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!
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.
As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.
Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (his television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.
Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.
Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.
My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!
The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”
The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.
Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.
***
Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.
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!
This is one of those books about which too much additional comment is warranted. In the main, I have said what needs be said in the review itself (see below). Gee can be correct about the mechanism of evolution and the inability of the physical evidence (fossils and DNA) to tell us a complete story about who came from what, and be incorrect as to its ultimate directedness towards capacity for abstraction laying the groundwork for moral free will, religion, and art.
Most of these arenas pertain to Gee’s discussion of consciousness, in particular “self awareness,” which he claims may be exhibited by crows and other animals. He recognizes that what looks like human-like self awareness in crows might emerge from some other mechanism (of consciousness) altogether and be unlike what humans experience. Nevertheless, he unhesitatingly declares that there is no qualitative difference between human consciousness and some of the higher animals. I beg to differ.
Gee claims that most people spend little to no time being “aware of their consciousness.” While it may be true that few besides philosophers spend hours a day in Husserlian epoche, the point is not that humans rarely think about their awareness, but that every human can exercise that capacity when he or she wishes. Moreover it lies always close at hand. All I need to do to evoke the capacity in you is to ask “are you awake?”
Self-consciousness, what I have elsewhere called recursive-consciousness, is the foundation of our ability to have abstract thoughts, thoughts about things unrelated to our sensory inputs or our need for food, sex, or avoidance of danger. It enriches our language by introducing the need to invent language that communicates the effect. From this stems religion and art.
What signifies the emergence of art and religion in a species? Broadly, behavior that has nothing to do with acquiring food, sex, or safety, warmth, and so on. Cave paintings and decorative items (shell necklaces anyone) will do for art, while ritualized burial serves for religion.
Are there animals who spend time and energy creating art or self-decoration. Are there animals who ritually bury their dead? I know of none. Both sorts of activities require resources and energy that would be better put to hunting or reproduction. Why ritually bury your dead? Something about this implies belief in some after life, and possibly also fear of ghosts, which may be the earliest outgrowth of the nascent religious impulse.
Primitive humans spent considerable resource propitiating ghosts later leading to venerating ancestors. The earliest human specialization might be the shaman, a profession dedicated to serving other than material needs. I know of no case of this among the animals. Gee would say (I believe) that we cannot know where exactly in the evolution of sapiens these qualities appeared. He is right, but again it doesn’t matter. At whatever point it appeared, that appearance marks “the human.” Could it be that art and religion appeared in hominid branches other than the sapiens line and petered out? Yes, it could. But that does not mean that these particular qualities are not qualitatively different from every other animal type that doesn’t exhibit them. It happens that our line, whatever sequence led to sapiens, is the only one left standing and in the absence of evidence (art, ritual burial, abstract language) the only one we know of that has achieved these milestones.
But even granting that art, religion, and the evolution of language to express them are evidence of a qualitative difference between human mind and the animals, why should this difference suggest the teleological in evolution? Because neither art nor religion contribute to the acquizition of food, clothing, and shelter. They do contribute to socialization which has adaptive advantages, but evolution has solved this problem, even among predators (e.g., wolves) long before the appearance of art and religion.
If it happens that there is a God, a teleologically infused evolution leading, eventually, to his recognition, would not be surprising. This is not to say that the appearance of art, religion, and the languaged to communicate about them entail a God, but a God is, at least, consistent with their appearance.
This is a book that does well in some parts and not so well in others. Broadly, it is a book about evolution, the evolution of modern humans, and the biological, social, and psychological parallels between modern humans and the higher animals.
The first part is the good part. Given the present scientific paradigm, no teleological (purposeful and established [ordained] before the fact) endpoint to evolution exists. Evolution is what it is: random genetic changes that happen to be of or take some advantage of some changing environmental condition. Gee argues convincingly that the appearance of humans as we know them on Earth now might have come out differently, arisen from different earlier stocks, or perhaps not come to exist on the planet at all. He also notes that the paleontological record is too sparse for us to reliably assemble the story of even our present form from the last handful of millions of years. This includes the marvelous addition of genetic analysis to the paleontological tool kit. Marvelous as genetics is, back past a few hundred thousand years, its samples are even rarer than fossils.
In roughly the second part of the book, Gee compares modern humans to animals to show that none of our supposedly unique qualities (gait, brain size, tools, language–he barely mentions writing–and self-consciousness) are entirely unique to humans. Here, I think he tries to be too clever by half, suggesting the slime trails of voles, or the smell of urine to a dog, are communication with some comparable quality to human communication, which also happens to include such passive forms of signaling if more subtle than slime or urine. Some animals even possess rudimentary language communicated through gestures (bees) and often sound, as do we.
Agreeing with Gee that the evolution of humans as we find them was not foreordained, we need not agree with him that nothing different-in-kind has emerged from the process. But since this difference manifests in art and religion, we cannot be entirely sure, as Gee unhesitatingly declares himself to be, that the endpoint (a being who could express himself in art, religion, philosophy, etc.) was not, by some unspecified ordination, teleologically driven even if it needn’t have emerged through exactly the path it happened to take. Gee’s very good first part and not-so-well-argued last part must leave that question entirely up in the air.
Gee is right that many animals possess nascent capabilities that resemble some of what humans do, though none I know of developed any form of writing. But he goes too far when he asserts that there are no qualitative differences between the abstractions of nuclear physics or moral philosophy and the chattering of birds and barking dogs. We cannot know, he tells us, what gospels the crows are telling one another. With regard to the last quality he covers, self-consciousness, which he admits is ultimately the source of religion and art (abstractions and their reflection in language in general), he is, in the end, an eliminative materialist on mind, a position that only writes off and does not explain such things as art, religion, and abstractions generally.
In my formal review (included below) I said this book has problems. Byron Belitsos is a long-time friend and I did not wish to give him too difficult a time on Amazon, but there are more problems with his book than I noted in the review. It’s time I reviewed those other issues. I hope he will take these in the philosophical spirit with which they are offered.
First up is a technical quibble. Byron seems disposed to believe in demons to a greater degree than The Urantia Book (a source in Byron’s book, see below) suggests is real or sensible, at least in my reading. On page 279, with reference to Pentecost and The Urantia Book, Byron states: “The unseen followers of Caligastia … now had a choice. … Those who accepted their judgment and agreed to rehabilitation were removed. …; others who did not accept were to remain here …” (that is, on Earth).
Byron is misinterpreting. His error makes a difference to the spirit of his book where “the demonic” is concerned. What The Urantia Book actually says is: “The entire group of rebel midwayers is at present held prisoner. No more do they roam this world … the pouring out of the Spirit of Truth upon all flesh forever made it impossible for disloyal spirits of any sort or description ever again to invade even the most feeble of human minds. Since the day of Pentecost there never again can be such a thing as demonical possession” [77:7.8 emphasis mine].
Byron has an escape! “Caligastia, your apostate Planetary Prince, is still free on Urantia to prosecute his nefarious designs, but he has absolutely no power to enter the minds of men, nor can he draw near to their souls to tempt or corrupt them unless they really desire to be cursed by his wicket presence.” [53:8.6 emphasis mine]
What constitutes “real desire” here? The Urantia Book is not explicit. Does it demand a knowledge of Caligastia specifically, or is a sincere desire to be “possessed by the devil” sufficient? There is a continuum between these two points, and the matter of what constitutes sincerity and its relation to what is known by the individual concerned must also be examined. But my point here is that Byron has some wiggle room to insert a genuine demonic, though in my opinion, very little. Possession as such is out. What powers does Caligastia have to communicate with anyone? The Urantia Book does not say.
My next issue is about something Byron does not say much about. Theodicy has two great domains. The domain of evil originating in human doings, and a domain theologians call “natural evil,” having no or only indirect human entanglement. Earthquakes are the quintessential example of natural evils, but floods, natural fire, disease, and many other things that can kill us also qualify. Why does God allow innocent people to be killed by these things? If a building collapses in an earthquake because it was corruptly built with inferior materials, then human-entangled evil enters the picture, but earthquakes, floods, etc, have killed innocents for many centuries before humans understood, even theoretically, how to protect themselves from these things.
Early in his book, Byron explicitly says he is not going to deal with “natural evil.” That’s fine, author’s privilege. But I do not see how one can write a book on theodicy and ignore natural evil. It, and not human-sponsored evil, is the foundation of the theodicy problem. Even in the earliest days of monotheistic theology, that humans did evil and that this evil is associated with free will and, therefore not directly, personally, God’s doing was understood. But what today is understood as a natural physical process was another matter entirely. The blame for an earthquake killing my family could be laid directly at God’s feet. Ironically, The Urantia Book has the finest answer to the matter of natural evil I have seen in any source. God cannot do the impossible. He cannot make a square circle, and he cannot make a universe grounded in universal physical law that evolves everything from stars to humans without the process sometimes harming humans (not to mention dinosaurs). I cover this in more detail in my essay Theodicy in The Urantia Book.
My third issue has to do with Byron’s use of Ken Wilber’s classification scheme to organize his “integral theodicy.” Wilber’s scheme here is not the issue but Byron’s use of it. Byron notices that not all the various theodicies he covers fit neatly into Wilber’s schema. More seriously, though, I wonder what Byron gets out of his process. I did not find anything in his “integration” that improved upon ideas already discussed in the book. Yes, one idea fits into category B, and another fits category C, but what of it? The integration did not, in other words, advance or enhance any understanding of the individual theories as he covered them prior to this ending. If anything, Byron’s process in this section is a categorical differentiation which is valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t “integrate” anything.
My fourth issue is more abstract. Byron began this book with a Master’s Thesis. The first part of the book, enhanced, is the thesis. Among the purposes of this book (personal communication with the author) is to introduce The Urantia Book to the scholarly (academic) theological community. I happen to think there is a lot that is nonsensical (cosmology, biology, human origins) in The Urantia Book (see my Problems with the Cosmology and Astronomy of The Urantia Book for details on the cosmological issues). However, The Urantia Book’s theology (and so the theodicy) eclipses everything humans have written on the subject for twenty-five hundred years! It isn’t that human speculations are all wrong, but they are woefully incomplete. Their truths are melded and greatly expanded in The Urantia Book, enhancing them in relation to one another.
Human speculations are often cast as either-or choices: either “free will” or “greater goods” for example. But The Urantia Book argues convincingly that the truth is more usually both-and. Not only are all the [partly correct but incomplete] human theories amalgamated, but much more is also given. The Urantia Book’s depiction of the universe’s administrative structure adds a thick layer to the resolution to the theodicy problem (on both “natural” and human-gendered sides) that no theologian has ever suggested (see my above-referenced theodicy essay)! The Urantia Book is the integration that Byron seeks! But for that very reason, his project must fail–at least for now. Western academic theology is chained wrist and ankle to the Old and New Testament, such source documents as exist, and centuries-old Apocrypha. No academic theologian today could publically embrace The Urantia Book without committing professional suicide!
The book is a scholarly examination of a subject called Theodicy. Theodicy attempts to answer questions like “Why does an omnipotent and good God permit evil?” Such questions arose with the appearance of Judeo-Christianity because this evolving thought was the first to arrive at the idea that there is one God who must be infinite, unified, and good.
Mr. Belitsos reviews the history of the discipline from pre-Christian thinkers through Augustine in the Fifth Century and on to modern times. He also covers the broad difference in approach to the subject between the Western (Roman) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christian traditions. He brings us up to modern times via Kant and Hegel and into the twentieth century. I am oversimplifying. There are many others he includes in his explorations.
Next, the author brings up The Urantia Book. While not considered a scholarly or authoritative text by academicians, the book does contain an approach to the theodicy question that adds significant psychological, social, and historical insights. I have read this text, and Mr. Belitsos misinterprets it in various respects, but that is only my opinion. The Urantia Book is complex and nuanced enough to stand up to differing interpretations. I will deal with these matters in my blog.
After introducing The Urantia Book and pulling together its theodicy, Mr. Belitsos combines it and traditional thought on the subject into what he calls “an Integral theodicy” based on a four-way partitioning of experience–subjective-objective, individual-social–by Ken Wilber, whom the author calls “an integral philosopher.” I’m not a big fan of Mr. Wilber’s work, but that is not to say his thinking might not be helpful in this regard. Mr. Belitsos believes this is the case.
From that point, adding back the insights of the Eastern Orthodox Church–of which he is a fan–the author attempts to summarize everything into a satisfying answer to the theodicy question. He fails, and to be fair, he knows he fails, pointing this out in the book’s last pages. Formulating an intellectually satisfying theodicy is possible–the author’s efforts are exemplary. But intellectual achievement is far from emotional repose. There is, the author realizes, no emotionally satisfying answer to the theodicy question in the face of our daily exposure to evil throughout our present world, not to mention the horrors of our history.
Mr. Belitsos’ scholarship is here and there uneven despite over three hundred detailed end-notes. At one point, the author connects the thought of a contemporary theologian with conspiracy theories that don’t belong in this book. Elsewhere he introduces a bit of “Urantia movement lore,” also misplaced in a scholarly work, even one that accepts The Urantia Book as a source! But these diversions are few and short. Truths about Evil, Sin, and the Demonic is a good summary of the subject and a commendable effort to find at least an intellectually satisfying answer to theodicy’s puzzle.
Book one (Foreign Agent) and book two (Foreign Agent the Last Chapter) are closely related. The final setting in the first book (Bangkok), and its characters, carry through the entirety of the second book. The “Cult of Aten” is introduced in the second book where its infrastructure begins to be built, but the novel ends before it is finished and launched.
Book three takes us back to the U.S. where its author, having published the second novel, receives a thumb drive from Bangkok containing the code for an elaborate website along with an image. As with the other novels, Cult of Aten is written in memoir style, this time explicitly as a diary begun in 2028 while Matthew lies in a hospital bed recovering from an assassination attempt–no spoilers here, this fact is noted in the first chapter. The bulk of the novel (everything through Chapter 19 of 22) is Matthew catching the reader up to all that happens from the autumn of 2023 when he launches the Cult of Aten, to his present–in the hospital–in 2028.
Except for five chapters in its middle covering a single [important] week spent in Mexico the pacing of this novel is much faster than the first two. This is necessary because the third novel spans five years compared to two years for the first and only one for the second. It is also consistent with Matthew’s claim (in 2028) that this catching-up was drafted in two weeks from his hospital bed. It is a result of this “catching-up” and explanation that Cult of Aten can be read as a stand-alone novel. Yes, the story is enriched by the first two novels–especially the second–but they aren’t strictly necessary. The reader is not lost without them.
What would a novel from Matthew be without sex? It’s here in plenty, but there is a change, Matthew says a “literary advance” on his part. While still explicit, the sex (with one exception “because it was unusual compared to the rest”) is softened around the edges. The exceptional detail Matthew is otherwise known for is absent, most of the time. Interestingly, this is also consistent with the story’s pacing.
So how does a text written in 2028 come to get published in 2023? Two words: time travel! You’ll just have to read the story!
All in all, in my opinion, this is the best of the three books. I asked Matthew what gave him this idea. What he said was: “The first novel’s insight was ‘what if the Chinese offered to pay me for my opinion.’ The second novel’s was ‘what if there was more than one alien spaceship and the other didn’t crash?’ This novel, the third was ‘what would happen if the Cult of Aten (first invented in novel number two) and the books really took off and became a global phenomenon?’”
Ruminations 