Want to do your bit for reducing the trade imbalances between the European centre and periphery? German Wikipedia’s Cabinet of Curiosities will exterminate all productive activity for a significant period of time. Spread it!
Amusing
1
Category Archives: Culture
Taking Stock of 2010: Books
Undemanding reading, with one or two exceptions, appears as the hallmark of 2010. Belated reaction to the economic crisis? Lack of initiative after spending several months with Count Tolstoy in 2009? Hard to say.
The exceptions: Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian, a survivor’s testimony from the time of his arrest in 1915 in Istanbul to his eventual escape into Central Europe in 1918; and in a completely different vein The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a retelling of Arthurian legends with the Grail quest a nuisance, all of the swordplay off-stage, and the men in general of secondary interest.
Most-read author this year just passed: Alexander McCall Smith. Authors new to me I want to read more of: John Biggins, Raymond E. Feist, Jo Walton, Hillary Mantel. Books read aloud to the eldest child: should be obvious from context. Best tale of the Austro-Hungarian navy: Tomorrow the World by John Biggins. Disappointment from a Nobelist I otherwise quite like: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk. Best novel of first contact in medieval Germany: Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. Books in German read: none, for the first time in many years.
Full list is below the fold, links are to earlier Fistful posts on the title or author. See also 2009, 2007, 2006.
Of Gods and Men: non-premature evaluation
In my role as the AFOE occasional film critic, off to the Curzon Mayfair for Of Gods and Men/Des dieux et des hommes. After the DICKHEADS, we’re going to deal with some much more serious terrorism in this post.
Of Gods and Men is a classic peace movie, in the sense that there are classic war movies. In fact, it mirrors quite a lot of the structure and tropes you expect from a war movie – a neat trick. The film deals with the hostage-taking and eventual murder, by unidentified gunmen, of a group of French monks in the high Atlas mountains of Algeria in 1996, during the grim worst of the Algerian civil war. The monks, to begin with, are living at peace – in fact, as we learn from some of their conversations, their elected leader Brother Christian sees their mission (that word, already) as a project in deliberately waging peace, a continuation of the alternative-leftist dream of 1968. Every time the monks have a meeting, Christian takes his seat directly in front of an icon of 1980s internationalists, the world map redrawn to make the size of Africa and Latin America more obvious.
The monks tend their land, produce honey and wine, worship. Christian is writing a book. They practice social service – one of them, Luc, is a doctor, who holds a weekly surgery for the poor. They live in apparent harmony with the Algerian villagers across the valley in their structural-tile favela settlement.
Nobody wants to be involved with the war, but the war wants very much to be involved with them. A group of Croatian engineers working nearby are murdered by insurgents. Gradually, the violence infects everything else. They try to refuse it – Christian meets with the Algerian governor, who offers to post troops near the monastery, and he refuses as a matter of principle. As a result, the monks fall out among themselves, not so much about the troops but because he has acted without getting their approval first. The war draws progressively closer, and they debate endlessly whether to abandon the whole project and go back to France, to move temporarily to a place of safety, to go back on the governor’s offer, or to stick it out. One night, the insurgents appear and demand medical assistance. Christian persuades their leader to stay outside the monastery, and they accept drugs and dressings.
Things rapidly become more serious. It becomes obvious that one side, or another, wants them dead. The insurgent leader is killed in action with the army and Christian has to identify his body, thus becoming suspect to both the insurgents and the army. A succession of monks struggle with their fear and doubt, but Christian talks them around one by one. Eventually, gunmen kidnap all but two monks (who succeed in hiding) and march them off into the mountains. They ended up dead in reality; who killed them, and how, remains a mystery.
I liked the way this film showed people at work – the monks, the Algerians, like the village haji who they hire to bring his Polish tractor and plough their patch. We see him hit a sticky patch, carefully raise the hitch, reverse, and try again. The doomed Croats boom around the site with their Caterpillars and a sort of proud working-class confidence.
I also liked the role of time. The monks initially seem to be blessed with the gift of all the time in the world, but as the film progresses, the slow progress of time becomes a source of cranking suspense and maddening waiting.
That’s another war-movie trick, of course. Among other things, Brother Bruno makes a dangerous journey through the checkpoints and the debatable lands to bring in an urgent supply run, including cheese, medicines, and several hundred rounds of communion wafers. People write home illuminatingly. One of the monks demands of their leader “What are we doing here – trying to be heroes? Martyrs?”, and his leader talks him down reminding him of the importance of their mission and his obligations to his brothers (another telling word). The characters seek out their leader one by one to talk to him in confidence, and he pays out the big cheap words used on all such occasions. After they are captured, one after the other, the hostage-takers make them read out their name, age, and monastic affiliation. (Monks don’t have serial numbers.) In fact, it’s arguable that this is how the war seeps into the monastery – the monks get pressganged into a war movie.
As well as being a great war movie about peace, it’s a pretty good peace movie about war. The Algerian regional governor honestly doesn’t want the monks to get killed, but he also has political motives – it would be welcome if they were to simply leave, but he would prefer they stay, so he can install a detachment of troops in the village and establish the government’s authority there on the pretext of protecting them. He would like to make the monks part of his counter-insurgency plan. And if the insurgents were to butcher them, despite all he could do, that would make useful propaganda.
The insurgents would much rather have the monks in place – it’s always possible to slaughter them if a dose of revolutionary terror is required, and they are a source of medical assistance. Although the insurgent leader doesn’t give Brother Christian any assurances, he does let others believe that the monks are under his protection.
And the people, it turns out, are hoping that the presence of the monks will deter the insurgents from doing anything to them, for fear of committing an atrocity awful enough to wreck their reputation. They don’t want the insurgents and they want the government still less – they want, most of all, to survive and to avoid being governed. It is telling that the villagers and the monks are the only people in the movie who practice a sort of democracy – the Algerian military, of course, couldn’t care less, and the insurgents obey their leader. But this doesn’t mean they are passive. Part of the horror is that the relationship between the villagers and the monks subtly changes, from peace to something approaching a hostage situation. After all, the villagers are in a position to denounce them to the insurgents (or the army) and then carefully see nothing.
Obviously, this situation is intolerable to both the insurgents and the military. Neither the insurgent nor the counterinsurgent will put up with people who insist on escaping from their joint demand that they take sides. In a sense, the monks are wiped out by an unconscious conspiracy between two factions desperately competing to deliver their rival visions of government to people who want no part of either. Monks don’t have serial numbers, and all the killers of the Algerian war want to impose them.
Oddly enough, the Algerian governor, with his Ottoman title of Wali, is quite a sympathetic character. A curious feature of his role is that every time he appears on screen, he speaks the unvarnished truth as a sort of bureaucratic Greek chorus. Also, he always appears in a black suit, a uniform that marks him as a survival of civilian power. In his office, though, when he talks about the people and gestures out of the window, you can’t see any people.
To slip under the European bailout umbrella
Or in German: unter den Eurorettungsschirm schlüpfen. It’s the tenth-placed expression in the German Language Society’s list of the most important German words and expressions of 2010. Cyberkrieg also made the cut (fourth place). In first place: Wutbürger, or ‘enraged citizen’. All of which we’ve covered on Fistful recently. No one can say we don’t have our finger on the world spirit. I have to say I admire the work of the GfdS here: I feel much better knowing that all it takes for a terrible thing to seem almost humorous is to discover there’s a community of language users that’s fond of giving the terrible things their own special names.
Deference check
An argument that’s often put forward by people who support the institution of the British monarchy is that the monarch and his or her family are apolitical; that is, they can rise above party politics and lead through dint of example and charisma. An elected presidential figurehead, by contrast, would inevitably be drawn into party politics. Names would have to be put forward; manifestos drawn up. We are better off without any of that, monarchists argue. The monarch and her family are popular, well liked; a force for national unity.
The fact that the occupants of a royal limousine were recently mobbed – and, allegedly, to some degree physically assaulted – surely does severe damage to that argument. The relevant counterfactual is this: if last Thursday that car had contained a figurehead president, would he or she have been mobbed in the same way? I reckon many people will find themselves answering yes to that question. And if that’s what you believe, then I’d suggest you jettison any belief you might have had that a royal family is better at unifying the nation than an elected president would be. At least consider the possibility that a president wouldn’t do worse.
There are some other things to think about as well. The second-in-line to the British throne is getting married next spring. The government wasted no time in deciding that this event should be celebrated with full spectacle: the location is Westminster Abbey; an extra national holiday is planned for the day. It seems very unlikely that a nation would do any of this for a president, let alone his or her grandson: the thinking has to be that the royal wedding will be bread and circuses popular; a unifying event. But will it be? There’s some polling on this. Only one in four thinks that the government should spend any extra money on the royal wedding. Plenty of people think that the monarchy should modernise. The most interesting figure in the Independent’s recent piece on the popularity of the monarchy is that around about two thirds of the D and E socioeconomic groups now say that the monarchy should modernise. I don’t see much bread and circuses potential there, given that ‘modernising’ is code for shrinking the spectacle. And one illusion about the royal family – that it can command at least a minimum of deference wherever it goes – has been shattered. Those who want to maintain the illusion will probably make an effort to show that the paint can throwers were asocial hoodlums, and altogether unrepresentative. I’m not sure it’ll work.
Premature evaluation – The Spirit Level
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level is a vigorous polemic for social democracy, something we’re probably in need of as the neo-liberals recover from the 2008 experience.
Unlike most such, this one is based on data – specifically, a whole battery of socioeconomic indicators that turn out to be strongly correlated with income inequality. In fact, the paperback comes with a handy table of the R-squareds and p-values of all the indicators used, which range across life expectancy, imprisonment per capita, patents issued per capita and much else. Everywhere, it seems, more egalitarian societies tend to do better.
This observation is rather more impressive than quite a bit of the book – there’s too much back-of-a-fag-packet neuroscience of the sort that actual neuroscientists run a mile to avoid about mirror neurons and such, as well as a fair bit of 1970s-ish romanticisation of the supposedly ideal status of hunter-gatherer societies. Steven Pinker’s work on the history of violence hasn’t landed here; in places it’s almost nostalgically sweet.
The data, however, speaks for itself. It’s true that quite a few of the charts derive a lot of their correlation from a few outliers, but the outliers invariably point to the same results – specifically the United States, which reliably turns out to have truly awful results for many, many tests – and also very high inequality. Similarly, there are a whole string of statistics that are driven by a group of post-Soviet states that turn out to be dramatically unhappy, conflicted, violent, unhealthy, etc for their level of income; of course, these societies underwent a historic explosion of inequality.
Many of the results have been checked by carrying out the same analyses with the 51 US states, which gives rise to the same conclusion and another crop of interesting outliers. The states of the Deep South are reliably terrible. They are highly unequal, and they get the effects – but they are far off to the top right of the trendline. In a sense, their marginal productivity in terms of inequality is unusually high – for every extra point on the Gini coefficient, they manage to produce a sharply higher degree of suffering than the national average.
On the other hand, there’s the importance of being urban. The more metropolitan the state, the less it suffers from the impact of inequality – New York has the social problems of the average, despite being very unequal. And there’s the Alaskan question.
The Alaskan question? Many people on the left are keen on the idea of a citizens’ basic income, and oddly enough, there is one territory with one in this study. Alaska, famously, distributes its oil revenues equally among the citizenry, and is therefore the most equal society in the United States. However, it also succeeds in being reliably among the worst on every other measure you can think of. Clearly, the statecraft of Sarah Palin must have some impact, but it’s equally clear that it can’t be the whole explanation.
Unless there is some huge missing factor that invalidates the whole data set, we have to consider that this particular basic income experiment has failed to deliver the benefits of equality. Alaska is, of course, a very special and atypical place – but it’s not that different to, say, Norway, another sparsely populated, mountainous, northern territory bordering on Russia whose economy is heavily influenced by oil and gas, forestry, fishing, and metals and whose government decided to take a radical approach to the oil revenues, and where a lot of people own guns. And Norway is both very egalitarian and reliably in the very top of all the metrics in The Spirit Level.
Perhaps the answer is precisely that the Alaskan basic income is free money? Despite all the stuff about mirror neurons, etc, etc, it seems that the trade secret of equality is – equality. It takes a long time for Wilkinson and Pickett to get to this, but the difference between handing out oil windfalls and real egalitarianism is that only one of them is founded on a different balance of power between classes. A lasting reduction of income inequality must be founded in a lasting reduction in the inequality of political power – otherwise it may not last, and it may not even have much effect.
Another interesting point is that changes in relative economic success among nations seem to have little effect on human happiness or security. Obviously, a total crash will do it. But once a certain threshold level of per-capita GDP is passed, Wilkinson and Pickett argue, pushing into the G8 doesn’t change much. They therefore argue that economic growth is useless. However, they then note that a whole range of their metrics, like life expectancy, do seem to go up a percentage point or two a year in the rich nations anyway. Which sounds a lot like growth.
It might be more accurate to say that growth relative to other industrialised states is not particularly important within the normal range of variation, although in absolute terms it is. However, the chart in question is quite heavily driven by the US outlier – which suggests that the costs of enough inequality will essentially swallow all your economic growth.
Eventually, the upshot of TSL is that the world, and especially China, needs trade unions.
Controlling The Uncontrollable: Spain’s National Addiction To The Use Of “Dinero B”
Well, before we go any further, I would like to make clear that what I am going to talk about in this post is not anything illegal, or even irregular (things like this must be going on in almost all Euro Area countries even as I write). Bending of the rules? Perhaps. Taking them to their limit? Certainly. Continue reading
Two random videos
This video is a satire – I want to emphasize this: a satire — done by the great American comic newspaper, The Onion. (The first 15 seconds is an ad. Sorry, that’s how they pay for this stuff.)
This video is an actual commercial that played on Greek televsion recently. (Scroll down for the English translation if you don’t speak Greek.) By pure random accident, I just happened to see them both on the same day.
And that’s all.
Are the Rand times here?
In 2006, the German architectural practice Gerkan, Marg & Partners (GMP) took a client to court. The client was the German national rail company, Deutsche Bahn. The architects argued that their design for the new central station in Berlin had been changed without their knowledge: Deutsche Bahn had hired new architects – Winkens Architekten – to substitute flat ceilings for vaulted ceilings over the lower level platforms. The change allowed Deutsche Bahn a cost saving; GMP took the position that cost shouldn’t come before design integrity. The Berlin District Court ruled in favour of GMP and ordered Deutsche Bahn to demolish what it had built and implement the vaulted ceilings instead. This decision surprised just about everybody.
It might even have surprised your typical Ayn Rand reader. Even the most heroic of architects isn’t supposed to win in court quite like that. In the Rand world, those who create will inevitably have their designs interfered with by those who don’t create. Creators aren’t expected to take it lying down, though, just like von Gerkan didn’t. In The Fountainhead (1943), the inner-directed and incorruptible Howard Roark is hired (on condition of anonymity) by the self-serving, wonkish and manipulative Ellsworth Toohey to design a public housing project: Cortlandt Homes. From the beginning, it’s Toohey’s intention to mess around with Roark, and so Toohey has it that architects with less integrity than Roark are secretly hired to make modifications. Roark moves to sue the client, but is rebuffed. With the help of Dominique Francon, he moves to physical intervention; he blows up the altered housing project. Only then does he get to go to court; he’s prosecuted. After making an inspired speech to the jury in his own defense, he gets off. Although the drama of the novel is more or less unaffected by this decision, Roark’s acquittal is still important for Rand’s purposes. She wanted everyone to know that the universe isn’t malevolent; by extension, neither are the people in it. Not all of them, at least. Continue reading
Just What Is The Economist Up To In It’s Seeming Crusade Against Catalunya?
Well, this is certainly not the first time I have had cause to complain about the quality of the journalism and economic reporting served up over at the Economist, and I’m damn sure it won’t be the last. But this latest example of shoddy (I would almost even go so far as to use the word “gutter”) journalism certainly takes the biscuit. Catalunya, the august magazine informs its readers is the “Land of the Ban” – “First the burqa, now the bullfight. What will Catalonia outlaw next?” Evidently the author of the article is entitled to his opinion, but could it be that the long-standing practice of incorporating unsigned opinion pieces may now have lost its earlier justification, and may it not somehow have inadvertently converted itself into a rather cowardly way of expressing otherwise hard to justify opinions behind the safe shield of anonymity. Or would our author really like to show us that valour is, at least in this case, the better part of discretion, and enter the arena in persona in order to face the wrath of the Catalan bull?
“The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word,” wrote Hemingway in his classic treatise Death in the Afternoon, “that is, it is not an equal contest, or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather, it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved, and in which there is danger for the man, but certain death for the animal.”