Classic Literature.
Apr. 8th, 2009 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davywavyMany years ago as a pretentious, up-myself student (as opposed to the pretentious, up-myself worker I am these days), I set out to read a class of books I defined as "All those books which everyone has heard of but nobody has ever actually read" - the great classics of world literature whose titles everyone knows but which never get picked up. I constructed a little fantasy in which I would be holding court in the kitchen at a student party: "War and Peace?", I would say with a dismissive wave. "I've read it. It was crap" or "The Brothers Karamazov? Pfft", I would give a disparaging gesture. "Now there's a book I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy". In my mind's eye, the girl I'd be talking to would be so impressed by this display of erudition and cynicism that she'd take her top off.
Of course, it never worked out like that - these things never do - but this initial plan eventually resulted in my realising that some books are classics because they're actually a pretty good read and so whilst I can, with all truth, say "Les Miserables? I wouldn't bother if you know what's good for you" (because it is a painful slog), I can wholeheartedly recommend anything by Alexandre Dumas or Honore de Balzac because they're both cracking writers. I sometimes wonder if this is why, unlike most of my gamer pals, I never got into books with titles like My character is way cooler than yours: Volume thirteen of the quests of Xx'axx de'G'axx'x the albino Drow psionic monk ranger with two scimitars.
One thing that's enjoyable about ploughing my way through the Penguin Classics shelf at Waterstones is seeing how genres of literature developed; take for example, the genre of future dystopias like Brave New World and >1984. Some people claim that the first in this genre was We (1921) by Yevegny Zamyatin (It's unreadable, don't bother), although I'm inclined to give that honour to Eugene Richter's remarkably prescient 1891 book Pictures of the socialistic future, which foresaw Stalinism decades before anyone else.
The thing about reading books like this is not just to see what they got wrong (Isaac Asimov once critisised 1984 for getting the date wrong...) but what they got right. Brave New World gets it bang on with consumerism to drive economic growth, and 1984 saw the rise of a political class and the creation of a meaningless political language to control thought processes ("We have a passionate commitment to drive change processes through tough targets") with remarkable clarity.
This brings me, rather neatly I think, to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Despite being written in the 1950's, it's a book which has had a lot of press lately. It is widely regarded as the most influential book on economic philosophy written in the USA in the twentieth century and deserves reading just to understand the influence and message it has carried to policy makers. Moreover, sales have trebled to 150,000 a year since the economic crisis and bank bailouts began so people plainly still see something in it. Newsnight dedicated a slot to it last week in which Rosie Boycott and a couple of less famous commentators demonstrated that they hadn't actually read it but felt comfortable pretending that they had because it's such a thick book that they didn't expect anyone else would either. And a thick book it is; at over 1000 pages of small print it's easily heavy enough to prop open a particularly heavy door or balance up the wobbliest table in your house. If the sort of social breakdown which Rand predicts within it actually takes place, you could easily use it to club your neighbours to death and then use it as fuel for a roaring fire to cook them over.
Now, I'm always a bit leery about thick books ever since that time I read Mein Kampf and found it was just like The murder of Roger Ackroyd - you read hundreds of pages and then find out at the end that the narrator was the murderer all along. However, I persevered and read it - mainly so you lot don't have to, I think.
Atlas Shrugged is the story of Dagny Taggart, the owner of a transcontinental railway in a rapidly economically and socially collapsing USA, and her struggles to keep the railway going as thought and human industry slowly vanish. First up, it has to be observed that Dagny Taggart is the biggest Mary Sue character I've encountered since Bella Swann. She's super talented and clever and able and beautiful and she runs the bestest railway in the whole wide world and all the other industrialists fancy her. She's such a teenage wish-fulfilment character that I'm just surprised that she doesn't have violet hair and a psychic wolf as her best friend.
As the book goes on, it becomes apparent that society is collapsing because the great minds and innovators are going on strike - withdrawing their ingenuity and dedication in silent protest at high taxation and the expansion of the state, and without their productive ability society is collapsing. In short, it's a thousand page long peaen to individualism and meritocracy and in that it's unobjectionable and even accurate. However, as a philosophical screed it falls into several traps.
The first is one that Plato fell into many years ago. Much of Plato's writings consist of a series of dialogues between Socrates and other people in which Socrates' philosophy is outlined by means of the famous "Socratic Dialogues". Unfortunately, Plato doesn't do himself any favours by having Socrates only argue with morons, meaning that there's no sense of any challenge to his ideas and resulting that I immediately disagree with them on general principle. A summary of Socratic dialogue might be:
One day, Socrates was out walking when he met Stupidus.
Socrates: Hail Stupidus
Stupidus: What-ho Socrates. I was just saying that I have proven that Black is White.
Socrates: Nonsense. It is obvious that Black is Black and White is White.
Stupidus: Darnit, you're right. I hasn't thought of that.
Greek Chorus: Ha ha, everyone laugh at Stupidus. What a belmer.
Rand falls into the same trap of making her villains so objectionably stupid and evil that there's no real feeling of challenge as the mighty industrialists out-think and out-argue them at every turn.
Secondly, Rand makes a number of statements that just plain aren't sustainable - for example, the assertion that the USA is the only nation is history to have been created through reason rather than conquest and through trade rather than looting. I rather suspect that this is a statement that the Sioux Nation might take exception to.
In all, it's less a novel and more a philosophical statement; the characters in it - Dagny Taggart, John Galt, Wesley Mouch, are no more real people than are Snowball and Napoleon the pigs in Animal Farm. However, there is one prediction that Rand got utterly, astoundingly right. As I read, I realised that Atlas Shrugged is an astonishingly prescient description of the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy. As the government seizes more property, the productive members of the economy (the farmers) remove their services (move to Mozambique and Tanzania). In panic, the government passes a series of laws resricting movement and banning people from putting up prices in order to fight inflation, until the end effect is a reversion to a subsistence economy, looting, banditry and the black market which the government blames on wreckers and traitors rather than their own hamfisted policies. The parallels are astonishing and the predictions of the effects of Zimbabwean economic and social policy are 100% accurate. I was genuinely surprised, as it's rare any predictive dystopian novel calls something so well.
So there you have it; Atlas Shrugged isn't a parable about our own economic crisis and the bank bailaouts, for all that some commentators say that it is. It's a parable about someone elses crisis and how predictable it really was. For that alone, it's worth reading.
In the light of all the above erudition and cynicism, I don't suppose any of my lady readers would care to take their top off?
Of course, it never worked out like that - these things never do - but this initial plan eventually resulted in my realising that some books are classics because they're actually a pretty good read and so whilst I can, with all truth, say "Les Miserables? I wouldn't bother if you know what's good for you" (because it is a painful slog), I can wholeheartedly recommend anything by Alexandre Dumas or Honore de Balzac because they're both cracking writers. I sometimes wonder if this is why, unlike most of my gamer pals, I never got into books with titles like My character is way cooler than yours: Volume thirteen of the quests of Xx'axx de'G'axx'x the albino Drow psionic monk ranger with two scimitars.
One thing that's enjoyable about ploughing my way through the Penguin Classics shelf at Waterstones is seeing how genres of literature developed; take for example, the genre of future dystopias like Brave New World and >1984. Some people claim that the first in this genre was We (1921) by Yevegny Zamyatin (It's unreadable, don't bother), although I'm inclined to give that honour to Eugene Richter's remarkably prescient 1891 book Pictures of the socialistic future, which foresaw Stalinism decades before anyone else.
The thing about reading books like this is not just to see what they got wrong (Isaac Asimov once critisised 1984 for getting the date wrong...) but what they got right. Brave New World gets it bang on with consumerism to drive economic growth, and 1984 saw the rise of a political class and the creation of a meaningless political language to control thought processes ("We have a passionate commitment to drive change processes through tough targets") with remarkable clarity.
This brings me, rather neatly I think, to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Despite being written in the 1950's, it's a book which has had a lot of press lately. It is widely regarded as the most influential book on economic philosophy written in the USA in the twentieth century and deserves reading just to understand the influence and message it has carried to policy makers. Moreover, sales have trebled to 150,000 a year since the economic crisis and bank bailouts began so people plainly still see something in it. Newsnight dedicated a slot to it last week in which Rosie Boycott and a couple of less famous commentators demonstrated that they hadn't actually read it but felt comfortable pretending that they had because it's such a thick book that they didn't expect anyone else would either. And a thick book it is; at over 1000 pages of small print it's easily heavy enough to prop open a particularly heavy door or balance up the wobbliest table in your house. If the sort of social breakdown which Rand predicts within it actually takes place, you could easily use it to club your neighbours to death and then use it as fuel for a roaring fire to cook them over.
Now, I'm always a bit leery about thick books ever since that time I read Mein Kampf and found it was just like The murder of Roger Ackroyd - you read hundreds of pages and then find out at the end that the narrator was the murderer all along. However, I persevered and read it - mainly so you lot don't have to, I think.
Atlas Shrugged is the story of Dagny Taggart, the owner of a transcontinental railway in a rapidly economically and socially collapsing USA, and her struggles to keep the railway going as thought and human industry slowly vanish. First up, it has to be observed that Dagny Taggart is the biggest Mary Sue character I've encountered since Bella Swann. She's super talented and clever and able and beautiful and she runs the bestest railway in the whole wide world and all the other industrialists fancy her. She's such a teenage wish-fulfilment character that I'm just surprised that she doesn't have violet hair and a psychic wolf as her best friend.
As the book goes on, it becomes apparent that society is collapsing because the great minds and innovators are going on strike - withdrawing their ingenuity and dedication in silent protest at high taxation and the expansion of the state, and without their productive ability society is collapsing. In short, it's a thousand page long peaen to individualism and meritocracy and in that it's unobjectionable and even accurate. However, as a philosophical screed it falls into several traps.
The first is one that Plato fell into many years ago. Much of Plato's writings consist of a series of dialogues between Socrates and other people in which Socrates' philosophy is outlined by means of the famous "Socratic Dialogues". Unfortunately, Plato doesn't do himself any favours by having Socrates only argue with morons, meaning that there's no sense of any challenge to his ideas and resulting that I immediately disagree with them on general principle. A summary of Socratic dialogue might be:
One day, Socrates was out walking when he met Stupidus.
Socrates: Hail Stupidus
Stupidus: What-ho Socrates. I was just saying that I have proven that Black is White.
Socrates: Nonsense. It is obvious that Black is Black and White is White.
Stupidus: Darnit, you're right. I hasn't thought of that.
Greek Chorus: Ha ha, everyone laugh at Stupidus. What a belmer.
Rand falls into the same trap of making her villains so objectionably stupid and evil that there's no real feeling of challenge as the mighty industrialists out-think and out-argue them at every turn.
Secondly, Rand makes a number of statements that just plain aren't sustainable - for example, the assertion that the USA is the only nation is history to have been created through reason rather than conquest and through trade rather than looting. I rather suspect that this is a statement that the Sioux Nation might take exception to.
In all, it's less a novel and more a philosophical statement; the characters in it - Dagny Taggart, John Galt, Wesley Mouch, are no more real people than are Snowball and Napoleon the pigs in Animal Farm. However, there is one prediction that Rand got utterly, astoundingly right. As I read, I realised that Atlas Shrugged is an astonishingly prescient description of the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy. As the government seizes more property, the productive members of the economy (the farmers) remove their services (move to Mozambique and Tanzania). In panic, the government passes a series of laws resricting movement and banning people from putting up prices in order to fight inflation, until the end effect is a reversion to a subsistence economy, looting, banditry and the black market which the government blames on wreckers and traitors rather than their own hamfisted policies. The parallels are astonishing and the predictions of the effects of Zimbabwean economic and social policy are 100% accurate. I was genuinely surprised, as it's rare any predictive dystopian novel calls something so well.
So there you have it; Atlas Shrugged isn't a parable about our own economic crisis and the bank bailaouts, for all that some commentators say that it is. It's a parable about someone elses crisis and how predictable it really was. For that alone, it's worth reading.
In the light of all the above erudition and cynicism, I don't suppose any of my lady readers would care to take their top off?
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 08:41 am (UTC)1) I wouldn't have spent outside the country's means in the first place.
2) I wouldn't have made it in people's short term economic interest to create a property bubble.
3) I would have let Northern Rock go under. It's basic Machiavelli - be ruthless before being kind. Save the other banks if you must, but let someone go to show them that you are prepared to.
I think I outlined this four years ago.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 10:54 am (UTC)One flaw in your argument...
By the time you advocated stage one...
You would never have been allowed to run the economy.
No one WANTED people like that.
They do NOW, of course, totally and utterly, but that's hindsight.
The truth is NO ONE would have elected you, no political party with the exception of some radical Greens who have not bathed in a while would have chosen you to be their representative and if you HAD of somehow lied to get the power after one or two happened- the second you allowed THREE to happen - you would have been fired and the party you represented would have either said
a- "We never liked him anyway!"
or
b- "Been thrown out of power"
Principle is one thing.
Realpolitik is entirely different.
The right are NOT short on principles right now. Good, solid, stand the test of time principles.
The problem is the world has shifted around them and frankly its the reality that's screwing them over.
Its easy to say 'Sure I would l;et Northern Rock' fall... but anyone who advocates that will NOT gain power nor be able to do anything except SOUND good...
So... now what?
Now if no one will ALLOW you do that...
Now what?
And THAT is where the right falls over.
Do not get me wrong- so do the left.
We currently have this weird system of spending loads of cash going on- which is neither left wing nor right wing- its driven by the fear of everyone.
The closest we have to a real right going on is that provided by our German companions.
Who are solidly sticking to their old fashioned guns... and have only 36% of the population who agree with them.
And as much as they be a hysterical lot bubbah... they ARE the people.
This is the crisis really. Always its the left who have these high falutin' principles that sound great but actually no one wants them in reality- the right had stuff that worked.
Now no one wants what the rights has got... its a weird and scary situation.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 11:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 11:23 am (UTC)(bows to your wisdom)
Still the miasma of the right continues to fascinate me like a car crash.
Its NOT a pretty site- especially in the US.
And you know what?
I am genuinely worried about it...
promise me David. Promise me Labour will not win the next election.
Promise me David and chums can NOT stuff it up?
That they CAN actually win?
Because right now... I still am unsure...
no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 11:54 am (UTC)Whether or not he'll be any good is another matter. Cameron I quite like - he's politically shrewd in a Blair-like way and, whatever Blair's other faults, at least he couldn't be accused of not being Prime Ministerial, unlike Brown. Unfortunately, the weak player in all of this is Osbourne, who is a hopeless figure of fun and utterly unsuited to the Exchequer. he only has the role because he's a Mandelson-like fixer and it's the job he wants. bringing Clarke back was an essential move because Osbournes weaknesses are manifest and the Conservatives need an economic big hitter on the front bench.
My ideal outcome would be the LibDems beating Labour into third place. Having vince Cable in a front-bench role would force the Conservatives to raise their game. At the next election, I shall be encouraging people to tactically vote in the hope of this happening.