One minor point of clarification. If Putin gives a speech at Valdai, followed by a lengthy question and answer period with journalists, would it be inaccurate of me to claim to have some insight into what Putin is thinking? I understand your point about the tendency of some historians to psychologize the subjects of their research, but in a very straightforward, every day sense, I think one can safely claim that if Putin tells us something about how he perceives things, we can accept that as an indication that he is telling us what he thinks. Should we take this at face value? Of course not, people lie every day. But weighed in relation to other pieces of information - i.e., what Putin has said and then done in the past - I think it's fair to say we can draw useful inferences. If you want to challenge this, then we're on the slippery slope of not knowing anything about anyone regardless of what they say or do. At that point, we can save trees and stop writing history and political analysis. And perhaps that would not be a bad thing.
Oh, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point about Hezbollah and Lebanese politics, but along with the Amal Group there are five Shiite ministers in the current government, two of whom are members of Hezbollah. The Speaker of Parliament is also from Amal. The two groups also hold 28 seats in the Lebanese Parliament. That suggests their influence remains fairly substantial. And over the pasts few days, Lebanese clans aligned with Hezbollah have been kicking the shit out of HTS fighters near Homs, who tried to cross over into Lebanon as part of their expansionist designs. So, the situation remains, how should we say, fluid?
Of course, Putin always speaks clearly. Everyone in Russia understands what he thinks. At the same time, Putin is not lying. Even if he denies something, it becomes clear to everyone when he has something to do with it. He does it intentionally. Perhaps to understand this, you need excellent knowledge of a language that Western translators do not know. In addition, they are engaged in direct translation - they do not have to explain the meaning.
At the risk of being called a Putin-apologist - and not for the first time - my experience listening to Putin's speeches and talks is that he speaks as an adult speaking to other adults, a practice I find to be almost completely lacking among Western leaders. Even Obama, much acclaimed in the West as an eloquent speaker, typically sounds like he's talking to children or people with limited ability to understand complex issues. And that's when he's not haranguing people who disagree with him, in his folksy way (a deliberate affectation since he's from Chicago and the product of private schools). When I listen to Putin speak it's clear to me he's well informed and conversant on a wide range of subjects. And in so doing he assumes his interlocutors possess similar capabilities. All this to say that I can't stand listening to Western "leaders" and politicians, with their insipid sound bites and condescending tone.
Putin does speak as an adult, and a knowledgeable one, on many subjects. Much of the issue may stem from the cultural context of his speeches and statements. Western pundits tend to "interpret" Putin's speech (arguably, "for Western audiences") instead of trying to understand what it says within Russian cultural history and concerns. An example would be his comment on the fall of the Soviet Union, which is always trotted out to emphasize his supposedly "expansionist" mindset when it was actually about stability and security in the region.
To go back to your original point, I think we can "know what Putin is thinking" only to the extent that we know Putin (which is actually hardly at all). We can try to understand his statements, but we are likely to gain only a small understanding into his thought processes. This is all complicated, of course, by the nature of political speech and the cultural differences (including language barriers) that must be overcome. So, I don't know if we can claim to "know" what Putin thinks, as much as we can discuss (contextually) what he said. So, your "some insight" might be an accurate statement, but we should recognize its limitations. Such is life.
Also, Putin's actions and decissions are contingent to what is happening at the particular time, probably anchored in strategic interests he has for Russia, increasing the well being and livability in Russia and ensuring the security of Russian space from direct attack and infiltrations as well...
"I’ve attempted on a number of occasions over the decades to write and lecture on what politicians and ordinary people in the 1930s actually thought and did, and why."
Not that you're a busker taking requests, but I hope us readers might persuade you to write about this in a future essay.
Agreed, I have been trying to get a grip on the 20's and 30's but all there seems to be is economic history divorced from the current thought of the period.
You know, AJP Taylor was fond of discoursing about this--his interpretation of how people wrote about the origins of the Second World War or difference in approaches to history by Toynbee and Geyl--Toynbee said that Dutch civilization and history were shaped by the strugggle against the encroaching sea, while Geyl said that the Dutch civilization was largely the product of the interior far from the sea. Taylor pronounced Geyl a great historian using this example, but hardly anyone knows who Pieter Geyl is, even among historians, nowadays, while Toynbee, perhaps precisely because of his proclivity to forcibly fit historical factoids into his preconstructed themes, remains widely known and even admired...
One thing that I strongly suspect is that the successful narratives are those that appeal to motifs, true or not, subscribed by people in many cultures about themselves (eg, the good people) and their rivals (eg, the bad people). Thus, morality sells, as do certain thematic elements. Toynbee could appeal to people in many cultures, whether or not they cared or knew much about early medieval Dutch culture, because struggle against harsh nature (whether factually true or not) is a common motif (about themselves) found in many if not most civilizations, whereas, to appreciate Geyl's explanation, you had to know (or care to learn) something about early medieval Northwestern Europe and the history of the Dutch people. In other words, successful narratives appeal to a combination of widely held prejudice/stereotype and ignorance, a most dangerous thing, imho.
A few years ago, I had come across a master's thesis by a history student about how Western intel services got the capabilities of Japanese air services totally wrong while they had good intel on their navy. One important factor that he attributed the gap in knowledge was the willingness of the Westerners to substitute prejudice ("Japanese culture" and its alleged proclivities) for their lack of knowledge and the general newness of air forces and associated technical and organizational details. For the navy, even if the new information was classified, the service was sufficiently mature and they had a good deal of information from the earlier period that they could base their analyses on. One might say that the tales they spun about Japanese air services fit the construction template of narratives better, like tales Toynbee spun about things that he didn't know for the audiences who knew even less.
Yeah. Aldous Huxley's idea of the brain as being to some extent a 'reducing filter' has some interesting points to make. And then there is the H.L. Mencken quote where he said (approx.): “The average man avoids the truth as he avoids arson, regicide, and piracy on the high seas, and for the same reason: it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn’t pay.”
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "<i>How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?</i>" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably <i>rifa</i>, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
Stalin was a Georgian from Georgia. This country became part of the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century. He spoke Russian with a big Caucasian accent, which is still parodied by all the actors. Georgians have always played a big role in the Empire and in the USSR. For example, during Napoleon's invasion, one of the Russian armies was commanded by the Georgian Prince Bagration. And the second army is Barclay de Tolly. This is a German from Riga. Now they would call him Latvian.
Rather than referencing a supposed ‘decision of the South African government to allow volunteers to fight on the side of the British in WW2’, it would have been clearer to the reader simply to have said that, after much internal debate, the South African government declared war on Germany a few days after Britain had done so, but didn’t introduce conscription.
When I saw the epic 1927 movie Napoléon (vu par Abel Gance), I came under the impression that Adolf Hitler had modelled his public persona after this aloof but decisive character of the loner Napoléon.
I was very fortunate to attend one of the six showings of Napoleon at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, in full triptych format and with Carmine Coppola conducting, in July, 1981. Setting aside the controversy surrounding the version that was shown, it was and remains a masterpiece in every respect, both artistically and technologically.
And in the mean time, if Churchill didn't decided to keep fighting Germany after the debacle in France instead of negotiate (as many English politicians advised and as Hitler himself hoped), one might think history could have been very different.
Except... preventing unification of the continent under a sole power by playing the smaller ones against the bigger one was always the English strategy. Churchill was just following it and made an alliance of convenience with Russia as soon as possible...
Following the Treaty of Versailles and the consequences of the 1929 crisis, there was a good chance that a nationalist movement emerge and take power an Germany.
With the idea of revenge and the conviction that their country could only take the upper hand on the other great powers by gaining access to Russian agricultural and oil resources. And that this meant first neutralizing France and England.
US citizens (I am presuming you are one) are notorious for having a very short attention span. But this is also endemic in European culture now, too. This is caused by the kind of advertising and internet media that you are fed, and because the art of reading (sometimes long) books is discouraged in contemporary schooling. For your own good you should take steps to counteract this. If you can only think in soundbites you will only have limited concepts to live your life by. Which is what the powers-that-be would like.
I grew up in Europe, now live in the States. I am far more educated than is the norm. If it's hard for me to read (and I am referring to the style, not the content) it probably is hard for a lot of people. I thought maybe Aurelien would like to know.
OK, that's how you see it. But I like to have to attend to what I'm reading, and do some work mentally to understand precisely what the author is saying.
I really appreciate this essay. I am interested in Morson's book. It brought to mind another intriguing book on time, called "The Time Paradox," by Phillip Zimbardo, which also cast an interesting light on the relationship of time to characterization in narrative, whether the author intended that, or not. I hope you will accept my kudos, although I am one of your subscribers who can be found amongst those "excessives," you so castigated.
Thank you, dear Aurélien, for your thoughtful analysis and supporting examples. I believe that trying to grasp the ideas of an intellectual *in its entirety* is highly beneficial, as it typically reveals a coherent and well-structured framework. I found your essays to be remarkably authentic and honest—I have been reading them for several years now, and I am happy to see that the number of your followers is growing. Of course, the choice of these personalities for "deep-dive" readings is inherently subjective, and there are, inevitably, limitations imposed by time constraints. You mention both limitations (objectivity of choice and time constraints) in your recent essay.
You refer to E.P. Thompson in your essay, and I will definitely read Thompson's books. Lately, I have been mostly reading Carr's books, which I subjectively placed on my "deep-dive" reading list. I asked AI about Thompson and Carr's mutual opinions, and I found the results interesting. Let me share just the conclusion:
*"The intellectual dialogue between E.H. Carr and E.P. Thompson highlights a fundamental tension in historical interpretation: the balance between structure and agency. Carr, with his deterministic and structural approach, saw history as a grand narrative shaped by long-term social, economic, and political forces. Thompson, on the other hand, placed human experience and agency at the center of his historical vision."*
Among other things I find interesting about Carr is his fascination with characters like Bakunin. One wonders where the people are today who are dissatisfied with the status quo and are seeking solutions. Even if historical figures like Bakunin may not have found solutions, the passionate restlessness in their search is admirable. For this reason, I share Carr's fascination for these characters. While thinking about Bakunin, I did think about your essays. The reader may not find solutions in your essays, but they will sense a relentlessness in your attempt to better understand the world an to help others in doing so, without letting it overwhelm us. Thank you again.
As to the second part of Aurelian's essay, I am reminded of a saying by my Zen Master, Kobun Chino Roshi. He told us that a question to him was like the clapper of a bell, and his answer was like the ringing on a bell. Aurelian's writing is like this. He rings our bells and evokes otherwise ineluctable thoughts.
As to the first, I was reminded of the New Age interpretation of 'karma', which ended up not being just cause and effect but a magical abacus that kept track of good and evil, much like Santa Claus' naughty list or St Peter's judgement at the gates of Heaven. The Zen saying about karma is preferable to me, "Tom drinks and Harry gets tipsy." We do a good deed and that lady over there in the next state gets the reward, and the same for evil deeds.
Still, there are consequences, or contingencies, of actions. When the Apalachicola River fishermen stretched a net across the river to catch all the sturgeon for their burgeoning caviar industry, did they know that their greed would both extinct the fish and destroy their industry? Probably not, they just acted tactically (for the moment) and let loose their greed.
And still I believe strongly in relative but decisive ecological and physical determinism (relative because nothing is ever absolute) as the ultimate background of anything else.
That is, ideas, values, political system and so ultimately the way power and wealth is shared in a society depend more than anything else on the ecological and physical conditions of the environment in which societies evolve.
Thus, the form of energy and the way a society is able to access it shape its political and economic system much more than any decision taken by politicians (and if they choose to ignore it, the result can only be catastrophic).
According to this logic, agrarian societies tend to be feudal. But those depending on irrigation tend to be even more centralized than those who depend on direct rain. Democratic and/or liberal societies can only occurs when energy in plentiful. That is, obtained from an abondance of fossil fuel. And so on.
This is fundamentally opposed to the idea that people only need to want something for it to happen. Or to the infamous idea of the "clean slate", quite popular among some part of the Left, where the entire economic and political system can be changed if only we want it to.
Thus the fate of Europe will strongly depends on the absence on the continent of cheap and abondant fossil-fuel energy needed to sustain its industrial economy. And only then how political leaders will acknowledge this fact and manage the consequences. In the mean time, to which extend the fact that they choose to cut Europe from its main potential supplier was contingent is still open to debate...
About "when", Jesus told his followers "it will come at a moment you do not think to be it". I am not making a religious point, but rather that Jesus understood the "when" problem that his followers would always have. Events almost always happen at a moment we do not think to be it.
One minor point of clarification. If Putin gives a speech at Valdai, followed by a lengthy question and answer period with journalists, would it be inaccurate of me to claim to have some insight into what Putin is thinking? I understand your point about the tendency of some historians to psychologize the subjects of their research, but in a very straightforward, every day sense, I think one can safely claim that if Putin tells us something about how he perceives things, we can accept that as an indication that he is telling us what he thinks. Should we take this at face value? Of course not, people lie every day. But weighed in relation to other pieces of information - i.e., what Putin has said and then done in the past - I think it's fair to say we can draw useful inferences. If you want to challenge this, then we're on the slippery slope of not knowing anything about anyone regardless of what they say or do. At that point, we can save trees and stop writing history and political analysis. And perhaps that would not be a bad thing.
Oh, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point about Hezbollah and Lebanese politics, but along with the Amal Group there are five Shiite ministers in the current government, two of whom are members of Hezbollah. The Speaker of Parliament is also from Amal. The two groups also hold 28 seats in the Lebanese Parliament. That suggests their influence remains fairly substantial. And over the pasts few days, Lebanese clans aligned with Hezbollah have been kicking the shit out of HTS fighters near Homs, who tried to cross over into Lebanon as part of their expansionist designs. So, the situation remains, how should we say, fluid?
Of course, Putin always speaks clearly. Everyone in Russia understands what he thinks. At the same time, Putin is not lying. Even if he denies something, it becomes clear to everyone when he has something to do with it. He does it intentionally. Perhaps to understand this, you need excellent knowledge of a language that Western translators do not know. In addition, they are engaged in direct translation - they do not have to explain the meaning.
At the risk of being called a Putin-apologist - and not for the first time - my experience listening to Putin's speeches and talks is that he speaks as an adult speaking to other adults, a practice I find to be almost completely lacking among Western leaders. Even Obama, much acclaimed in the West as an eloquent speaker, typically sounds like he's talking to children or people with limited ability to understand complex issues. And that's when he's not haranguing people who disagree with him, in his folksy way (a deliberate affectation since he's from Chicago and the product of private schools). When I listen to Putin speak it's clear to me he's well informed and conversant on a wide range of subjects. And in so doing he assumes his interlocutors possess similar capabilities. All this to say that I can't stand listening to Western "leaders" and politicians, with their insipid sound bites and condescending tone.
Putin does speak as an adult, and a knowledgeable one, on many subjects. Much of the issue may stem from the cultural context of his speeches and statements. Western pundits tend to "interpret" Putin's speech (arguably, "for Western audiences") instead of trying to understand what it says within Russian cultural history and concerns. An example would be his comment on the fall of the Soviet Union, which is always trotted out to emphasize his supposedly "expansionist" mindset when it was actually about stability and security in the region.
To go back to your original point, I think we can "know what Putin is thinking" only to the extent that we know Putin (which is actually hardly at all). We can try to understand his statements, but we are likely to gain only a small understanding into his thought processes. This is all complicated, of course, by the nature of political speech and the cultural differences (including language barriers) that must be overcome. So, I don't know if we can claim to "know" what Putin thinks, as much as we can discuss (contextually) what he said. So, your "some insight" might be an accurate statement, but we should recognize its limitations. Such is life.
Also, Putin's actions and decissions are contingent to what is happening at the particular time, probably anchored in strategic interests he has for Russia, increasing the well being and livability in Russia and ensuring the security of Russian space from direct attack and infiltrations as well...
"I’ve attempted on a number of occasions over the decades to write and lecture on what politicians and ordinary people in the 1930s actually thought and did, and why."
Not that you're a busker taking requests, but I hope us readers might persuade you to write about this in a future essay.
Agreed, I have been trying to get a grip on the 20's and 30's but all there seems to be is economic history divorced from the current thought of the period.
You know, AJP Taylor was fond of discoursing about this--his interpretation of how people wrote about the origins of the Second World War or difference in approaches to history by Toynbee and Geyl--Toynbee said that Dutch civilization and history were shaped by the strugggle against the encroaching sea, while Geyl said that the Dutch civilization was largely the product of the interior far from the sea. Taylor pronounced Geyl a great historian using this example, but hardly anyone knows who Pieter Geyl is, even among historians, nowadays, while Toynbee, perhaps precisely because of his proclivity to forcibly fit historical factoids into his preconstructed themes, remains widely known and even admired...
PS.
One thing that I strongly suspect is that the successful narratives are those that appeal to motifs, true or not, subscribed by people in many cultures about themselves (eg, the good people) and their rivals (eg, the bad people). Thus, morality sells, as do certain thematic elements. Toynbee could appeal to people in many cultures, whether or not they cared or knew much about early medieval Dutch culture, because struggle against harsh nature (whether factually true or not) is a common motif (about themselves) found in many if not most civilizations, whereas, to appreciate Geyl's explanation, you had to know (or care to learn) something about early medieval Northwestern Europe and the history of the Dutch people. In other words, successful narratives appeal to a combination of widely held prejudice/stereotype and ignorance, a most dangerous thing, imho.
A few years ago, I had come across a master's thesis by a history student about how Western intel services got the capabilities of Japanese air services totally wrong while they had good intel on their navy. One important factor that he attributed the gap in knowledge was the willingness of the Westerners to substitute prejudice ("Japanese culture" and its alleged proclivities) for their lack of knowledge and the general newness of air forces and associated technical and organizational details. For the navy, even if the new information was classified, the service was sufficiently mature and they had a good deal of information from the earlier period that they could base their analyses on. One might say that the tales they spun about Japanese air services fit the construction template of narratives better, like tales Toynbee spun about things that he didn't know for the audiences who knew even less.
Yeah. Aldous Huxley's idea of the brain as being to some extent a 'reducing filter' has some interesting points to make. And then there is the H.L. Mencken quote where he said (approx.): “The average man avoids the truth as he avoids arson, regicide, and piracy on the high seas, and for the same reason: it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn’t pay.”
Something I wrote some time ago:
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "<i>How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?</i>" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably <i>rifa</i>, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
Stalin was a Georgian from Georgia. This country became part of the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century. He spoke Russian with a big Caucasian accent, which is still parodied by all the actors. Georgians have always played a big role in the Empire and in the USSR. For example, during Napoleon's invasion, one of the Russian armies was commanded by the Georgian Prince Bagration. And the second army is Barclay de Tolly. This is a German from Riga. Now they would call him Latvian.
Rather than referencing a supposed ‘decision of the South African government to allow volunteers to fight on the side of the British in WW2’, it would have been clearer to the reader simply to have said that, after much internal debate, the South African government declared war on Germany a few days after Britain had done so, but didn’t introduce conscription.
Just like Canada really…..
When I saw the epic 1927 movie Napoléon (vu par Abel Gance), I came under the impression that Adolf Hitler had modelled his public persona after this aloof but decisive character of the loner Napoléon.
I was very fortunate to attend one of the six showings of Napoleon at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, in full triptych format and with Carmine Coppola conducting, in July, 1981. Setting aside the controversy surrounding the version that was shown, it was and remains a masterpiece in every respect, both artistically and technologically.
I took my family to see this presentation in San Francisco. They still wonder why.
Exactly. Hitler even started the war with Russia on June 22, as did Napoleon. Although many Germans told Hitler not to do it.
If Hitler would have been accepted at the Institute of Modern Art in Vienna, history might have had another turn.
And in the mean time, if Churchill didn't decided to keep fighting Germany after the debacle in France instead of negotiate (as many English politicians advised and as Hitler himself hoped), one might think history could have been very different.
Except... preventing unification of the continent under a sole power by playing the smaller ones against the bigger one was always the English strategy. Churchill was just following it and made an alliance of convenience with Russia as soon as possible...
And maybe not...
Following the Treaty of Versailles and the consequences of the 1929 crisis, there was a good chance that a nationalist movement emerge and take power an Germany.
With the idea of revenge and the conviction that their country could only take the upper hand on the other great powers by gaining access to Russian agricultural and oil resources. And that this meant first neutralizing France and England.
Egon Schiele himself supposedly rejected his application.
Some feedback, Aurelien. I am no dummy but of late your essays have been a turn off in their convolutedness (if that's the right word).
Don't take me wrong, I really like this stack, but... well, for me, this is just not readable any more.
Not a putdown. Just wanting to give honest feedback, maybe I am an outlier, but maybe not.
US citizens (I am presuming you are one) are notorious for having a very short attention span. But this is also endemic in European culture now, too. This is caused by the kind of advertising and internet media that you are fed, and because the art of reading (sometimes long) books is discouraged in contemporary schooling. For your own good you should take steps to counteract this. If you can only think in soundbites you will only have limited concepts to live your life by. Which is what the powers-that-be would like.
I grew up in Europe, now live in the States. I am far more educated than is the norm. If it's hard for me to read (and I am referring to the style, not the content) it probably is hard for a lot of people. I thought maybe Aurelien would like to know.
Cheers.
OK, that's how you see it. But I like to have to attend to what I'm reading, and do some work mentally to understand precisely what the author is saying.
Whereas I don't?!
Argh.
I really appreciate this essay. I am interested in Morson's book. It brought to mind another intriguing book on time, called "The Time Paradox," by Phillip Zimbardo, which also cast an interesting light on the relationship of time to characterization in narrative, whether the author intended that, or not. I hope you will accept my kudos, although I am one of your subscribers who can be found amongst those "excessives," you so castigated.
Thank you, dear Aurélien, for your thoughtful analysis and supporting examples. I believe that trying to grasp the ideas of an intellectual *in its entirety* is highly beneficial, as it typically reveals a coherent and well-structured framework. I found your essays to be remarkably authentic and honest—I have been reading them for several years now, and I am happy to see that the number of your followers is growing. Of course, the choice of these personalities for "deep-dive" readings is inherently subjective, and there are, inevitably, limitations imposed by time constraints. You mention both limitations (objectivity of choice and time constraints) in your recent essay.
You refer to E.P. Thompson in your essay, and I will definitely read Thompson's books. Lately, I have been mostly reading Carr's books, which I subjectively placed on my "deep-dive" reading list. I asked AI about Thompson and Carr's mutual opinions, and I found the results interesting. Let me share just the conclusion:
*"The intellectual dialogue between E.H. Carr and E.P. Thompson highlights a fundamental tension in historical interpretation: the balance between structure and agency. Carr, with his deterministic and structural approach, saw history as a grand narrative shaped by long-term social, economic, and political forces. Thompson, on the other hand, placed human experience and agency at the center of his historical vision."*
Among other things I find interesting about Carr is his fascination with characters like Bakunin. One wonders where the people are today who are dissatisfied with the status quo and are seeking solutions. Even if historical figures like Bakunin may not have found solutions, the passionate restlessness in their search is admirable. For this reason, I share Carr's fascination for these characters. While thinking about Bakunin, I did think about your essays. The reader may not find solutions in your essays, but they will sense a relentlessness in your attempt to better understand the world an to help others in doing so, without letting it overwhelm us. Thank you again.
It would be interesting to explore your sources!
As to the second part of Aurelian's essay, I am reminded of a saying by my Zen Master, Kobun Chino Roshi. He told us that a question to him was like the clapper of a bell, and his answer was like the ringing on a bell. Aurelian's writing is like this. He rings our bells and evokes otherwise ineluctable thoughts.
As to the first, I was reminded of the New Age interpretation of 'karma', which ended up not being just cause and effect but a magical abacus that kept track of good and evil, much like Santa Claus' naughty list or St Peter's judgement at the gates of Heaven. The Zen saying about karma is preferable to me, "Tom drinks and Harry gets tipsy." We do a good deed and that lady over there in the next state gets the reward, and the same for evil deeds.
Still, there are consequences, or contingencies, of actions. When the Apalachicola River fishermen stretched a net across the river to catch all the sturgeon for their burgeoning caviar industry, did they know that their greed would both extinct the fish and destroy their industry? Probably not, they just acted tactically (for the moment) and let loose their greed.
Thanks for providing "something actually worth reading", even if I beg to differ occasionally. There's not a huge amount of that around (as you say).
And still I believe strongly in relative but decisive ecological and physical determinism (relative because nothing is ever absolute) as the ultimate background of anything else.
That is, ideas, values, political system and so ultimately the way power and wealth is shared in a society depend more than anything else on the ecological and physical conditions of the environment in which societies evolve.
Thus, the form of energy and the way a society is able to access it shape its political and economic system much more than any decision taken by politicians (and if they choose to ignore it, the result can only be catastrophic).
According to this logic, agrarian societies tend to be feudal. But those depending on irrigation tend to be even more centralized than those who depend on direct rain. Democratic and/or liberal societies can only occurs when energy in plentiful. That is, obtained from an abondance of fossil fuel. And so on.
This is fundamentally opposed to the idea that people only need to want something for it to happen. Or to the infamous idea of the "clean slate", quite popular among some part of the Left, where the entire economic and political system can be changed if only we want it to.
Thus the fate of Europe will strongly depends on the absence on the continent of cheap and abondant fossil-fuel energy needed to sustain its industrial economy. And only then how political leaders will acknowledge this fact and manage the consequences. In the mean time, to which extend the fact that they choose to cut Europe from its main potential supplier was contingent is still open to debate...
You've hit it out of the ball park with this one.
History is fractal. This is a good model.
About "when", Jesus told his followers "it will come at a moment you do not think to be it". I am not making a religious point, but rather that Jesus understood the "when" problem that his followers would always have. Events almost always happen at a moment we do not think to be it.