Spies as self-deluded fools

     

     Phillip Knightley. The Second Oldest Profession (1986) The subtitle ”The spy as patriot, bureaucrat, fantasist, and whore” describes the thesis pretty accurately. Knightley surveys the history of security and intelligence agencies in Britain and the US, and to a lesser extent in Germany and Russia. The book is pre-glasnost, so it assumes the Cold War setting. There is varying detail about various operations, both regime-disruptive and intelligence-gathering. The net effect is to confirm whatever suspicions one may have about the price/payoff ratio of these services. Bottom line: failures are more common than successes, and the focus of these services has shifted from providing useful information (much of which can be gathered from open sources) to empire-building and "counter-intelligence." Spies spend most of their resources spying on each other.
     The most worrisome aspect is that paranoia and fantasy drive the world-views of these organisations. (They also drive the world-views of many people afraid of the enormous reach of computers, much greater than anything Knightley or his sources envisaged in 1986). The result is such a massive amount of data that no humans could sift through it all, let alone make sense of it. Thus the increasing reliance on AI algorithms. AI algorithms are inevitably biased, and will yield false positives as well as false negatives. The danger is that the merely human recipients of algorithm-supplied intelligence will trust it. As Pedro Domingos says,  People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.
     An essential book IMO, still remarkably relevant after 30 years.  Considering the increasing paranoia and fantasy in online discourse, perhaps even more relevant. ***

So you want to show off your Latin

     Eugene Ehrlich. Amo, Amas, Amat and More (1985) A dictionary of Latin words and phrases in more or less common use. By the 1980s, Latin was removed from almost all high school curricula, even as an elective, but many people still used Latin tags and phrases. This book will help anyone who reads works from the 1980s and earlier.
     Ehrlich divagates often, adding wry and not so wry comments to his explanations. Such as this one:
     sit non doctissima coniunx
     A Roman formula for a happy marriage.
     One of Martial’s epigrams, Literally “may my wife not be very learned”, revealing more than we would like to know about one Roman’s attitude towards women.
    To which I would add, many men would agree with Martial. I don’t: I prefer sit doctissima coniunx.
      Ehrlich uses the English/American convention of Latin pronunciation. I learned a different one in Austria, but (as he points out) we don’t really know how Latin was pronounced. Nor, I think, do we know how the dialects varied. Pleasant introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr.  A well done reference book. ****

A Beatles Book

     Lee Minoff et al. The Beatles Yellow Submarine (1968) The book of the movie, made up of graphics and text. The movie was an excuse to put Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Chub Band on the screen, and it worked very well. We watched it with our children. Wonderful movie.
     Beatles music was a staple in our home, making this book a nostalgia trigger. Unlike many conversions from screen to page, this works as well as the movie, perhaps better. The plot is simple: the Blue Meanies want to take over Pepperland, but of course they fail, thanks to the Beatles.
     A fun trip. ***

Le Corbusier, one of the first starchitects.

     H. Ginsberger. Le Corbusier. (1959) Catalogue of an exhibition of Le Corbusier’s work. The show, whose North American tour comprised Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, and San Francisco,  consisted of photographs, drawings, and models of the buildings, and projects; paintings, tapestries, and sculpture; and quotes by Le Corbusier. The catalogue includes a brief biography and discussion of Le Corbusier’s philosophy of architecture. Well organised and printed, it’s a nice little souvenir and document.
     I bought this booklet many years ago, when I had notions of becoming an architect. I’m still interested in architecture, but think that the emergence of starchitects has been a disaster. Le Corbusier was one of the first. He took it for granted that he could plan cities, living spaces, without consulting the people who would inhabit them. He knew best, but he was I think remarkably obtuse about the psychological and social effects of buildings. It did not, apparently, occur to him to ask whether people would like to live in huge apartment towers surrounded by vast parkland traversed by multi-lane traffic arteries. Where this kind of urban planning has been tried, it has been a dismal failure. Low-rise buildings interspersed with small to medium green spaces, seem to work much better, perhaps because then the parks and gardens feel more closely connected to the buildings that border them.
     Le Corbusier’s signature style of elevating the house on stilts separated the home from the land on which it stood, visually, functionally, and psychologically. His use of unadorned concrete had the same effect. His theories spoke of buildings scaled and proportioned to fit the human body, but his practice was singularly devoid of human content. In this, he prefigured the practices of the starchitects that followed him. For much of the 20th century, buildings were erected not to serve their clients but to display the architect’s style. Le Corbusier has much to answer for.
     As a survey of Le Corbusier's work, well done, hence ***

Paper Money

     Richard Doty. Paper Money (1977) An overview of paper currency available to numismatists. Doty promotes the hobby with numerous colour photos, and a brief survey of paper currency by country and region. I learned a few new facts, such as the issue of Notgeld (emergency money) by German towns and villages when hyper-inflation prevented the national bank from supplying cash. The Chinese were the first to use paper money about 1400 years ago, but they soon gave up on it because it was too easy to counterfeit, and because the temptation to print too much was too great. They did not use paper money again until the 1800s.
     The West invented paper money independently, when bankers and merchants issued letters of credit. Since the issuers were good for the coin specified on these instruments, people quickly realised that letters were tradable, and began to use them make payments. The next step was to use paper bills as means of exchange, at first always with the promise to redeem them for real money, i.e. metal coin. Eventually, paper bills were defined as legal tender. The history of paper money is thus the history of the slow recognition that money is information about wealth and not itself wealth. Nowadays, most money circulates as debit and credit entries in bank accounts. Canada and a few other countries now use plastic instead of paper for bills, testifying that cash will likely not disappear in the near term. But the steady development of money from precious materials to pure information is nearly complete.
     An interesting little book. Numismatics, like most collector hobbies, has declined, which makes this book an historical document. **½

A subway by any other name....

Here's one of the stories about Elon Musk's proposal for underground roads for autonomous electric vehicles: Musk's Hole. Looks an awful lot like a subway to me.

This whole autonomous car thing is an attempt to combine the indvidual convenience of the car with the safety of rail. From a rail passenger's point of view, a subway car is an autonomous vehicle. "Leave the driving to us", Greyhound used to say. Well, when you ride in a train, someone or something else is driving. Properly controlled and isolated from cross traffic, a railroad is a horizontal elevator (as George Kneiling said many decades ago). The first elevators were controlled by human operators. Now they are automated. There's no reason not to automate passenger rail, except our weird notion that we should all be able to come and go as we please, and damn the expense.

"The soul of the combat soldier in his worst hour"

     Franz Schneider and Charles Gullans, trans. Last Letters from Stalingrad (1961) From the introduction by S. L. A. Marshall Brig. Gen., USAR, Ret: “The writers were German, in that hour our enemies. But who may read and not weep for them?”
     The letters went out with the last plane from Stalingrad. They were confiscated and carefully examined for clues to the morale of the troops, which was so bad that the report was never forwarded to Hitler. This selection is from copies found in Potsdam. The saddest fact is that the letters did not reach the people to whom they were sent.
     There does not seem to be a German version of this book.
     If you can find a copy of this book, read it. ****

Jingoism and myth making: An early 20th century school history of the British Empire

     John M. Wood and Aileen G. Garland. The Story of England and the Empire (1951) A textbook for middle schools, adapted by Garland for Canada. This is a revised edition, containing hints that the first edition was published sometime in the 1920s or 30s. It’s a fascinating example of school history as propaganda and myth making. The message radiates from the title on out: Britain is the most important country in the world, it has created the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, the rest of the world still depends on British values and ideals to lead it into the uplands of a bright, happy future; etc. Not to mention British manufactures, which lead the world in quality.
     It’s also a Great Man history. Almost all the important actors are men (Elizabeth I is the major exception), usually characterised as one of the greatest soldiers/kings/etc; wise, strong, just; etc. Or weak, lazy and feeble; unable to command obedience; etc. The best rulers are described as gentle and just, making good laws, and making sure the people obeyed them. Clearly, you are supposed to be grateful for having such wise, strong, gentle, and just people in charge of your life.
     What’s even more interesting is what’s missing: there are almost no specific details or stories that would illustrate what life was like. It’s almost entirely about politics and economics. Vague words like prosperity, peace, happiness, etc, abound. The writer (Mackenzie) admires power, and has no sense of what middle school children (aged 10-14) would like to know about. I’m not surprised that from the late 1950s on the “enterprise method” became popular in Canada for teaching history. It set pupils the task of finding out about the everyday lives of their ancestors, and representing them in models, pictures, and stories.
     The tone and attitude of this book persisted for at least another generation, and fomented a sentimental and stupid nostalgia for the great days of empire, which has had a malign effect on British politics, most obviously in the Brexit vote. I think the fantasy of a Great Britain motivates a minority, but it was enough to bring the Leave vote over the 50% mark.
     School history has always been a contentious issue. Its primary purpose is to tell the nation’s story so that children will develop a proper sense of citizenship. This inevitably results in exaggeration of the nation’s international role and influence, and more or less obvious myth making and jingoism. For example, although the history I was taught in Austria in the 1950s wasn’t quite as jingoistic as this book exemplifies, it was focused on Austria’s past role in geopolitics, which was considerable. It was after all the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince that triggered the first World War, an event that itself testifies to the fantasy that some Great Man who leads a Great Power can make a decisive difference.
     What popular histories have tended to ignore or downplay is the fact that we can choose only from the (always limited) options available to us. Whatever influence we do have rarely produces new options for ourselves. It’s left to those who come after us to choose from the options we have  inadvertently created. That's usually some variation on cleaning up a bloody mess. Historians who tell the story more objectively tend to be ignored as mere academics.
     This textbook is interesting and IMO important data for anyone who wants to understand how popular sentiment affects the options available to our leaders, leaders who are themselves of course influenced by the same sentiments that we have developed in school, and which the press and entertainment amplify, simplify, and distort. As history, the book is awful. As sociological data, it’s priceless.

Stories of love and grief by Maeve Binchy

    Maeve Binchy. The Return Journey (1998) Binchy’s usual mix of bittersweet near-sentimentality, and sharply observed foolishness and vice. She’s very good at showing how self-deception and fantasy are more likely to cause trouble than the intentional wickedness of others. Her morality is straightforward: cheaters get their comeuppance as often as not, and good folk often get unexpected opportunities for happiness. Respectability is no shield against grief. And the apparently small injuries and disappointments of ordinary lives are as significant as the failures of the famous and powerful. More so, if anything. For most of us lead ordinary lives. Binchy’s talent is compressing a lifetime’s meaning into a few scenes. She loves ironic twists and poetic justice.
    I like her stories. This is an early collection. In her later work, she’s more willing to look at the evil that indifference, selfishness, and folly can cause. ***

Textbooks as they used to be

      Miriam Rosenthal. The French Revolution (1965) A textbook for middle school, one of a series published by Longman’s. Ah, the days of carefully written history books for all ages of children. The assumption was not only that children should know a good deal of history, but that well-written books would interest them. This book addresses the reader directly, which may feel somewhat patronising to the adult reader. But it’s a pretty complete account of the Revolution, unafraid to comment on the characters involved, and equally willing to recognise the puzzles, for example, Why and how did Robespierre change from a man who refused to be a magistrate because of the death penalty into a man who dispensed death sentences with cool indifference. The answer is interesting: Robespierre was a man who “lived in a world of words”, not of people. He was what Fromm and others have called a True Believer, a man who believed he could make the world conform to his theory of what it should be. Such people sooner or later will kill those who can’t or won’t conform.
     Many illustrations, about as well printed as was possible back then, and a number of quotations from diaries, letters, etc. The general conclusion: The French Revolution was a necessary but sadly violent phase of the journey from autocracy to democracy, from oppression to freedom, from privilege for the few to rights for all. In 1965, one could still believe that democracy and universal human rights were well established, and life across the globe would continue to improve. Worth reading both as a helpful summary of a complicated history, and as an example of the values underpinning the teaching of history in the 1960s. ***

Anglo-Saxon Jewel Goes Missing (A Morse Mystery)

Colin Dexter. The Jewel That Was Ours (1991) The jewel is the tongue of an Anglo-Saxon bronze buckle, and will be returned by the widow of the man who bought it many years ago from a shady collector. She’s one of a busload of Americans on a tour of England. The tongue goes missing, the widow (remarried by this time) dies of a heart attack, the intended recipient (on behalf of the Ashmolean) is found in the Cherwell dead of a couple blows to the head. The usual cross-purposes and assorted sexual shenanigans interfere with the investigation.
     The story’s told in short chapters headed by more or less apt quotations. A note states that the novel is “based in part on an original storyline” supplied by Dexter to Central Television. That episode was titled The Wolvercote Tongue, and I think it’s much better than the book. Dexter indulges in his usual shticks, mostly foreboding foreshadowings and gratuitous leering. **

A History of Leisure

     Witold Rybczynski. Waiting for the Weekend. (1991) Where and when did the weekend habit originate? Answering this question takes Rybczynski into the history of our calendars, religious customs, and the effects of industrialisation, which severed work from leisure in a way that no other techno-cultural innovation did. That leads to the puzzle of what we mean by leisure. Chesterton famously said that leisure was the opportunity to do nothing. Nothing except sit or stroll and experience the present senses, or think about them. But idleness has always been frowned upon by the serious people who want us all to be good. So leisure has become suspect unless it’s used for serious pursuits, or for the serious pursuit of frivolities.
     As always, Rybczynski writes with grace, wears his learning lightly, and triggers both clarification of old insights and recognition of new ones. Best of all, he connects the dots. The result is another nice web of ideas and fact.
     He also encourages thought about what think we already know. One thing we know is that work is good, and idleness is bad. That making stuff is good, and using it up is bad. Both of these ideas helped create our economy of abundance and waste. Both of them will have to be abandoned if we want to survive climate change and maintain a comfortable life. We make too much, and what we can’t use up, we throw away.
     Read the book. ****