Category Archives: Culture

Not Being God, a collaborative autobiography of Gianni Vattimo

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I was a bit hesitant when, a few weeks ago, I accepted to write a review of Not Being God, a collaborative autobiography (or non-auto-autobiograpy as I like to call it) of Gianni Vattimo, published by Columbia University Press. The book is officially called a “collaborative autobiography” because, even though it was written by Piergiorgio Paterlini, it adopts the style of a first-person novel. Basically, the written text is Paterlini’s but the voice you hear is that of Vattimo. The reason for this is given in the introduction, where Paterlini states:

”(…) because I wanted to do it (long live subjectivity) and because Gianni Vattimo agreed to do it with me. But above all, because this necessary (auto)biography is something he – who writes so engagingly, unlike many of his colleagues – would never have written.”

And I must say the approach worked. After a couple of pages you forget Not Being God is not written by Vattimo. It is beautifully ‘subjective’ in all senses of the word.
The first thing that struck me when I embarked upon the book, was that it almost reads like a lifeblog. The chapters, 64 of them, are a bit like short stories, mostly chronological, on different aspects of Vattimo’s life. The format makes for easy reading and allows the reader to put down the book from time to time for a moment of reflection without losing track of the story line. This is very useful, for instance, when you are reading about Vattimo’s philosophical thought and need to do some googling, like I had to. I am a notorious Philistine when it comes to ‘higher culture’. Sure, I like art and philosophy and literature, but I am about as highbrow and erudite as a rent boy in Turin’s Valentino Park. This is the very reason why I hesitated to write a review on Not Being God. To make things worse, I had never even heard of Gianni Vattimo! Well, it turns out my ignorance was not really a handicap. On the contrary. It allowed me to focus on the man behind the philosopher. And the book really is highly enjoyable. And so is Gianni Vattimo. You have got to love this gay man who wanted to have a normal family life, taking the view that “sexual specialization is impoverishing”, and who is endearingly candid about his personality:

”On one hand, faced with an attack full of gratuitous hatred, I think, with childish surprise: How can they not be fond of someone like me? On the other, I always think that I’m incapable of winning over anyone, of deserving anyone’s affection. If someone does show me affection, simply and naturally and without expecting anything in return, I almost wonder how it’s possible.”

Furthermore, the book whisks you through a few decades of Italian politics and history and even gives you an inside look on the way the European Parliament works (according to Vattimo):

“At Brussels I always used to say, “Give me a report, even a rapporto protetto.” Because, since they can’t decide anything, members of the European Parliament try to win a name for themselves by attaching their name to a report on some topic or other. The Commission sends you a measure they wish to take, you study it and write the whole thing up, then take it to your group and present it. Even if the Assembly does vote it down, the Commission goes ahead with it anyway, because they’re utterly indifferent.”

Philosophy takes, of course, a prominent place in Not Being God, but the philosophical passages are easily digestible and Vattimo (through Paterlini) explains them well enough. And there are several interesting ideas that even a layman like myself can understand and appreciate:

”I’m convinced that not much can be done about the uniformization of the world, in the current situation at any rate, under a sole empire, the United States. But tomorrow it might be someone else. If there’s a way out – with the end of every absurd claim to absolute objectivity – it’s for society to become the place where truth signifies accord among interpreters, not the claim to demonstrate how matters stand.”

So, to summarize, Being God is a delicious mix of philosophy, history, politics, ‘gayness’ and the personal experiences and thoughts of an interesting man, thinker and political activist with an extraordinary life. It is thoroughly enjoyable, well-written (and translated, by William McCuaig) and, at times, enormously funny. It should appeal to everyone and, especially, to those who already know Gianni Vattimo or take a keen interest in Italian culture, its recent politics and history. And do not worry if you know little about Italian politics. All the Italian abbreviations that are used in the book are translated and explained at the end. Also, there is a handy index in case you want to research the tons of names that are mentioned in this autobiography.
The book’s official Columbia University Press webpage is here, more excerpts from the book (about Vattimo’s concept of “weak thought” and death threats among other things) can be found here and Gianni Vattimo’s very own weblog (in Italian) can be found over here. Enjoy.

The invisible hand of letting people know who’s boss

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Edward links downblog to a piece by Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine. My precis of Bailey’s thesis runs something like this. Having children, per se, isn’t so expensive. Educating them, on the other hand, is very expensive. This is because the levers of a modern, free market, rule of law, enforcement of contract society are complicated and you need a lot of training in order to know which lever to pull, and when. In actuality, lack of training generally leads to denial of access to said levers and hence a lifetime of poverty, and no one wants that for their child. Hence the expense of education deters prospective parents from actually going ahead and having children; this is the ‘invisible hand of population control’. And it’s a good thing! This is because no one wants a tragedy of the commons situation, like you’ve got in all those poor countries.

I can see the following problems with Bailey’s argument, in no particular order, and not worked through, since this is not an essay:

(1) There’s your local commons, and then there’s the global commons. Further, population and global resource depletion need not be coupled; the small population of a developed society may take more in the way of resources from the world than the much larger population of a less developed society;

(2) The length, complexity and cost of education need not be coupled to the total skill demand in a society; to take a picturesque example: piano tuning is a difficult skill to acquire, but it’s easy to imagine a society that generally prefers simpler instruments and has no pianos at all;

(3) In actuality, the length, complexity and cost of education is often to do with status display; in many (most?) societies, education is a positional good purchased by the parents;

(4) The cost of education need not be the only, or even the main deterrent to having children; it’s possible to find low birth rates in actual societies where most (or even all) formal education is state provided (and hence, obviously, the cost of that education is shared between all taxpayers);

(5) It’s fairly well established (I think) that freedom is not something that necessarily flows from rule of law and enforcement of contract; it’s possible to have a society where many citizens have relatively little freedom yet all contracts are honoured;

(6) In the context of (5) above, we should probably ask what Bailey means by ‘economic freedom’; his gist seems to be ‘those freedoms enjoyed by the better off’;

(7) A society where a majority composed of not so well off people is deterred from raising children – and where, by contrast, a few well off people have lots of children – is not necessarily a very nice society. I’d suggest there might be gentler ways of avoiding tragedy of the commons situations.

Gold and Iron, by Fritz Stern

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“This is a book about Germans and Jews, about power and money. It is a book focused on Bismarck and Bleichröder, Junker and Jew, statesman and banker, collaborators for over thirty years. The setting is that of a Germany where two worlds clashed: the new world of capitalism and an earlier world with its ancient feudal ethos; gradually a new and broadened elite emerged, and Bismarck’s tie with Bleichröder epitomized that regrouping. It is the story of the founding of the new German Empire, in whose midst a Jewish minority rose to embattled prominence. It is a record of events and of the interests and sentiments that shaped these events; it is a record of events and of the interests and sentiments that shaped these events; it is a record largely told by contemporaries, in thousands of hitherto unused letters and documents. It is also the story of the fragility of that Empire and its ruler, of its hidden conflicts, and of the hypocrisy which allowed a glittering façade to cover the harsh and brutal facts below. The ambiguity of wealth — its threat to tradition and its promise of mobility — is part of this record, and so is the anguished ambiguity of Jewish success, so striking, so visible, so delusive. It is a study of a society in motion, and mobility was its essence and its trauma. …”
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Random thoughts on returning from French Africa

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If you’re a human being who speaks French, you’re more likely to be African than European. La Francophonie’s demographic center of gravity is now somewhere around Bamako, Mali.

If you’re a human being who is literate in French — say, at a high school graduate level — you’re probably European. But not for much longer. Demographic growth plus the slow-but-steady rise of literacy rates in most of Africa means that by the next decade, most literate Francophones will be African too.
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E-Facing The Future

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Quietly clicking my way through Bloomberg last Sunday afternoon, I came across this:

Facebook Members Register Names at 550 a Second

Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking site, said members registered new user names at a rate of more than 550 a second after the company offered people the chance to claim a personalized Web address.

Facebook started accepted registrations at midnight New York time on a first-come, first-served basis. Within the first seven minutes, 345,000 people had claimed user names, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. Within 15 minutes, 500,000 users had grabbed a name.

Mein Gott, I thought to myself, if 550 people a second are doing something, they can’t all be wrong. So I immediately signed up. Actually, this isn’t my first experience with social networking since I did try Orkut out some years back, but somehow I didn’t quite get the point. Either I was missing something, or Orkut was. Now I think I’ve finally got it. Perhaps the technology has improved, or perhaps I have. As I said in one of my first postings:

Ok. This is just what I’ve always wanted really. A quick’n dirty personal blog. Here we go. Boy am I going to enjoy this.

Daniel Dresner once broke bloggers down into two groups, the “thinkers” and the “linkers”. I probably would be immodest enough to suggest that most of my material falls into the first category (my postings are lo-o-o-ng, horribly long), but since I don’t fit any mould, and Iam hard to typecast, I also have that hidden “linker” part, struggling within and desperate to come out. Which is why Facebook is just great.

In addition, on blogs like this I can probably only manage to post something worthwhile perhaps once or twice a month, and there is news everyday.

So, if you want some of that up to the minute “breaking” stuff, and are willing to submit yourself to a good dose of link spam, why not come on in and subscribe to my new state-of-the-art blog? You can either send me a friend request via FB, or mail me direct (you can find the mail on my Roubini Global page). Let’s all go and take a long hard look at the future, you never know, it might just work.

Review: Alistair Crooke, “Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution”

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I’ve been asked to crosspost this from my blog…

Resistance – The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such thought, and another would be a slightly eccentric, neo-Platonist rant with overtones of Ian Buruma’s notion of Occidentalism.

Well, that sounds fun, doesn’t it? Then you have to add in Crooke’s career; the book glosses him as an advisor to the European Commission on the Middle East, but makes absolutely no mention of his term as SIS station chief in Tel Aviv, in which role he negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which lasted until an unfortunate air raid resulted in the deaths of a round dozen civilians and not the Hamas man the Israelis were after. (The story is here.)

The war resumed, and Crooke was recalled; officially this was for “security reasons”, but if anything imperilled his security it was probably that after the event, the Israeli tabloids discovered his job title, identity, and photograph with un-mysterious suddenness. He eventually fetched up in Beirut, running a thinktank called the Conflicts Forum, devoted to contact between Western powers and Islamists. (Time was, it would have been a nightclub, but we live in fallen times.)

So, what upshot? Crooke makes a strong case for modern Islamism as a classical reaction to colonialism and modernisation, or rather an interwar vision of modernity. He relies on an impressive battery of reading ranging into cultural Marxism at one end and into hardcore conservatism at the other. More controversially, he tries to place Islamism since the 1950s in a context of rebellion against free-market economics drawn from Naomi Klein; but the Ba’athist and similar regimes hardly qualify as Friedmanites, with their nationalised oil companies, state military industries, and extensive Soviet influence in administration, secret policing, and military doctrine and structure.

He draws on a battery of confidential interviews, which are some of the most interesting things in the book, to illuminate current ideas and practice, specifically among Hezbollah thinkers. Notably, they argue, the Caliphate should now be seen as a world-wide network of loosely interconnected “communities of resistance”, rather than a state or any other kind of hierarchical organisation. The aim of these is to uphold the practice of an ideal, self-organising community of believers against a total onslaught by the forces of liberalism, which wishes us all to be atomised individuals.

In practice, this demands a sort of liberation theology/community-organising/vaguely anarchist drive to create base groups everywhere, drawn together by the practice of mutual aid and the study of critical texts, and if necessary to form the underground shadow-administration common to all good guerrilla armies.

Crooke is interesting on the military implications of this, but I think what he describes is less original than he suggests. Flat, highly networked command structures, with a high degree of autonomy down to the squad and the individual, are not characteristic of Islamic or Islamist warfare; what he is describing here sounds a lot like Auftragstaktik. Also, he describes the requirements of a Hezbollah leader as integrity, authenticity, reliability, personal charisma, and ability to mobilise others; would anyone at all disagree?

There is an interesting side-trip into Islamist economic ideas. He criticises Westeners who assume that the main aim of these is to find technical workarounds to make the normal course of business sharia-compliant; apparently the real thing is considerably better. However, a lot of it (as described here) consists of accepting a market economy but not letting money be the be-all and end-all of everything, etc, etc; in practice, this seems to mean a welfare state. No surprise, then, that one of the thinkers he quotes had to write an entire book to rebut the charge that his ideas were indistinguishable from European social democracy.

According to Crooke, the main distinction is in the field of monetary economics; but, in so far as his writing is a true misrepresentation of it, it seems to be distinct in a way which isn’t particularly original. Apparently, Islamist economists are very exercised about M3 broad money growth, on the grounds that this represents the growth of credit in a fractional-reserve banking system and that this is the root of the evils of capitalism. Instead, they are keen on…the gold standard, that most free-trade imperialist of economic institutions!

At this point you might want to halt briefly; Islamist Auftragstaktik applied to community organising? The Caliphate in terms suited to Clay Shirky? Dear God, Islamist monetarist gold bugs? Phew! And you could, perhaps, take comfort from the thought that however strange Iranian political thought may be, their economic thought is no stranger than Fraser Nelson’s or Jude Wanniski’s. Placing an upper bound on the strangeness, after all, is probably an important step towards international understanding.

Then we get into the second book. Crooke is always quoting Plato, specifically the apposition between the port and the city; he attacks Karl Popper, and uses a great deal of Horkheimer and John Gray. It is fair to say he accepts entirely the complex of critiques that argue that life is meaningless without a higher purpose usually decided by higher people, that the freedom offered by liberalism is no such thing, that trade (or commerce, or industry) is “mere”; it is harder to say whether he accepts this for the sake of argument, as much of the Islamist thinking he is discussing bases itself on these ideas.

And there is a valid argument that a lot of it claims to represent the up-side of such critiques – the need for a self-empowered, cohesive community, the problems of the free market – but might just as well be the downside. The economy should be directed, at a national level, towards certain “great concepts”; this could be post-war French indicative planning, and might well be, having been written in the 1950s – or it could be a Straussian exercise in National Greatness Conservatism. We should work and care for society; or is it, as one of Crooke’s interviewees says, that “life is not worth living without something worth dying for”?

None of this stuff about “false reconciliation” and “self-pacifying”, materialism, etc, etc, answers E. P. Thompson’s classic attack on “theories that assume that ordinary people are bloody silly“, either. Strangely enough, towards the end of the book, we have a sudden swerve back towards liberalism; freedom is not so bad after all, it turns out, compared with a neoconservatism informed by Leo Strauss.

Curiously, I left the book with a feeling that it had set out to make right-wing Americans feel closer to political Shi’ism.

Impertinent Question, 2

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What’s Chinese for cultural destruction?

Over the next few years, [Kashgar] city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of [the city's Old Town, a] warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.