I’ve spent the last month working on a paper on Burke, Babeuf, and Adam Smith. (Guess which of these two had a similar theory of value? Hint: It’s not Smith.) It’s been a miserable experience.

Whenever I have trouble writing, I remember this passage from Philip Roth:

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.

And I feel better.

But then I read this from Bertrand Russell:

I…found that my first draft was almost always better than my second.  This discovery has saved me an immense amount of time.

Bastard.

I blogged a few days ago about Oscar Martinez’s brilliant account of the dangers migrants from Central America face as the travel through Mexico, so this is a follow-up to that. In the latest New York Times Magazine, journalist Luke Mogelson and photographer Joel van Houdt recount the experience of disguising themselves as migrants and taking the trail from Kabul to Australia. Harrowing and depressing stuff. There are fewer predators on the road, but the mostly Iranian travelers have to face the endless sea and the burning sun, and, at the end there is no hope. All detained and sent to Nauru or Papua New Guinea and their dreams of new lives in Australia turn to dust. In the piece we learn that Australia has absorbed a tiny number of asylum seekers compared to many European states, but the votes are in pandering to the racists, so that’s what Australian politicians do. (h/t to the brilliant BritCits )

The latest London Review of Books has an unexpected bonus, a review by James C. Scott of Jared Diamond’s The World Before Yesterday. Scott also takes aim at Steven Pinker’s arguments in Better Angels. Scott is particularly scathing about two issues: first, the assumption that remaining hunter-gatherer societies can tell us anything about the societies of our distant ancestors, since these survivors are profoundly shaped both by interaction with and marginalization by statist societies; second, the claim that states emerged as responses to levels of pre-state violence. In respect of the first claim, I’m not totally convinced, since there’s been good work done by anthropologists and primatologists who know the “marginalization” criticism but find sufficient material in the commonalities among such societies and in our similarities (and dissimilarities) to our ancestral species to draw at least some inferences (see Christopher Boehm’s work, for example). In respect of the second, I’m largely in agreement, though I’d note that Scott uses the word “state” in the review to denote a heterogeneous range of forms of political organization (as anthropologists often do) and that’s a departure from his usage in Seeing Like a State. But read the whole thing, as they say.

That’s the title of my new piece at Jacobin, which links back to a variety of discussions we’ve had here at CT, in particular this one from Ingrid. Mankiw, whom Ingrid cites, offers an implicit defence of the 1 per cent, implying though not quite asserting, that the gains accruing to those in this group (largely senior executives and the financial sector) have been the price we pay for a process that benefits everyone, yielding a Pareto improvement. As Ingrid says, Pareto improvements aren’t as self-evidently desirable as Mankiw assumes. My argument focuses on Mankiw’s factual premise, concluding that the expansion of the financial sector has made the majority of people worse off. This implies that a response to the global financial crisis focused on attacking the financial sector is feasible as well as being, in my view, politically necessary as an alternative to rightwing populism.

Jacobin doesn’t appear to have a comments section, so feel free to comment and criticise here. I’ve had an interesting discussion with Daniel on Twitter already, but it’s not really a great medium when more than a few people are involved.

Mostly I read comics in digital form these days. Comixology is a pretty good platform – bit crashy on my old iPad. But I like the Guided View format. If you haven’t gotten into the whole buying digital comics thing yet, you might check out the Top Shelf sale going on right now. Top Shelf is a major indie publisher with a lot of great titles and a pretty extensive catalogue. You can get Alan Moore, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. You can get Jeff Lemire stuff like Essex County and The Underwater Welder. You can get Nate Powell stuff like Any Empire and Swallow Me Whole (which I previously recommended here.) You can get hilarious Jeffrey Brown stuff like The Incredible Change-Bots (also recommended before.) Lilli Carre, Tales of Woodsman Pete. James Kochalka, Monkey vs. Robot and Superf*ckers. And on and on. Good stuff!

I also notice, via the Top Shelf front page, that there’s a new Amazon thing called Kindle Matchbook. If you’ve bought a physical book through Amazon, at any point in the past, you can add a digital copy for cheap. I so much prefer digital, especially for research purposes, that I will probably be availing myself of that option in future. But Kindle comics aren’t so good. You can’t zoom individual frames, as with Comixology. And not that many publishers are on-board with this Matchbook thing, apparently. I suppose they feel it will put yet more pressure on paper sales by encouraging people to sell their used paper copies, once they’ve got the Kindle copy. Probably they’re right.

Of course mine was unplanned. Which goes to show anyone can. Never say never!

Believe me, you don’t want the heartburn, the swollen ankles, the back ache and I swear to God if ___ just brushes my nipples again I’ll murder him.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

I never really wanted them myself.

You know, a friend of mine moved to a warmer country and within weeks. Have you ever thought of doing that?

You know, a friend of mine tried for ten years and then they gave up. And then it just happened like that. And they’ve had two more since.

You know, I have a good feeling that it’ll work out for you. I just know it.

If you could just relax a little, you know? Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

Have you thought of trying fertility treatment?

But you’ll be such brilliant parents. You just have to believe it and it’ll come good.

God I know exactly how you feel. We thought my first one was an ectopic until I had the scan.

God I know exactly how you feel. It took us nearly a year for the first. I was sure there was something wrong.

Have you thought about adoption? They’ll let anyone do it these days. Sorry. You know what I mean.

Well at least you have each other.

You’re so lucky. Lie-ins are a thing of the past for us. I haven’t been to the toilet on my own in three years.

Still, there’s always being a god-parent and uncle or aunt. Lucky kids. And you get to give them back when you’ve had enough.

Have you thought of volunteering?

Think of all the holidays you can take. Just the two of you.

My friend went to some clinic and it worked for her. I’ll get the name of it. I’m sure it will work for you.

You’re always hearing of people it worked out for in the end. I’m sure it’ll be the same for you.

Well you know, what with over-population and everything.

Look at the state of them. Are you still sure you want any?

At least you‘ll never have to go through childbirth.

You know I really believe you’ll get there in the end. You just have to stay positive. I know you can.

And here’s the one response that doesn’t cut down to the bone, whatever the situation or experience of the friend / acquaintance / or heavily pregnant lady at the parking permit office who wouldn’t take no for an answer (yes, just this morning):

“I’m so sorry.”

I’m reading David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70’s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life – For Better Or Worse.

Why am I reading it? Oh, you know me.

But consider this bit (Corey Robin, I expect you to be particularly interested): [click to continue…]

Actually, that’s an unnecessarily coarse title for this post, which is a pointer to a thoughtful, timely and by all accounts superbly executed play about bankers’ role in Ireland’s financial crisis. Journalist documentary-maker Colin Murphy (full disclosure, an old and dear friend) has written a play called ‘Guaranteed. It tries to get to the heart of what the *%$%ing £$%! happened in 2008, using official documents and interviews with insiders. Let’s just say it’s a little more insightful than Michael Lewis’ back of the taxi/fag packet journalism, and goes gratifyingly against the official grain.

‘Guaranteed’ is in Waterford tonight, Dun Laoghaire on Tuesday and Wednesday, then around the country till the 29th.

A palate cleanser afterward might be Colm McCarthy’s recent piece in the Indo, marking the triumvirate of ECB/IMF/EC and their involvement in Ireland’s forced bail-out out of 10. You may be surprised by who scored highest.

I usually write a post on 11 November, the anniversary of the armistice that brought a temporary end to the Great War that engulfed Europe in 1914 and continued, in one form or another, until the end of the 20th century. But nothing I write could match this from former Australian Prime minister Paul Keating. The core of the piece

The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.

The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.

But all of it is worth reading and remembering, along with Keating’s 1993 speech at the funeral of the unknown Australian soldier.

I’m not going to take comments on this at CT, but you can discuss it at my blog.

Cormac McCarthy used to live in El Paso, just over the border from Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. I kept thinking about this as I read Oscar Martinez’s book The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (Verso) because the parallels between Martinez’s non-fiction work and McCarthy’s novel The Road were sometimes striking and horrifying. Martinez is a journalist from El Salvador who has taken the courageous step of following the migrant trail that Central Americans would-be migrants to the US take through Mexico. “The Beast” of the (English) title is a reference to the trains that so many of them cling to through days and nights. Each chapter tells a different aspect of the story, from what makes people flee their homes in El Salavador, Guatemala or Honduras to the risky business of how to swim the Rio Grande at the end. Each chapter is different, yet each has the same essential theme: poor and desperate people who are the prey of criminal organizations in Mexico – the drug cartels – with police, the “polleros” and “coyotes” (migrant guides) and others being induced by a mixture of greed and fear (mainly the latter) to act as agents for the cartels (such as the Zetas) or at least to pay the tax they demand.

If you are a woman who undertakes the journey, you will almost certainly be raped, perhaps many times. Maybe this will happen when your are misdirected into an ambush in La Arrocera (near the beginning of the trail), perhaps it will happen on the train, perhaps it will happen when you are kidnapped and held on a ranch with hundreds of others whilst your relatives wire a ransom to the gangs, perhaps near the US border where a “bra tree” displays the underwear of victims as the rapists’ trophies. The stories of mass kidnapping and the warehousing of migrants by the gangs, with torture a regular part of the plan and summary death (in front of the others) for escapees are chilling.
[click to continue…]

Approximately a bazillion commentators have pointed out, rightly, that the right-wing of the conservative movement holds sway over the political right, in the US; whereas the left-wing of the left-wing party, the Democrats, is so wimpy, comparatively, that it sounds funny even calling the Democrats ‘left-wing’, per se. Of course, conservatives say the opposite. They are the moderates blah blah blah. I don’t know what truth would have the tremendous force needed to burst their epistemic bubble, so let’s move on, talking among ourselves.

Here’s a non-obvious (perhaps because it is incorrect) thought about the dynamics of having a right-wing dominated by its extreme right-tip, to the point where it doesn’t really have much of anything but a right-tip. You’d think it would automatically NOT be like that. You’d think such a dominant right-tip would not only generate a more moderate middle but also an ‘acceptable’ right to its right. That is, whatever is the center of political gravity – which is now on the extreme right – would sort of end up ‘moderate’, by definition, so long as you adopt a relative definition. That is, folks would figure that if Ted Cruz is ok, then Ted Cruz’ dad is probably ok. Because, what the hell, they aren’t THAT different. (By contrast, Obama really didn’t seem much like Jeremiah Wright. The shocker there was going to have to be that this association proved he believed stuff totally different from what he said.) Overton Window 101. But this doesn’t actually seem to be the way of it. Rather, what we get is this big weight of conservative opinion, this huge clump of conservative grass-roots, right at the edge of what is considered at all acceptable, in US political discourse. There is a very narrow range of things you can say without being, on the one hand, a RINO squish; or, on the other hand, having to say it was all ‘taken out of context’ when David Corn or Media Matters gets wind of it. [click to continue…]

All that’s solid melts into air.

Schocken Verlag* was a German publishing house established in 1931 by Jewish department store owner Salman Shocken. In 1939 it was shut down by the Nazis. It slowly made its way to New York, where it eventually became Shocken Books. In 1987 Shocken was acquired by Random House. Eleven years later, Random House was acquired by Bertelsmann.

During World War II, Bertelsmann was the largest publisher of Nazi propaganda, including “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth.” It also made use of Jewish slave labor in Latvia and Lithuania.

Confronted about the company’s past in 2002, a Bertelsmann spokesman said, “The values of Bertelsmann then are irreconcilable with the company today. The company is now a global player in the media industry.”

Because the one thing the Nazis definitely were not were global players.

“Common sense tells us,” wrote Nabokov, “that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

*I learned of this history in the London Review of Books, and gleaned additional details from Wikipedia and the BBC.

A colleague who lost his teenage son due to a traffic accident 3 years ago, told us about the ‘black halo’ which remains above his head, and which only others who have lost a child are able to see. I do not doubt for a second that this is the case – that people who have not lost a child are, perhaps a very few exceptions aside, not able to truly understand what it means to lose a child, and how it changes the person you are. It reminds me of a friend who lost her father about a year after I lost mine. She had been very supportive when my father was terminally ill and died, but told me after her father died that she had no idea how hard it was until she experienced it herself. Good intentions are simply not enough to understand certain experiences.

I think it’s not just with experiences, but also with varieties of ‘differences’ and with social practices, being ill, and other features of human life. It is not just the death of someone near and dear that we have a hard time to understand if we haven’t experienced it ourselves; or what it means to have autism, or to live with and/or care for someone who has autism (in my experience, most people don’t understand, despite what they believe themselves about their understanding); or what it is to be constantly subjected to racism. I am confident that I have no clue what it means to grow up in abject poverty, or to live through a civil war, or to be the victim of domestic abuse.

My worry is that this category of experiences, differences, practices, and other features of human life that we cannot understand without first-person experience, is much larger than we generally tend to assume. And that as a consequence, we believe that we know much more than we actually do know. And, as a further consequence, that we too often are wrong in our judgements of aspects of the lives of people significantly different than ourselves.

Somehow it strikes me as wise, and possibly even as a precondition for social justice, if we would rehabilitate epistemic humility at the core of our educational and social practices.

Since CTer Scott McLemee is not exactly what you would describe as an incessant self-promotor, two recent pieces by him that deserve attention.

First, on Colin McGinn, the Mind “review”:http://m.mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/10/31/mind.fzt073.full?ijkey=JaKp6eczj44oA1I&keytype=ref that’s been doing the rounds, and the tradition of savage book reviews by philosophers:

The new issue of Harper’s magazine reprints, under the title “Out on a Limb,” a blog post by McGinn from June 2013 in which he explains: “I have in fact written a whole book about the hand, Prehension, in which its ubiquity is noted and celebrated… I have given a semester-long seminar discussing the hand and locutions related to it. I now tend to use ‘hand job’ in the capacious sense just outlined, sometimes with humorous intent…. Academics like riddles and word games.”

Some more than others, clearly. McGinn then considers the complexity of the speech-act of one professional glassblower asking another, “Will you do a blow job for me while I eat my sandwich?” The argument here is that nothing he did should be regarded as sexual harassment of a graduate student, and the real victim here is McGinn himself: “One has a duty to take all aspects of the speech situation into account and not indulge in rash paraphrases. And one should also not underestimate the sophistication of the speaker.”

Nor overestimate the usefulness of sophistication as a shovel, once one has dug oneself into a hole and needs to get back out. McGinn subsequently thought the better of this little essay and deleted it from his blog, but the Harper’s “Readings” section preserves it for posterity. Life would be much simpler if good judgment weren’t so tardy at times.

Second, from last week, on “Lou Reed and Delmore Schwartz”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/10/30/essay-lou-reed

Fifty years ago, Lou Reed himself was a senior at Syracuse University, where he studied with the poet Delmore Schwartz. Reed was 21 – roughly the same age Schwartz had been when he wrote the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” In it, the narrator revisits the scene of his parents’ courtship in 1909 as if seeing it in a film of the era.

Simply told and strangely beautiful, it is both haunting and haunted. By its close, any hint of sentimentality dissolves in a moment of painful self-awareness. Its appearance in 1937 in the revived Partisan Review was the stuff of legends. The poetry and criticism Schwartz published after that were more than promising, and he won the Bollingen Prize in 1959 (five years after Auden had received it) for a volume of his selected poems.

Beginning in 1962, Schwartz held an appointment in the English department at Syracuse, despite having become, at some point over the previous decade or so, manifestly insane. The distinction between bohemianism and madness is sometimes a matter of context. With Schwartz the case for nuance was long since past. He had fallen into the habit of threatening friends and ex-wives with litigation for their parts in a conspiracy against him, led by the Rockefellers. While living in Greenwich Village he had smashed all the windows in his rented room and been taken to Bellevue in restraints. He died alone in New York City in 1966.

The following year, Reed dedicated a song on the first Velvet Underground album to Schwartz, and in another song from the early 1980s he imagined being able to communicate with the poet via Ouija board. Last year Reed published a tribute to him that has also appeared as the preface to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, an edition of Schwartz’s selected short fiction.