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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3665 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. The documentary was interesting enough, but I'm still not sure what to expect. The open, scholarly tone is welcome, more nuanced than I would have expected from a book about left and right brain hemispheres.

Meanwhile, Dantes is escaping in Monte Cristo.

I am reading Sacred Symbols that Speak about symbology in the Orthodox Christian church. One of the most beautiful sections so far has been the one on candles. Candles are a big thing in the Orthodox church, and the overall symbology rests on the idea that Christ brought a fire to earth, as he says:

I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

And so the goal of pious Christians is to be as a candle - but one burning with light, hope and love. I found this idea incredibly beautiful.

Also catching up on The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, which is a great classic where a demon is sending letters to a trainee on how to tempt men to the devil. It's quite funny.

I was thinking last week about this section, which I read as a “baptism by fire”. It’s nestled between these two passages about punishment:

the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful

Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division

The way I interpreted this (if I can opine) is by first eradicating literalism. Baptism does not mean submerging in water, its broader meaning is immersion. A Greek study shows that it’s also using for changing the whole color of a cloth by dying, or in cooking recipes for fundamentally changing the nature of a food item through immersion in some other liquid. There is the immersion by water of John’s baptism for forgiveness, and then there’s the immersion by fire (the opposite of water). And what is this fire? Complete and utter pain and punishment — the opposite of forgiveness — as hinted by the Christ’s anticipation of his passion:

how great is my distress until it is accomplished

This word “accomplished” or finished or completed often refers to the Crucifixion, as for instance in John immediately before he says “it is finished”. (Consider also that Father divided/against Son is certainly one way of seeing the Crucifixion depending on your theology).

This interpretation allows us to now understand the other “baptisms” mentioned. The baptism by the Holy Spirit (immersion into it), and the baptism in the name of the Lord (immersion in knowing and identifying with Christ). These coincidentally line up with the four ancient elements: water, fire, air (spirit, same word used in koine Greek), and earth (God made man as if from clay is common metaphor). However, this has led me to some unorthodox theology, that for instance Jesus does not call us to be baptized by water but to be baptized into his Being. Hence the “john the Baptist baptized with water, but I baptize with the Holy Spirit”

so the goal of pious Christians is to be as a candle

To be a “burnt offering”!

Interesting thoughts here, I honestly don't know enough theology to really comment but it makes ya think. I do believe that what the modern world considers "Christianity" is far from the true teachings of the Church or Christ. I think the Orthodox church by far comes the closest, but still not 100% that they have it all. Then again as I said I'm pretty ignorant at this point.

I think the Orthodox church by far comes the closest, but still not 100% that they have it all. Then again as I said I'm pretty ignorant at this point

Closest to Roman Imperial church of 4th century? Yeah.

Closest to first Christians? (always nonviolent, always rejecting all Earthly authority, always preaching and evangelizing, always persecuted, always awaiting end of the world, always willing to suffer and die for their faith)

Go look somewhere else.

edit: link

I never said they were perfect. shrug

I've finished The Return of the King. Nice enough.

Then I burned through 1984 in a fever of horrified interest. The most disconcerting dystopian fantasy I've ever read of. Now I'm seeing Ingsoc everywhere.

Now I'm reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but with my usual suspicion that whatever I read is just the author trying to be his own propagandist.

And I also got a facsimile of the Royal Armouries Ms. I.33 fencing manual for Christmas, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Too bad there's nobody here to fence with!

Now I'm seeing Ingsoc everywhere.

This is deliberate. Nineteen eighty-four (Orwell always spelt out the title) was intended to be a self-preventing prophecy about what was, in 1948 when he wrote the book, a plausible future. In particular, he deliberately set out to write about the nature of totalitarian socialism, rather the accidents of any particular form of it, in order to provide a fully general warning. The name Ingsoc suggests that it evolved from a form of "national socialism" but there are also a lot of hints in the book that Ingsoc actually evolved from some kind of communist-adjacent movement. But by 1984 it has lost almost all traces of the original cover story (economic egalitarianism for communism, racial-national renewal for national socialism) and has gone mask-off about the purpose of power being power, as O'Brien so memorably puts it.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out re. superintelligent AI, acquiring power is an intermediate goal of almost all optimisation processes. And totalitarian socialism is the best way for a movement that has or can reasonably hope to achieve control of a state to consolidate and extend its power in the medium term. So every political movement that doesn't have guardrails against it "wants" to become totalitarian. At the time Orwell wrote the book, the western democracies had weakened their guardrails deliberately in order to mobilise against the Axis, and a lot of people (cough, Joe McCarthy, cough) wanted to weaken them further, at least notionally in order to defeat the Soviet Union. A well-targetted memetic immune system in the minds of the elite (the "High" in Goldstein's theory of oligarchy) and potential counter-elites (the "Middle") is a powerful new guardrail. And it still works.

You should be seeing tendencies towards Ingsoc everywhere - Orwell wants you to be on your guard against totalitarian tendencies, regardless of whether they wrap themselves in the Bible, the Flag, the Constitution, the Universal Brotherhood of Man, or Martin Luther King's burial shroud. And he wants you to have the language to call them out. Above all, he wants you to focus on the correct target. Newspeak and doublethink should be scarier than swastikas or hammer-and-sickles.

You will notice that when we want to call out totalitarian tendencies, we still use language taken from Nineteen eighty-four. Orwell was very good at what he was doing.

The Return of the King

Including the appendices?

You got me. No, I haven't finished those yet. I'm on them, but they require somewhat more effort to read than the story itself.

I rather enjoyed Theft of Fire. Premise is that a rich gene-modded anime girl kidnaps tough Spacer Pirate in his own ship for a secret quest. An enormous amount of sexual tension ensues.

Pros:

  1. Engaging from the get-go. I drop a lot of writing early on, this novel caught me and kept me. That's the most important thing a book can do, IMO.

  2. Author dunks on leftists on twitter but they're not really screeds so much as long well-written, impassioned pleas and thoughtful statements that sound that they could belong here, albeit toned down from twitter norms of hostility. The ultimate political tone of the novel is right-libertarian: holding to one's promises, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The setting is right-libertarian, there are no state govts in space and Earth is an irrelevant basketcase. No strawmen ideologies amongst the main cast though, characters are treated with dignity and the setting has the flaws you'd expect of ancapistan. I think the author only actually got noticed because he was dunking on leftists on twitter, some of the people I followed retweeted him and that's how I found out about the novel.

  3. Thematically clear and interesting, it had a variant on the Frog and the Scorpion that made me think 'this guy is somewhat thoughtful'.

Cons:

  1. It's not what I'd call 'hard' sci-fi, taking a few too many liberties with stealth-in-space, though the no-stealth-in-space principle isn't totally violated. AI is of the pre-GPT tropes of 'artificial stupidity' or 'completely human-personality tech-genius in a box' kind, which I found slightly irksome. I hope this trope is finally going to die soon. There's some implausible evasive flying later on.

  2. Some of the combat writing became a bit hard to follow but this was rather minor.

  3. Ending somewhat weaker than the middle. When I was half-way through I wished 'why can't this book be longer' and I still want to see a sequel, I just don't want it quite so desperately.

There's also David Chalmers' Reality + which I found to be midwit regurgitation of better minds (Bostrom and so on) + more unnecessary pop culture references than you could poke a stick at.

I just started General Wrangel’s ”Always with Honor” after hearing it described as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time, up there with ”Anabasis” by Xenophon, which I’m reading simultaneously.

If you’re not familiar, General Wrangel fought in the side of the whites in the Russian civil war and held out in the Caucasus mountains for years. He died in exile.

I just finished Christopher Moore's Razzmatazz which I found highly disappointing after loving his earlier works as Teen. I just found so many of the tropes tired and lame, the stereotypes of Chinatown and gay nightlife felt so stupid and flat, and the noir pastiche felt ridiculous. I'm wondering if it's that Moore is stuck in the past, or if I'm stuck in the present.

I'm working song by song through Bob Dylan's Philosophy of Modern Song. It's really interesting in that I'm a huge Dylan fan and you see what influenced him.

On digital, I read the first chapter of the War Nerd Iliad. It's fun, I'll probably finish it in between, but it isn't what people claim it is. It's raising in me the interesting question: in translation and abridgement/editing of a great work, what constitutes "reading" it? Clearly reading every word of the original published manuscript in the original language constitutes "reading" Mysterious Affair at Stiles. But what if a copy abridges some superfluous scenes? Have I read Tolstoy if I don't read Russian? I've read the Iliad in multiple translations, and I understand the goal of the War Nerd Iliad and that it considers itself a translation, but if you read the War nerd Iliad I'm not sure I'd say you had "read" the Iliad in the way I would say you had if you read the Fagles translation. But then Pope also took liberties, and his Homeric translations are my prior favorites.

I'm getting to the latter portions of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As it wraps up I'm probably going to write an effort post on it. It's a really interesting piece of historiography that I think reflects a really interesting view of the period, in the same way that historical films always give the characters slightly modern haircuts. The strong homophobic invective thrown at Roehm and (hey, gotta hand it to @SecureSignals on this one) the way he views the Holocaust in a way that is clearly different from our current view, along with the relatively few tomatoes thrown at Stalin et al. A better title overall might be "a political history of the Third Reich", while events on the battlefield are covered the author remains most interested in dispatches, internal memoranda, negotiation, and intrigue. I'm happy I broke my WWII fast with this one after seven years.

I want to read Rise and Fall too. Unfortunately, my WWII backlog hasn’t gotten any shorter, and I’ve already got a copy of Speer’s Inside the Third Reich to try.

If you're already knee deep in WWII stuff, I could probably sit down and abridge the chapters for you and halve the length. It aims to be a fully universal history of the Reich, and covers things like battles in sketch form, but where he does his best work is in examining diplomatic and bureaucratic documents.

Overall the book confirms my general view of the Hitler phenomenon as misunderstood as a result of the bastardized Hegel that governs how history is taught in the USA.

Okay, I very much would like to see your writeup(s).

I came away from high school thinking I had a decent understanding of the phenomenon, so I’d ask what you think is missing. Perhaps that’s just bias from immersion in other sources?

Okay, I very much would like to see your writeup(s).

Moreso I feel like you could skip/skin 40% of the book that deals with battles, events, etc. because you already know those pretty well. His thumbnail sketch of Stalingrad will probably leave you cold, particularly given the paucity of soviet sources at the time of writing. I've actively avoided WWII stuff since about 2015-16 or so, but I feel that a lot of his material is strong and fairly novel to me.

I came away from high school thinking I had a decent understanding of the phenomenon, so I’d ask what you think is missing. Perhaps that’s just bias from immersion in other sources?

I think that the tendency of American schools (I can't speak to any particular schools except the ones I attended or that my close friends attended/taught at) to teach in distinct "units" reflecting a sort of pseudo-Hegelian "zeitgeist" view of history. So for example, a lot of schools teach American history unit-by-unit and teach "The Industrial Revolution" or "Westward Expansion" after they have already taught "Slavery/The Civil War"; this tends to obscure the ways that Westward Expansion and Northern Industrialization caused Slavery to become such an important issue leading to the Civil War.

So the flaw in Nazi historiography tends to be that a lot of schools teach "The Cold War" after they teach "WWII/Nazis/The Holocaust." The rise of fascism is best thought as occurring in the context of a Cold War that started before the Tsar's body was cold, was in its infancy from the Paris Commune onward. Every developed, and most undeveloped, nations had major communist parties, many of which took orders directly from Moscow. Germany and Italy came close to falling to Comintern parties. The red scare took America before the 20s. The battle lines were drawn: The western democratic capitalist imperialist powers, against the USSR and the Comintern.

The Western democratic powers very much felt that Fascism, while perhaps distasteful, was preferable to communism. The feeling was that Mussolini and Hitler were better than puppets of Stalin. Western readers of Mein Kampf tended to see the rabid anti-communism, the clear intention to invade Russia, and see Hitler as a reliable partner against the Soviets. He might ultimately need to be brought into line, but he would certainly stop Communism from expanding West. To a certain extent they were correct: Hitler and Mussolini did prevent Moscow from taking Spain, Communism took control of no European nations outside Russia until after Hitler was on his way out, and Hitler did ultimately invade Russia even though by then it was a really bad idea.

On the Soviet side, meanwhile, the USSR can always be thought of as in many ways a theocracy. While Stalin and his clique were unbelievably cynical and evil, they were also in many ways true believers in Marxism. It's a matter of faith for orthodox marxists of the time that the imperialist capitalist powers must come to blows with each other. Stalin did not really worry about Hitler because it was a matter of theory that the imperialist powers would fight destructive wars, exhausting each other, until they fell to Communism. His actions only make sense if he assumed that the Nazis must, inevitably, as a precept of the Science of History, go to war against the Western Capitalists. To a certain extent he was correct: Hitler did go to war with the Capitalist powers first, and as a result Communism swept over half of an exhausted Europe. (As an aside, we should also note that Japan's early invasions of China were hockey-assisted by Mao's ongoing civil war, and that after KMT and Japanese forces had worn each other down Mao would sweep to power in China a few years later)

Of course, while each side was partly right in that Hitler would do tremendous damage to their enemy, they were also partly wrong.

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Shlott's The Canceling of the American Mind. Only just a little way into it, and there's some bits that, while I understand why the authors would feel the need to include them, are a bit well-worn for me. Also, from the tone, I'm expecting their offered solution to be an "if everyone would just…" proposal.

and there's some bits that, while I understand why the authors would feel the need to include them, are a bit well-worn for me.

Lemme guess: "these cancellation tactics actually hurt people of color more" or "cancellation is a band-aid and a distraction from systemic change to fight racism/sexism/xism"?

No, just a lot of citing of statistics and example after example to establish that 'no, really, canceling is a real thing and not a myth.'

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