages. All of Clark’s many subjects are presented on a high level. There are interesting acorns—using my forest metaphor to tie my theme together—everywhere. Whether a writer or an inveterate reader, this little book has insights to be found.
Published in 1933, I do not seriously presume to review this classic. I will briefly summarize salient themes and relate some of what Huxley says to my novels. Full disclosure: such a review and linking as this is purely for fun. My novels are not in the same league as Huxley’s. I make no claim to profundity.
WARNING! SPOILER ALERT
I begin at the end because the connection to my work is at the beginning. The “savage” commits suicide because, among other things, he cannot reconcile his [perfectly normal] youthful lust for an attractive young woman—who makes plain her desire for him—and his austere upbringing outside the brave new world. His mother, who came from the new world but became trapped in the savage land when she was pregnant (by a new-worlder), craves a return to the new world. When she finally returns with her son (now a young man), she cannot handle the culture shock compounded by the social opprobrium of new world denizens for her having gotten—and looking—old. She also kills herself, albeit more slowly. In the new world, both she and her son are freaks.
In Huxley’s new world, nobody is ever [supposed to be] unhappy, and the powers that be achieve this in three ways:
First, individuals are literally bred and conditioned through their childhood to fulfill specific social and industrial roles. One often hears the adage: “Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.” In the new world, people are made to love what they are born to do.
Second, drugs, Soma, the fictional drug of the new world that provides temporary ecstasy and escape from the real world, is not, apparently, harmful over the long term unless taken too often and without some recovery time—this is how the savage’s mother kills herself. Everybody has access to this drug.
The third way is sex. There is no stigma to casual sex in the new world; indeed, all sex is casual. No one marries, and women are not supposed to have babies—Literal bottles make babies (remember this published in 1933). To be sure, sex is consensual on both sides. Men and women can invite sex, and either party can refuse or accept invitations.
There are a few things to note about the sex. Power plays are going on. Handsome men and beautiful women are, of course, favored, but there is also a dynamic in which more powerful men, higher up the management hierarchy, have an advantage when inviting women to bed. Lower-order women often accept invitations from such men because the men are in a position to help them along a [limited] career path or give gifts. But as one might expect, such sex does not always make the woman happy. Lenine takes Soma to get past the sex when she sleeps with her supervisor-lover.
As an aside, Huxley here exhibits some chauvinism. Even in Huxley’s new world, the women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. Why? Surely, vasectomies were available in Huxley’s day? Why weren’t all male children vasectomized, or for that matter, why not alter the invitro gestations so that everyone—or at least all of one sex—is born sterile? The story precluded such a solution. At least one woman, the mother of the savage, had to become pregnant.
Before getting to the connection to my work, I note a few things about Huxley’s vision. He was wrong about the future of flying cars, but he predicted our present throwaway culture in which old things are easily discarded and exchanged for new things. To some extent, this was—for Huxley—a cultural phenomenon as it is for us. Also, like us, on the macro-economic level, the steady acquisition of new items keeps the wheels of industry and the economy working.
Huxley’s insight is built into Capitalism as we have it. He did not invent this idea (it goes back to Marx and Engles), and his new world elides the ecological and climatological problems occasioned by our conspicuous consumption—problems already, albeit tentatively, appreciated by the scientists of the 1930s. He correctly predicted that conspicuous consumption would grow way beyond what was already manifest in his time.
I now return to the connection between Brave New World and my novels, a connection that runs through sex.
There are sex-related geopolitical implications in all of my novels. In the first novel, Foreign Agent, the Chinese plan to disrupt American social and political life by introducing genetically modified men and women who can deliver much more powerful peak sexual experiences than ordinary humans. In the second novel, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, space aliens propose to pacify humanity’s militant inclinations with more and better sex than anyone—well, few anyway—is presently having. In Cult of Aten, novel number three, worldwide good sex precipitates international chaos because in many [actual] countries, sex, other than the minimum required to produce tax-paying citizens from a marriage explicitly sanctioned by the State, is literally illegal! In Indonesia, sex outside the bounds of a conventional marriage is a capital crime! In novel number four, LoveMe Inc., we discover that radically conservative women are conservative because they aren’t having sufficient—or any—orgasms!
In Brave New World, Huxley illustrates his new world’s failure to deliver endless happiness through a sexual union made, on the woman’s part, from habit, not desire—like much sex in the real world. Huxley’s mistake was failing to distinguish sex from good sex, especially for women. Like accidental pregnancy, this is a plot demand for Huxley. It does not burden my stories.
Does this mean I believe that good sex alone is the solution to the world’s strife? Of course not! My novels are ridiculous, clumsy satires, while Huxley’s, if not a masterpiece, has demonstrated staying power in the canon of English socio-political satire. But if good sex alone was not sufficient to cure the world’s ills, it would, I believe, make some difference. People would be happier, and happier people are more tolerant of others’ differences. No novel, however masterful, addresses everything required for human happiness, let alone global peace and prosperity. All art is an interpretation, some more faithful to perceived reality than others.
Brave New World is not faithful to reality except in its anticipation of conspicuous consumerism, cross-cultural psycho-social shock, and bigotry—the last two the ultimate themes of the story. Like Huxley, my novels are socio-political satires, but the first three anticipate nothing. The fourth novel does make use of a real phenomenon. Orgasms activate brain centers related to tolerance and compassion—The novel cites actual research. But I leverage this objective observation to absurd levels. In my hands, it is not a prescient theme but a plot point.
Huxley’s themes speak to real life. His satire is filled with irony, pathos, poignancy, loneliness, and false happiness. He is not, however, funny. Huxley’s world is ridiculous and physically impossible, but it serves as a stage for human social and psychological reality. The political nature of my satire is unmistakable, but my world is ridiculous not because of any physical impossibility but rather its psycho-social absurdity. Orgasms do not, alas, turn Republican women into Democrats! Would that it be so! Huxley’s characters react realistically to their world. My characters react unrealistically to our world. But for this reason, and unlike Huxley, my novels are funny!
Pure history, 1570 through 1680, mostly of Europe, though Blom touches on the rest of the world from time to time. Why Europe? Because the records are the most extensive. Why those dates? Because they are the coldest (with some exceptional outliers before and after) period of the “Little Ice Age,” and it is that period, and the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that occurred during that century, largely compelled by the cold, that this book is about.
Earth scientists call the five centuries between 1300 to 1800 C.E. the “Little Ice Age.” At the beginning of this period, the Earth began to cool, reaching its lowest temperature, 2C below the 1300 average around 1570, and remaining there until 1680 or so when it began slowly to warm back to pre-1300 levels reaching them in the mid-1850s—Note that this is fifty years after the beginning of the industrial revolution. There have been other coolings in the not-to-distant past. The Earth’s northern hemisphere became unusually cold from 535 to around 545 C.E., but this shorter (10-year) cooling can be traced directly to large Icelandic volcanic eruptions. No one quite knows what factors contributed to the much longer cool period beginning in 1300.
So what happened? Well, for one thing, the weather changed. More storms, more droughts, much colder summers. Crops could not grow properly in foreshortened growing seasons; fruits would not ripen. In short, people starved. The result, over the first two generations of the coldest period, was a revolution in economics, trade, and agriculture that saw small subsistence farming converted into much larger, more efficient farming that provided for storage of excess product in good years (there were some) and trade in the bad ones. Such changes proceeded at different rates in different parts of Europe. Some of this difference was driven by political and religious ideology (Spain and Italy were more conservative than England or Scandinavia) and partly by climate. Spain was colder than usual but not as cold as Denmark.
There was also a revolution in thinking supported by the availability of books, thanks to Guttenberg. The foundations of “The Enlightenment” were laid in this period. Blom spends much of the book describing the thinking and the thinkers of this period and, in particular, their new-found ability to move around the continent, relocating to places where their thinking was better appreciated. This was the beginning of modern science and political philosophy. Blom asserts that all of these changes were more or less directly (economics and politics) or indirectly (philosophy, nascent science) tied to the cold.
Ending the book, Blom asks what the Little Ice Age can teach us about our present issues with climate change. Alas, there isn’t much it can teach us except that we should prepare for a long bout with geophysical changes (and their effects like reduction in food production, pandemics, and wars) that will surely cause a complete rearrangement of global civilization, including the likely (Blom doesn’t say this but read between the lines) collapse of the present world order. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was right in the middle of the cold.
Alas, our situation is very different, something Blom mentions but does not elaborate. In the Little Ice Age, sea levels dropped a bit, something easier to deal with than our present situation. Moreover, our present situation is a result of our activity. There were not enough humans on Earth to have greatly impacted the global climate. Lastly, in the past, the climate changed and then changed back. It isn’t going to change back this time. Even should humans, or at least their industrial activity, be extinguished, and the population shrinks to where it was in 1600 or earlier, the climate will not “change back” for possibly thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. See my review of The Uninhabitable Earth.
This was a somewhat disappointing book. Amitay Ghosh is an Indian novelist. His contention in this nonfiction work is that novelists, more specifically writers of “serious literary fiction” (compared, say, to science fiction), are not taking on or dealing with the challenge of climate change. Why? Ghosh gives a few related reasons. They come down to the modern novel’s focus on character and its—his, hers, or theirs—interaction with the world, usually leading to some triumph of the human spirit. In other words, the humans of modern novels control (more or less and sometimes imperfectly) their destinies in spite of what the world throws at them. We moderns are (so novels would have us believe) largely responsible for the character of our lives. Climate change, Ghosh believes, has, or will, put paid to this notion (which is true), but serious novelists have not caught up. Serious novelists are still writing novels in which humans, for good or ill, are in control or end up in control.
Ghosh spends much of the book connecting the modern novel to the “industrial age,” in other words, to the world’s carbon economy. He does a good job tracing this parallel evolution, particularly as it unfolded in India, but not ignoring the rest of the world. The problem is that this connection is indirect. It is a coincidence not because the modern novel—not to mention the novelist—is independent of the carbon economy but in the sense that the carbon economy is responsible for modernity in general, and the modern novel, the “we are in control” trope, is merely one expression of modernity like everything else.
But there is more coincidence here. There are many modern literary novels whose story occurs in the context, say, of big wars. Now, wars are caused by humans living now (or when the war happens), while climate change is the result of human activity over the past 275-plus years—and more especially the last 100 years. From a literary viewpoint, what big war has in common with climate change is that modern character-oriented stories cannot encompass the whole of it, instead focusing on the effect of the over-arching event on the smaller events of individual people’s lives. Like war events, climate events are discrete.
But there is also a difference between big war and climate change. People, governments, have control over big wars in that they can and do eventually stop them, if only for a time. No one alive today, in 2025, nor anyone who lives through the next ten generations is going to block the oncoming impact (in discrete events—more floods, droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, etc) of climate change! Indeed if we ceased human production of atmospheric carbon tomorrow, the worldwide climate—cascades like melting permafrost and enormous annual forest fires having already been triggered—would continue to grow more inimical to human life for the next thousand years (see The Uninhabitable Earth by Wallace-Wells)!
The “out of context” problematic nature of climate change (compared, say, to war) is some part of Ghosh’s point. It isn’t that the modern novelist cannot write poignant stories about people living through climate-driven excessive heat, or floods, or what-have-you. Grapes of Wrath is nothing if not that. The problem is, I think that a hypothetical climate-change-driven novelist cannot end the novel on a note implying mankind (instantiated in the novel’s characters) still has some control over his physical environment. If the novel is to be written for or about this time—the first half of the twenty-first century—the characters involved might make spiritual, moral, or intellectual progress. But against the weather, the atmosphere, and oceans, the characters must, in the end, be crushed.
What is a novelist to do? Ghosh never tells us, even tentatively. It’s the one thing I was looking for in the book. If, as I assert, modern novelists can write such novels, then why aren’t they? Ghosh’s final position on this question seems to be that they haven’t broken free of the human-ultimatly-in-control trope. Perhaps he is right about this, but surely there are some serious modern novelists who are willing to cite climate change along with human stupidity, develop sympathetic characters, and then kill everybody off. Kurt Vonnegut’s Glapagos comes to mind.
What, as a writer, could I do? Could a modern novel encompass climate change in the abstract? What would such a novel look like? It might be more like The Odyssey than a modern novel. Characters might develop over volumes as some intrepid band navigates the globe, encountering one disastrous effect of climate change after another. In each place, some climate-related effect is responsible for the death of one or more members of the group. In the end, the last member must also die—symbolic of the inevitable future collapse of our present civilization—and not too distant a future at that. The project is too big a bite for me, but perhaps Ghosh might give it a go.
LoveMe Inc. is Matthew Rapaport’s fourth novel, a new story in a new place, with new characters, including the narrator (also Matthew), who is but thirty-eight years old. Ah to be young again… And yet, despite it’s narrative separation from the person of the author, Matthew manages to contrive some marketing for himself and his particular skills.
The story begins ambiguously in the summer/fall of 2027. Matthew, a programmer and statistical analyst, is contacted by a libido-endowed artificial intelligence (AI) and leads him into the employ of Dr. Pamela Parker (who researches psycho-sexual pathologies in women) and her post-grad student Lakshmi Tripathi. When the book opens, Matthew has already seduced and fucked six of Dr. Parker’s patients—I’m drifting into spoiler country here! No sex is portrayed in this part of the narrative, but his “bad boy” behavior comes back to bite him (and not in the good way).
Together the three of them, along with the AI, discover that certain women can be politically liberalized by orgasms. Between them, and soon more characters come into play, plots are hatched to help sway the national election of 2028, which the Republicans—having, as we know, won in 2024 by disinformation-appeal to an undereducated electorate—plan to fix so that electoral politics in America is ended once and for all.
There are multiple twists in this plot. AI is at the center of most of them. To tell you anything would commit major spoilers. Here is a minor one: how does Matthew Rapaport market himself? The full answer has two parts, but I’m only going to reveal one. His three novels (Foreign Agent, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, and Cult of Aten) are the last three novels in the training corpus of the libidinous AI! Of the second, I will only say that it is one of the novel’s tragedies.
Mr. Rapaport is surely honing his craft. This is the most complex of his novels thus far, and except for a limited amount of gratuitous sex—90% of all the sex being softcore—the action all connects up sensibly. Moreover, there are no hanging threads needing resolution in epilogs. Mr. Rapaport ends this one properly!
Liberalism combined with modern democratic government is the only socio-political philosophy that builds and maintains a happy society in the long run. The basic idea is that the locus of cultural and political choice lies with the individual, not the group. Fukuyama makes clear that this freedom of the individual cannot become license. There must be some commonly accepted behavioral boundaries, roughly captured by the notion that I am free to swing my fist until it makes contact with your nose.
Fukuyama uses most of the book to explore alternatives to liberalism: Communism, Fascism, neo-liberalism, pointing at Libertarianism, and identity politics. One by one, he shows how these alternatives (combined with human nature) always lead to political and economic unfairness greater than that of democratic liberalism, democracy–the vote–adding the dimension of political choice.
He then explores criticisms of “true liberalism” itself, for example, its insistence on tolerance of widely diverging cultural norms and possible violation of religious or nationalistic prescriptions or proscriptions. These might help establish cultural norms of behavior but may just as easily discourage tolerance of differences. Without something to be shared—Fukuyama cites nationalism as one, albeit dangerous, possibility—the polity is ultimately pulled in so many directions that policy gridlock ensues.
Of course, all of this is theoretical. The U.S. is no longer entirely “democratic,” and what aspired to be reasonably liberal in the post-WWII generation is now divided, socially, culturally, politically, and even economically, into blocks that see competition between themselves and others as a zero-sum game.
Neither liberalism nor democracy can persist in the face of an insufficiently educated public. If the education system permits a generation to forget the horrors perpetrated by attempts at systems other than liberal democracies, the next generation—dissatisfied with the difficult choices liberalism forces on the individual—will think to attempt them again. Even worse, an education system that leaves basic facts (scientific and historical) in doubt breaks apart the last atoms of common ground the polity possesses.
I have said elsewhere that a fully tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance at the risk of its tolerance being politically undercut. The U.S.’s tolerance of intolerance had led us down the populist path thanks to education’s failure noted above. Fukuyama’s apology for classical liberalism is right on the mark as far as I am concerned, but then, I’m an educated individualist who gets along with his fellow man! Too many now fail at one test or the other.
In the not-to-distant past, we were, perhaps, a bit closer to the educated-liberal polity ideal. Of course, we were never entirely there—the “good old days” were never wholly good. Distortions have always existed—selfish individuals who would leverage the non-liberal to their own political or economic advantage, further distorting the system—and under those conditions, when society tolerates outright intolerance of others for political, racial, or sexual reasons and historical education fails, the liberal order is quickly eroded. We are living the process now.
Author’s note: As of December 2024, I am no longer posting reviews of my non-fiction reading on Amazon (see this for more information). I will continue to post reviews here, and in addition, instead of posting the original [Amazon] review preceded by my extra comments, I will review with integrated extra comments.
A superb review not only of conspiracy theories but also of the psychological and now political phenomenon of conspiracism, the inclination to believe broadly in conspiracies. Belief in broad fantastical conspiracies has been around for a long time. Dr. Konda takes us through some history, starting in Europe but then quickly moving to the U.S., which has, it seems, been conspiracy-addled since its founding.
Konda takes us through the broad conspirational ideas, the hidden hand conspiracies of the Illuminati, Jews, bankers (often Jewish bankers), and so on, down to more modern variations, like the anti-vaccine crowd, climate change denialism, Kennedy assassination conspiracies, the “9-11 truther movement,” and so on. Some of these ideas—fake moon landings, flat Earth—are harmless in themselves, while others—mistrust and misunderstanding of science in general or the illegitimacy of the Federal Government—are potentially very dangerous—psychologically, socially, and politically.
Konda leaves us embedded in the modern problem. Despite conspiracism’s long U.S. history, it is surprising that so little government economic and social policy was impacted by it—until the present century. The rise of social media—cheap international communications direct to the individual—has greatly increased the reach and danger of the conspiracist landscape.
How have we come to this sorry state? The bottom line seems to be a failure of American education, a crucial lack of civics and critical thinking. Ironically, the present educational environment is reinforced by a generation of conspiracists who now comprise a large part of the government. Civics is “socialism”, and critical thinking is “wokeism,” and so on.
I make only one small critical point. The book was published in 2019, and there is no mention of QAnon, a conspiracy consolidator and clearing house—capturing everyone’s social media attention—appearing on the scene in 2017. Konda is too thorough to have missed this. The book was likely finished before QAnon’s emergence, and the publisher responsible for the two-year delay.
An excellent and frankly frightening read not nearly as long as it appears—almost half of it is end notes: hundreds of books, articles, and websites. If you are looking for the roots of present-day conspiracism or have concerns about its present political implications and force, this is a good source.
This is a book about a socio-economic bubble. Like economic bubbles, when they pop, political, financial, and social chaos can ensue. Unlike economic bubbles, which always seem to grow larger than common sense should allow but from which nations usually recover, this bubble often, though not always, results in the collapse of the country or civilization involved. I have briefly covered Turchin’s theory in my Amazon review (attached below).
There are ten “planetary boundaries” which, if crossed—and we have crossed six or seven—will certainly doom our present industrial civilization and possibly human life. Briefly, the ten are:
Ocean acidification — Even now impacting our food chain.
Ocean and freshwater deoxygenation — Occurring at an alarming rate planet-wide.
Atmospheric aerosol loading — particles (smoke from forest fires, anyone?) pumped into the atmosphere. Many sources.
Biochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus) — from farming and other sources. One cause of deoxygenation in bodies of water.
Stratospheric ozone depletion — we beat this one. Now it’s back.
Biosphere integrity – biodiversity loss – collapse of the food chain — already underway.
Fresh water resource stress and loss — Whole nations—India, for example—are running out of water.
Deforestation and other land-use problems contribute to the collapse of the biosphere.
Novel entities – Land and water pollution — heavy metals, plastics, non-biological wastes.
Climate change — the big kahuna! Impinges on all of the above.
What do these ten items have to do with Dr. Turchin’s socio-economic theory? Among other things, Dr. Turchin tells us that external factors like hostile nations, wars, and stresses like the ten listed above—all having economic implications—act to make collapse triggered by the socio-economic cycle he describes more likely.
According to Dr. Turchin, the United States came close to a collapse into populist autocracy following the Depression of 1929 thanks to the same dynamics—stagnant wages leading to the immiseration of the working class, a gigantic wealth gap, and the overproduction of elites. Franklin Roosevelt’s election and policies—taxing the rich and using the money to build real public assets—pulled us back from the brink. Ironically, World War II gave his policies an unexpected lift, and the good they did helped the nation coast through mostly good economic times for over thirty years following the war.
But things began to turn downwards again in the mid-1970s. Working-class wages stagnated, and taxes on the rich were reduced to the extent that overproduction of the elite class and an enormous wealth gap were inevitable. In Roosevelt’s time, the American Congress was not as fully captured by the monied elites as it is today, and perhaps even more significantly, planetary physical systems had not crossed any of the ten planetary boundaries listed above.
In the 1910s, there was, in fact, an interconnected, globalized world, albeit with a lower bandwidth than in our present. An Englishman in Bristol could pick up a telephone and order cigars from India with a reasonable expectation of delivery—though not in two days. World War I put an end to that early version of globalization. Since World War II, it has reassembled itself, this time at a far more frenetic and energy-intensive pace.
There was a crisis of asset prices in the 2007-10 financial meltdown that might have ended us. In the U.S., Obama’s policies ended it, but not like Roosevelt! Roosevelt took money from the rich and built tangible assets—dams, electric grids, highways, etc. Obama didn’t touch the rich, but re-inflated asset prices (mostly homes and the stock market) on internationally borrowed money. See “Ages of American Capitalism” by Johnathan Levy for more. Rather than correcting the excesses, Obama increased them by making room, in Turchin’s terms, for more elite overproduction.
The Trump presidency made matters worse by increasing U.S. debt to over one hundred percent of our gross national product for the first time. The COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the Biden administration to do more borrowing, was—and still is—another stress bearing on Truchin’s thesis. Today, the U.S. is embroiled in two wars (Ukraine and the Middle East), a quasi-war with China, and trying to deal with ever-ballooning bills for weather-related disaster relief. It is not unreasonable to imagine that the election of Donald Trump in 2024 could be the spark that brings to its end four hundred years of “Western civilization” since the Enlightenment. If I read Turchin and the world situation correctly (have I ever? We shall see), and as I’ve said for years now, this time civilization, such as it is, and sooner rather than later, doomed.
A well-written, high-level analysis of why societies—throughout history—cycle between growth and strength and then weakness and [potential] collapse. Often, the heights and depths to which these cyclic ends go are determined by factors like climate, geopolitical environment, institutional resilience, and the character of individual leaders. But the cycles themselves are the result of an impersonal and shifting movement of wealth within any given society, and this seems to be true of every culture the author could study going back to ancient Rome, China, Europe, and the U.S., from roughly 1600 to today is the focus.
Turchin calls his method Cliodynamics (‘clio’ ancient Greek for history). It involves the collection and cataloging of vast troves of historical data and systematic analysis of that collection using models tuned by taking the data of social growth and decay (for example, from 1500 through 1850) and then running the models through to the present to see how well they predict what we already know to have happened.
Three short appendices describe the process in non-mathematical terms. The bulk of the book, its first half, reviews the results of the cliodynamic investigation for our present time. The short of it is that we—the U.S. (Turchin’s main focus) and much of the world—are at a cliff’s edge, and the cliff is unstable and about to crumble, hence the book’s title.
There is the immiseration of the larger—laboring or unemployed—population. This means that wages are falling in real terms from decade to decade. Salaries do not cover the cost of living, often with two working adults in the household. At the other end of the economic pyramid are the economic elite, in today’s terms, the billionaires. Because they control so much of the total capital, they can dictate the economics of the laboring class. Government labor policy is heavily influenced, even outrightly purchased, by their money. To the extent that it controls coercive power, the government itself is a facet of the elite. In between the immiserated and the elite is an educated (in the technical sense) technocratic class and a group (call them the entrepreneurs), even better educated, who aspire to become elites.
Instability arises because there is room economically for only so many elites. Eventually, so much wealth concentrates in elite hands that the immiserated starve, depriving the elites of even low-cost labor. This isn’t good for anyone, so more frequently, some of the elite aspirants become counter-elites. They become the opposition, populists, and revolutionaries. They have the organizational and political skills to utilize starving labor as muscle in the business of overthrowing the system and establishing themselves as the new elite class.
Every culture and every time will vary in detail. How the revolution fares depends on the coordination of the masses, the unity of the elites in response to the challenge, and factors external to all. In the 1920s- 30s (U.S.), the then government was strong enough to force the elites to reduce their numbers (via taxes) and pay to alleviate the impoverishment of the laboring class. From the 1940s through the 1970s, wages grew in real terms. There were fewer of the truly impoverished. A large middle class arose.
So what happened? The middle class invested in the education of its children, resulting in an explosion of elite aspirants! At first, there was room at the top. There was money to be wrung out of the labor pool. Eventually, labor was immiserated again, and the elite ranks became overcrowded. New counter-elites arise, and the cycle begins again.
This is the oscillation Turchin describes. His version is more nuanced and sprinkled with historical examples that mark the various cyclic turnings. I hope I am not being unfair to Turchin. I’ve read and reviewed six or eight books on the theme of why nations fail, or why a particular nation failed, or the present day’s economic predicament, or the roots of Trumpist populism in America, and so on. End Times is consistent with all of them and gives the reader a bird’s eye view of a larger process rooted in economics and human psychology—humans are greedy. They want what is best for their families and class (though, to be sure, sometimes they do not understand what that comes out to in the short term). That leads to an inherently unstable competitive dynamic because the point at which the elite class becomes numerically saturated and the point at which that fact is recognized can be a generation apart.
As I noted above, the details and time frame vary considerably from place to place and age to age. Much depends on factors in both the internal and external environment of the society under study. Turchin gets into all of this, the what, how, and why of the process. An excellent read for anyone interested in the cycles of history and power politics.
My review of Sheild of Achilles is linked here. Garments of Court and Palace is an examination of the first of the transitions (from the feudal order of the European Middle Ages to the “Princely State”) that took place (in Europe) in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
My purpose in this essay is to examine Bobbitt’s projection—in the epilogue to this book—of the next, presently occurring evolution in statehood from “Nation-State” to “Market State.”
Bobbitt tells us a State, of whatever kind, must draw legitimacy from the people living in it by serving “the common good” of the people living within it (or at least that those people perceive their good to be served). What “common good” means, what percentage of the State’s citizens must believe they are being so served, and in what way (something that surely varies with the times and the politics of any particular State), Bobbitt does not say.
In the last chapters of his Achilles book, Bobbitt sketches three broad types or variations on the market state theme, using the U.S., China, and Western Europe as examples. In Garments, his purpose is merely to remind us that the market state is the next chapter in the present evolution of political organizations. But he does say a few things about it.
He tells us that as the present nation-state secured its legitimacy by providing services (electricity, water, education, security, medical care in much of the world”) and thus fostering “the common good,” the market state will legitimize itself by providing opportunity and choice. Opportunity means the market state does not care if you are black, white, gay, straight, or anywhere in between. So long as you have the education, skill, and desire to serve in a presently required—worth remuneration—role, you will have a job.
He makes two problematic observations:
In a market state, the “wealth gap” will naturally widen as some are better able to take advantage of available opportunities.
The media (and he means all types: TV, newspapers, social media) will assume the role of watchdog over the doings of the market and its players.
Some wealth gap will exist in any economy that the government does not strictly control, in which case the executive splits such wealth as may exist. However, recent history has taught us that the extreme gap manifesting in the U.S. and Western Europe is corrosive to social cohesion. Nothing about our present situation supports the “common good” unless that is perversely defined as the top one or two percent of the wealthiest people in the nation. In End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Peter Turchin, 2023), the author cites historical data going back thousands of years, points to an excessive wealth gap as one of the main progenitors of socio-political turmoil and usually,, collapse. I will undoubtedly review that book when I’ve completed it.
If capitalists really wanted, for example, to improve their own productivity twenty years on, they would, among other things, generously fund education. But twenty years (most corporations do not survive even that long) is far too long a horizon for corporations competing in the market for investors who want, naturally enough, to maximize their gains today, or at most in a very few years.
If capitalists paid all of their employees a living wage, invested in education, and at least slowed the adoption of labor-replacing technology, giving people time to adapt, that would foster the common good. However, with rare and minor exceptions, corporations have not taken this course—unless forced by the government or unions—in the history of capitalist markets.
More is to be said about this, but I do not want to belabor the point. The short and sweet of it is that I cannot find any plausible interpretation of “the common good” that could, in the long term, be satisfied by the present market paradigm.
Even if a market state would not be particularly good for most people, Bobbitt can well be correct in that we (the world’s advanced industrial nations) are transitioning into versions of it. His analysis was prefigured by the movie Rollerball in 1975—even the greatest of philosophers “stand on the shoulders of giants.” (Isaac Newton 1675)! Bobbitt does, however, make a correlated prediction that appears to have been falsified. He tells us that “the media” (social media included) will operate as a check on the market’s participants—corporate and individual.
In this 2012 book, he was aware that local newspapers were disappearing all over the U.S. Twelve years later, this trend has accelerated. Why? Because all these little news outlets are owned by three of four gigantic corporations (who also own local and national TV and big-market papers), the little papers, in particular, are not profitable. Since profit is the ultimate aim of the market, they’ve got to go. It is possible, in 2012, that Bobbitt thought evolving social media would compensate for this local news extinction, but it does not. In 2012, the public was, by and large, unaware of social media’s capacity for convincing and indiscriminate disinformation and propaganda, something that came—to Americans anyway—as rather a shock in 2016-17 and has become far worse since then.
Far from being checks on corporate shenanigans, the media are quickly being transformed into shills! From the viewpoint of markets, this makes perfect sense. There is more profit to be made if everyone speaks highly of you. This across-the-board trend in media is another piece of evidence that “the common good” is not an objective at which the market aims.
Lastly, I want to say something about China and the intrinsically international nature of market states. In Shield of Achilles (2002), Bobbitt cites China as an example of one sort of evolving market state. In 2012, when he wrote Garments, it was possible to believe that China would continue on this trajectory. In 2024, it is moving back toward a centrally planned economy. Bobbitt is smart enough to know that geopolitical evolution is not a straight line, and some backsliding cannot be uncommon. But he does not tell us how long before a temporary reversal becomes a different direction altogether, nor what happens, globally, when a major pole of the evolving system reverses course.
If a belligerent nation reverses course for the sake of military adventurism—as China appears to be doing for the sake of Taiwan and the South China Sea—can the other major, still evolving, nation states just permit that evolution to continue naturally? Are market states as efficient as nation states in providing for their defense—of crucial importance and Machievelli’s primary concern? Can a substantial military that always costs more (in its totality) than any individual corporate profits made by equipping it, be supported in a fully formed market state? I’ll leave such questions for my readers.
In 2002, Philip Bobbitt published The Sheild of Achilles, in which he traces the European evolution—from the feudal order of the fourteenth century—of the modern “nation-state” through prior phases, roughly every one hundred to two hundred years. Garments is a book about the times of the first of these changes, the appearance of the “princely state,” and in particular one man’s perception and foreshadowing of it.
Besides explaining Machiavelli’s “The Prince” (which Bobbitt tells us was the name given by the publisher after Machiavelli’s death. Machiavelli called it “The Principalities,” an important distinction that helps Bobbitt to make his points), the author makes the perfectly reasonable argument that, taken in historical context and with regard to another of Machiavelli’s major works (The Discourses), Machiavelli was not the renaissance Rasputin, but rather a highly insightful and articulate geopolitical analyst and theorist of his day.
Far from being the person who advised tyrants to be as tyrannical as possible for the sake of maintaining their personal power, Machiavelli attempted to direct princes (and often he spoke of republics, his example early Rome) in what might be necessary to preserve his state acting, it is hoped, for the good of the people who are its residents—at least its citizens. Today, Machiavelli would not only be the world’s consummate political philosopher and exponent of “realpolitik,” he would be considerably more moral—in Christian terms—than some of the infamous practitioners of realpolitik in the past seventy-five years. Making this case, in addition to painting a picture of Machiavelli’s political times, is the overall purpose of Bobbitt’s book.
Bobbitt uses an epilogue to remind us that the nation-state is not the end of the matter and that we are now moving into the market-state. I think Dr. Bobbitt is too sanguine about this development, even if he is right that it is occurring. Perhaps he is trying hard to remain neutral. A market state in the modern Capitalist paradigm cannot, almost by definition, be legitimated in the way Bobbitt claims it must be. There have been a few reversals since he wrote this book in 2012. I will take this matter up on my blog.
The reader should note that only 52% of the pages listed are Bobbitt’s text. The rest are references, acknowledgments, and so on. It was a good read. I enjoyed it!
Ruminations 