Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political change in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Some contemporaries were irritated by this interest in the times as much as the life but not this reader.
The book is nearly 680 pages long. Perhaps the more casual reader might have liked some cuts to make it more manageable but the length is justified by the authors interweaving of three closely related stories - that of a personality, that of a scientist and thinker and that of his times.
The personality is fascinating in its own right but what comes across as equally interesting is the subversion of his own class - that of the well-heeled but capable gentleman naturalist - by his alliance with the new men of professional science, self made and seeking 'jobs' in institutions.
This is where personality ties in with wider social change. What drove this rather timorous man with a life time of seriously unpleasant psychosomatic illnesses to defy convention at some social risk and, quite late in the day, allow the publication of his radical thoughts on evolution and natural selection?
Although Desmond and Moore do not quite answer this question directly, a personality that could do nothing but investigate and think on what it investigated - a classical case of scientific curiosity as core to personality - eventually had to break ranks to express its 'truth'.
His biography (excepting a rather unprepossessing country gent early life and the last days of being lionised and loving every minute of it) can be roughly broken down into three phases - the days on 'The Beagle', those living his theory discreetly in the country and those once his theory was in play.
The first phase is of a very young man with a considerable capacity for hard work who built up sufficient reputation from his specimen collecting to become accepted as part of a family of naturalists and scientists exploring the difficult terrain between nature and revealed religion.
The second phase has him highly respected within a respectable world but finding that his 'thinking' was taking existing evolutionary thought and extending it into something that could and would 'in the wrong hands' completely undermine the very social order on which he and his family depended.
We have to remember that Darwin was never in want of funds. He was connected to both the Darwin and Wedgewood dynasties and the valuation of his estate at £250,000 (roughly £23m in today's money) at the end of his life did not arise from his writings or scientific work.
This was a man from a comfortable Whig family. It may have been in class opposition to aristocratic Tory squires and parsons but it was, like Labour and Tory today, essentially part of a struggle in which both sides competed for advantage within a system they both maintained as 'sound'.
During this second phase (as the book makes clear) Darwin's 'thinking' led him into troubled waters because its logic was that of a challenge to the very ideological fundamentals that held the mob at bay in the years following the Chartist threat to property.
Working and middle class radicals were very interested in evolution for ideological reasons although they preferred the ideas of Lamarck, a preference of the Left that was to prove highly problematic in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
To undermine the ideology of God's grace creating a perfectly structured and benign nature (as proposed by the Anglican Paley) with the 'truth' of an evolutionary natural order with God (if present at all) very distant could imply that radical solutions to social problems were potentially correct.
The secret to Darwin's triumph lies not in him being 'right' (which he mostly was) but in what he proposed arriving at just the right time to buttress rising social forces that endorsed a new imperial order that, in turn, buttressed the order of property more effectively than religion.
The trigger of course was that Darwin could see that his ideas were in danger of being trumped with the less experimental or consistent thought of others, notably by the younger socialist (in a confused sort of way) Alfred Russell Wallace. He had to publish or lose his edge.
It should be made clear here though that Darwin and Wallace were not competing as scientific equals and that Darwin had earned the right to leadership in the field. Darwin never treated Wallace badly and Wallace never regarded Darwin as having done so.
Darwin is a complex character. The biography restores emotion to the Victorians but, for all the usual faults that lie in the character of the time (his imperialism, his casual racism, his patronising attitudes to the working class), he was by mid-Victorian lights ethical and broadly compassionate.
So, Darwin has to publish to be the one who gets credit for a truth that is brutal in its vision of nature as a war of all against all in the battle of survival and of the survival of those who are fittest. These then, it seems, go on to drive species, racial and all other forms of 'progress'.
We can see straight away how useful this was to the rising middle class professionals in the scientific community but also to a new imperial society being born out of the expansion of trade and industrialisation. It 'explained' hegemony. It 'countered' socially radical alternatives.
'Property' (all things being equal) might have been happy to continue with the old Tory paternalist ideology of a settled and benign Nature and of traditionalist values that placed everyone in their assigned role and relied on squires to protect the poor and parsons to comfort them.
Science was always going to unsettle this view because science is what it is - the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, Nature is actually mindlessly brutal with God increasingly (if he even exists) pushed further back by reality into being little more than the designer of general laws.
The initial challenge had come from two equally opposed sources. We have mentioned the radical challenge which became a socialist one in due course. This emphasised the possibility of social improvement on Lamarckian lines but the more important challenge at this point was the Whig one.
Whig intellectuals took up Malthus which led, after the 1832 Reform Act, to the cruelest triumph of Liberal Progressivism - the Poor Laws. Prior to Darwin's publications over a quarter of a century later, 'existential struggle' was already being brutally imposed on the working classes.
It is part of the centre-left myth of its own trajectory that Victorian Liberalism was a good thing and the Tories were a bad thing but nothing is so simple. For totally different reasons, yet both thinking in compassionate terms, Tories and radicals challenged the Malthusian ideology of this new elite.
Victorian Liberalism was intent on a form of managed revolution in the interests of its own class alliances - wealthy industrialists and dissenters, evangelical Christians, Malthusians, the new professional class, self-made men, the first propertied feminists.
This was a culture of trade and empire and of assumptions of worth epitomised by the Self-Help doctrine of Samuel Smiles. The way to handle too many working people was to force them to export themselves to colonies where the imperial authorities subjugated inferior peoples to fit them in.
In a weak form, these are attitudes about cultural superiority, social control, ideological conformity and the handling of the working class that are still embedded in American progressives and what was once called 'New Labour'. It is the ideological original sin of the Anglosphere Centre-Left.
Darwin straddled this main ideological divide. He was of free-thinking stock where the money had been made in industrial enterprise. He was 'liberal' in the best sense in his dealings with people but, on the other hand, he was also a village country squire and responsible for a parish and good order.
The third phase in his life and in the book is what happens when he deals with his internal conflicts and publishes 'The Origin of Species' (1859) and later 'The Descent of Man' (1871) (as well as very many other works) dropping a lighted match into the oil dump of elite ideological tensions.
Darwin's work becomes the weaponry to be used by a self-consciously engaged network of 'professional' (or aspirantly professional) elite scientists actively seeking to overturn the old order and transform the existing 'gentlemanly' institutions of the scientific community.
Darwin's technique is interesting. He knows what he is doing and he wants to promote the scientific revolution but he also wants to retain his aura of respectability. He does this by standing back and providing the guns and bullets for his shock troops but avoiding the front line himself.
His health shifts from being the psychosomatic result of intense stress at the potential revolution that he might create to its being the excuse for not engaging in revolutionary acts by attending events and for not commenting on the ideological, social or political ramifications of his theories.
He sits like a spider at the centre of an ideological web as Huxley in particular (but not only Huxley) takes on those who refuse to abandon religion as the core of Victorian ideology (men such as Bishop Wilberforce and the Duke of Argyll) and builds up a shock troop of like-minded scientists.
This is why the book is so valuable. It not only gives us an insight into Victorian elite society at a key point in its history between the troubles of the 1840s and the High Imperialism of the 1880s but it helps to explain why change happened and suggests how change might happen today or tomorrow.
By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, the 'revolution' is completed. The thesis of Tory Anglicanism and the antithesis of Liberalism are synthesised into the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Darwin's interment in Westminster Abbey (fixed by Huxley and the gang).
As Desmond and Moore indicate, Darwin had become a secular saint but his interment in the Abbey as provider of a neat indirect justification of British imperial superiority ('survival of the fittest') was a symbolic negation of the alternative of his interment in a family vault as local patriarch.
In essence Gladstonian Imperial Liberalism 'won' and old-style Tory Paternalism lost but the Anglican Church was vouchsafed a place in maintaining social order and the Lamarckian socialists were 'dished' by the weight of evidence that Darwin had provided.
Alongside the British story there is, of course, the story of 'Darwinism' (the -ism helps indicate the ideological aspect of this new way of seeing the world) as both Social Darwinism (a more overt ideological system with no serious evidential base) and as its reception overseas.
Darwin cannot entirely be absolved of responsibility for Social Darwinism although he did not actively promote it or anything like it. It emerged as, if you like, its own 'bourgeois necessity'. However, he shared the baseline thinking - the struggle for existence with winners and losers in life's race.
What becomes interesting is the rapid German intellectual adoption of Darwinism with an enthusiasm and excitability that sometimes comes across as at the edge of comical if we were not reminded of some of the eventual darker consequences of its adoption in the next century.
The authors are only interested in how the Germans related to Darwin personally but we can see the lineaments of an interpretation that is similar to that we have seen in relation to the British Empire - an idea, strengthened by its apparent truth, met a newly necessary ideological need.
This is the Germany of Bismarck. The defeat of 'effete' France by Prussia saw most of the British elite preferring modernising Germany to France with its perceived tin pot Napoleon III. Germany looked dynamic, the fittest, both to itself in potential and to the wider world.
With Haeckel playing the role of Huxley, Darwinism appealed because it weakened the role of the churches in restricting the authority of the State and it suggested ideas of natural selection that were not uninfluential on philosophers like Nietzsche.
As my mentor at university, the late Norman Stone, pointed out to me, national socialism was the consequence of a lot of young people being taught half-baked ideological theories by half-educated schoolmasters in small towns. Darwinismus would have been part of their tool kit.
One day the path by which two decent men's ideas (those of Darwin and Marx who only interacted briefly in writing once) becomes socially transmuted away from their actual intentions into mass murder and genocide will be traced with more insight than we have seen to date.
From this perspective, Desmond (who was an historian of evolution prior to the 'Origin of Species') and Moore (whose previous work was on the controversies in Victorian London triggered by Darwin's work) provide important material on the ideologisation of 'truth' and the role of intellectuals.
We should add here that the authors concentrate as much if not more on the man as on his ideas and environment. This makes the book, based on deep research into available letters and papers, extremely readable as a human life that unfolds over more than seventy years.
There are two critical death scenes (of Darwin's daughter Annie and of Darwin himself) that should move anyone - in both cases the available evidence gives us scenes of horror that few biographies tend to provide. It is important to understand what death entailed for Victorians.
Similarly the account of the Voyage of the Beagle is a deft summary of Darwin's own writings that allows us to picture a young sea sick man prepared to put up with a great deal of hardship and risk to find out how the world might work and do his job of collecting specimens for home.
For all the social and ideological aspects and consequences of the case, Darwin comes across as a basically decent human being who loved his family and especially his long-suffering wife Emma, was loyal and supportive to his friends and worked immensely hard because that is who he was.
His 'genius' was not based on one just idea or the books for which most people remember him but on a major body of research work involving demanding and committed experimentation and the ability to worry at a problem and follow the logic of his experimental discoveries.
How his material was used was not really his fault because he was only telling the truth as he saw it. His truth almost entirely (with the odd speculation overtaken by history) stands up as exceptional science that just happened to be very convenient to powerful people who then weaponised it.
Fortunately we have long since moved past the ideological accretions. Scientists eventually returned to the science and built on it. One hopes that, at some stage, the same can be done with those aspects of the work of Marx that still hold 'truths' that it has now become all too convenient to deny....more
'The Young Fur Traders' was R. M Ballantyne's first novel (1856), preceding the more famous 'The Coral Island' by a year. It would probably be classed 'The Young Fur Traders' was R. M Ballantyne's first novel (1856), preceding the more famous 'The Coral Island' by a year. It would probably be classed as Young Adult fiction today although, of course, any romance is perfunctory and limited to a few final chapters.
A group of young men are stuck in clerical work at first and yearn to be part of a Hudson Bay fur trading network 'in the field'. They get their wish in different ways. Many adventures ensue alongside representatives of the noble Indian warrior and an experienced French-Canadian trapper.
It is certainly an adventure novel, albeit somewhat wordy in the way that popular Victorian fiction can be but sincere enough. Ballantyne is undoubtedly excellent at description and character. It is not going to be a popular read today but we can see why it would have been enjoyed at the time.
The book is very much based on that old dictum for first novelists - 'write about what you know'. When he was 16 Ballantyne had joined the Hudson Bay Company in Canada and had traded furs with the indigenous Americans until he was 22.
He started writing about his experiences as non-fiction soon after and then took up a full time literary career on the far side of 30. This first book was thus a distillation of his adolescent experiences in the wilds of Canada expressed as fiction.
The tone is kindly and often humorous. In effect, it is a tale of young men adventuring for profit at the edge of empire under often harsh conditions which they bear with Christian fortitude. A type of muscular universal Christanity is a constant presence throughout the book.
Like so many forgotten novels, the value to us has shifted from excitement and immediacy (and perhaps inspiration) towards providing an insight into the normal patterns of thought of another country - the past more than Canada itself.
What is striking is that our young traders may be patronising to the indigenous Indians but no more than they would be to the working class at home. I detected barely any sign of the racism that would later emerge with the arrival of social darwinism and formal empire.
Traders have to rub along with each other to their mutual benefit and the Indians are just another type of human who have their heroes - the heroic and upstanding Redfeather - and their villains and ordinary folk. If gentlemen do not mate with Indian women, it is a social caste thing not one of race.
And, of course, the Indian who becomes a Christian has seen the light and is equal to any white man, to be invited most honourably alongside the brave French trader to a young hero's wedding. This is a world where religion is central to who you are, not the colour of your skin or culture.
Indeed, there are several speeches which indicate a determination to press the point - that a man is judged by his conduct and beliefs and a man of good conduct with the wrong beliefs can still be a good man, only to be made better by the right beliefs.
The gender relations are also those of the different but equal. Boys want to adventure in adverse circumstances. Girls want to create secure households. The harsh environment and the need for physical resilience dictates that balance but still a girl rides her horse with the best of the men.
The story itself unfolds as many interconnected adventures that are brought to a satisfying conclusion but these adventures are much less interesting that what we learn about life in a world of packed snow, frozen lakes, floods, canoes, Indian villagers, animal hunting and frost bite.
These are people who have chosen this life. They entirely depend on each other for survival but yet there is room for the lone trapper who knows his environment to disappear for weeks and months on end living off the land. The secure freedom is much of what would have appealed to a young reader.
Of course, the freedom is qualified not only by the environment but by the codes of Victorian culture so perhaps is not quite what we would consider freedom. Nevertheless, assuming you believed in work and God, then there would certainly be more freedom from constraint and equality than back home.
There are probably no worlds any more where quasi-indigenous life styles are simultaneously culturally sufficient unto themselves and closely reliant on the global market - in this case, the civilised demand for furs. Perhaps they are now only imagined in science fiction.
There is no sentimentality about nature here. It is there to be exploited. Animals are just moving meat and tradeable product when they are not threats. The beauty of nature is appreciated but also seen as a harsh mistress to be tamed. It is a backdrop to the human.
For an easy-going if somewhat sanitised picture of largely unregulated life on the American (Canadian) frontier in the 1840s, this fictionalisation is entertaining and informative enough to enjoy but perhaps only if you do not mind Victorian sentimentality expressed for a tad too long. ...more
Part of a wholly unacademic pop cultural series on the 'Unxplained' (sic), 'Visionaries and Mystics' is better than expected, well written, without hy Part of a wholly unacademic pop cultural series on the 'Unxplained' (sic), 'Visionaries and Mystics' is better than expected, well written, without hysteria and quite sincere in its attempt to inform rather than excite. It should be read as an entertainment.
This volume covers theories of the soul, various forms of prophecy including Nostradamus and Fatima, 'mystical places', astrology and the cycle of the mystic year and the folklore surrounding it and interpretations of classic myths and their links with the seasons and creation.
It reads like the work of a very intelligent autodidact and Jamies Stokes turns out to be a highly competent jobbing writer who, it seems from his web presence, can turn his hand to almost any subject. ...more
I am afraid I have only read the 1986 revision of the 1977 Second Edition. The Janson brand has been used subsequently to deliver new editions arising I am afraid I have only read the 1986 revision of the 1977 Second Edition. The Janson brand has been used subsequently to deliver new editions arising from an original 1962 version. By rights I should not 'review' this volume because the Editors would have long since moved on conceptually.
Nevertheless, it might be useful to note the flaws and positives of the earlier text if only to test the past against the present and also see where Janson's successors may have 'guided' the text in the directions demanded of twenty-first century audience.
I would hope the positives would be retained and the flaws corrected. I note straightaway that the latest edition refers to it being a history of the Western Tradition because one flaw in the original was the almost complete neglect of anything outside the classical world, Europe and the USA.
Once it is positioned as a history solely of the flow of tradition from the pyramids to whatever is the latest iteration of art in the West then it stands up more than adequately. The luxurious Thames & Hudson hardbook certainly has plenty of very high quality illustration.
However I found the US-centric approach (or rather Franco-US bias) somewhat tiresome so that the original sometimes reads like the sort of cultural tract you might expect the State Department to have been ecstatic about.
Similarly Janson's temperament tends to be both a little patronising ('you really must understand that we experts know what we are talking about') and presumptuous in making judgements that make too many assumptions about what artists 'must have been' thinking as they created.
Janson evidently wanted to construct a particular narrative of progress and liberal values as you might expect from an American of his generation. A lot gets shoe-horned into that model, although, to be fair, to tell 5,000 years of art history in nearly 800 pages is no mean feat.
The pages are simply not enough for what he wants to do (especially when we note that perhaps 60% or more of the 800 pages are actually illustrations). He is forced into short hand and short hand cannot help but require some ideologisation of the subject matter.
Having noted that concern, one of his virtues (given that he has to rattle through his history) is to make links between illustrations to show how art has reflected previous art in both content and form. It is only in the modern era that this process of linkage starts to look a little forced.
The book covers art as most of us understand it but also photography and architecture. Indeed, the coverage of architecture is quite detailed and occasionally technical. The coverage of representation flows far more easily until things get complicated in the last two centuries.
Forced to make tough choices (he does not include cinematography on the weak grounds that he cannot show moving images), he might have done well to dump the architecture and photography and produced a broader exposition of painting, sculpture and their collapse into concept today.
For example, even in the 1986 revision, there is no mention of Joseph Beuys or Fluxus and the creation of Pop Art in the UK is dismissed in one line. On the other hand, there is inordinate coverage of American art in the post-war period.
What is a clear flowing narrative up until the French impressionists then becomes fragmented. If socialist realism is not mentioned (no surprise) nor is much significant European art that is not related to an individual 'within the tradition'. There is no reference to Arte Povera for example.
And this is where the judgments become to feel a bit dodgy as you realise that Janson's American individualism tends towards a rather old-fashioned but very American view of the artist as creative innovator if not genius working in relation to previous artists.
'Progress' is implied to be that process whereby craftsman directed by societies steadily mature into free individuals finding their way to come up with new forms of creativity, within the bounds of reasoning, feeling and imagination, that constantly push forward art's own boundaries.
It is a mentality that places the long 5,000-year tradition as the background to innovation although it has led us to the point where anyone who screams a political or emotional slogan can claim to be an artist and frequently does. And he appreciates Claes Oldenburg while I think he is trivial.
If the misery of the past was a world where craftsmen depended on socialisation, religion and rulers to enable them to experiment and innovate, perhaps today it is a world where experiments and innovators may not have to be even craftsmen to earn a living as an 'artist' in a free market.
Perhaps they just have to invade a church in the cause of sexual politics. Or show a decent craftsmanlike skill in producing what are, in fact, large-scale single use jokes so that anyone who can make a joke that makes us 'think' in a certain direction is an artist.
So, I don't entirely accept the argument of ineluctable progress rather than one of constant flux as technology and an open society permit change. Perhaps a totally open society eventually gets to the point where it is technology that dictates innovation - and so we have the NFT nonsense.
From this perspective, the 'original' Janson looks like a critic surfing a 5,000-year old wave that was eventually going to crash to shore. He is aware of societal aspects - he starts the process, for example, of noting black and feminist artists - but it is the individual that matters to him.
Still, the book that I had access to was valuable and lavish if frustrating. Although it did rather crash to shore in the fourth quarter of the last century, it still gives an excellent grounding in the 'great tradition' and must be recommended on that basis. The surfing proved quite fun. ...more
This is one of the best books on nineteenth century American history that I have read even if occasionally the author presses a point a little too rep This is one of the best books on nineteenth century American history that I have read even if occasionally the author presses a point a little too repetitively at times and he cannot help wearing his slightly standard issue liberal-leftism on his sleeve every now and then.
These are minor flaws though. The book is actually well and clearly written. If you can find a contemporary academic without his bias then you have truly struck gold. Indeed, by contemporary standards Specht is rather restrained and we should thank him for that.
I say that it is book of history (and it is) but it can perhaps equally be read as a text on the sociology of American capitalism. He uses the cattle-beef complex to eluicidate much deeper themes as someone studying the military-industrial or security state systems might do.
I am not going to try and reproduce a complex argument with many fine gradations. What is interesting is the final result which strikes me as providing close to an iron law of capitalism under the American Constitution - the alliance of oligipolistic business with consumers and the State.
The idea that oligopolistic business runs the State is flawed. What actually happens is that consumers as voters drive the State into managing centralised production sufficiently that it provides low prices and quality at the expense of other players in the game.
Oligopolistic business engineers itself prior to state intervention into providing cheap goods and state intervention appears later to make sure the goods stay cheap and the quality remains good. In return, the oligopolists retain their oligopoly and their substantial profits.
In the case of the cattle-beef complex, the losers are the localised middle men (wholesale and independent butchers), suppliers of raw material (the cattle ranchers large and small) and the packers' semi-skilled labour in whom consumers have no interest with little sympathy.
As Upton Sinclair, the socialist novelist, gloomily pointed out regarding the reception of his expose of worker conditions, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach". The public stressed about the sanitary issues and gave not a hoot for the condition of the workers.
On the other hand, one might feel sorrier for the cattle ranchers and their own labour force (the cowboy) if one was not made aware (as Specht makes us aware) of their initial wealth and wages depending entirely on their collusion in the systematic expropriation of indigenous lands.
In fact, small and large-scale and perfectly normal greed, whether as bison hunters, ranchers or settlers, did for the 'Indians' who should not be romanticised in their turn. These were also appropriative players who had only appeared on the Plains after the 1680s.
The book, in five well argued chapters, takes us through the expropriation of the nomads, the rise of the ranches, the creation of a market for beef through the creation of mobility (trails and railroads), the dominance of the Chicago meatpackers and the culture of beef consumption.
It all hangs together not as an event but as a process that Specht rightly refuses to see as an inevitable result of technological and managerial innovation. There were accidents, chances and competitive struggles that built this system even if I would tend to think the final result inevitable.
Specht underplays the inevitability because he wants us to think in 'what if' terms but the dominant hegemony here lies not in the economic players on their own but in the US Constitution and its inherent bias towards commerce and property. The law ensured the complex.
The United States in the late nineteenth century was (and is) the perfect form of the 'bourgeois state' guaranteed not to become anything other than it is by the processes of accrued federal power and judges interpreting the law to protect business as property and consumer as individual.
Thus, while players could draw the State into doing its will in opening up territory (as the ranchers did), that same State consolidated industrial power by regulating only for consumer interests (price and quality) and weakening local state resistance to interstate commercial power.
This casts new light on the nature of progressive reform which now looks more like a rationalisation of the polity in favour of a collusive alliance of capital and consumer rather than offering much relief to victims of the process - Indian, primary producer, small business or labour.
American progressivism, when it does good things, does so as a by-product, cleaning up the mess, if you like. Progressivism never challenges market individualism, federal power or the core tenets of property ownership.
Specht clearly does not like this very much but, with socialism using state power to protect the victims an impossibility, reform had to be merely 'progressive' to permit the capital accumulation necessary for innovation and maintain elite legitimacy amongst most voters.
And let us not be naive ... as in the Soviet Union and Communist China, an American socialism, electorally impossible, would have ended up with its own exploitative structures but with different victims. On the Soviet analogy, it might have been better for the indigenous peoples!
It was a system of exploitation much like that observed in all industrialisations and modernisation from the mill towns that Engels observed through Stalin's forced industrialisation to today's gig economy and centralised high profits of the consumer-pleasing logistics industry.
The people have desires and needs en masse. Those thrust to one side or exploited are a minority of the members of the total system. The Chinese Communists have understood the ineluctability of this approach to growth and refuse to be tormented by its necessity.
The United States being a democracy, the victims do get a chance to complain and delay. Their situation is at the very core of populist resistance, resistance that can rarely cohere because of internal conflicts of interests and seems only to delay the inevitable.
This may, of course, be different in the first half of the 21st century because the 'losers' (notably the steady slow proletarianisation of the middle classes) may add up to a majority that can be organised yet the worst 'losers' seem to be divided and managed from the get-go by the elite.
Back then, since consumers did not come to America (if they were immigrants) not to eat beef and have a better and more free life and since America really did offer opportunities for advancement through hard work, consumers as voters were never going to be interested in a socialist alternative.
Indeed, the 'progressives' were to consolidate their hegemony in early twentieth century America by crushing its socialist and anarchist rivals in the wake of the Russian Revolution through often brutal means without much of a whimper from the majority of voters.
Liberal capitalism in America might sometimes look weak and sentimental on the outside but, inside, it is as hard as steel, maintaining the triangular relationship between centralised corporate power, federal intervention and consumer/voter desire by any means necessary.
Specht's book is not as explicit as this. It does not need to be. The facts are all there, laid out sequentially (because it is a process and this is a history) and I am afraid those facts may depress any genuine socialist (rather than the ersatz type thrown up on the Left of the Democrat Party).
You can draw your own conclusions on whether this book is particular to its time and place (roughly the US between 1850 and 1910) or whether it suggests some general character to American capitalism - and whether recent events in the US can be seen through its prism.
Specht drops the odd and rare hint about the persistence of the system at a global level but he is too good a historian to go hurtling off into speculation or partisan position-taking. His sympathies are clear but suitably vague.
I have ideas but this is not the place for them. The best thing to do is to recommend this book to a much wider audience than specialist economic or American historians as an important insight into the trajectory of capitalism in a market society based on the rule of eighteenth century law. ...more
This 1933 'weird western' [published in 'Weird Tales'] is one of the best uncanny stories I have read in some time. Howard is often at his best when h This 1933 'weird western' [published in 'Weird Tales'] is one of the best uncanny stories I have read in some time. Howard is often at his best when he is writing about Texas and cowboy lore. There is no doubt that his reading of the Comanche Wars helped create the ethos behind his heroic fantasies.
The story, half the length of most stories reviewed to date, does not make the mistake of switching tone from one genre to another so that what starts out as promising ends up as banal or trite. Here the uncanny and the horror are fully integrated into the settled frontier's mise-en-scene.
These are people you sense are true Texans coming up against a mystery outside their normal of experience of life but responding with true grit. These are no intellectuals but practical and sometimes very violent men who themselves have to decide whether or not to work within the law.
Howard and the frontier have often been written about by academics and commentators but it stands repeating that not only are his Westerns some of his best stories but that the rugged ethics of the frontier and the notion of the savage are absolutely central to his imagination.
The superiority in war of civilised man over brutal degraded savage, the supernatural mysteries hiding behind savagery, the noble savage, the near-savage nature of the settler and the necessary decadence of civilisation, where something is lost just as much as is gained, are frontier issues.
Howard's awareness of a brutal frontier that existed in the living memory of those he grew up with gets transmuted (amongst many other influences) into tropes that are shifted into other imagined frontiers - Caledonia in the age of Rome, the North West frontier or Hyperborea.
This particular story has a fantastic idea at its core - the eternal magical heart of a pioneer Texan granted by an Amerindian shaman - but there is none of that sub-theosophical or direct sub-Lovecraftian guff that ruins so many unpublished drafts. This horror tale is told as a realist one....more
The 'Seed from the Sepulchre' appeared in Weird Tales in 1933 and is a tale of alien vegetable body horror that reminds one of Ballard, albeit Ballard The 'Seed from the Sepulchre' appeared in Weird Tales in 1933 and is a tale of alien vegetable body horror that reminds one of Ballard, albeit Ballard is writing two or three decades later. Others might compare the 'monster' to Wyndham's Triffid, also much later in publication.
The story plays on popular stories of man-eating plants in the then still unexplored darker reaches of the south American jungle but Ashton Smith's peculiarly fertile imagination takes it a stage further with a grim pathology where you feel something of the desperation of the protagonists.
Once again, Ashton Smith offers something just a cut above most pulp fiction. ...more
An old-fashioned type of book that reminds one of the polymathic style of a Jung or a Huxley or any number of pre-post-modern autodidactic (in the sen An old-fashioned type of book that reminds one of the polymathic style of a Jung or a Huxley or any number of pre-post-modern autodidactic (in the sense of having self taught themselves out of some learned specialist category) general thematic histories.
In this case, Gyrus (disclaimer: we have met and like him but this does not change our critical faculties) looks at the 'mind of man' (a common theme of such texts) as a relationship to the sky and to the polar (arctic and antarctic) cosmologies that often underpin our intellectual history.
The style is dry but readable, well in the tradition. There are insights and I can rarely fault the judgments on specific matters but it left me with the nagging doubt that such books tell us more about the writer than they do about the world he is trying to describe.
In Gyrus' case, this is made unusually explicit in a nightmare epilogue, a dream sequence, that suggests that we are seeing here is writing as psychotherapy - a formal intellectualism finally imploding in some rather obvious personal anxieties about the stability of being.
Doubts increase when his personal values intrude - especially value judgments about what it is to be human that personally do not resonate with me. One suspects that the tale has been structured more as a covert morality tale than a demonstration of the reality that I and most others know.
None of this detracts from the text if you do not expect more than an intellectual entertainment that offers one possible interpretation of the meaning behind some of the vast range of cultural artefacts that we have inherited as part of a literate Western civilisation.
But the underlying position represents the paradox of our time - a deeply conservative eco-ideology emphasising an unattainable wholeness and seeking after some form of lost tranquillity set in an implicit claim to radical resistance to order and the dominance of the 'head'.
Perhaps this text is best appreciated as a sign and symbol of the confused pseudo-progressive eco-conservatism of a generation, a last or the latest burst of that romantic impulse that places man within a web of essences rather than as a stable reasoning manipulator of his own condition.
Antithetical to all I see as valid in the description of reality, this world view must nevertheless be understood even as it is being displaced by new values and ideologies in the wake of 2008. In that context, it is learned, humane and may appeal to those adding to their stock of acquired meanings.
I simply retain my doubt that developing a thematic approach based on set texts, some anthropological and archaeological research and the mental mapping of significant thinkers tells us very much about how real people really thought in past real worlds.
The book feels like a fact-based 'invention' rather than a 'discovery', based on an invented narrative to try to tie down some relationship between discoveries - to create, in short, meaning and wholeness, neither of which may actually be there.
It is a personality thing. Some people thrive on fragmentation and a chaos which they order as autonomous individuals. Others demand that their selves be integrated with something greater and project their selves onto the world. Others simply distintegrate into given roles.
This book is of the second type - the desire for wholeness and for things to hang together even if they hang together in a way that might induce pessimism as to our condition. This reviewer just happens to be of the first type, impatient of those claiming histories rather than creating futures.
This is a 2015 re-publication of a solid thriller from the immediate post-Cold War period with a slightly breathless introduction by the children's fa This is a 2015 re-publication of a solid thriller from the immediate post-Cold War period with a slightly breathless introduction by the children's fantasy writer Philip Pullman.
The novel is more than competent. Excellently written and (mostly) a 'page turner', it is has all the vices and virtues of the genre - implausibilities set within a carapace of gritty realism.
The implausibilities are manifold. The hero is capable of feats of toughness that really are 'in your dreams, mate' and we have exquisite planning by an intelligence agency that, in reality, could scarcely tie up its bootlaces when it came to operating inside Russia.
The hero's luck operates at an absurd level (especially as the Russians are drawn as competent and professional) and his sexual exploits are there to comfort the lonely man caught in yet another airport in yet another city going to yet another business meeting.
There is also a quasi-science fantasy element that won't fool anyone with any understanding of modern science, even those inclined to think that the Russians always have something up their sleeves.
But get all that nonsense out of the way and you have a very much above average effort. Davidson could actually write. The obligatory formulaic aspects of the genre are transformed into more plausibility than you usually get within these masculine fantasies.
Pullman rightly points out that Davidson manages the trope of mechanical detail brilliantly by embedding these moments deep into the plot rather than pausing the action to give us the excruciatingly dull particulars of some bit of military hardware.
Instead of one's eyes glazing over and feeling forced to skip the next few pages, Davidson educates and informs so that you cannot finish the book without having a much better understanding of the world in which it is set - the Canadian and Siberian frozen backlands.
The characterisation is also generally good within the conventions of the thriller with the exception of the hero who seems to be a sort of cut-out sentimental sociopath of enormous animal cunning but without much of an interior life as far as we are concerned.
But that is the point - these heroes are not written by Jane Austen. They appeal to the latent sociopath in every male wolf turned into corporate dog. The sentimentality keeps the reader from forgetting that actually he prefers life as a dog, all things considered.
But the essence of the book is its relentless energy, finally tuned so that it all hangs together as a set of necessary perilous quest journeys (much as Pullman notes).
The central journey on a tramp steamer from Japan to Siberia might well be a tribute to Eric Ambler and Jack London even if I still remain thoroughly puzzled as to why our hero should take quite such a tortuous route to get unnoticed into Russia.
The final scenes 'on the ice' (I will say no more because I don't do spoilers) are positively filmic, almost directions for the movie, and (assuming you are someone with reasonable visualisation skills) certainly exciting and tense. So, all round a highly recommended thriller if you like thrillers.
This is superb history - dispassionate though not without judgment, informative with a clear narrative and capable both of changing prejudices and assThis is superb history - dispassionate though not without judgment, informative with a clear narrative and capable both of changing prejudices and assumptions and suggesting analogies with today.
Fehrenbach wrote this book forty years ago as a sympathetic historian of Texas and Mexico who was filling in the natural sovereign gap in the history of the South West - the 'savage' Comancheria.
Because it was written so long ago, it was also written before 'political correctness' obliged us to accept an entirely false view of the benignity of savagery because of our fear of what Hobbes claimed.
In fact, Fehrenbach (who does have a bias towards 'civilisation' that might be unwarranted) treats the southern plains Amerindians with more respect and less sentimentality than East Coast liberals.
He takes them for what they were and not what deeply idiotic Quaker Indian agents would like them to have been - the book presents a standing argument for keeping religion and ideology out of empire.
There are two overwhelming truths about the dreadful experience of the Comanche: the official state machines of Texas and the USA were never in control of the situation; and the Indians were vicious.
The first point is one of demography and not actually of superiority. Indeed, the white settlers were held back, even pushed back by Comanche determination, for many decades.
Driving the white population forward was the simple fact that they were breeding like rabbits and surviving, sending waves of dour Baptists and then desperate migrants eastwards.
Ironically, the West is now besieged by the opposite - excitable pentecostalists and islamists and desperate migrants moving northwards with the same sort of sentimentalist evading the consequences.
The native Amerindians were numbered in tens of thousands, not millions, and were defeated ultimately first by disease and second by a market-driven, not calculated, destruction of the bison herds.
The United States in particular, but also the Republic of Texas, were not sophisticated hierarchical empires with the ability to enforce assimilation or treaties but polities trying to keep a lid on things.
The British in Canada preserved Indian culture by enforcing deals against settlers but the sheer scale of European migration and the weakness of the state meant that this was not possible in the US.
Hence the much written about tragedy of long and violent border wars and brutal and intermittent guerrilla actions leading to the utterly self-destructive tactics of the tribes and their final destruction.
Fehrenbach plausibly argues, using the Navajo example and alluding to Canada, that the best strategy for the Indians would have been a decisive military defeat and enforceable treaty-making.
It is at this point that he may be too kind to the populist federal republics that emerged in Texas and which made up the rather nasty Jacksonian democracy that drove agrarian indians ever westward.
The plains indians were not fools but simply ignorant and Jacksonian democracy as a political model had lies and faithlessness built into it - Texas was a mere extension of Christian Southern arrogance.
The point was that the Indians could never possibly resist the surge from the East because it was many and they were few but their culture and experience failed them in organising adequately to deal with this.
A diferent sort of Indian culture might have followed the classic barbarian model of creating a single Comanche proto-state that could create its own settler patterns but this was not to be.
Had it had the intellectual and organisational resources to do this, it would have followed the Slav pattern, created a sovereign war chief ('king'), adopted Protestant Christianity and become the Comanche Republic as a state within the Union or independent.
This could either have happened naturally (which no plains indian seemed able to achieve) or as a result of a defeat in effective collaboration with a sympathetic federal enemy (as in Canada).
This latter is not as absurd as it sounds since the military were professional not racist and there was a strong body of Eastern opinion sympathetic, overly so, to the Amerindians.
Unfortunately, the classic problem of American democracy - populist hysteria and inter-agency conflict constantly evaded a decisive handling of the problem.
When the military were finally permitted a free hand, the war of attrition between millions of whites and thousands of Comanche was a brutal walk over that destroyed a culture that had no room to adapt.
The Comanche, by their blunders and brutality, also sped up the end for their northern plains counterparts but that is another story.
So far, my account of the book sounds rather one-sided but that is because I have missed out the essential truth of the conflict - that the Comanches and other southern plains tribes really were savage.
The small-minded Baptists and racists were no less unappealing to modern tastes and many whites were thugs of the first order but the plains indian culture was inherently violent.
What we are dealing with here are not the romantic noble figures with waving feather headdresses who speak of great spirits and environmental responsibility but torturing half-beasts.
These were stone age people engaged in permanent internecine warfare of consummate brutality, engaging in the vilest form of torture and destruction for a form of 'honour'.
Horses and then iron simply upgraded the methodology of terror to include the plains and competition with other tribes. This moved on to brutal raids against vulnerable Mexican villagers for loot.
Given the culture, its misogynistic kin-orientated brutalities would naturally be applied to the very different tejanos even if they were initially restrained with the americanos.
Be in no doubt, the horrors perpetrated by the Amerindians on their own kind and the settlers - systematic rape, mutilation, kidnapping, enslavement, murder and wanton destruction - were 'normal'.
Any excuse that they were responding to the invasion of their territory does not hold water. They were raiding because it was profitable and that is what their young men did to get 'honour'.
Fehrenbach's book is good not only in clarifying this but in giving important context for each stage of the Comanche's evolution so that we learn a lot about the history of the whole American South West.
As he points out, what was 'normal' to Amerindians became normalised as barbarities amongst the besieged 'tejanos' although the Texans and Americans certainly did not rape, mutilate and torture as a 'norm'.
These were two incommensurate borderlands cultures and, as we know from European history, borderlands are the liminal areas where any cultural restraints will collapse under pressure.
Fehrenbach points out the differential in 'organisation' (not intelligence or technology) and the effects of demography and market capitalism as decisive in the final American victory.
But, as we note above, this victory took an inordinately long time a-coming and only emerged when the American Civil War had permitted the federal state the ability to organise itself for modernity.
The story is a tragedy. There are many capable people in it and some heroes - the disastrous rule of the Quaker Indian agents must not be included here. Most people here are muddling through on tram-lines.
Perhaps that is the lesson for today - populist democracies can never seem to get a grip on what needs to be done and there is, as a result, far more suffering than is necessary.
For all their brutalities and short lives, the plains indians deserve the respect that Fehrenbach and the best of the soldiery gave to them.
They deserved an early defeat in battle with honour and a treaty imposed by a superior force that enforced its provisions with the same sense of honour and professionalism as was found in Canada.
(Although we should be careful of claiming too much British Imperial decency. Once those missionaries got their teeth into the tribes, the decency started to disappear pretty quickly)
Instead, the Comanche faced a weak state whose lies and incompetencies derived from sentimentalism and religion. These did far more harm to them than any number of honest military defeats could have done.
The soft sentimental liberal and faith-based mind simply cannot understand this - that progress comes from direct brutal struggle between strong forces succeeded by magnanimity and the rule of law.
The final form of the American Federal State, before it degenerated again into ideology and religiosity, got this perfectly right in 1945 after another existential struggle.
It is probable that the USA will never be great again until it learns the lessons of the Indian wars - use power effectively, decisively and sparingly and be generous to the defeated.
The treatment of the Amerindians after their defeat, despite their brutal 'norms', is a lasting stain on American democracy, indeed on the normative claims of the West in general.
I recommend this highly readable book to anyone who wants to understand our own species better, what differential power really means and why sentiment and faith are appalling guides to policy. ...more
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