“The single most important political decision any of us will make in our lifetime.”
Brexit: the Movie
Reply
Category Archives: Books and movies
Where the triumphs of human genius may lead
I’ve been reading my way through at a quite leisurely pace a quite instructive book by John Simmons with the title, The 100 Most Influential Scientists: a Ranking of the 100 Greatest Scientists Past and Present. What did amaze me was how many I had never heard of, including one Rudolph Virchow, ranked 17, who had discovered, if that is the right word, the biological cell sometime during the nineteenth century. Quite an amazing man (which left me wondering about my own education in that I had never before heard his name). But it was this passage by Simmons that really made me stop:
Virchow became politically engaged after investigating a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, home to the oppressed Polish minority in Prussia. As part of a commission formed by the government after revelations in the press, Virchow travelled to the region and issued a report which found that the fundamental causes of the epidemic were social. This was the first of Virchow’s political thrusts, and he prescribed for the epidemic “democracy, education, freedom and prosperity.” He asked rhetorically a question that resonates no less clearly today than in the nineteenth century: “Are the triumphs of human genius to lead only to this, that the human race shall become more miserable?” (Simmons 1997: 90)
It is something I have been thinking about as I work on the third edition of my Free Market Economics, since whatever else prosperity has or has not done, it has not brought happiness and contentment. Not good, but perhaps also not possible.
Hitler’s favourite religion
Hitler, like virtually all socialists, was an atheist. But religion did have its uses, with some religions more useful than others.
‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a Männerreligion—a “religion of men”—and hygienic too. The “soldiers of Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with “houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was much more suited to the “Germanic temperament” than the “Jewish filth and priestly twaddle” of Christianity.
And how did it matter?
Muslims fought on both sides in World War II. But only Nazis and Islamists had a political-spiritual romance. Both groups hated Jews, Bolsheviks and liberal democracy. Both sought what Michel Foucault, praising the Iranian Revolution in 1979, would later call the spiritual-political “transfiguration of the world” by “combat.” The caliph, the Islamist Zaki Ali explained, was the “führer of the believers.” “Made by Jews, led by Jews—therewith Bolshevism is the natural enemy of Islam,” wrote Mahomed Sabry, a Berlin-based propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood in “Islam, Judaism, Bolshevism,” a book that the Reich’s propaganda ministry recommended to journalists.
Moreover, the tentacles from the 1940s reach into the present and the likely future.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founder of Palestinian nationalism, is notorious for his efforts to persuade the Nazis to extend their genocide of the Jews to the Palestine Mandate. The Mufti met Hitler and Himmler in Berlin in 1941 and asked the Nazis to guarantee that when the Wehrmacht drove the British from Palestine, Germany would establish an Arab regime and assist in the “removal” of its Jews. Hitler replied that the Reich would not intervene in the Mufti’s kingdom, other than to pursue their shared goal: “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.” The Mufti settled in Berlin, befriended Adolf Eichmann, and lobbied the governments of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria to cancel a plan to transfer Jews to Palestine. Subsequently, some 400,000 Jews from these countries were sent to death camps. . . .
Fearing Muslim uprisings, the Allies did not try the Mufti as a war criminal; he died in Beirut in 1974, politically eclipsed by his young cousin, Mohammed Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, at Munich, the surviving SS volunteers, joined by refugees from the Soviet Union, formed postwar Germany’s first Islamic community, its leaders an ex-Wehrmacht imam and the erstwhile chief imam of the Eastern Muslim SS Division. In the 1950s, some of Munich’s Muslim ex-Nazis worked for the intelligence services of the U.S., tightening the “green belt against Communism.”
The most important lesson from history is how unpredictable it is. The likelihood that Christianity will be the dominant religion of Europe a century from now is already looking very unlikely and becoming less likely by the day.
Died: April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
It was exactly 400 years today that William Shakespeare, once a well-known playwright across the English-speaking world, shuffled off this mortal coil. I therefore thought we should mark the occasion. How I will do it is by noting that I picked up a secondhand copy just yesterday of Lytton Strachey’s Books and Characters: French & English which has a wonderful essay on “Shakespeare’s Final Period”, although the reason I actually bought the book was because it was dedicated to John Maynard Keynes. But what I found so interesting about the essay was that it assumed intimate knowledge of about a dozen Shakespearean plays of which for me, anyway, many were way off my own most important dozen. I have to admit I am almost entirely unfamiliar with Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale or Timon of Athens although with the others he discussed I was pretty au fait. I suspect few enduring a modern education would even recognise these titles never mind know a thing about the plays. I, on the other hand, am from a different era. Today it is Tony Soprano rather than Titus Andronicus anyone would be more likely to know.
But this short post is about Shakespeare’s death and the article was about whether he had become more content with life even as he aged, which apparently was a common view in 1906 when the article was written. Based on an ability to properly date the order in which the plays were written, which had been discovered just around that time, Strachey thinks it is nonsense and goes about showing there is no genuine sign that Shakespeare had entered upon a serene and contented existence as his life drew to an end. If anything, he says, he just got bored with trying to write about real people in real circumstances and therefore went off on various imaginative excursions so that he could write beautiful poetry but didn’t have to worry whether his characters were realistic and the plot lines made sense. The Tempest, as he says, ought to be play about Prospero’s revenge but ends up being mostly a love story.
Anyway, however Shakespeare spent his final years, they ended on this day four centuries ago. It is a miracle that so many of his plays have been preserved and one may only hope that 400 years from now there will be others to commemorate and honour the anniversary of his death.
Modern education
Somehow these two stories belong together. First this: University students are struggling to read entire books. And then this, Professional Educator: Grades, Showing Up On Time Are A Form Of White Supremacy:
While the traits listed [being rigorous and punctual, speaking grammatical English] may simply be regarded as positive traits for success in the modern world, Dr Heather Hackman described them as traits chosen and emphasised to favour whites to the detriment of non-white groups, who are forced to assimilate ‘white’ traits such as good discipline and goal orientation or else be left behind. Hackman’s solution, then, is to train teachers to move away from all these aspects of ‘white privilege’ in education. She routinely touted the benefits of collective assessments (measuring student learning at the class level instead of determining whether each student knows the material), as well as eliminating all school grades entirely.
There is more craziness in the world than you can ever believe and it is getting worse and not better.
Mantoux and his criticisms of Keynes
The issue of Keynes’s complicity on the road leading to World War II has been raised in another post. So I have now added my own contribution.
At this stage, there is no point discussing the rights and wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles. But there is no doubt that Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace was one of those Al Gore-type treatises of incontrovertible truth that brought out into the open a particular variety of criticism. The book was, as you would expect, a non-starter in France but a runaway best seller in Germany. It helped solidify grievances inside Germany that did help foster World War II but how far you can go is impossible to say, although I would say it was close to none at all. On how much Keynes mattered, the book that has had lasting significance was an attack on Keynes by the French economist, Etienne Mantoux, in his Carthaginian Peace: the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes, which you can download here. Mantoux had also published a trenchant attack on The General Theory right after its publication, whose English translation can be found in Henry Hazlitt’s The Critics of Keynesian Economics.
What is indisputable is that The Carthaginian Peace made Keynes an international superstar so that by the time he published The General Theory in 1936 he was far and away the most famous economist in the world. Without the first book, the second book would likely have been a nine-day wonder, about as influential as any of the other Depression-era texts written at the time.”>a post that has brought my name into the issue.
Who has to read when you already know everything?
A fascinating story with the title, University students are struggling to read entire books. Books are so slow motion, and require such concentration, why should anyone be surprised? But there were two bits at the end that addd to the pleasure of the story. First, there was this from someone who was described as “chair of Universities UK’s mental well-being working group”:
“I think most students do thoroughly enjoy the challenge of reading,” said Ms Francis. “I remember having to read Derrida and thinking I’d lost the plot – but these materials are supposed to be engaging and difficult.”
Yes, lost the plot, but more to the point how distorted a worldview must ultimately arrive if you finally think you have unscrambled Derrida. In fact, it leads very nicely into the very last quote in the article:
Lizzy Kelly, a history student at Sheffield added: “Students might be more inclined to read what academics want them to if our curricula weren’t overwhelmingly white, male and indicative of a society and structures we fundamentally disagree with because they don’t work for us.”
Our future leaders. She already knows at 19 what is best. A history student, yet, with no sense of history. Why she even needs to go to a university is beyond me.
The classical theory of the cycle explained
I received an email yesterday from someone in America who had read my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution who was then proposing to write a blog about what he had found. And lo and behold, that he has now done: How Keynesian Economics Has Distorted Economic Thinking (Somewhat wonkish). It never occurred to me that all this stuff is for the more studious types, but there you are. Looks natural and straightforward to me. It’s this Keynesian nonsense that requires the effort. You can read the whole of his post at the link, but here’s how it ends:
Contrary to popular belief, Keynes and many of his followers have misrepresented classical economics. This has led many to renounce classical theory without realizing that it not only offers logical explanations for the business cycle, but that the classicalists were well-versed in and rejected Keynesianism before it became known as Keynesianism. And that’s a fact that merits more attention.
I, of course, go beyond the notion that these ideas merit more attention. I am along the lines that Keynesian theory should go the way of the labour theory of value and the textbooks that carry this debilitating infection should be consigned to the furnace. But that’s just me.
Finally, I will just mention the list of labels he has attached to his post:
Labels: Classical Theory, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill, Keynesian Economics, Say’s Law
There they are, almost everything you need to know about what makes an economy go, specially that John Stuart Mill fellow, and Say’s Law.
Possibly the world’s last sane psychiatrist
This is from the incomparable Theodore Dalrymple, the only man on the planet to rival Mark Steyn for saying the most important things in the most readable way. Interestingly, I discovered them both at the same time when they were writing for The Spectator while I was living in England multitudinous years ago, Mark reviewing movies and Dr Dalrymple writing a weekly diary on the travails of life as a prison doctor. Here is a sample of the sort of things Dr Dalrymple (whose real name is Anthony Daniels) writes:
I am no respecter of persons, particularly politicians, but even politicians are human — more or less — and are therefore deserving of some kind of elementary courtesy.
When, shortly after my arrival in Australia to spend April at CIS, I read a Guardian article reporting the Treasurer’s remarks on state taxation, I read with mild dismay, but not surprise, the readers’ on-line responses; for example the following:
… thanks Scott you f***ing two faced jumped up lying mendacious piece of crap. (asterisk insertion mine)
Since the Guardian sometimes excludes contributions as not being in accordance with its ‘community standards,’ one is forced to wonder what those standards actually are. Are contributions excluded for being too polite or too well-reasoned? The community standards do seem to include the use of the language cited above, for the following comment approved of what had been said:
Pretty well spot on with that lot.
It seems, then, that at least a proportion of the population’s minds — not necessarily the least educated proportion of the population, for the Guardian’s readership (I assume) is better educated than average — runs like a sewer, in which insult is not only an argument, but also the only argument. The medium really is the message.
However, for a moment he managed a short burst of lucidity, writing:
… now i know who to blame when i can’t… find a decent public school for the kids…
Certainly, his difficulty is not beyond the bounds of possibility. But if Australia is anything like my native England, the state spends $150,000 per head on a pupil’s education, and still 20 per cent of pupils can’t read properly when they leave school. This is a miracle that makes the parting of the Red Sea seem like an everyday event.
He is in Australia on a speaking tour organised by the CIS and if you can you should go to see him. Here is where you can sign on.
The best political thriller in a long, long time
A film not to miss: Eye in the Sky. Here is the beginning of the description at Rotten Tomatoes:
EYE IN THE SKY stars Helen Mirren as Colonel Katherine Powell, a UK-based military officer in command of a top secret drone operation to capture terrorists in Kenya.
The rest is the most nerve-wracking film I have seen in ages. It also follows Kates’s Five Minute Rule for Hollywood movies, that the last five minutes of every serious film are devoted to replacing life’s reality with some kind of making-everything-right for the kind of people who need trigger warnings. In company with Zootopia, it captures the madness of our own times. Do yourself a favour and not find out what it’s about beyond what I have just said before you enter the cinema. It is also Alan Rickman’s last film which is another reason to go.
As I say, the best political thriller in a long, long time and about contemporary issues as well.
UPDATE: The reason I had invoked my Five Minute Rule for Hollywood endings was that I was not sure which side the film was actually on. No question that the film as it came out will appeal to people like myself, but there is that last five minutes which made me think that the producers had not intended the film to appeal to me at all. That this is the case has been confirmed by the comment from PoliticoNT, who wrote:
Two stars at best. The director’s film ‘Rendition’ which the critics panned is much better. You’ve been warned.
To have preferred Rendition gives the game away. So let me give you just a touch of an understanding of what the film is about. Suppose that we are in the middle of World War II, at the end of 1943, and the entire Nazi high command is meeting in some place that can be bombed to smithereens. There you find Hitler, Göering, Himmler, Goebbels and Eva Braun all in one location at the same time. However, as they are about to bomb this location, some innocent young fräulein is so close to the building that the entire decision making process is frozen as they decide whether or not to bomb the place if there is more than a 50% chance that the girl will be killed. Now go see the film since there is nothing in it that anyone will think of as unrealistic about how the threat of terrorists is treated in the modern world.
Law of Markets 