Saturday 23 July 2011

The Boredom of Reading History Books

Mainstream history books are too long, with too many facts, presented in a too-straightforward fashion... For all their facts, there is often no coherent or abiding "truth". And maybe I need a mixture of both, when reading about the past; a sort of stylised history, true and informative but not prosaic.
Darragh McManus' criticism of mainstream history (via Moby Lives) seems fair and right to me. He's talking about popular, Waterstones-friendly books (like The Court of the Red Tsar), but there's not as much of a gap between these books and many of their academic cousins as we might think. There's actually a reciprocal influence. After all, academics want to be popular too. But readers - the kind of people who buy history books in Waterstones - want to be, well, a little bit academic. Think Peep Show's Mark, with Rubicon on his desk and pick-up lines about Stalingrad. Am I being too snobby, or generalising too much, when I say these people think 'facts' and 'history' are basically cleverer than fiction, which is, commensurately, for girls?

And you know, I bet your Waterstones history readers read like academics too.* That is, they don't read a history book like you'd read a novel. They read pages here and there; they dip in where they think it might be interesting. They get what they want, then it's back on the shelf. So it's irrelevant if books "simply spool out information, doggedly and relentlessly – and often very samey information at that." That's even kind of the point. If the structure was more complex, if the presentation wasn't chronological, if the book spent time creating an atmosphere or a peculiar internal logic, you'd have to read it like a novel. And men don't like novels, remember?

The question for historians is, to resist or not? As with all publishing, there's a dialectic about bowing to or trying to shape public taste - or, in practical terms, you do what the publisher tells you. But if we're talking about what a history book should be, should it be more like a novel? Should it be, basically, less boring - less full of relentless information, more shaped by voice and atmosphere, more interestingly structured? And, behind that, the question: do those things actually help to create "abiding 'truth'"?


* To add another insult to the history-reading public, I'll question whether most of the books sold actually get read at all.

Wednesday 20 July 2011

What is the law?

My thesis about Federalism is that the post-revolutionary project is about more than just the constitution, it's about reconstructing and settling social norms. As Federalist theorists (especially educationalists) pointed out, there's no use enshrining respect for property (say) in law if people aren't prepared to accept that as a value. So the problem of political culture, and the structures of social power, seem to be beyond and beneath the law. The law is, if anything, an expression of those hegemonic values - a superstructure, in vulgar Marxist terms.

But it also seems that that's a shallow and broad way of looking at the law. Political culture is an amorphous phenomenon - it's the outcome of hegemonic (and counter-hegemonic) practice. But what kind of action is that practice itself? Well it's rhetoric, and it's force. Law is the hegemonic practice par excellence because it's a combination of both rhetoric and force. It's law that holds political culture together: through law, we negotiate and institute (and then renegotiate) all sorts of specific limits and structures that would otherwise be out of control.

Law fills in the gaps that ideology creates, and in that sense it's all about negotiations within hegemony. For example, ideology may say property is an absolute right; debts have to be paid - but it falters when there's a case of prioritising one debt over another (e.g. in the American post-revolutionary case, the problem of repaying credit notes to soldiers - pay at face or real value? Original or final holders?). Law enters that arena. In my example, politicians had to make the law to fit the case, but mostly the law is already there, pre-emptively, although always ready to be renegotiated.

In a sense, law is powerless against the larger claims of ideology within hegemony. Property is still king here. But in the war of position, law is a powerful tool. Precisely because it acts on tensions within the hegemonic structure, and because it shapes specific local practice only broadly governed by ideological norms, it can be a site for some level of resistance. Good laws can make things a bit better for the worse off. The guardians of law (a professional class that is in general beholden to hegemonic interests, but not always or necessarily so) could potentially, through winning many small battles, create significant change.

Monday 18 July 2011

Absent-Minded Hegemony

My supervisor gets worried when I talk about things like hegemony and social control. When I say "Federalists wanted to adapt mechanisms of control that could function in the context of republican values." It makes it seem like there was a conspiracy. If they wanted to do these things, it makes it seem conscious, and calculated, and malicious.

Actually, that reaction seems very similar to the reaction to Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation. As much as he wanted to talk about forces, about class, ideology, and structure, his readers wanted conspiracy theories - which they could then shoot down. Sympathetic analysts of Beard point out the 'slips' where he does seem to be advocating a kind of conspiracy, and a kind of personal responsibility - and therefore a personal, moral failing - in the Federalists. But he always maintained that that wasn't the point.

The point is in one sense fundamentally structuralist, Marxist: that it's class, inequality, materiality, that really cause change, and not individuals. But you can think of it in a different way, as actually a really personal, individualist, humanist kind of approach: that is, nobody is really evil, or thinks they are. People in general want to be good and do the right thing. It's just hard to know what the right thing is, and there are lots of factors that constrain and influence - structure.

When I started postgraduate work I wanted to be a champion for the Federalists. I thought, 'these seem like good guys, and my book is going to defend them.' Now I see Federalism as part of a transition in power, the creation of the structure of the modern world, where certain concepts like rights and property define our choices, and where power is preoccupied with hiding, disguising, and legitimising itself. But it's not that Federalists set out to create liberal hegemony. They set out to do good.

The historical questions are, a) what determined their idea of good, and b) how did they act on those ideas. Then there's a question that is more than historical, it's also philosophical: c) what was the relationship between their idea of good, and the outcomes of their actions?

Sunday 17 July 2011

The Second Date

I’ve been on two real dates in my life, both of them in my freshman year of college, nearly a quarter century ago. The first, as it happens, was with the eldest daughter of Robert Ross, the founder of TACT. We met at a party and took up with each other for a while. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation. We went to “Burn This” on Broadway. I remember John Malkovich stomping around onstage and then my date catching a train back to Scarsdale. She remembers that we went to a Chinese restaurant and (this hurts) that I ordered a tequila sunrise. That night, anyway, was the end of it for us.

For the next date, on the advice of a classmate from Staten Island, who claimed to have dating experience, I took a sophomore I liked to a T.G.I. Friday’s, in a shopping center on Route 1 in New Jersey. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. We’ve been together for twenty-three years. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other.

 Nick Paumgarten, Looking for Someone (in The New Yorker)

Saturday 9 July 2011

The Poor We Will Have Always With Us

I was talking to my friend about charity and Giving What We Can. I was making an 'argument' that went like this: if you want to do good (and we should take that as given!) then isn't the most good to give to the worst off. And if everyone gives to the worst off, and when he's no longer the worst off, give to the new worst off, and so on, then eventually everyone will be equal. The rich will have given away all that made them rich and the poor will no longer be poor. That seems like the end-point of charity, and of the GWWC idea, to me.

But then she said, well, suppose everyone in the world, one day, has exactly £100. They're all equal. But by the end of the day, some of them have spent all their money, or even borrowed money and spent more - wasted it, say - and others have made money, sold things or whatever. Now at the end of theday, they're not equal any more. So what do you do about it? I sat there for longer than I should have done, thinking about this. I mean, ok, what is the answer? I don't know.

But that isn't the point, is it? It seems to me like an evasive sort of argument. Because the real people that charity helps are not poor through their own bad choices. They're poor because they were are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And we're rich because of the opposite. No matter how much we earned the money we have here (and my friend worked hard for what she has, which must make it so much harder to think like this), we really started off already so far ahead of the average, just by being born where we were.

Yes it makes some sense to think about what the outcome scenario is for all this charity. But how can we let it stop us working to get there in the meantime. Maybe all that's needed to say is that the one-day-after-equality-world is a hell of a lot more equal than the world is now. It's taken thousands of years to get here, so shouldn't we start reversing it? Because it's not really about reaching the end. I think that is what Jesus meant when he said, 'the poor you will always have with you.' Maybe we really can change the world eventually. But right now, the poor are with us, and they need our help, and it is right to help them.

Wednesday 6 July 2011

Shyness, its History, Culture, and Politics

In a similar vein to my 'project' on irony - which resulted in this piece in the Oxonian Review - I'm starting something new: this time, about shyness. I guess I see it also in the vein of Adam Kotsko's Awkwardness, which I reviewed here. (And so this project is also a meta-project: is it possible to deliberately build an online, blog-based project which will be picked up by Zero Books?)

Shyness is obviously related to awkwardness, but is it the same thing? There's a lot that I don't know about shyness. It feels to me like it's essentially universal, that everyone must have feelings of shyness, even if they don't seem shy to me. But is that right, or are there structures in society and culture, or in the brain, that make it a phenomenon of specific people, times, or places? Have there always been shy people - were there shy cavemen? Is there something about our modern, liberal constructions of identity and society that establish the conditions for shyness - or perhaps something older, to do with our notions of family, love, community, and outsiders?

What does shyness mean now, for the people who 'suffer' from it, and for other people? Is the world deprived of creative, intelligent people who are too shy to put themselves out there? Are shy people actually self-deceiving narcissists who are too vain to countenance their own imperfection? How, when, and why do people become shy? Is shyness a personal trait, or a category of experience, a quality of certain moments or relationships, but not others? What does shyness mean for love, and for understanding between people? What does it mean for happiness, fun, creativity?

For me, it seems like shyness creates a paradoxical relationship towards others. I often feel like I don't like to be with other people; but I also long to give myself up totally to someone. Again, I feel like, surely everyone feels this way? For now, here are some lines of Dostoevsky that touch me, because they remind me of this feeling:
"Oh my dear, my dear, why don't you ever ask me anything?"
"Because you won't tell, that's why I don't ask."
"I shan't tell you. I shan't, I shan't; even if you kill me, I shan't tell you,' she said quickly. 'Burn me, if you like, but I shan't tell you. And however much I've suffered, I shan't tell anything. People will never know!"

- The Possessed