"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" IV Vox Populi

I often feel that an inescapable part of the debate in today's day and age is: "Just how much democracy do we really want?."

"Do we really want those people to be in charge?"

"You know, those idiots vote.  And there are a lot of them."

Okay, so I grant you, that's more of the informal conversations people will have between each other, but even among the more politically attuned and high-minded, the essence of the debate isn't much different.  Have you paid a visit to Jesusland?  Or are you a member of the 47%?

Truthfully, that angle is boring.  All nations are heterogeneous mixtures of people with all sorts of whacko views sprinkled liberally around, and considering the healthy dosage of jerks, it's stupidly easy to find evidence of the other side's perfidy.

What does interest me is that any given country is a leavened loaf of fanatics, partisans, idiots, and blowhards; but also a lot of regular, middle-of-the-road folks of every class and race.  How do you calibrate the balance between giving a voice to the people and insulating our institutions from popular whim?  Can democracy always successfully balance competing factions? Continuity and stability clearly matter - just look at California.

In that vein, one passage in this book really jumped out at me.  Revolutionary France was in turmoil after the execution of the king, and the National Convention was basically at the mercy of the sans-culottes, the Parisian working class.  The sans-culottes (also sansculottes) and their allies in the Convention were demanding the guillotine for all opponents of the Republic, and they were quick to use their sheer numbers to literally threaten the Convention to doing their bidding.  This naturally had bad consequences, as the rest of the country started rising in revolt, demanding "Federalism" and objecting strenuously to the "radical" tyranny of Paris:

"...[W]hat the 'Federalists appear to have resented if anything even more than the grip of the sansculottes on elected deputies was the range of emergency measures any government would have felt to take to cope with the downturn in French fortunes that spring.  Conscription, enhanced police powers, market controls, and forced loans, actual or threatened, [My note: all popular sansculotte measures] were now coming on top of years of upheaval tolerated only because of the promise of calmer times to come...but the disappearance over the summer of 1792 of the distinction between active and other citizens* seemed to place the power to exercise authority enhanced by authority in the hands of those with least to lose." (p. 242)

And that's the thing.  The "'blood-drinkers'" of the Paris sections were so embittered against the old regime, that their lust for vengeance against old enemies, and the supplication of the government to the mob meant that the French leaders pursued a policy of exacting their pound of flesh from the propertied beyond any reason.  Let alone, addressing the nation's and the Revolution's real problems.

The rise of Robespierre and the subsequent Reign of Terror that took place between 1793-1794 can be traced in part to the increasing power of the sansculottes, and their government by mob rule.  The Parisian mob, hungry, impoverished, embittered, and newly-aware of their own power did not hesitate to use it to get the government to enact a program they believed beneficial to them.  The demonstrations on September 4, 1793 show exactly how this worked:

"Chaumette, at the head of thousands of sansculottes, denounced the shortages, the failure to implement existing laws to deal with them, and those who caused them: 'Legislators, the immense gathering of citizens come together yesterday and this morning...has formed   but one wish:...Our subsistence, and to get it, apply the law!"....The Convention voted to do it on the spot-although it did not authorize the guillotines on wheels which Chaumette thought every detachment....ought to have....It was all carried by acclamation, amid scenes, in Barère's words, of delirium.  Terror, he observed, was now the order of the day." (p. 251)

Reading this, I find myself trying to understand what can be understood from these episodes.  The Revolution started off as a bourgeois affair - even the men who stormed the Bastille were culled from the bourgeoisie.  The men who populated the Estates-General, the National Assembly, and the National Convention were almost all to a man highly educated.  Visionaries, even.  Check out this mind-bending quote from Jean-Paul Marat, elected to the National Convention and a famous scientist and rabble-rouser:

"Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."

For good measure, let me emphasize that he said that in the 1790's! 

And yet, four years in, the mob had seized control.   How did this happen?  How did it not happen in America?  The answer lies in the structure of the population of France itself.

Representative democracy tends to work best (i.e. be most stable) in small, culturally homogenous, and egalitarian societies.  Prior to the 20th century, there were exceptions like England, but this was generally the rule.  This description in a lot of ways could be applied to Revolutionary America.  Yet, none of those adjectives described Revolutionary France at all.  When major segments of the population becomes isolated and oppressed by the ruling classes, electoral politics, when it finally does arrive, becomes an exercise in using the leverage of numbers to exact justice, economic and social, against former oppressors.  We see this time and time again.


As an American, what these episodes say to me is that fearing growing inequality is one thing.  Fearing the growing perception that the game is rigged is more dangerous, because coupled with the increasing numbers of entrenched poor, may be more wise, as the combination has shown itself to be explosive.  Revolutionary, even.  In that sense, we should perhaps look at the Tea Party and the Occupy movement as shots across the bow.  To freely paraphrase from Milan Kundera:  while we are in the midst of the sunset of the dissolution from our American empire, we should be wary that everything becomes illuminated by the aura of nostalgia for better times; yes, even the guillotine.**


* "Active" citizens were simply those who were eligible to vote, usually based on property or wealth requirements.
** The original quote is:
"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" III - Le Déluge Arrive

"Après moi, le déluge" - Attributed to Louis XV*

Been about a week and a half since I last posted, apologies.  This book has proven a bit more dense than the previous books, so a bit more time was required to get to the real meat of the history.

Let me start with an opening salvo: the radicals were right.   Not just right on the merits, but they were right to be outraged.  Right to demand action.  And right to try and take down the monarchy.  L'audace* was not a bad place to start. 

France under the Bourbon monarchy was, plainly put, a mess.  As a painting, it'd be a vintage Jackson Pollock.  And like a Jackson Pollock, good luck to the casual historian of making heads or tails of that nonsense.

In theory, absolute monarchies governed their nations like private fiefdoms.  The king was a benevolent pater familias patriae, tending to his nation the way a good father would tend to his family and his lands.  In practice, this was less tidy English manor and garden, and more like the Hoarders approach to governing.  From the time of the Charlemagne to the eve of the Revolution, the borders of France had grown, shrunk, and regrown as wars, dynastic marriages, and strategic annexations had slowly congealed to form the Kingdom of France.  And like all great hoarders, France just hated to modify or throw out any little thing about its newly found treasures.  (Preciouses?)  The cumulative effect over a millennium was that there was an absolutely mind-blowing lack of uniformity from region to region.  In addition to international borders, there internal customs unions.  Some regions had noble parliaments; some did not.

"Apart from royal edicts on certain general issues, the king's domains were subject to no law and no administrative practice common to them all without exception.  Southern provinces regulated their affairs by written, Roman law; but even there, in isolated regions like the Pyrenees, local customs were more important.  In northern France, they were all important....  This meant that the law relating to marriage, inheritance, and tenure of property could differ in important respects from one district to another. Every district, too, had its own range of weights and measures, and the same term often meant different values in different places.  In these circumstances fraud, or fear of it, bedeviled all exchanges..." (p. 4) 

This did have the effect of occasionally freeing up the hand of a region to exploit opportunities. By the 1780's, France had developed a small but growing class of industrialists and bourgeois who were to play a critical role in upending the old order.


Even more insidious than this was the proliferation of privilege.  A good deed done for an old king of France done there, and another done here, and said family or region or estate was exempt from one tax or another.   By the 1780's, this array of exemptions and privileges was dizzying:

What then made nobility so desirable?  Obviously there was the glamor, distinction, and recognition that noble status had always brought.  Then there was a range of privileges which all nobles enjoyed... Privilege was the hallmark of a country without uniform laws or institutions...  Nobles took precedence on public occasions... They were not subject to the corvée [the system of unpaid, mandatory labor], billeting of troops, or conscription into the militia... They escaped much of the weight of the gabelle, the hated, extortionate, salt monopoly...(p. 27)

The combination was, frankly, toxic.  The brew of idiosyncratically-ruled regions and inherited exemptions for individuals meant that by the 1780's, France had a small but entrenched minority of the population with a deeply personal stake in the continuation of not just the system of monarchy, but the Bourbon monarchy itself.  Worse, is that this meant that the glass ceiling of France that stood in the way of the successful bourgeois and the positions of ultimate power were effectively blood and the royal whim.  Some tiny fraction of the non-ennobled nouveau riche were able to acquire political power through the purchase of "venal offices", but only at tremendous expense.  This had the effect of embittering the ascendent bourgeois, who not only had to watch people eminently poorer, less-educated, dumber, but with the pedigree a thoroughbred would wicker in envy of, be granted the best military commissions, the best positions at court, and not have to pay the often heavy taxes imposed by the king.  The gap these privileges exposed between the entitled and the Third Estate was so glaring, that even on the eve of the Revolution, many nobles were agreeing to give up their fiscal privileges.
 
The first five chapters, while ostensibly a background in pre-Revolutionary France, fascinated me.  Among many other things, one of the best reasons to study history is that it is a chronicle of one, long experiment of human beings trying different things, and often failing.   The ancien régime is a case-study of everything that can possibly go wrong with absolute monarchy and then some.  Most of the people lived in abject poverty, one bad harvest away from starvation.  The nobility was a mix of poor, threadbare landowners clinging to old titles, and a lucky few ensconced at court, paying often ruinous sums to stay abreast of the latest fashions at Versailles.  The bourgeoisie was squeezed in the middle. Wealthier than the peasants, but deprived of any formal representation and significant legal rights, the bourgeoisie burned with resentment against their titled, often poorer, betters.

To boot, because the king could direct war policy as an extension of his person and his reputation, France was deeply indebted, after having come to the aid of the Americans in the Revolutionary War.  Why did France overextend itself to help a bunch of Yankee colonialists?  To avenge the loss of French North America in the Seven Years War.  Not that we contemporary Americans can relate to being over our heads in debt due to spending too much money liberating a foreign people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  Or anything.

I am, admittedly, a man more of a David Brooks-style temperment (if not his politics), so I find conceding to any kind of radicalism galling, by instinct.  Normally, I suspect that greatest fault made by contemporary liberals and conservatives on a crusade to "change Washington" is to be heedless of the Folly of Chesterton's Fence, the idea that when coming upon an obstructive fence in the road, the first instinct of a reformer will be to demand the removal of the fence instead of asking why it got there.  In France, this had long since surpassed a case of dealing with Chesterton's Fence.  Chesterton's fence had spread like kudzu, turning the whole country into a hopeless labyrinth of white pickets. The Jacobins, coming across this maze in the road, were right to size it up, and to remove the Louis XVI-sized plug in the levee, and hope that the deluge would wash it all away.

At least, at first...


* Some debate about who said it, but Merriam-Webster's acknowledges Louis XV.

** A quote by the moderate Jacobin Georges Danton, inveighing his fellow deputies to stand strong at the height of the crises of 1793, "Pour les vaincre, messieurs, il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace et la Patrie sera sauvée!". Translation: "To beat them, gentlemen, if we are bold, bolder still, forever bold, then France is saved!" (p. 191)

"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" II - On the Origins of the Specie

I learned a little something about the origin of my chosen profession, economists.  Great debates on the state of French government finances were raging in the wake of France's loss in the Seven Years War (known better to my fellow Yanks as the French and Indian War).  The monarchy conducted a top-down review of the government, and even turned to the menagerie of regional parliaments to ask for their input:

"In 1763, unprecedentedly, it even asked the parlements [sic] to make proposals for economic and fiscal reform-which produced nothing very constructive, unwisely flattered their pretensions, and left them aggrieved when, ignoring their suggestions, ministers turned in preference to the untried theories of a group calling themselves by the new and unfamiliar name of 'Economists'."

Uh oh.  And it seems like economic thought has evolved in 230+ years less than we'd like to think:

"Their founder was a royal doctor, Quesnay, who in a number of articles in the Encyclopédie in 1756...argued (in curious parallel to Rousseau) that there existed a natural, benevolent economic order which had been distorted by ill-judged and artificial human intervention.  Economic wealth could only be unlocked by removing all unnatural burdens..."

Now this is a familiar line of argument.  Ah, but wait, maybe our thinking has gotten more sophisticated after all:

Paradoxically, the economic freedom preached by the Physiocrats [My Note: Another name for economists] implied a powerful, interventionist role for governments, for only they had the strength to sweep away artificial impediments to the natural economic order.  Le Mercier even advocated a sort of despotism[bold mine], which he called legal because its sole purpose would be to bring in the greatest of all laws, that of nature itself.

Before we cringe, echoes of this are still popular views in a few quarters.  Le plus ça change...

"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" I

Pivoting off Empire Falls, the next book I'm going to knock off of the reading list is going to be William Doyle's The Oxford History of the French Revolution.  What? you say, they're clearly unrelated.  Au contraire!  That passage I quoted about the slowness of time from Empire Falls:

"Slow, Tick decides.  Things happen slow.  She isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is....Take her parents.  At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in their dissatisfaction and need-in their personalities, really...

And that's the thing, she concludes.  Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them.  If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump.  'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower." (Empire Falls, p. 441)

The essence of this passage is exactly why I turn to the French Revolution next.  Frankly, I don't get it.  As a historical event, it has always puzzled me.  Unlike the Russian Revolution, which is mostly the story of speed mortared with copious amounts of blood, the French Revolution has seemed to me from my limited understanding of it to have this really odd stop and start quality to it.

First, pressure builds for a hundred years as the economy and the political system seethe and stagnate under the ancien régime, all well and good. So then the King bends, calls in the Estates, things escalate, aaaaaaaaaand boom! the Bastille falls in 1789. All right, obviously I'm missing details, but with you so far. But then, what? It takes another three years for them to execute Citizen Capet? What the hell were they doing for three years? From there, we get the Reign of Terror, the levees en masse, and finally, the Directory and Napoleon. How did the Parisian street mob storming a prison climax with a Corsican burning Moscow, and end with that same Corsican ending his days in the Southern Hemisphere and the royal family reinstated? In other words, what the hell happened here people?

So, I aim to find out. This book is longer and denser than the previous two, so I plan to include a few more updates before I culminating with the usual book review.

"Empire Falls" II

On the back of my edition of Empire Falls is the following blurb from The Christian Science Monitor:

"The history of American literature may show that Richard Russo wrote the last great novel of the 20th century."

This is very likely true.

Empire Falls is a gala of a novel, where you are passed effortlessly from denizen to denizen from the small town of Empire Falls, Maine, dancing a waltz to the music of time.  The rhythm is unhurried, perhaps because in so many ways, you and the characters have no place else better to be than in this figment of Richard Russo's imagination.   Or at least, you the reader do not, but the characters on the other hand will spend the entire novel struggling with that very premise, and in the process, we too ask ourselves: well, how did they get there?

Empire Falls is a meditation on human time and human space, but whose musings on the subjects are always incidental to the story itself.  Set in a dying mill town in rural Maine about 12 years ago, the plot revolves around all of the people who are the main characters in the story of Miles Roby's life.  Miles Roby is a middle-aged short-order cook, and manager of a diner in town.  He is separated from his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Janine, who set in motion the unraveling of their marriage by cheating on Miles with the owner of the local fitness club.  Janine has a fire lit under her ass to be rid of her plodding marriage almost as much as she's ready to be rid of her plodding husband. She itches to take up with her lover, "that little banty rooster" Walt Comeau (the self-styled "Silver Fox"), in an agitated fit of determination to reinvent her life while there's still a life to reinvent.  Miles and Janine are proud parents to an introverted, astute 16 year-old daughter, Tick, who is chiefly preoccupied with measuring within herself which of her personality components are from her beloved father, and which are careless hand-me-downs from her self-centered mother.   Helping him run the diner is his moody younger brother David, his beautiful, unavailable boyhood crush Charlene, and another short-order cook, Buster, who spends most of the novel off-screen on a bender.

Perched above the blooming chaos of Miles Roby's life is the willful, deliberate Francine Whiting, heiress to the Whiting fortune, whose money and industry built Empire Falls.  She married into the family long ago, and became the custodian of its inheritances when her husband shot himself in plain sight of their crippled daughter.   Mrs. Whiting vulpine presence as capricious benefactor is as much of a character as the personage herself, and no more strongly felt than when Miles and David struggle to think of ways to improve the profits of their grille, of which Mrs. Whiting remains the owner.  She must always be dealt with.  Miles many meetings with Mrs. Whiting are dramatic, for all of the low stakes involved, as in spite of her frequent attestations of affection for Miles, you and he cannot escape the feeling that she is deftly manipulating Miles into fulfilling some master plan that benefits her and her alone.

Miles has been firmly in her grip ever since his mother died 20 years ago, when he dropped out of college to take care of her as she lay dying of cancer.  Mrs. Whiting arranged for Miles to take over the Empire Grill when the proprietor died as a stop-gap measure, and there he remained long after his mother died, through the beginning and end of a marriage, the birth and adolescent blossoming of his only daughter, and the continued eclipse of Empire Falls. 

Nothing aforementioned is an unique event, and all of these things are the kind of pages in a life's story that are familiar to millions of people across America.  But beneath the predictable unfolding of Miles Roby's and Empire Falls' senescence, the slow accumulation of decline, disappointment, and degeneration have created a seam of untapped, coal-black fury.  In Cormac McCarthy's memorable phrase, "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage"* - and this is no less true of rural Maine than anywhere else history has passed on by.  Both man and town are drifting inexorably toward ruin, and the final quarter of the novel witnesses the eruption of the seam.

Normally, a novel that takes 350 pages out of 483 before the plot quickens is a novel that is destined for the farthest back shelf of the bookstore.  Yet, this slow progression does not detract from the novel at all.  Russo is a nimble and gifted enough writer, that you may not be moving fast, but you are still enjoying every minute with every character.  As soon as you get bored, you switch to another character, and off you are again, plumbing another mind and another set of secrets and dreams deferred of Empire Falls.  This slowness of action but quickness of mind is payed a sly tribute in one of the book's best passages as her world crumbles over the precipice into bloody chaos:

"Slow, Tick decides.  Things happen slow.  She isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is....Take her parents.  At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in their dissatisfaction and need-in their personalities, really...

And that's the thing, she concludes.  Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them.  If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump.  'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower." (p. 441)

And that really, is the story of Miles Roby and Empire Falls, and so many of the rest of us.  We can lose ourselves in familiar rhythms, learn all of the steps of our routines by heart, but one day the music stops.  Often as not, it happens just when we've convinced ourselves that we have finally mastered the dance.

* Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

Empires of Sound Ain't Looking so Hot, Either

Also from The Economist was tucked away this story about America's professional orchestras. The story details the problems at the highly-regarded Minnesota Orchestra:

Thanks to the recession, ticket sales and donations have fallen about 10% over the past six years. So far, the shortfall has been covered by withdrawals from the orchestra’s endowment. This, combined with poor investment returns over the past few years, has produced a sizeable gap between what the orchestra’s board was expecting to have when it agreed to the last round of contracts with musicians in 2007, and what it actually has in hand today.

And points out that this is hardly limited to Minnesota:

Many other orchestras, including those of Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, St Paul, Detroit, Spokane and Richmond, have also endured contentious pay disputes and even strikes. Drew McManus, an arts consultant, believes this is because the sagging economy “uncovered institutional problems more than anything else”. According to him, musicians in certain orchestras are being forced to pay for managers’ past mistakes, including aggressive empire-building and insufficient provision for bad times.

Truthfully, as these things go, I've always been puzzled by the continued existence, let alone success, of regional symphonies.  Saying this as someone from Cincinnati, who went fairly frequently to its symphony orchestra and enjoyed it, it always struck me as funny that for an orchestra with a not-so-very large natural audience, it still somehow managed to be ranked in the top 20 for highest pay.

The Decline and Stagnation of Empires of the Mind

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." -Winston Churchill

This week's Economist has a long-form piece on the growing concern that the rate of technological innovation is falling.  If true, this is the kind of thing that would give sci-fi writers and futurists the world over the heebie-jeebies: no flying cars for suburbanites, nor The Matrix-style insta-martial arts lessons.  Oh, the humanity, indeed.

To wit, here's the crux of the hand-wringing, the gnashing of the teeth, and the rending of the garments:

Some suspect that the rich world’s economic doldrums may be rooted in a long-term technological stasis. In a 2011 e-book Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argued that the financial crisis was masking a deeper and more disturbing “Great Stagnation”. It was this which explained why growth in rich-world real incomes and employment had long been slowing and, since 2000, had hardly risen at all (see chart 1). The various motors of 20th-century growth—some technological, some not—had played themselves out, and new technologies were not going to have the same invigorating effect on the economies of the future. For all its flat-screen dazzle and high-bandwidth pizzazz, it seemed the world had run out of ideas.

I read Tyler Cowen's book a year and a half ago, and he makes the case that all of the "low-hanging fruit" of innovation had been plucked from the Tree of Knowledge, and all that's left to us is either barren branches or apples so high up the tree as to be out of our reach for the foreseeable future.   

It's a flashy metaphor, and one that I think sometimes obscures the point instead of illuminating it.  The real idea going on here is that while our TVs may get bigger, and I am sure I'll live long enough to see the roll out of iPhone 1000, no transformation on the scale of the introduction of electricity or flight will be seen in our lifetimes:

There will be more innovation—but it will not change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustion engines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is more willing to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are no more low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.

But...that's a breathtakingly bold assumption.  And while Tyler Cowen and others can marshal an army's worth of evidence (e.g., here and here), this is a bandwagon I am deeply reluctant to jump on.
My problems with this hypothesis cut in basically two directions.   One, is that I think economics in general has a problem with time scale.  We only have quality data for a small handful of countries for only the past (at best!) 50 or so years.  50 years in the scale of human history is pretty small.  And those 50 years specifically, if you think about it, were pretty damn unique.   Even in the much-heralded rush of technology and development between 1800-1960, there were still lulls and slower periods in between major discoveries and their implementation:

Roughly a century lapsed between the first commercial deployments of James Watt’s steam engine and steam’s peak contribution to British growth. Some four decades separated the critical innovations in electrical engineering of the 1880s and the broad influence of electrification on economic growth. Mr Gordon himself notes that the innovations of the late 19th century drove productivity growth until the early 1970s; it is rather uncharitable of him to assume that the post-2004 slump represents the full exhaustion of potential gains from information technology.

Second, the issue might less be that the Tree of Knowledge has yielded up all of her most ripened fruits to us, and more that the effort to harvest as much as possible may have damaged the orchard.  Compare how people like Nikolai Tesla or Marie Curie worked, in their homes, or in glorified workshops; and now think of what a modern laboratory looks like.   Forget their surroundings, even, and think about how to become a reputable research scientist today involves a Ph.D. (21+ years of education), plus a post-doc (1-2 years), and the securing of grants and one's own laboratory.   By not just formalizing, but by institutionalizing, the process by which research is done, we may have found a way to direct more resources at science than before, but we have also drastically raised the cost.

A modern lab not only has to apply for grants for all of its expensive machines, but also has to abide by any number of safety rules created by federal agencies, state agencies, and whatever else on top of this a university might add in.  Thomas Edison did not need to worry about OSHA breathing down his neck, but labs in academia and in the private sector are highly concerned.  Further, all of this increased expense in machinery, conditions, and labor practically incentivizes relatively risk-less, sure-shot, piecemeal scientific advances.  The expiry of a grant can jeopardize the existence of the very laboratory itself, and there's no faster way to lose grants than to have no published papers to show for the money.  So, a researcher faces very strong pressures to only push the boundaries of knowledge incrementally, rather than risk taking a bigger jump, failing, and effectively losing all of their funds.

In the end, our desire for greater control of the process of discovery, instead of leaving it to some crackpots in their basements, that might be, in the end, choking the wellsprings of knowledge with weeds.

"Empire Falls" I

One down, another to start.

Pivoting off of my post about West Virginia, I decided to next pick up Empire Falls by Richard Russo.  The book is set in a rural Maine mill town, whose glory days are long behind it, and whose primary benefactor is a few years past her expiration date.

I've only been to Maine once, to go visit Moosehead Lake with a friend and his family back in the summer of 2011.  I remember it being one of the most lushly verdant places I have ever seen.  Yet, sadly, didn't see a single goddamn moose.  Damn you, Maine place-names, and your raising of my expectations!


In terms of Maine itself, though, that's pretty much where my personal knowledge of this world begins and ends*.  The very same friend who invited me to go to the cabin a year and a half ago has been strongly urging me to read this book, and as long as my mind was on the rural poverty track, well, sure, why not?

*Unless you count having read The Cider House Rules, but I think I learned more about abortion than Maine from that one.

Take Me Home, Country Road....Hey, what is the name of this country road, anyway?

Cool little article from this month's Atlantic, where apparently, the back roads and hollows of rural West Virginia are finally getting street addresses.  Yes, that's right people, if you were a poor, benighted UPS deliveryman working in West Virginia, you have absolutely no way of finding people:

I’d come to McDowell County because, like much of rural America, its streets had long gone unnamed, its roads unmapped. Addresses have historically been an urban commodity; in rural areas, where most people know each other and outsiders are rare, many communities never got around to naming streets and numbering houses.

One of those small, but important things, no?  Imagine if you're a high school junior or senior looking over the horizon for greater opportunity, or even just to go out and see the world, how exactly would all of those fancy college brochures find you?  As an economist, and especially as an urban economist, I am interested in all of these mundane, but structurally important, reasons that poverty proves so intractable.   We can all get into existential debates about whether the poor are lazy or deserving, whether its lack of opportunity or cultures of poverty that are preventing people from moving up, but its stories like this that remind me that barriers to wealth come in more prosaic forms, too.

Good news, though.  Addresses are arriving, and some of these are hilarious:

Other taxonomic efforts have been more ad hoc. Say Vista View and Pine Street are taken, but you come across remnants of a party scattered at the end of a country road. Bingo: Beer Can Alley. By that same logic, one widow—a “pretty hot lady,” according to an amused state employee—suddenly found herself living on Cougar Lane.

$5 says that all the local teenage boys already knew exactly where this street was.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" II

I finished the book late last night, and I've spent the past 12 hours or so mulling over what I want to say about it.  The most interesting thing about "Thousand Autumns" as a reader is that I learned quite a bit about this footnote in Dutch and Japanese history that I was only dimly aware of before.

But, I'm not going to write about that aspect of it.  That's ultimately kind of trivial, because this book does aspire to a higher purpose, and that, in the end, deserves more attention than ooing and aahing at the author's attention to detail.

"Thousand Autumns" seeks to be a member of the august parade of high literature that paradoxically fuses together a fanatical loyalty to historical detail and gritty fact with out and out, well, magic.   Don't mistake me or the author, this is not the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez's amazing One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor is it the philosophically-oriented mysticism of Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle, both of which are semi-historical fictions, but with the magic right, up-front and center.  Nor, even, of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, whose magic is mostly confined to one character, and creeps up on you only slowly as the novel progresses.  No, David Mitchell's magic is seen only fleetingly through the fog of medieval Japan, and it when it does appear on stage, it just winks at you, before disappearing again behind the paper screen.

Nonetheless, it is there, and the need for an author who is otherwise fairly committed to recreating realistically Dejima's (the Dutch island in Nagasaki harbor) twilight and the dawn of the long 19th century* to include these little winks and nudges suggests something important about what we as readers and they as authors want out of the past.  Historical fiction often serves to breathe life into two ancient human convictions.   One, that the past was in some important way better.  Two, today's present is unedifying.  Industry, routine, and technology have conspired to rob life of most of its external unknowability.  The essential wonder of the world has somehow been diminished.  Modern day Alexanders might shed a tear while watching daytime television, reading best-selling self-help books, or talking to practitioners of the latest "trend" from the East.  The chorus chants in its yoga pants that the only meaningful journeys left to us are within.  But! It wasn't always this way...right?

By embracing a story set in the past, we can imagine ourselves in our ideal time of choice, and find ourselves enjoying those first discoveries that the world was still offering in its plenitude to the audacious.  But where does magic fit into this?  Ah, well, the past still presents its own problems.  Modern scholarship has filled out many of the details of not just important events, but also is giving us a richer and richer picture of what it was like for an average person to live at any given point in the past. A writer doing research on his setting will discover that while much is unknown about the past, a surprising amount has already been documented to the point where there is precious little room for that key ingredient of all fiction writers: imagination. So, how then to satisfy the demand for a past where the feeling of an individual's possibility for a true adventure was greater, with this oppressive, insistent record of historical fact?  Magic. 

In the case of "Thousand Autumns", magic is mostly confined to the comings and going of the character known as Abbot Enomoto, who as a character rarely rises above the level of comic book villain.  Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot of shades of Ra's al-Ghul here.  He is a malevolent, politically powerful figure of the shadows who heads a religious order secretly devoted to immortality.  And of course, claims to be immortal himself.  Naturally, he winds up being the book's main antagonist to our Batman Jacob de Zoet. How exactly he purports to achieve this, is one of the book's secrets, but needless to say that it's by no process Francis Bacon would approve of.   While we see one, brief demonstration of his "magic", for the most part, David Mitchell is content to leave unanswered and unexplored whether Enomoto's magic works. 

This sort of half-hearted approach to introducing an element of magical mysticism to the past, even in form of an evil character, is pretty much par for the course of all of the other plot devices.  David Mitchell can't resist throwing in a British attack upon Dejima, a love story, a daring rescue attempt of the story's kidnapped heroine, and a handful of chapters showing Japanese intellectuals meeting to discuss how their country is dangerously lagging the rest of the world.  Much happens, and Clerk de Zoet will leave for the Netherlands with the adventure of a lifetime under his belt, but what, in the end was the point of it all?  The magic of the abbot ultimately amounts to little, the British attack on Dejima peters out just at the point where the British triumph is most assured, and Japan and Dejima plod on.  If there is a coherent message in all of this, I failed to see it.

The shortcoming of this kind of historical fiction is that by unifying those two old convictions, you unwittingly expose a third truth about we people: we want more from the past than it can give us.  It was not enough to recreate the story of the Dutch traders living in Japan during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars and their stranding in Japan by the bankruptcy of the Dutch East India Company.  Not enough, let's introduce an evil religious character who may or may not be practicing some truly dark magic.  Not enough?  How about moving backwards in time by 8 years the HMS Phaeton's attack on Nagasaki Harbor to add more complication to the plot? This attitude of pumping the past for maximal gratification of present needs is pervasive, from the Tea Party's tricorn hats, to Tarantino's Inglorius Basterds and Django Unchained.  As The Atlantic author Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it:

It was almost as though history was refusing to give me what I wanted. And I have come to believe that right there is the thing--the tension in historical art is so much about what we want from the past and the past actually gives. All the juice lay in abandoning our assumptions, our needs, and donning the mask of a different people with different needs. This is never totally possible--but I have found the effort to be transcendent. It fills you with a feeling that is outside of yourself.

This is pretty much it right on the money for why the narrative of "Thousand Autumns" reaches for glory and falls short.

* The Marxist historian Hobsbawm held that for all intents and purposes, the 19th Century intellectually, economically, and culturally really encompassed the years 1789-1914.  I've always liked this formulation, as it has kind of bowled over the arbitrariness of demarcating the beginning and of centuries in the course of human events.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" I

"Ink, from his cracked inkpot, indigo rivulets and dribbling deltas...
Ink, drunk by thirsty wood, dripping between cracks...
Ink, thinks Jacob, you most fecund of liquids..."

Amen to that. I had a gift for spilling ink on myself in high school, and I still remember being amazed how it always just seemed to seep into every stitch of clothing I had.

All right, I'm about 100 pages into "Thousand Autumns", and so far?  Well, I'll give my ramblings in a second, but here's a rather loose plot summary:

Set in 1799 in the Japanese city of Nagasaki (yes, that Nagasaki), the book opens with an absolutely arresting chapter on the labor of the Japanese magistrate's wife.  The birth is very complicated*, and Ms. Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife whose been trained in some Dutch methods of delivery, finally intervenes to help.  David Mitchell does a fantastic job here of creating intense suspense and it was one of the most vivid and gripping descriptions of the process of childbirth I've ever read.

That first chapter acts sort of like a prologue, for we now switch to Jacob de Zoet as our point of view from here on out.  He arrives in Nagasaki with twinned purposes.  One, his official duty, which is to untangle the messes left behind by previous administrators of the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki (called Dejima), and secondly, to use his five year assignment with the Dutch East India Company (VOC - its Dutch abbreviation from here on out) to make a fortune.  He has a fiancée at home back in Holland,  and her father is not too keen on the notion of giving away his daughter to a poor, if otherwise respectable, young man.  The first 100 pages are mostly written to give a flavor of what's awaiting Jacob (lots of palace intrigue among the officers of the VOC, disrespect from the motley crew of the lower ranks of the VOC, and tense political interactions with slippery Japanese potentates).  Jacob meets the alluring Ms Aibagawa when she stumbles into a warehouse he's working in, chasing an ape who has stolen an amputated leg.  He tries to help her out, is charmed by her, and finds himself wrestling with a fascination for her wholly unbecoming of a man who is supposed to be diligently making a name for himself for his beloved.

The key plot that seems to be taking shape runs like so:  The VOC is slouching its way towards bankruptcy, but due to the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, few people outside the company have cottoned on.  In the VOC's global trade constellation, Dejima's purpose is to secure Japanese copper.  Japanese copper is shipped to Batavia (today, Jakarta), which is the brightest star in the company's universe.  The buckle of its Orion's belt, if you will.  The copper is used to make coins to pay the native armies that defend Dutch interests in the East Indies.  No copper, no payment.  No payment, no armies  No armies, will lead to, well, "plunder, rapine", and the like.  Vorstenbosch has issued an ultimatum to the Japanese shogun to either increase the amount of copper by something like a magnitude of 10(!), or the Dutch will shut down Dejima, thus closing Japan's only window to the world.  Drama now begins to ensue.

Plot now duly summarized, my impressions so far are mixed.  The author is David Mitchell, (in)famous(?) for being the mind behind Cloud Atlas.  Whether you hated or loved the movie, everyone who saw it seemed to agree that it was an unique experience.  So far, any hopes I've had that the book would be unconventional in any big way have been largely disappointed.  The characters are largely standard-issue, mass-production people:

1.) Jacob de Zoet - Our quiet, unassuming hero fit to bursting with integrity.
2.) Chief Vorstenbosch - Brash, ambitious, ethically slippery boss of former.  Also condescending towards natives, to boot.
3.) Ms. Aibagawa - Exotic, intelligent, slightly deformed foreign beauty.  Potential love interest for white hero?
4.) Grote - Weasley white guy trying to make a few bucks in the Nagasaki black market.  The name is Dutch, but the whole persona screams Cockney. I await the sentence he addresses Jacob as "gov'neh".
5.) Ogawa - Japanese translator interested in Western ideas.  Also quiet, unassuming, and like our Western hero, fit to bursting with integrity.  Seems like David Mitchell's factory for "good" men only had one molding.
6.) Fischer - Senior clerk envious (and anxious) about Jacob's new powers and assigned role as investigator of the company's books.  Kind of priggish, which means of course that his nationality is Prussian (read: German).

The set pieces, too, also feel somewhat lazy.  A key scene towards the end of my reading has one of the official Japanese interpreters, Kobayashi, coming back to meet with Vorstenbosch, Jacob, and a few other officers of the VOC.  He reads the shogun's reply, which mentions nothing about the copper, but instead politely requests (demands) a gift of one thousand peacock feathers.  Jacob, that wily, industrious company employee that he is, catches Kobayashi in a deliberate mistranslation, trapping Kobayashi into showing that he deliberately misrepresented the word for "one hundred" as "one thousand", in the hopes of swindling the Dutch out of the other nine hundred.  The purpose of all of this seems to be to underscore that Jacob is loyal and smart  and that some of the Japanese are greedy and untrustworthy.  However, it all has a feeling of being too cute by half, in that you can almost feel the author's need to prove the point more than be faithful to the true thinking and motivations of his own characters. So he has the ostensibly Kobayashi wander into a trap set up by Jacob, that even a less bright person would simply avoid by obfuscating.

After all, aren't diplomatic translators supposed to be good at that?  Dictators of the world: if your translators can't filibuster their way out of getting caught in their own scams, execute the old guy and find a new one.  If you feel like you've seen this kind of set piece before of the wily hero secretly using knowledge of the native language to smoke out a better deal, you have.  See: Daenerys Targaryen outfoxing the slavers in A Storm of Swords, for a good one.  Readers, got any other classic examples?  I'm pressed on time before I go to class.

Criticisms aside, this book rises above these sort of rote structures by being absolutely rich in every other respect.  The language is often a joy to read.  The rhythms and the idioms of that epoch express themselves in ways that are unsuspecting and fun.  For example, Jacob meets with the curmudgeonly company doctor, Marinus, and after facing a demeaning assault of scorn and irascibility on his place of origin, Jacob replies that as he and the doctor will be neighbors, he hopes that his presence will raise his esteem of Zeelanders, the province in the Netherlands Jacob hails from.  The doctor curtly replies:

    "'So propinquity propagates neighborliness, does it?'"

Ok, I admit it, that tickled me.

Also thoroughly enjoyable is the breadth of historical detail.  David Mitchell places his story four-square and center in the midst of one of the most turbulent events in human history: the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars.  The fact that the story is taking place in a relatively remote island of calm makes it no less compelling, as there is a sense that it cannot remain so sedate for long.  On a more granular level, little things like the smell of Chinese fireworks, the sight of dead dogs in the harbor, and the texture of the coffee make it all the more fun to read.  These serve, as a reader, to make me appreciate the exoticism of Shogunate Japan.  The Dutch were not permitted to leave their trading post except for very special circumstances, so you only get little glimpses of what lies across the bridge to Nagasaki proper, and the mystery only adds to the allure of Old Japan that David Mitchell is painting for me.

All right readers, that was a bit of a long start to my segment on this book.  Now that I've laid out some of the groundwork of what's in it, future updates will be somewhat shorter.

* It even comes with a diagram!

The Official Reading List

To keep myself honest, here is the list of books that I need to read.   This may actually get slightly revised, because there are a few books that relatives bought me for the holidays that I'm still waiting to get delivered, and whose titles I can't quite recall at the moment.  


I listed these a bit haphazardly, and probably will read them in an order in no way resembling the order given here. My strictly objective criterion of the order to read them in will be whatever I damn well feel like reading next.

All right, to the list!

1.) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell 

2.) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy, by Stieg Larsson

3.) Conversation in the Cathedral, by Mario Vargas Llosa  

4.) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

5.) Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

6.) The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins

7.) The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood

8.) Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev

9.) White Noise, by Don DeLillo

10.) Friday Night Lights, by H. G. Bissinger

11.) The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

12.) Life and Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee

13.) Selected Writings, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (probably will just skim this bad boy)

14.) Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

15.) Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow

16.) Foe, J. M. Coetzee

17.) Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche

18.) Steppenwolfe, by Hermann Hesse

19.) Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis

20.) Homeland, by R. A. Salvatore

21.) Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth

22.) Collected Poems, 1909-1962, by T.S. Eliot

23.) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome

24.) Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

25.) American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

26.) Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov

27.) City of Thieves, by David Benioff

28.) The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene

29.) City of Bohane, Kevin Barry

30.) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

31.) The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon

32.) Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman

33.) Red Calvary, by Isaac Babel

34.) God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History, by Stephen Hawking*

35.) A House for Mr. Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul

36.) Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon

37.) Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

38.) Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett

39.) Bismarck: A Life, by Jonathan Steinberg

40.) Reconstruction, by Eric Foner

41.) The Oxford History of the French Revolution, by William Doyle

42.) The House of Morgan, by Ron Chernow

Update: Found four I missed
43.) Empire Falls, by Richard Russo
44.) Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
45.) A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
46.) The Autobiography of Malcolm X

*Quail, literature majors! It’s math!  Rest easy, I’ll keep any discussions about this book boiled down to the finer points (read: easily digestible) for any general person who accidentally found this blog on the way to something better.

In the beginning

Hello,

I decided to start this blog as an exercise in self-discipline.  Some people, you see, collect dolls.  Some collect china, porcelains, and other rarities.  A few enterprising souls collect dead bodies in cold storage.  I am less ambitious than those last sorts, as I have restrained myself for the past few years only to accumulating novels, non-fictions, and poetry collections on my bookshelf.  The problem has become that while I have many reading options, I am only finishing, say, 50% of the novels I buy.

I want to change this. The challenge I'm giving myself is to buy no more books until I've finished all of the ones I've got, no matter how tedious or poorly-written.  This blog is going to be the keystone of this promise.  By forcing myself to update at least once weekly, I'll hopefully not only keep up with my reading, but who knows?  Maybe I'll even entertain a few people as I work my way through my collection.

So what will I be talking about?  Well, I'm a pretty voracious reader, even in spite of my recently low completion rate, and even in the poorest books, there are occasionally great turns of phrase, interesting points, fascinating character development.  I plan to blog about my thoughts, reflections, and general impressions of the books I'm in the middle of during each update.  My magazine subscriptions should also provide lots of interesting stories and ideas that I can weave in to whatever is striking my fancy that particular day.

With that preamble out of the way, starting this coming week, I'm going to pick up with my first book, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell.  I also have this week's Economist and month's Atlantic to plow through.  So folks, let me entertain you, and at the least, entertain myself.