The Lost Colophon

Is political hatred the product or the tool?

2012-03-12T11:02:00.001+11:00

THE NEW HATE:
A history of fear and loathing on the populist right.

By Arthur Goldwag, Scribe, 368pp.

It's disturbing to watch the American democratic process so suffused with rage and hatred, from both left and right. Free speech and open debate is to be cherished, but the cynical peddling of lies and conspiracies to influence frightened voters is the great weakness of democracy.

Plato warned about it in ancient Athens - at some point the Greek republic had laws that exiled demagogues from the city. In modern western democracies, the challenge is to retain fundamental freedom of speech without turning over democracy to those with the greatest power to lie most loudly.

Thinking people of all persuasions share a broad discomfort about the political mobilisation of hatred . Some blame whichever party or interest group they don’t support, and many blame our news media for fostering political violence (real or synthetic) for the sake of cheap ratings points or journalistic one-upmanship.

Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate looks at a wide range of current Obama-haters, from Tea Party to rabid broadcasters to Islamophobes and bizarre conspiracy-cult websites. He places them in a context of hate-farming that traces right back to the earliest Puritan colonists. It seems there never was a time when American politics was not infected with conspiracy theories about unseen, powerful groups bent on subverting the Bible, the Constitution, or the apotheosis of the white race in American Exceptionalism.

Religious identity has often been the target, echoing the politico-religious purges that drove Puritans and many other waves of immigrants to America from their European homes. Freemasons, Roman Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, Communists, homosexuals, witches and innumerable real or imagined secret societies have been the object of hate campaigns embraced by high-level politicians as well as rabble-rousers and entrepreneurs. Goldwag is a declared liberal Democrat, but provides balanced accounts of many hate-merchants and their innocent or questionable targets across the centuries.

So why are human societies so susceptible to falsehood, prejudice, and paranoid fantasy? Goldwag suggests that the common visceral element is a human yearning for a secure identity. Any perceived threat to that identity, whether religious, cultural, race, or economic, induces a natural fear that is easily fanned into rage and hate. The more that a relatively successful society has fostered a sense of entitlement and “rights” among its citizens, the easier it is to promote outrage and hatred whenever such entitlements may seem challenged.

Charitably, Goldwag accepts that some hate-peddlers at least believe what they are saying. He concludes that the majority of those who claim to believe Obama is a foreign Muslim are less concerned about Obama’s identity than about

America

’s identity not being what it used to be, at home or abroad.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites, when a broadcast current affairs producer and editorial executive, has struggled to balance coverage of punch-ups with coverage of policy.

Deng Xiaoping's life story - a true modern epic

2012-02-21T11:31:00.001+11:00

DENG XIAOPING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF

CHINA

By Ezra Vogel, Belknap Harvard, 876pp.

In China, they play politics seriously. We need to know how things work there, and this book will help.

From one man’s navigation through six decades of Chinese politics, we can learn much about the choices we humans make about how our societies are to be governed. Blow away the fog of ideology, and Deng Xiaoping’s choices, loyalties and betrayals could as well take place in ancient Rome or modern Washington as in Beijing. Deng’s personal saga of the acquisition, application and retention of power might attract a future Shakespeare, but for contemporary readers it's instructive to understand how this particular man, more than any other, delivered 20^th Century

China

from its Maoist hell into the vital, but still turbulent, economic powerhouse we see today.

All the evidence suggests that Deng, since his days as a 16-year old Communist student in France in the 1920s, Deng never budged on the one principle that all power in

China

must be centralized through the Communist Party. Communist ideology provided some core principles and objectives for the Communist program, but its main function was to define discipline and solidarity to maintain the Party's grip on power.

After the death of Chairman Mao, Deng fought bitter battles within the Communist Party leadership to promote economic liberalization, but did not hesitate to crack down hard, whether on life-long Communist colleagues or on Western-influenced student dissidents, whenever he sensed any serious challenge to the absolute power and authority of the Party.

Deng's Leninist conviction on the central role of the Party never wavered even when nepotism and corruption among the Party elite caused deep resentment among the population. A few junior crooks could be shot, and senior ones humiliated, but the Party’s hold on power must not be challenged.

Deng’s survival through savage intra-Party struggles and ultimate rise to the top is an epic in itself. This could be compared to surviving at the court of King Henry VIII. Deng’s reputation for effectiveness and Party loyalty meant he always had protectors when he needed them, whereas many equally loyal but less judicious Communists were destroyed utterly by Mao, or in his name.

Any organization that sets itself above the law, as the Chinese Communist Party has always done, may fall to subversion by dominant individuals. By the late 1960s Mao Zedong had established a virtual monarchy. After Mao, Deng Xiaoping emerged as the one figure with the deep personal support base, and the tactical skill, to bring bitterly divided Party factions together into a viable, common program that bypassed the leftist conservatives.

Deng in later years enjoyed recognition as “paramount leader” or “supreme leader”, but he never held or claimed Mao’s absolute authority, and he largely avoided the dangers of a personality cult. Deng would cautiously place chosen people in key positions and wait for an alignment of events that favoured his next challenge to opponents within the Party.

There’s no evidence that Deng Xiaoping had any interest in broadening democracy for China, although there were times when he acted and spoke to mobilize liberal intellectuals, at home and abroad, so as to put heat on more conservative Communist colleagues. Deng had promoted the capable and popular liberal Party leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang for their reforming vigour and openness, but when Hu and later Zhao provoked strong reactions from conservatives, whose support Deng needed at the time, he ended both their careers with very public humiliations - sacrifices on the altar of Party unity.

Vogel is a veteran sinologist who has accessed a wide range of Chinese and foreign sources, including some personal interviews with surviving key players or those close to them. He assembles insights never available to those of us who were trying to cover these events as they occurred.

Because of the Party’s vigilance, sinologists are often reluctant to jeopardize future access to their privileged sources. Vogel abstains from challenging the Communist Party’s central claim that China can have only Leninist one-party rule, or chaos. He notes, however, that memoirs of key figures, including former liberal Premier Zhao Ziyang and conservative politician Deng Liqun, could not be published in China, but were published in Hong Kong.

Richard Thwaites was ABC correspondent in Beijing in the years Deng Xiaoping achieved pre-eminence in China’s leadership, 1978-83.

Read the full review here..

How Humans made Words, and Words made us Human

2011-11-22T10:27:00.001+11:00

PLANET WORD:

The story of language from the earliest grunts to Twitter and beyond.

By J.P. Davidson, Michael Joseph, 445pp.

As books become easier to write and easier to sell, each book becomes harder to sell. Publishers are finding one of the most reliable strategies is the tie-in between a book and another medium, especially TV. Public broadcasters can't rely so much on the celebrity endorsement power of TV book clubs and the like, but they can anticipate that audience that watches public TV overlaps pretty strongly with habitual book-buyers.

It also overlaps pretty well with those people who enjoy language as an art, and may toy with questions about the philosophy and history of language.

John Davidson, is an anthropologist and long-time BBC documentary producer of travel and exploration programs hosted by personalities like Michael Palin and Stephen Fry. This book is the “companion” to accompany a new BBC TV documentary series, presented by the over-eloquent Stephen Fry.

Like a TV show, the book sets out to be serious in an entertaining way. It tries not to be boring and doesn't demand too much extended concentration. It is packed with little gee-whizz facts and personal anecdotes that hold attention. As a book, this takes us back to the days before television or radio, when families used to read encyclopaedias and non-fiction miscellanies for entertainment and self-improvement. Now we can get lost in a maze of hyperlinks on Wikipedia, launched from any conceivable Internet query.

Davidson and Fry fossick like gentlemen explorers across a vast terrain of human language, beginning with the most primitive indications of language in animals, and the extent to which the human body and brain are shaped for language.

They examine how language is used to build our identities as individuals and as members of communities, and how language is harnessed for purposes of political nationalism.

This book is itself a solid object you can hold in your hand and admire on a shelf, nicely designed and built to last, as a classy hardback on good quality paper, generously illustrated and with an attractive slip-cover. An entertaining and handsome book about words not the last place you would expect to find the name of the printer Gutenberg misspelt as "Gutenburg", among other proofing errors.

Read the full review here..

Old China Hands - Rogues or Heroes of the Revolution?

2011-10-23T21:50:00.001+11:00

SHANGHAI FURY

Australian Heroes of Revolutionary

China

By Peter Thompson, Heinemann, 530pp.

Plenty of foreigners write plenty about China every day, from the fawning to the ferocious. Many write with the best of intentions, doing their best to seem impartial and to "explain" China to readers. I've done that myself. Others write for an audience that is inherently hostile to China, playing up the perceived threats and inferiorities of a strengthening, but still alien, modern China.

Not many who write popular histories of China acknowledge that they are taking a specifically "foreign" point of view.

In this book, journalist and author Peter Thompson has sifted through the public records, autobiographies and newspaper files of Australia, Britain and the English-speaking Treaty Ports of China prior to 1949, to remind the current generation of Australians about how many Australians played notable roles in Chinese affairs through the last years the Manchu Dynasty, through the 1911 birth, decline and fall of the Republic of China, and into the 1949 establishment of the Peoples' Republic of China under the iron control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Australians were among the earliest 19th Century opium traders, gunboat “free trade” opportunists, missionaries, scholars and adventurers of Canton, Shanghai and the Yangtze valley. Some, like G E Morrison and William Donald, combined influential journalistic careers with powerful inside advisory roles to important players in Chinese republican politics, from the Boxer Rebellion onward.

There were also a disreputable cast of opportunists, including some who collaborated with the Japanese regime occupying Shanghai 1939-45.

Numbers of Australian-Chinese took aspects of their Australian experience back to China. The biggest Shanghai department stores, Sincere and Wing On, were founded by Australian-Chinese on Australian models, as were numerous progressive newspapers, trading houses and fledgling democratic movements. The Australian links are generally ignored by American or European writers of Chinese histories.

Thompson's anecdotal history mainly reflects the views and recollections of non-Communist and anti-Communist particpants in Chinese affairs, as well as being an unapologetic chronicle of foreign interventions, big and small, in China. It may seem anachronistic or politically incorrect to modern sinophiles, but it is a good read for the non-specialist with an interest in modern China, or for the jaded specialist interested in a fresh overview. Having reported from China myself for five years in the past, I recognise that when it comes to Chinese history, the alien perspective may be as valid as the local.

Read my published review here...

Afghanistan - the West's Tar Baby?

2011-10-02T15:27:00.000+11:00

Most Americans and many Australians (of a certain age) know the folksy tales of Brer Rabbit, read to us as children from the popular books by "Uncle Remus", in the style of African-American story-telling.

Most memorable to me was the tale of the Tar Baby, wherein one of Brer Rabbit's many enemies made a doll out of sticky tar and sat it in the road where Brer Rabbit was to pass by. The irascible Brer Rabbit, as expected, picked a fight with this mute, inanimate Tar Baby, and began strike it in anger, because the Tar Baby would not reply to his impertinent questions. Brer Rabbit hit the Tar Baby with his right fist, and it stuck in the tar. Then he hit it with his left fist, which also stuck. Then he kicked it with left and right feet, becoming firmly stuck and helpless. I forget how he lived to embarass himself another day.

The story came strongly to mind in reading Karen Middleton's new chronicle of how Australia, seeing its strategic advantages as bound tightly to the US government, has become further and further enmeshed in the conflict in Afghanistan, from which no exit is visible even when no credible good outcome can be predicted.

I've read and reviewed several books dealing generally with this conflict, but Middleton's is unique. She is a long-serving bureau chief in the political Press Gallery of the Australian Parliament in Canberra. She was visiting Washington DC with Australia's then Prime Minister, the conservative John Howard, on 9 September 2001, and has followed every twist and turn of Australian policy and political debate on Australia's strategic engagements since then.

Sadly, Australia seems to be trapped in the same colonial mentality we have suffered since the first British colonies were established in 1788. Governments of quite different political colours have rushed to answer the call for token support from whichever hegemon we were dependent upon, lest we be considered ungrateful for the supposed umbrella of protection we might, in future, wish to call upon.

Earlier colonial leaders used to get royal favours and knighthoods for their public loyalty to the British crown. Now the most they can expect is the occasional stroll in the White House rose garden, a brief photo-opportunity on a White House portico for the Australian evening TV news, and a patronising affirmation that the USA "has no closer or more trusted ally" than Australia. If invited to a White House karoke night, I recommend any Australian politician to rehearse that great American cultural export, Carole King's splendidly honest song "Will you still love me tomorrow?"

Karen Middleton's book is:

An Unwinnable War: Australia in Aghanistan
published by Melbourne University Press, September 2011.

Read my published review of Karen's book here...

Extreme Money - how financiers play us for fools on risk and debt

2011-09-18T09:08:00.000+10:00

EXTREME MONEY: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk.
by Satyajit Das,
Penguin, 514pp.
Reviewed: 17 September 2011

The best economists are the not the best mathematicians. They are those with the most realistic appreciation of human nature. Too often, its the mathematicians and algorithm apostles who have garnered the Nobel Prizes for their construction of dizzying theses and techniques for the management of "risk".

Satyajit Das is an economist who worked decades in risk management for banks and investment houses, but he is also humane and no fundamentalist. He recognises a truth glaringly obvious to all but the economic fundamentalists and their self-serving acolytes. "The Market" is never pure, correct, or inevitable, except in hindsight. The unseen hand that guides the market, so beloved of those who fatten themselves on speculation with funds they have not earned, is no more than the sum of unequal interests.

The "market" will never be fair when knowledge is unequal. Every practical adult knows that and has experienced it in daily life. "Buyer Beware" may be an adequate baseline for barbarians, but when human societies try to be better than barbaric, we construct agreements and rules about how we will do business with each other.

Money is the way we measure exchange of goods and services. Finance is the tactics and technologies for directing the circulation of money, for any private or public purpose. Economics is the study of production, exchange and consumption of goods and services.

Styajit Das's book delivers a horrifying picture of how Extreme Money (under-regulated, manipulative finance) has corrupted both the world of money and the world of academic and government economics.

Masters of the Universe are the class of financial operators in Wall Street, London and their equivalents, who build, operate and protect a financial system based upon fake valuation of assets and the concealment of risks, so as to turn other people’s real savings into real losses, while the Masters pocket stupendous fees and “performance” bonuses for themselves.

Rarely do we understand the extent to which our personal risks can be manipulated by the financial Masters of the Universe, essentially to their own private benefit. Risk is abstracted, repackaged and traded by the financiers, using derivatives and hedging techniques, to the point that neither buyer nor seller really knows the risk (and therefore the value) of the instruments being transacted. Ultimately, buyers exchange cash for false expectations of security. The smarter financiers take their bonuses in cash.

Das exposes the shambles of a system characterized by bogus and failed economic market theory, a shamelessly rapacious finance industry, and a broad failure by governments to protect either their citizens or their productive industries from a finance industry driven by the most perverse incentives.

The Chicago School of Economics was espoused and funded enthusiastically from Wall Street, and has garnered several Nobel Prizes for economic theories that, when put into practice by financial institutions, have proved shallow and bankrupt. The fundamental flaw has been failure to account for the greed, fear, dishonesty and ignorance that drive opportunistic human behaviour in the real world.

Alan Greenspan, long-time Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, had a lifelong ideological commitment to Ayn Rand extreme individualism, which blinded him and his like to all evidence of failure in de-regulationist neo-liberal finance policy. A whole generation of politically-favoured economists were essentially fundamentalists, who dismissed any contrary interpretations or inconvenient facts that did not suit their ideology.

The Masters of the Universe exploited these flawed policies to make personal billions from useless or destructive market manipulations, and the global economy still pays for that. Behind the financiers’ marble façade is a flimsy wooden shack riddled with termites.

Das's book is packed with facts, case studies and incidents to support its harsh polemic.

He quotes widely from ancient historians, industry insiders and even post-modern cultural critics to show that underlying issues of trust, governance and human market behaviour are as old as history and as present as the sun. Don’t believe anyone who says, “It’s different this time”.

Ultimately, the challenge is to the credibility of governments. Today, while financiers in Wall Street, London and Sydney resume their well-resourced rent-seeking campaigns, governments in all the capitalist democracies face a crisis of public confidence in their ability to manage their economies.

Read my published review here ..

Playing Games with the News - for good reasons

2011-08-29T08:29:00.000+10:00

NEWSGAMES: Journalism at Play

by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Shweizer

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 235pp.

The role of journalism in shaping public opinion is always contentious. As information media proliferate, the traditional ethics and rationales are challenged by any number of media that draw upon current events as the basis for entertainment and propaganda. If this is not traditional "news" or "journalism", it is none the less a powerful influence shaping the world views, decisions, and behaviours of huge sections of populations.

In democracies, this matters. Who could deny the power of media "personalities" to make, or more often to break, the public standing of a politician or opinion-leader?

Newsgames is the product of Ian Bogost - graduate of the MIT new media stream and now professor at Georgia Tech, together with two of his grad students (let's assume the grad students did most of the grunt work in collecting and collating examples and case studies).

The point of the book is to examine how "games" interact with the practice of journalism. Here the scope of "games" is extended to cover all forms of interactive simulations and graphics that are now available to the online world. So it embraces quite a lot that might earlier have been described as "educational" material - but who wants education if you can call it games in stead?

It's any interesting read for anyone who cares about the role of information in our advanced democracies, and where future generations may go with the information media. Bogost himself is a participant in this, not just an academic observer. His company "Persuasive Games" has been active in producing interactive news-based games that have enjoyed a degree of online success. So you could read a bit of cross-promotion into the selection of numerous examples from Persuasive Games. I don't have a problem with that.

Read my published review here..

Insiders and experts tell us why Afghan engagement is futile

2011-08-15T11:10:00.001+10:00

THE AFGHANISTAN CONFLICT AND AUSTRALIA'S ROLE
Edited by Amin Saikal.
Melbourne University Press. 210pp.
Reviewed: 30 July 2011

CABLES FROM KABUL
The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign.
By Sherard Cowper-Coles.
Harper Press.312pp.
Reviewed: 5 August 2011

INFERNAL TRIANGLE
Conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and The Levant – Eyewitness reports from the September 11 decade. By Paul McGeough.
Allen and Unwin. 338pp.
Reviewed: 5 August 2011

It was the burden of the prophetess Cassandra to see future doom, but her curse was that nobody would believe her warnings.

The bloody embrace of Western nations with Afghanistan is a situations in which everybody who knows what they are talking about realises that almost the entire Western engagement has been futile and even counter-productive.

The first of these books is a symposium of experts from a conference at the Centre for Islamic and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University. All of them are area experts, several of them are Afghans, others are distinguished military strategists or social development activists.

Several contributors refer to the great needs for social development in Afghanistan - but none of these could convince me that the Western alliance could deliver such development in any way that would survive the imminent withdrawal of western military forces on the ground.

Most depressingly, the strategy experts (such as Prof Hugh White) question whether the missions, and particularly Australia's tag-along mission, were ever undertaken for good reasons. We all remain hostage to the hegemonistic fantasies of the neo-con Bush administration.

Sadly, it seems that our own democratic societies are part of the problem. Our leaders can be overthrown by media-driven perceptions that they are "weak", so they struggle to avoid the appearance of anything that can be described as "defeat". Military establishments and government advisers all try to avoid association with defeat, and so continue to pretend that "victory" is possible. It reminds me of stockbrokers and real estate agents constantly assuring investors that they will be OK "in the long run".

Cables from Kabul is a personal memoir of a classic kind. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is a classic kind of English establishment product, talented as well as privileged, who served as British Ambassador in Kabul and as the UK's Special Representative on Afghanistan during 2010.

His perspective is that the western alliance should have learned more from the accumulated history of failed imperial engagements with Afghanistan, particularly the experience of the British Empire a century or two ago. He is probably right. But making these points too often and too cheekily for Washington's taste eventaully caused embarassment in London, and thus put an end to his diplomatic career. We can be grateful for this - his memoir is a classic and fun to read, though the man himself might be difficult to get along with and shows a rather patronising attitude toward Australians (as well as Americans).

Infernal Triangle is a journalistic collection by distinguished war correpondent, Paul McGeough. The collected despatches cover not only Afghanistan but also Iraq and Palestine (thus the Triangle). He provides many useful perspectives - one being the interconnection between these different war zones. Another is that the chronological sequence of his reports shows his growing disillusion with the Western "project" to democratise Islam. Western indulgence of Israel's expansionism is the common factor linking it all together, because it defines the entire West as an enemy of Islam and, worse, as hypocritical.

It is sheer madness that our governments turn a willful blind eye to that obvious canker and obstacle to peace and development. Perhaps this is another artifact of our democractic subjection to determined propaganda. Let's never forget that Hitler came to power in Germany by democratic elections. In our era, the real saboteurs of global peace are not Islamists, and not Zionists, but madcap Christian fundamentalists who terrorise American electoral politics (and some ill-informed elements of the Australian electorate as well).

Read the reviews for a rant-free evaluation of these three worthwhile books.

This blog may become less polite..

2011-08-15T10:19:00.001+10:00

Two things have indicated it is time for a change of direction in The Lost Colophon.

First, I've upgraded my personal book reviews site at Richard Thwaites' Book Reviews so that the full text of reviews is easier to find. The new pages present concise summaries and a dated list of links to all past reviews, which is easier to navigate than this public blog's format that hides everything in dated archives. Who ever browses by dates???

So there's no more need to post extensive texts of my published reviews here.

Second, there are certain constraints and conventions in writing reviews for an established print medium such as The Canberra Times, the newspaper of Australia's national capital. An a priori respect for the author, and an attempt to be fair to the written work, are reasonable premises from which to write a non-fiction review. A reviewer should avoid grandstanding and self-promotion, while providing readers with the best possible understanding of the qualities and limitations of the work under review.

But this virtuous commitment to balance leaves little room for the reviewer to share, with his own readers, the essence of the reading experience: how did this book affect me?

So, as of now, The Lost Colophon will record the personal aspects of the book-review task as I experience it, stepping through current non-fiction works of authors who are trying to say something that is worth taking seriously.

I'll be talking about all the books I review, and referring interested readers to the reviews themselves at Richard Thwaites' Book Reviews.

Is Victory worth the Price?

2011-05-16T10:27:00.001+10:00

THE ILLUSION OF VICTORY:
The True Costs of War. By Ian Bickerton.
Melbourne University Press.241pp.

Reviewed 14 May 2011

Our era of unresolved conflicts, between state and non-state antagonists with ill-defined or unstated goals, seems ripe for a review of the idea of victory.

Ian Bickerton is a senior historian at the University of New South Wales who has specialized in the study of US foreign policy and of conflict in the Middle East. He takes a dim view of war in general, and in this book, he tackles the problem of war backwards - rather than questioning the causes, he questions the results. The book hangs on his proposition that, in war, victory is an illusion, and in our current era has lost all meaning.

It's a fine topic for a vigorous debate, but first you have to define “victory”. Bickerton doesn't offer a concise definition, but he refers to “strategic victory” as imparting the ability to impose peace and stability, including within the politics of the defeated nations. That sets the bar quite high. My Oxford Dictionary defines victory more simply, at two levels: “the position or state of having overcome an enemy or adversary in battle, combat or war”; then “supremacy or superiority achieved as the result of armed conflict”. Bickerton's case is that victory of the first kind (overcoming an enemy in combat) does not guarantee any lasting strategic supremacy, superiority, or even peace for the nominal victors.

His analytical method is systematic but blunt. He takes a series of wars that involved Europe and/or America, from the Napoleonic to the "War on Terror", and lists what the “winners” demanded as their terms of victory. He then checks the situation after twenty-five years. By his reckoning, almost never have the terms of victory turned out as the victors intended. In most cases, the “losers” have done at least as well as the winners. German and Japanese post-war industrial reconstruction are the classic examples.

On the other side of the ledger, he collates the vast human and material costs of war, which are as likely to have crippled generations of the winning side as of the losing side.

The horrors and costs of war have been recognized from the beginning of human history, but wars keep happening. So is the idea of Victory really worth attacking in this day and age, or is it something of a straw man? Expectations of victory not be fulfilled, but does that prove that no war should never be fought?

The historical method ignores the counter-factual - what would have happened if there were no response, and no threat of response, to the temptation for a strong or angry party to use aggressive force? Bickerton quotes Ambrose Bierce that “peace is a period of cheating between two periods of fighting”, but his best alternative to war is “consideration of more creative political approaches to resolving differences between states, and between states and non-state groups”.

The human propensity for war seems intransigent, but not entirely beyond moderation. Modern weaponry has vastly increased the rate of civilian casualties as "collateral damage" to combat - Bickerton says 90% of casualties in the Iraq conflict have been civilian. But the threat of mutually assured destruction, together with the greater accountability of governments to the governed, provides increasing restraint on the resort to warfare. On average, more democracy should mean less war.

So how is aggression is to be resisted or even discouraged? Bickerton quotes Sun Tzu on the tactic of “defeating the enemy's strategy” by offering to meet the enemy's objectives by peaceful, mainly economic, inducements. He does not quote another part of Sun Tzu's Art of War, that the greatest general is he who wins the war without having to fight a battle - by isolating, encircling, bribing and intimidating a weakened adversary.

This is an interesting polemic that deserves to provoke debate.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites has reported on wars and politics, and participated in policy wars, but has so far avoided personal engagement in mortal combat.

How the West saw Gandhi

2011-04-26T00:16:00.001+10:00

GANDHI IN THE WEST:
The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest.
By Sean Scalmer. Cambridge University Press.248pp

People all over the world keep putting their lives on the line for political protest. But when public communication in our Western democracies seems dominated by news-cycle political stunts and media demagogcracy, has radical protest lost its moral and political force?

Sean Scalmer casts a historian's eye over Western protest movements of the 20th Century, from when the techniques of Mahatma Gandhi first attracted Western attention, up to a high point of Western political protest movements, against the Vietnam War.

Scalmer reviews how Western societies responded to Gandhi's words, actions and image, and how those responses influenced political action in Western democracies.

His primary sources are the words of the activists, officials, journalists and commentators whose various impressions of Gandhi, or “Gandhism”, fed into the making of Western public and political opinion.

Until Gandhi's assasination in 1948, Western attitudes generally reflected whether people supported, or resisted, Indian independence from the British Empire. He was also admired and imitated by Western pacifists, numerous 1920-1939 but much fewer once faced with the aggression of the Axis powers.

Later Western movements that owed technical credits to Gandhi's modes of protest were the nuclear disarmament campaigns, beginning in UK in the late 1940s, the US Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and 60s, and finally the protests against Vietnam War.

Gandhism (a term Ganhi himself rejected) had both a moral component (setting out how and why the individual should act in particular situations) and also a pragmatic component, setting out how people could act together to achieve political objectives.

Gandhi's blend of Jain, Hindu, Christian, Sufi and other moral systems earned him a certain mystic authority to mobilize mass protest action in India, and attracted a useful subculture of Western devotees. But the personal side of Gandhi's moral philosophy ultimately was too eccentric for him to be accepted, by Indian elites or by average Westerners, as a political leader for all Indians.

It was the pragmatic effectiveness of his protest techniques that most influenced Western emulators. Gandhi coined the phrase satyagraha from the Sanskrit terms for truth (satyam) and for firmness (agraha). He and his followers believed that mass non-violent resistance against oppression would morally convert the oppressors.

Although this occurred, at some level and with some oppressors, more hard-headed analysts attribute Gandhi's political successes to publicity.

The public sympathy generated by images of demonstrators being treated violently can mobilize support for political change. But its effect depends on the ruling powers being accountable, at least to some degree, to that converted public. And other significant factors may have to be close to a tipping point for the moral sympathy factor to tip that balance.

Scalmer traces how successive Western protest movements gradually watered down the Gandhian moral element of satyagraha, reducing it to lip-service, then to a pragmatic political method, until eventually American protest movements dropped all reference to Gandhi and claimed that passive resistance methods were their own invention.

By the end of the 1960s, Rev. Martin Luther King's non-violent protest movement, based on Gandhian as well as Christian values, had been replaced in the public eye by the conflict-model Black Power movement, and by the middle-class anti-establishment stunt politics of the psychedelic era.

The media, then and now, give publicity more readily in return for the gratification of retailing conflict, not resolution. Scalmer's survey, in the end, is about us in the West, not about Gandhi. Scalmer writes clearly and concisely, and offers insights that are well worth the read.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites passively resists taking part in organized protest movements.

How Free can Free Speech be?

2011-03-29T09:13:00.000+11:00

SPEECH MATTERS
Getting Free Speech Right.
By Katharine Gelber.
University of Queensland Press.215pp.

It's easy to agree on the principal of Free Speech - until people start saying what they really think. Most will agree there have to be some limits to Free Speech, but few can agree upon where those limits should lie, or how they should be applied.

Katharine Gelber has been pursuing Free Speech, and its evil twin, Hate Speech, through the academic world of political science for well over a decade. Now an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, she offers this survey of the complex status of freedom of speech in Australia. She points to flaws and inconsistencies in the way governments impose limits on various freedoms that Australians generally think they possess. She also identifies a wide disparity of opinions among Australians as to where Free Speech can, or should, be overridden by other political, social, cultural or moral values.

The book title proposes that we can “get it right”. I turned to the final chapter on How to Get It Right. Sadly, after so much study and explication, the author can only exhort us to try harder with “a more robust commitment to this fundamental freedom” that needs liberating from the strictures that our complacent political culture has allowed to impinge upon it.

Prof Gelber notes that the right to freedom of speech in Australia has been limited in various ways by federal, state and local governments. But the right itself has never been confirmed or defined by our High Court, nor does it appear in our Constitution. By contrast, the United States First Amendment to its Constitution expressly forbids any level of government from making any law that will curb freedom of speech, and successive US Supreme Courts have not only upheld this general right against government limitations, but have extended its ambit to cover many non-speech and non-political forms of expression.

Australia's record is not all bad. Gelber devotes a whole chapter to the repeated refusals of Australian parliaments to make it an offence to insult the Australian flag, despite the calls of nationalists to restrict that particular form of political expression. She also commends the ACT Government for its unique legislation to prevent corporations employing SLAPP writs (“Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation”) to stifle public protest against their commercial activities.

Gelber's case is that Australian political culture has been too ready to accept creeping erosion of the right to free speech in over-reaction to political exigencies. She gives particular attention to the many infringements upon personal liberties, including freedoms of expression, rushed through Australian parliaments in the name of the War on Terror, and never moderated since then. For example, it remains illegal for an academic to collect, for research purposes, any publication that might inspire a mentally impaired person to consider committing an act of terrorism.

Gelber's research indicates that Australians support free speech in principle, but rarely give it priority over other values such as security and social cohesion. Perhaps this is because few Australians have ever experienced the absence of free public expression, and we have sufficient trust in our democratic institutions to believe that if something becomes intolerable, we can change it.

The Free Speech issue is one aspect of the broader contradiction between two democratic values - freedom and equality. Gelber defines "Hate Speech" and vilification as being attacks by the empowered against the “weak and marginalized” in society. At one point she equates vilification with violence. Doesn't this view contradict general free speech principles?

A civilized society will protect the weak against the strong, and institutionalized values should discourage abuse of power through "speech" as much as any other form of abuse. But the record on vilification laws and the politicised notion of “Hate Speech” seems to show that legal avenues of redress are of most value to the most organized, not to the genuinely weakest targets of abusive speech. Without careful calibration and adjudication, anti-vilification laws can themselves be abused to the same effect as SLAPP writs.

This book will be a worthy addition to political science reading lists, but should also find a readership among those who are interested in how we manage our ideals through our institutions of government.

Richard Thwaites values his democratic right to vilify the powerful on an almost daily basis.

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Can we really Tolerate Pluralism?

2011-03-12T17:11:00.001+11:00

The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism.

By Tariq Ramadan.

Allen Lane.212pp.

Reviewed: 5 April 2011

Multiculturalism has always had its critics. Elected leaders of Germany and the UK have recently denounced it, and across most of Europe its social benefit is under review.

Tariq Ramadan is a prominent voice in the European debate about multiculturalism, at least at the philosophical level. Of Egyptian background but Swiss nationality and education, he is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford.

In The Quest for Meaning he sets aside the economic, social and political dimensions of the multicultural debate to focus on how systems of belief shape personal and group identities, and then how such identities divide people who are sharing the same space.

Ramadan is steeped in the philosophical traditions of both West and East, and has structured this book with a deliberate formality based on balance and counterpoint. Chapters often address a duality like Faith and Reason, Emotion and Spirituality, or Tradition and Modernity. He writes in scriptural rhythms that can become hypnotic. The prose does not so much offer linear arguments as erect a structure of symmetrical chapters and sub-chapters like the compound vaulting of a fine Persian dome.

Ramadan summarises his own book as “a strange mixture of analytic thought, Cartesianism, strict rationalism and flights of mysticism”. He ponders whether his work is that of “an Eastern mind or a Western intellect”.

It was certainly a challenge to the Western intellect of this reviewer, who is normally happy to leave the flights of mysticism to any beings, human or otherwise, who might exist on some other plane. Ramadan is essentially rational, offering many aphorisms such as “Dogmatism is to thought what narcissism is to self-image”.

The first problem is embodied in his title. He equates “meaning” to a clear sense of causality, purpose and direction in a linear cosmic history, and of our place in it. Then he assumes that the quest for this “meaning” is universal to each individual, including rationalists. But those of us who are content to leave imponderable questions unanswered may still find Ramadan’s explorations worth chewing over.

For Ramadan, as a Muslim European philosopher, the real problem is how universal reason can reconcile different faiths that each claim the unique truth. His answer is to call for a deep-rooted pluralism that involves not just “tolerance” of others’ beliefs, but a conscious embrace of the ultimate equality of faith-based belief systems.

This is a tall order that has drawn enmity from conservatives and radicals on all sides. Fundamentalists of all faiths resent his suggestion that they do not hold a monopoly on truth, nor have God exclusively on their own side. Social radicals and skeptics complain that he is too tolerant of hocus-pocus and does not prioritise social change in conservative faith-based societies.

Ramadan was famously denied a US visa to take up a religious post teaching Theology at the (Catholic) Notre Dame University in 2009. He has family links to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and has studied with Islamic scholars at Cairo’s al-Azhar university. Nothing in this book could suggest the slightest sympathy for terrorism or radical Islam, but the one issue on which he descends from his philosopher’s tower is to take several swipes at United States policy and intervention in the Middle East. That would be enough to draw the fire of the Neocons and other powerful lobbies.

Ramadan asserts that all members of a society will benefit from greater inclusiveness of a genuine, deep pluralism. One might question how this ideal can take root in societies based upon competitiveness and distrust.

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Richard Thwaites is part of a pluralistic family embracing several faiths, philosophies, and none of the above.

Opening the Files on MI6 - a bit

2011-02-15T09:56:00.001+11:00

MI6.
The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949.
By Keith Jeffery.
Bloomsbury Inc.810pp.

Reviewed 12 February 2011

Secret agents have fascinated us since story-telling began. We get excited about the moral ambiguities of Wikileaks and of political propaganda. Practices that are crimes in civil life may be praised as heroic in the competition between nations.

Demand for transparency in domestic politics goes along with acceptance of secret intelligence work in “defence” of common national interests. The paradox is that we are asked to trust in the effectiveness, and appropriateness, of actions undertaken in our names, that employ secrecy and deception, and that are publicly deniable by sponsoring governments.

So an authorized history of a secret organization like MI6 might seem to challenge the professional ethics of a historian, whose access to the archives depends on his agreement not to reveal (potentially juicy) bits of what he has seen. How much is to be believed when you don't know what remains concealed?

Keith Jeffery, a Professor of British History, was given privileged access to the archives of Britain's secret intelligence services - an Aladdin's Cave with filing cabinets.

Jeffery's meticulous 800 pages will help aficionados to sort fact from fiction in the spy memoir genre. He draws on hundreds of published works, as well as the files of MI6, to add anecdote and character sketch to what could have been a rather dry review of this romanticised subject.

In 1909, “tradecraft” was initially of the Sherlock Holmes variety, at best. Off to meet a potential recruit in disguise, Cumming had himself fitted up with a wig and false moustache at a Soho theatrical costume shop, and for good measure had his new appearance photographed so it could be replicated by the next costumier.

Effort and budget were boosted successively by British fears of Imperial Germany, international Communism, the Axis Powers, then Soviet Communism. The organization grew from one man in 1909 to a multi-layered network of thousands of agents and informers across the globe by 1949, when the veil is drawn.

Recruitment carried unavoidable risks. The kind of individuals who would undertake deception and betrayal must include some charlatans and some willing to double-cross - from top-drawer old boy network traitors like Kim Philby down to local informers turning under threat, torture, or for a better financial offer. The many stories of double-cross included here are just a small sample of an alarming rate of attrition among agents.

Another occupational hazard was over-confidence on the part of those who enjoyed the risk-taking aspects of operations. One internal critic of MI6's early World War II sabotage operations in Europe compared it to “arranging an attack on a Panzer Division by an actor mounted on a donkey”.

There were repeated takeover attempts by the Defence Forces establishment. MI6 also faced frequent pressure from the Foreign Office to curtail activities that could embarrass the local diplomats .

The history reminds how difficult relations were between Britain and the USA over this period. Bringing down the British Empire was an open objective of many Irish Americans (notably Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy, and several US journalists who actively spied for Germany), of many German Americans, and others who saw Imperial Britain as an economic competitor.

Keith Jeffery avoids too many obvious references to James Bond. Commander Ian Fleming appears as the author of disinformation published to cover the bungled murder of a traitorous agent.

Bond was most likely modelled on a suave Paris-based MI6 agent with a legendary taste for fast cars and faster women, but a name more evocative of tweeds than of tuxedos.

“The name's Dunderdale … Biffy Dunderdale”.

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Richard Thwaites' father was an ASIO officer 1950-1971, but his own experience of the field consists solely of being kept in the dark .

Rough Indian Ocean Passage for USA

2010-12-20T12:31:00.002+11:00

MONSOON
The Indian Ocean & the Battle for Supremacy in the 21st Century.
By Robert D. Kaplan, Black Inc (Australia), 366pp.

Reviewed: 18 December 2010

It's a difficult time for an American to write a serious review of America's future place in the world. All the facts seem to point to a decline in the global supremacy of the United States. Yet American political debate is still defined by widespread belief in “American exceptionalism”: that the United States has a unique, even divinely-appointed, civilizing mission to the world, so the lessons of history do not apply.

Robert Kaplan is a critic of the Bush regime and sympathetic to Obama, a Fellow in the Democrat-aligned think-tank Centre for a New American Security and member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.

Kaplan identifies a problem for Americans in even conceptualising the Indian Ocean. Standard American world maps do not split the globe at the international dateline, but place the Americas page centre, filling adjoining space with the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans - the self-referential “Western Hemisphere”.

The Eurasian land mass and the Indian Ocean, home to 80% of humanity, are split into disjointed friezes down left and right margins of an America-centred world. There is no intuitive sense of the continuity of Eurasia by land, or the Indian Ocean by sea.

Kaplan sets out to provide a sense of the scale and diversity of the societies linked by the Indian Ocean, and the key drivers for both conflict and collaboration. These draw in all the world's powers, including the United States. Religion and national ideology furnish his key descriptors, with economics seen as enabler or consequence, more than as driver of events.

To his credit, Kaplan does not actually talk about the “Battle for Supremacy” promised in the book's subtitle. That phrase seems to have been a shot of publishers' marketing hype. He outlines national interests that may stoke conflict between major powers and coalitions of powers, but with none likely to achieve any conclusive “supremacy”.

This is a maritime perspective, but the politics are driven by people living inland. Not only the littoral states such as India and Indonesia, but inland states of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and above all China, are vitally concerned with their access to Indian Ocean resources and transport lanes. Massive trade volumes between Europe and Asia, and American sea access to Middle East oil, depend on unimpeded Indian Ocean sea-lanes.

China is bothered by the bottleneck at the Malacca Straits where the Indian and Pacific Ocean sea-lanes meet, so it seeks overland access to the Indian Ocean through both Burma and Pakistan, funding massive port developments. A Panama-style canal across the Kra Isthmus in southern Thailand is on the cards, making a direct link between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

India and China each plan massive expansion of their navies, with China in particular building significant facilities as “aid” projects in Sri Lanka and the Gulf, as well as its multi-purpose port facilities in Pakistan.

Of 34 aircraft carrier groups on today's oceans, 24 are American. His case is that these mobile military facilities are not solely projections of military power, but also a “presence” that, for example, can deliver humanitarian assistance to victims of natural disasters. That would be a pretty expensive way to deliver aid. And doesn't current thinking see carriers as too vulnerable to modern missile attack?

Kaplan doesn't see the USA's multi-trillion dollar national debt as an issue. He is certain that America “will recover from the greatest crisis in Capitalism since the Great Depression”.

Kaplan sees the geopolitics of the next century evolving with the USA in diminished, but still central role, balancing the new great powers of China and India. He quotes Huntington and thinks the “civilisational” challenge from radical Islam is real, but will be managed by engagement with moderate Islam. If Indonesian girls can wear hijabs with tight shorts, anything is possible.

He sees China's rise, including its military expansion, as “responsible” and amenable to beneficial co-existence. That's not so good news for dozens of China's less-powerful neighbours who distrust China's hegemonic intentions. Nor does he mention anywhere the topic of Chinese or Indian emigration flows, which are causes of great anxiety throughout the region.

You have to read this book in the company of Kaplan's target reader - an American person of lesser knowledge and greater naivete, to whose voting intentions many allied states entrust a significant part of our future security. Reading it this way, the book is quite instructive.

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Richard Thwaites worked for over ten years with a range of Asia-Pacific cooperative institutions.

Madoff on Wall Street - the Fall of the Damned Greedy

2010-11-23T22:57:00.004+11:00

THE BELIEVERS
How America Fell for Bernard Madoff’s $65billion Investment Scam
By Adam Lebor. Phoenix. 288pp.

Do you really know where your superannuation and other savings are stashed? Hundreds of wealthy Americans and Europeans, discovered on 10 December 2008 that they had lost billions of dollars to Bernard Madoff, whom they had trusted for years, even decades. They had considered themselves canny investors.

Madoff’s swindle was the greatest Ponzi scheme ever recorded. New capital coming into the fund was used to pay regular and generous “dividends” to investors, and to pay out promptly any investors who occasionally sought return of their capital.

Investors received detailed monthly statements setting out which stocks and Treasury bonds had been traded on their behalf. The problem was, all of those trades were fictional. Any “dividends” were simply part of the client’s capital, as bait for further investment.

Adam Lebor traces, in often painful detail, Madoff’s talent for exploiting the psychological weaknesses of others, principally by making them feel privy to a rare and special opportunity.

He had his staff turn down all unsolicited requests to invest. Investors felt that they were part of a closed group, privileged to benefit from complex and secret investment strategies that Madoff would never divulge. In hindsight, it had all the features of a classic confidence trick.

Madoff could pull this off because he had another public and legitimate career as a Wall Street stock trader. He was a founder and chairman of the NASDAQ secondary exchange, a pioneer in developing electronic share trading, and prominent in the industry negotiations with government and regulators. Far from being an aggressive Gordon Gecko type, he presented himself as modest, personable, and deeply engaged in philanthropy. Some of New York’s richest philanthropic trusts lost their capital to him.

Lebor, himself Jewish, says Madoff was able to exploit clannishness and love of “beating the system” to defraud his own people more than any outsiders. Some admitted to believing that Madoff was using insider trading to generate his exceptional “profits”, and this added spice to the investment “opportunity”.

The players were by no means all Jewish. Many “feeder” funds were set up to tap into wealthy communities such as the WASP wealthy of Connecticut, or fast living South Americans. Jet-set figureheads for these “fund managers” were rewarded with enviable life-styles to attract investments from their peers and emulators.

At one level, this tale reads like a Reformation tableaux on the Fall of the Damned. Investors were sucked in not just by simple greed, but by a belief that they could beat the market odds, by entitlement, privilege, or cunning.

This grim tale is a reminder that securities markets will never be “self-correcting” because information on the market will never be symmetrical. One of the Wall Street operators declares, “There are no smart trades on Wall Street, just better informed trades”. And less informed investors to fleece.

Read full review..

Richard Thwaites has modest investments in superannuation and keeps his fingers crossed.

Hamlet had a Blackberry

2010-10-11T15:35:00.003+11:00

Hamlet's Blackberry
A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age,
by William Powers, Scribe, 267pp.

William Powers is a journalist and media critic who lives on (and in) the world of digital connectedness, but sees peril in a life that is continually distracted by the beeps, flickers and tweets issuing from our always-on smart-phones, portable screens, and email alarms.

He has recognized that addiction to connectedness can seduce willing victims of E-harassment with demands for attention from workplace, from well-meaning friends, and compulsive participation in spurious “social networks” that feed on a false sense of artificial community.

But Powers is no I-phobe. The issue, as in every instance of a powerful new tool, is to winnow the useful applications from the purely wasteful and the actively harmful. It is for the individual user to work out how much connectedness actually contributes to what philosophers call “the good life”.

Without time for introspection and intimate conversation, unmediated by technology, an individual cannot attain “the good life”.

Socrates, with a career based on conversation, was addicted to the bustle and chance encounters of the Athenian agora - to being “always on-line”. Yet once forced off-line to a rural walk and uninterrupted conversation with one individual, he acknowledged feeling significantly refreshed.

The tale of Hamlet's Blackberry is a wonderful piece of Shakespearian exegesis. At one point Hamlet, trying to clear the “distracted globe” of his mind, declares:

Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records…

And later, when struck by something he wants to remember..

My tables - meet it is I set it down..

The “Tables” was a new invention - a pocket notebook with erasable pages, all the rage among Elizabethan early-adopters. Powers' point here is that Shakespeare links Hamlet's distracted mind with an obsessive collection of “trivial fond records”, just because he possesses the device that enables this collection.

The arguments here follow well-worn themes about extraversion, introversion, self and society, applied to the current context of connectivity enthusiasm - what he calls “digital maximalism”. As so often, the choice is not binary, but of individual balance.

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Richard Thwaites once worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and pursues a good life, cautiously connected, in Canberra.

A Liberal American Loses her Innocence Abroad

2010-09-17T08:22:00.002+10:00

Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War

by Megan Stack

Scribe (Australia), 255pp

Too many correspondents barely try to step out of their home assumptions, and instead settle for recycling the reportage clichés and stereotypes that their editors won’t question.

Megan Stack reported for the Los Angeles Times for over ten years from the Middle East. She earned a Pulitzer nomination in 2006 for her work in Iraq. This book is the meta-narrative of what she learned about herself and about America at the real Ground Zeros of the “War on Terror”: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Israel.

Stack writes in a heightened, consciously literary style packed with metaphor that varies from the acute to the distracting. She admits she aimed to “extract poetry from war”, but by the end has tired of that. The book echoes a long American tradition of introspective accounts of combat, from Steven Crane’s Civil War era Red Badge of Courage, to Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and many more.

Stack enters the fray confident in her liberal democratic values, and confident that America is acting with just cause. In the immediate wake of September 11, 2001, she is assigned almost by accident, as a young domestic political reporter, to cover the US attempt to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. She expects the Afghans to be grateful that America is bringing them democracy, but finds that almost all of her assumptions are wrong.

The title “Every Man in this Village is a Liar” is drawn from a parable. For Stack, it comes to refer not only to the stubborn opacity of Afghan politics, but also to the disingenuous spin and rhetoric emanating from Washington. In a few short weeks, she learns deep cynicism and wades in the blood of innocent victims. She feels irreparably damaged.

Over the next years, she encounters courageous and principled individuals struggling to cope with intolerable local politics, and the often fatal consequences of American intervention. People she interviews are killed. The teenage son of a dedicated Iraqi journalist colleague is shot dead by US troops in Baghdad, retaliating randomly for a bomb attack. She is beaten by Egyptian police while reporting blatant vote-rigging by the Mubarak regime,, and she sees that the teargas canisters used against the protesters are stamped “Made in

USA

”.

Stack, the naïve correspondent, emerges from this narrative as emblematic of American liberal values. Seeking truth, she finds lies. Believing she can help make a better world, she finds a trail of resentment, loss and collateral damage.

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Richard Thwaites was a foreign correspondent for Australian Brooadcasting Corporation, 1978-1983.

Consistent, Conservative Pillar of Quadrant Magazine

2010-08-18T22:23:00.001+10:00

The Last Intellectuals

Essays on writers and politics

by Peter Coleman

Quadrant Books, 320pp.

Reviewed: 15 August, 2010

Readers may approach this miscellany of Peter Coleman's later essays with assumptions based on Coleman's long public life as an energetic anti-communist, political conservative and Liberal politician, now father-in-law to Peter Costello.

I expected a coherent political survey of Coleman's engagement in the Australian front of the Cold War. Indeed, the flyleaf suggests that the book chronicles how “journalists, essayists, poets, novelists and editors defended cultural freedom and contributed to the collapse of communism”. The collection is both less, and more, than that.

Historians may debate how much anti-communist poets and novelists in Australia really contributed to the collapse of global communism. Coleman himself makes no exaggerated claims. A number of the essays do look back, with wry good humour rather than bombast, on the history of the international Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Australian affiliate, the Association for Cultural Freedom, which launched Quadrant magazine and published it for twenty years.

Coleman's conservatism was of the Menzian, liberal kind rather than the Tory, Howard kind. Though fiercely loyal to friends in the Quadrant circle such as the poet James McAuley, he sees himself as an apostle of the values of classical liberalism rather than an adherent to any modern ideology. He leaves current culture and history wars, on the whole, to others.

In 1966 Coleman was approached by McAuley to edit Quadrant, then a struggling bi-monthly which Coleman describes as having “grown out of a post-war no-man's-land of frustrated intellectuals, ideological acrobats, disillusioned Marxists, anticommunist Liberals, premature neo-conservatives, demi-vierges of Christianity … the flotsam and jetsam of the Age of Ideology”.

He found the milieu irresistible and took it on for most of the next twenty years.

Most of these essays were published in Quadrant from 1991 to 2009, when Coleman had passed his eightieth birthday and sixty years in the world of letters. There is no introduction or foreword to offer an organizing principle or purpose to the collection, and it is not stated whether chapters are excerpts or full reprints of the original published essays.

Fortunately, Coleman writes with great clarity, blessed brevity and well-calibrated force. Reminiscences of shenanigans of the cultural Cold War may intrigue younger generations as well as entertaining rusted-on Quadrant loyalists.

Coleman is really at his best not as a combatant but as a ponderer. A fine, self-critical piece describes his disillusionment with parliamentary politics, after stints as Liberal leader in the NSW parliament and as a Federal member for Wentworth in the last days of the Fraser government.

Some of his most interesting pondering takes the form of highly readable short essays on various thinkers influential on the liberal tradition, from John Milton and John Stuart Mill to Alfred Deakin and Michael Oakeshott. He finds philosophers more useful than economists as guides to good government. One may infer that he is one of many “wet” but loyal Liberals privately appalled by philistine neo-conservative influence on the modern Liberal Party, but with nowhere else to go.

This book's title is regrettable and unexplained - the phrase “last intellectuals” does not appear anywhere in the book and there is no hint as to who such people might be. Why dismiss every current and future thinker, however misguided one may consider some of them to be?

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Richard Thwaites recalls the cultural Cold War as a background of distant artillery to his baby-boomer youth.

A Shanghai Jewish Microcosm

2010-08-18T22:11:00.001+10:00

Goodbye Shanghai

A Memoir

by Sam Moshinsky

Mind Publishing, 219pp.

Reviewed: 17 July, 2010

It can be refreshing for a reader to spend a few hours in the microcosm of an unpretentious personal memoir.

Sam Moshinsky is a member of a small community of Jews whose family histories over the 20th Century took them from pre-revolutionary Russia, to the Russian Far East, to China, and finally to Australia.

Sam was born in 1934 in Shanghai, and this memoir is his recollections to the point that his family settled in Melbourne in the early 1950s.

Sam's perspective on Shanghai is both intimate and somewhat detached. The family's social life was almost exclusively within the Jewish community of Shanghai, which included synagogue, an active and prosperous Jewish Club (later the Shanghai Conservatorium), school, and even a militantly Zionist youth association, the Betar, where Sam dressed in paramilitary uniform and practised martial arts for the prospective war to create an exclusively Jewish Israel.

Sam seems to have been keen to fit in wherever he found himself. His best friend for life was Alex Vinogradov, a Shanghai neighbour whose family were of the traditionally anti-Semitic White Russian community. At St Francis Xavier's College young Sam, the only Jew in the school, topped his final year in Catholic Catechism (to his parents' bemusement).

The Moshinskys had an unusually easy time in Shanghai during the Second World War. Because they had never taken up Soviet citizenship they were officially stateless. Shanghai was one of the few places stateless persons were welcome. Neither the Allies nor the occupying Japanese identified them as enemy aliens. Their family business, the Shanghai Cardboard Box Factory, just kept on supplying their ice-cream containers to Chinese, Japanese or American customers as control of Shanghai alternated during and following the War.

Life continued without major interruption until the Communist takeover. In due course, communist officials imposed a retrospective “income tax” to cover all the years that the factory had operated, during which there had never been any income tax in Shanghai. They could not get exit visas until the entirety of the family property had been signed over to “the people” in payment of this fictional tax debt.

On his first trip back to Shanghai, in 1986, Sam found the Cardboard Box Factory still operating, after 40 years as a “people's collective”, with exactly the same machinery they had left behind, and even his father's managerial desk in exactly the same position.

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Richard Thwaites has followed developments in China since the 1960s.

Secrecy and Absolute Control - China's Party Line

2010-08-18T21:51:00.001+10:00

The Party

The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers

by Richard McGregor

Allen Lane, 300pp.

Reviewed: 10 July, 2010

Regulators and politicians may know, but seldom say publicly, that no Chinese corporation of strategic scope or scale, regardless of its formal structure, can operate outside the pervasive control of the Chinese Communist Party. Governance and accountability are crippled by the fact that corporate, judicial, and legislative responsibilities are all subject to direct control by a Communist Party that is above the law in China, accountable only to itself.

“Separation of Powers” is anathema to the Communist Party, and so it is largely a charade wherever it is pretended to exist in the Chinese system.

When contemporary Chinese leaders refer to democracy in China, they mean what was spelled out in an internal White Paper for the Party, in 2005: “Democratic Government is the Chinese Communist Party governing on behalf of the people”.

Every element of the state structure, and as far as possible every social or “private sector” organization, is host to a Party Committee that shadows whatever powers that body may have. Since the Party organization itself is strictly hierarchical, this means that both policy and patronage can be both supervised and directed by the Party, at any scale of organization.

A highly secretive Party Organisation Department controls appointments and promotions at every senior level, including the vast state-owned commercial sector and board appointments to “private” corporations.

This tight control of China Inc has enabled China to make spectacular resource allocations for political purposes and to control internal markets, but it has its downsides. Corruption is endemic because Party patronage is universal and unchallengeable. Party members, however corrupt, may not be prosecuted by state law authorities unless the Party’s internal discipline office recommends it. McGregor says that less than ten percent of Party members found to be corrupt have been sent to court – the rest are let off with internal discipline and demotions.

Of course, the Party also controls the press, police and the “Peoples Liberation Army”. The Party controls the legislature at every level, and can change the Constitution whenever it chooses.

McGregor doubts that any external factors can shake the control of the Communist Party. Its propaganda thrives on external threats.

If liberalisation of any kind is to come, it will have to come from within the Party itself. Neither toadying nor megaphone diplomacy from foreign liberals will deflect its primary aim of retaining absolute, unaccountable power at any cost.

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Richard Thwaites was ABC correspondent in China, 1978-1983.

Economic and Social Gloom Stirred, not Shaken

2010-08-18T21:32:00.001+10:00

The Rational Optimist

How Prosperity Evolves

By Matt Ridley

Fourth Estate, 438pp.

Reviewed: 26 June, 2010

I opened this book with some hope. The title offered a chance to be both optimistic and rational.

By the end of the book the gloom had been stirred, but not shaken. The welcome stir was Matt Ridley’s catalogue of our remarkable human history of adapting to great and unforeseeable problems, on every scale from the microbial to the global. We have also generated almost continuous growth in overall quality of life, across most of a multiplying global population.

Regrettably, Ridley’s arguments did not shake this reader’s view that the individuals of our species, given freedom of choice, too often choose to avoid the measurable, individual short-term pain that is needed for an immeasurable, collective long-term gain.

Ridley presents himself as a true believer that private enterprise and market forces are the only reliable engine of prosperity. A claim to be rational is always contestable. Ridley is really an optimistic neo-liberal, and his guru is Friedrich Hayek, the father of neo-liberal economics.

Ridley blames society’s failures on a very long list of human villains: chiefs, priests, poll-driven politicians, bureaucrats, financiers, professors, out-of-control militarists, privilege-seeking corporations and monopolists. All are described as “parasites” on the productivity generated by the hard-working makers and traders further down the social tree.

It can be confusing for a reader to work out how, if the role of government should always be minimized, then all these competing stakeholder interests are to be reconciled.

Ridley clearly states that the key to trust in markets lies in stable institutions backed by an accepted rule of law. But he doesn’t seem to trust anyone who might have the responsibility for generating, renovating or administering such institutions and laws.

In the end, Ridley pins his optimism on Hayek’s concept of “catallaxy”. He believes human intelligence will become more collective, and innovation will become more bottom up, thanks to the “dot-communism” of information exchange enabled by the Internet and allied communication ecologies. This will (probably) solve all challenges, if only the human “parasites” can be kept at bay.

This book needs to be read as a polemic. Facts and opinons are marshalled to support a rhetorical purpose rather than pretending to offer a balanced enquiry. I found enough instances of dubious attribution, or casual dismissal of effects on large populations, to stir my skeptical juices.

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Richard Thwaites has worked with politicians, public servants and journalists.

The Real Macbeth in Scotland's History

2010-08-18T21:13:00.001+10:00

MacBeth

A True Story

By Fiona Watson

Quercus, 320pp.

Reviewed: 12 June, 2010

There was a real King MacBeth of Scotland, more complex, and more interesting, than Shakespeare’s eloquent but fatally flawed villain. Scottish historian Fiona Watson has spent years scanning the annals and records from Scotland, Ireland, England and Scandinavia to unpick the centuries of biased misreporting in search of him.

The real MacBeth died in 1058 after ruling Scotland for seventeen years. His reign was characterized by peace and prosperity, a rare thing in those bloodthirsty times. He was actually the first ever king of a Scotland united in the boundaries that we now recognise, and also the last Gaelic-speaking king before the permanent takeover of Anglo-Saxon and Norman dynasties.

People’s lives then depended on the ability of local warlords to enrich them, or protect them, in an environment where raiding, rape and pillage were normal. Any lord or king who was unsuccessful would be replaced, commonly by murder, as readily as the modern sacking of a football coach or CEO.

MacBeth had gained power by force of arms from Duncan, but Watson argues that this was consistent with the “best practice” statecraft of the time. Duncan had just led Scotland into a failed invasion of England, and his replacement would have been welcomed and entirely expected. MacBeth’s claim to the throne was equal to any, and his method of asserting it not exceptional.

So why the bad rap?

Duncan had been the first King appointed on the principle of primogeniture – his descent from the previous King Malcolm. This was a break from the Scottish tradition of rotating the monarchy among several families with royal claims – including MacBeth’s own ancestors.

A prosperous MacBeth could afford the huge expense, and the political risk, of a pilgrimage to Rome. Pope Leo IX was in the process of reorganizing the hierarchies of the Roman Catholic Church across all of Europe, so Watson surmises that MacBeth hoped to persuade the Pope to confirm Scottish nationhood by appointing a separate Archbishop for Scotland.

This may be what really provoked the English King Edward to overthrow MacBeth. Regime change has a long history.

Shakespeare’s patron was James Stuart, just appointed James I of England on principles of primogeniture. The 16th Century “histories” had been edited to apply this principle, retrospectively, to MacBeth’s era. In history, Banquo only appears in accounts written 500 years after the events of Macbeth. Banquo was invented to provide an ancient lineage for the Stuart dynasty, including Shakespeare’s King James.

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Cocktails and Daggers in Diplomacy's Courtly World

2010-08-18T19:07:00.000+10:00

A History of Diplomacy

By Jeremy Black,

Reaktion Books, 312pp.

Reviewed: 15 May, 2010

From early historic times, the written records of Hittite and Egyptian empires give detailed descriptions of the protocols and ceremonies for the reception of foreign envoys, to ensure that relations between competing states and individual rulers should not be more violent, nor costly, than necessary.

Diplomacy is the function and culture of mutually-recognised arrangements to mediate communication between states. Black tracks the development of diplomacy as a specialist profession; the continuing tug-of-war between ideology, idealism and realism affecting diplomatic relations; and the modern complexity caused by growth of numbers and kinds of states that need to be accommodated in any national or international diplomatic practice.

Envoys used to be personal representatives of an individual sovereign. Ambassadors had to put up a display of pomp and conspicuous life-style at least as grand as their competitors at a foreign court. Scandals and even traffic accidents arose from diplomats vying for protocol precedence.

Diplomatic privileges and immunities have had many functions apart from the protection of foreign legates. Amongst them was royal shopping – Louis XV of France ordered hunting dogs and condoms to be delivered from London, through diplomatic channels.

The slow evolution of states, from absolute monarchies toward versions of electoral democracy, has in many ways complicated the lives of diplomats, though rendering them generally less liable to be beheaded for a failed mission or a protocol blunder.

Contested sovereignty and claims for independence have always created problems on the status of representation and recognition – current glaring examples are Taiwan and Palestine.

Resident diplomats still have a very practical role in providing information and intelligence to their home government, aided by conventions such as immunity from local laws. Increasingly, they are also called upon to participate in forms of public relations activity that would been unthinkable in earlier times, when diplomats were a privileged, often secretive, elite.

For most of history, Empires and hegemonic powers have played a significant role in managing conflicts between lesser states. Now, an interdependant, globalized world is supposedly organized into almost two hundred sovereign states enjoying nominally equal status, in fora such as the United Nations or World Trade Organisation.

Black considers the greatest weakness of diplomacy to be inability to resolve differences that are ideological, religious, or otherwise irrational. Diplomacy should deliver outcomes of most advantage to most parties – and that requires compromise. Neither Jihadists nor Neo-Cons may see the point.

Diplomacy faces future challenges from rising powers, such as China, that may see advantage in repudiating “Western” notions of international diplomatic practice. But Black suggests that the tested methods and conventions of diplomacy remain a vital tool as, at least, one of several tracks for managing the relations between sovereign powers. The specialist understanding of local nuance can be the difference between conflict and resolution.

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Richard Thwaites spent many years on the fringes of the diplomatic world, as observer and as participant

Difference: the true test of Democracy

2010-08-18T18:55:00.001+10:00

Taming the Gods:

Religion and Democracy on Three Continents

By Ian Buruma,

Princeton University Press, 132pp.

Reviewed: 17 April, 2010

We face many current political issues in which religious belief, or religious identity, stress test the operation of our democratic processes.

The terms “democracy” and “freedom” are thrown about without definition. Demagogues appropriate them for their own purposes, as if democracy and freedom were unquestionable absolutes. When democratic societies include different communities, each claming divine authority for incompatible religious beliefs, then the secular foundation of democracy may be questioned.

Ian Buruma's “democracy” is not a majoritarian monoculture which demands conformity, but a liberal society which tolerates difference within a framework of shared rights and obligations. The heart of this book is the question: how much difference is tolerable?

It's significant that Buruma is a European. Though working within commute of Manhattan and writing primarily for an American readership, he barely refers to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and is dismissive of the apocalyptic “Clash of Civilisations” thinking that gained such a populist boost from that event. Extremists are not nearly as interesting, nor as important, as the way that democratic societies respond to changes and differences in belief within their own populations.

Buruma himself doesn't like politicized multiculturalism (which he believes is dangerously divisive in democracies) but he argues that modern democracies must accommodate significant differences in the values held by their members - on the basis of tolerance rather than institutional multiculturalism.

The essence of a liberal democracy, he says, is that all members of society must be subject to the same laws without discrimination, but that those laws must be limited to secular rights and obligations. The realm of state law must be clearly separated both from religious institutions and from regulation of behaviour on religious principles unless those principles can be justified by rational argument.

In most Christian countries, the threat to liberal democracy comes more from extremist Christian fundamentalism than from any foreign religion. In non-Western societies, most religious extremism reflects political alienation partly induced by Western cultural and economic dominance, rather than any kind of global ambition.

As to Islam: with the exception of Iran and possibly Saudi Arabia, he notes that all significant Muslim countries are functioning secular states, and several of the biggest (including Turkey and Indonesia) are effective democracies coping well with significant internal difference.

Buruma's argument is that, to preserve itself, a liberal democracy may tolerate any degree of differences in belief, including beliefs that are themselves illiberal, but can only tolerate differences in behaviour that do not offend the rights of others set out in laws applying to every citizen.

The test for liberal democracy is to convince those whose beliefs are not implemented that their rights are nevertheless respected.

A book like this can not really produce answers, but can certainly sharpen the questions.

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Richard Thwaites has lived in both tolerant and intolerant societies

Deep Focus on the Hazards of Digital Culture

2010-08-18T18:45:00.001+10:00

You Are Not a Gadget:

A Manifesto

By Jaron Lanier, Allen Lane, 210pp.

Reviewed: 20 March, 2010

This is the best book I have read on the challenges posed by the growth of digital online culture, and it is in a printed book that you can hold in your hand, dog-ear, annotate, or throw on the floor whenever the punchy aphorisms get too much.

Jason Lanier writes with love of the possibilities of digital media to represent and extend our experience of reality. But he writes with even more passion about the capacity of humans to abuse those possibilities in ways that demean human individualism.

He writes with the authority of one who has been at the technical forefront of the “digital revolution” for decades: as a pioneer of Virtual Reality, inventor of online avatars, developer of computer-assisted microsurgery techniques and big-selling video games, and as a long-term university teacher and industry columnist.

His central concern is that his fellow engineers are so infatuated with the possibilities of the digital realm that they are blind to threats to individual personality and to the social interaction of real people in a real world. Lanier sees these threats not as intentionally malign, but as inherent to the way software design is reductive of any experience that the software purports to represent.

Where Web 2.0 proponents talk about individual empowerment and information freedom, Lanier sees “a torrent of petty designs”, uniformly driven by targeted advertising platforms, where personalities are crammed into templates and “friendship” means no more than having a record in a database.

“Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups” are not valuable creativity or genuine social interaction. Instead, they detain their participants in “neotony”, a state of immaturity based on play, rather than mature social contribution. Genuine personal interaction is replaced and demeaned by involvement in activities in which pretence is normal. The most successful participants in Facebook, he says, are those whose identities are faked.

Anonymity brings out the worst in us - the “inner troll”. Pseudonymous online discussions can quickly descend into abuse, and online bullying is by no means just a school-age phenomenon – scientists and philosophers can get just as down and dirty under a cloak of invisibility.

Lanier strongly resents the assumption by digital natives that, if “information wants to be free”, then anyone has the right to appropriate an author’s work and use it in any way, without reference or acknowledgment. He is also bothered by Google-type online library schemes that serve up a miscellany of “relevant” excerpts in response to a query, in which each minced excerpt has been classified by some remote, non-transparent algorithm, and authors’ words are divorced from their original context.

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Richard Thwaites has worked with computers, software and digital content for thirty years, but has 0 Facebook friends.

'Stealing' Ideas: the Murky Waters of Copyright and the Piracy Debate

2010-08-18T18:38:00.001+10:00

Piracy:

The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

By Adrian Johns, University of Chicago Press, 591pp.

Reviewed - Canberra Times' Public Service Informant 6 March 2010

If intellectual property piracy is a form of theft, then legitimate owners must be robbed of their property. Is “intellectual property” an oxymoron? To what extent can an idea be someone’s property?

Professor Adrian Johns of Chicago University provides an illuminating history of the debates, wrangles and occasionally violent struggles that have characterised the development of intellectual property rights and their enforcement.

Since the european Enlightenment, economies generally have developed away from monarchic patronage, and toward monetized markets based on private property. Printing and later communication technologies have enabled markets for information of every kind, with ever cheaper unit costs of reproduction and distribution. Governments have long recognized that creators of valuable ideas, or valuable expressions of ideas, should be compensated for their effort and investment. But there is no natural barrier to replication and appropriation of their work in a free market for information.

Patents (for a design) and copyrights (for a reproducible expression) are in fact private monopoly privileges. They descend directly from monopolies handed out by kings (published in “letters patent”) in return for money or loyalty.

A state-granted intellectual property right is a defined opportunity to use (or authorise others to use) a created work in particular ways, in particular places, and for a particular period of time. Like other “rights”, without enforcement by state authority it is worthless.

Johns’ account shows that the conflicting interests and arguments, the commercial and political tactics, have barely changed over the centuries.

Creators seek recognition and reward for their efforts. Entrepreneurs seek maximum market profits in publishing or other commercial exploitation. A public interest seeks maximum access at minimum cost, the freedom to appropriate and develop on others’ ideas, and trust in the authenticity of information and products. And politicians try to balance these irreconcilable demands, buffeted by vociferous lobbies and frustrated by often literalist courts.

Over the centuries it has been the entrepreneurs – not the creators - who win most arguments about intellectual property. The case for extending or enforcing property rights is usually promoted as supporting creators, but for the most part the commercialisation of creative effort delivers only trivial dividends to those original creators.

The “piracy” theme of this book highlights the defiance of information monopolies that was to some criminal, to others heroic, and to most simply pragmatic.

Johns wonders how intellectual property rights can survive this Internet age of borderless, instantaneous and apparently uncontrollable exchange of information. Despite current rhetoric and propaganda stunts, governments may be losing the ability, and perhaps the will, to defend exclusive rights in a global market.

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Richard Thwaites has worked in book publishing, journalism, the National Office for the Information Economy, and on international negotiations on trade in services.

Radio Broadcasting: Private Interests, Public Interest

2010-08-18T18:30:00.001+10:00

Changing Stations:

The Story of Australian Commercial Radio

By Bridget Griffen-Foley, University of New South Wales Press, 530pp.

Reviewed: 19 December 2009

The 80-year story of commercial radio in Australia is a remarkable one. Britain stuck for decades to state-owned broadcasting, and America left all domestic broadcasting to the private sector, but Australia, since the 1930s, has maintained a rare hybrid of public and private broadcasting, maintained by a moving kaleidoscope of government regulation.

“Wireless” broadcasting, beginning in the 1920s, was the most significant development in public communication in six centuries since the printing press. There was no precedent for a technology that allowed whole populations to be addressed both simultaneously and individually in their own homes and workplaces.

This new power generated both excitement and alarm. Governments quickly realised that some form of regulation would be required. The British model was for the state to monopolise broadcasting “for the public good”. The American model developed more in the way that traffic regulation follows accidents: an initial free-for-all phase had resulted in the chaos of competing private stations trying to shout each other down on the same tuning frequencies.

By the early 1930s the established arbiters of public communication – politicians, churches, social activists and the press – all began insisting on degrees of access and control of the new medium. Electronic media had arrived as a key vector of Australian social and cultural discourse. Its history has always been political.

Griffen-Foley is a professional historian who has assiduously mined the archives of commercial radio operators, networks, regulators and especially the records of the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters (more recently known as Commercial Radio Australia).

Vested interest groups have tussled repeatedly across the decades. Station owners always fought against any increase in the number of stations sharing market revenue, or any increase in government regulation. FARB’s intense lobbying was successful in delaying for decades the introduction of additional AM licences, then FM radio, and then digital radio.

Program content producers (sheet music publishers, record companies, drama producers, newsagencies, sports organisations and individual “stars”) have battled to increase their shares of the revenue pie and to limit cannibalisation of their other revenue sources. Advertising agencies’ control over the direction of advertising revenue enabled them often to dictate program policies to suit their clients. For commercial radio, the bottom line had to rule.

Politicians have rarely dared to face down the private interests of commercial broadcasters, preferring to make overt or tacit deals that will protect the politicians of the day from the hostility of this most intimate and persuasive of the mass media.

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Richard Thwaites has worked variously with ABC radio, community radio, and for several years heading the departmental branch advising federal Ministers on commercial broadcasting.

Stories and Why We Need Them: Evolution and Fictional Narrative

2010-08-18T18:24:00.001+10:00

On the Origin of Stories:

Evolution, Cognition and Fiction

By Brian Boyd, Harvard University Press, 540pp.

Reviewed: 24 October 2009

Why do we bother with stories? Why do humans invest so much energy in making, sharing and consuming narratives that we know are not factual, when we could put that energy into competing to accumulate, consume and defend ever more possessions?

In evolutionary terms, pleasure is not the reason for anything, but rather the reward for something that contributes to our success as individuals or as a species.

Brian Boyd, Distinguished Professor of English at Auckland University, is fed up with “the recently dominant paradigm that calls itself Theory or Critique” which, he believes, has displaced holistic study of human culture with shallow, circular, and presumptuous ideologies.

Boyd approaches literature, and art in general, from the “biocultural” perspective that sees the individual psyche not as a zero-sum balance between Nature and Nurture, but as a dynamic product of both. Our evolved and evolving common humanity (with individual genetic variations) refracted, in each person, through the cultures of specific times, places and life experience.

He expects some to scoff that this approach is reductive or mechanistic, because it implies denial of the sublime, the divine, or the grandly political. Boyd contends that to see culture in the full context of its evolutionary function is in fact to open the study of art and literature to its widest, most inclusive scope.

When baby humans (and other creatures) play with toys, they demonstrate the ability to engage mentally, physically and emotionally with fiction. Play constitutes rehearsal for life in ways that contribute to evolutionary success.

Pre-verbal art, such as cave paintings, must have had strategic value. Once human language evolved to the point where it could transmit ideas about past and future, narrative became possible. We have learned to use fiction to practice tactical deceits, and also to exchange stories that train our brains for ultrasocial life. Group identity, ideology and religion are reinforced by such stories.

The unpredictability of the diverse human environment gives evolutionary advantage to individuals who can learn to cope with threats and opportunities before having to encounter them in the real world.

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The Unforgiving Digital Past and the Updated Possible Future

2010-08-18T17:02:00.001+10:00

Delete:

The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

By Victor Mayer-Schönberger, Princeton University Press, 237pp.

Future Files:

A History of the Next 50 Years

By Richard Watson, Scribe Publications, 302pp

Reviewed: 21 November 2009

Most readers show more interest in better remembering than in better forgetting. But Mayer-Schönberger, an ex-Harvard Public Policy academic now based in Singapore, believes that our world of digital information storage and retrieval is at serious risk of remembering too much for our own good.

He says mental and social health depend on a reliable process of forgetting. Decisions we make should not be over-influenced by past events whose context is no longer relevant. What’s more, if we are aware that our words and actions will be relentlessly recalled, we inhibit our natural responses to the present.

To argue for more forgetting is counter-intuitive to those who value information, history and transparency, but the writer pursues it systematically and thoroughly. Humans learned useful ways to externalise, preserve and communicate memory with pictures, then oral language, then writing. This generation has moved orders of magnitude into the out-sourcing of memory through information technologies of formidable capability.

It is now cheaper to store digitised information for ever rather than spend the time to selectively delete documents, images and communications whose ephemeral purpose has long been met.

So is it fair that a person’s job prospects or personal relations can be blighted by the retrieval of some injudicious photograph or email sent across the Internet decades earlier, in a context that has long changed? This book asserts that we all should have the right to re-make ourselves over time and shed the past.

For the individual, the author suggests that perfectly-retrieved digital memories actually impede decision-making. Sometimes, it’s actually harmful to remember accurately how we or others felt and acted at specific times in the past. His favoured solution is to time-stamp all digital information with an expiration date controlled by its “owner”.

Good luck with that.

Richard Watson’s Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years is promoted as a provocative book, and it certainly succeeded with this reviewer. Spanning society, technology, business, entertainment and business, Watson brandishes a fire-hose of snappy analyses and predictions, any of which could kick off a robust argument in a pub or over a dining table.

The value of this book is not any single prediction you could put your money on, but rather a persistent prodding to think and argue about possible projections from where we are today. And so, about possible consequences of how we act today.

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Richard Thwaites has worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and former Department of Communications, IT and the Arts.

Remaking Disordered Cities, from the Bottom Up

2010-08-18T16:51:00.001+10:00

Welcome to the Urban Revolution:

How Cities are Changing the World

By Jeb Brugmann, University of Queensland Press, 342pp.

Reviewed: 22 August 2009

Canberrans live in one of the most self-conscious cities in the world. Canberra’s history as a compromise child of Federation, rather than as an heroic colony of the Empire, divides us from the States. We are the only city-state on this continent of vast expanses. Our local economy reflects a national project, rather than any spontaneous factor.

Jeb Brugmann’s work on the global challenges of urban development ignores our category of national project capitals (of which there is long and growing list). Brugmann is a Canadian who has worked most of his life on urban development issues in United Nations and NGO development agencies and projects. Ottawa, too, is ignored.

The thesis is that the potentially devastating resource issues confronting humanity can be addressed most effectively through a community of practice that he calls “urbanism”, expressed through the implementation of deep local consultation and collaboration systems that he calls “urban regimes”.

Most of the time, top-down government urban planning fails, because it is either fatally compromised by corruption and commercial opportunism, or based on too shallow and too short-term consideration of consequences. Even genuinely democratic governments become hooked on the short-term revenues and positive economic indicators that can be extracted from building projects and schemes whose performance is measured in quick financial returns rather than long-term economic benefit.

Brugmann uses the term “Urban Revolution” loosely to describe the mass global transformation of humanity from rural to urban economies, rather than in any neo-Marxian sense of confrontational regime change. Urbanist principles deprecate the modernist master-planning approach in favour of something much more akin to organic agriculture. Start with the soil, foster the natural ecosystem.

The “urbanist regime” that he advocates involves a great deal of economic empowerment at grass-roots neighbourhood level, minimising disruption of local informal economies, high valuation of public asset and amenity over private gain, and political power exercised for the long term rather than for the budget or electoral cycle.

Brugmann’s idealistic “urban regimes” have much appeal when set up against the apparent capture of constitutional government decisions by the more powerful, or better organised, vested interests.

Jeb Brugmann’s book is a valuably holistic perspective on urban futures extending beyond the physical and infrastructure planning dimension to integrated, local socio-economics.

As to the Urban Revolution: a reader may choose to adopt this as a handbook, but would be advised also to keep handy a copy of Animal Farm, just to cross-check on any Civil Society urban regime that might emerge.

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Richard Thwaites has worked extensively in both government and non-government organisations.

Chiang Kai-Shek, Pragmatism and how Communism won China

2010-08-18T16:40:00.001+10:00

The Generalissimo

Chiang Kai-Shek and the Battle for Modern China

By Jay Taylor, Belknap Harvard University Press, 722pp.

Reviewed: 1 August 2009

History is not kind to losers, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek is usually remembered in the West as the leader who “lost” China to the Communists. Generations of Western students have been taught that this defeat was inevitable because the KMT was incurably inept and chronically corrupt, whereas the CCP was incorruptible and efficient.

This new and monumental biography shows that things were far more complex. In particular, Western fumbling, arrogance and ignorance repeatedly undermined KMT attempts to develop and protect a more modern society that would permit the development of democracy in a non-Communist, Republican China.

The West broadly accepts the CCP myth that it was a spontaneous grass-roots movement of Chinese peasants, workers and patriotic intellectuals rising up against internal and foreign oppression. While that is part of the story, this book reminds of the extent to which the Soviet Union, under Stalin, provided direction, finance and military support that were absolutely decisive in the victory of Communism in China.

Chiang Kai-Shek was a polarizing figure during his lifetime and most historical treatments have been either hostile or adulatory. Jay Taylor is well-credentialled to seek a balance, with a background as a China specialist in the US State Department, as a Harvard academic, and with access to Chiang Kai-Shek’s revealing personal diaries, family papers, and important materials from Moscow, Washington and Peking.

The tale is a true epic, both in scope and in scale. Chiang rose uncertainly to leadership of Republican China through endless manoeuvering amongst up to 40 regional autonomous warlords, plus several rival Republican factions, all in the context of growing territorial incursion by Japan in the northeast. Even Shanghai gangsters had a role in his rise.

No Western powers showed any inclination to help China defend itself against Japan, despite China’s increasingly desperate pleas.

Once the United States entered the war against Japan after Pearl Harbour, China was recognized as an ally and military assistance began to flow. The relationship, however, was managed poorly by both sides. Chiang’s control over regional commanders required deft management, quite foreign to Western assumptions about disciplined lines of command.

One might think of contemporary Iraq or Afghanistan, but on a massively greater scale.

Chiang’s diaries confirm a complex personal morality that was fundamentally neo-Confucian, overtly Christian, and morbidly self-critical – but combining iron commitment to patriotic ends with infinite flexibility as to the means. Brutality, exemplary executions, and tolerance of corruption (as the price of loyalty), could be combined with personal frugality and scrupulous fiscal propriety on the part of Chiang himself and many of his closest colleagues.

The corollary to infinite pragmatism is chronic suspicion, even of close colleagues. Many lives and careers were sacrificed to his paranoia. In this, his life paralleled that of his Communist nemesis, Mao Zedong.

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Richard Thwaites has been a student of China for 40 years, including five years living in China as an ABC correspondent

The Imperialism behind Civilisation

2010-08-18T16:28:00.001+10:00

The Empire of Civilization

The Evolution of an Imperial Idea

By Brett Bowden, University of Chicago Press, 304pp.

Reviewed: 6 June 2009.

How often our ears ring from the amplified calls of politicians and lobbyists rousing us to violent or oppressive action “to defend civilization”. The enemy is always barbarian.

By default, “civilization” seems to include whatever we hold dear about the society in which we live – property rights, religion, or football. Brett Bowden invites us to step back and review the slippery range of meanings attached to “civilization” over the centuries, and to follow how the term has been employed politically to justify or motivate the actions of states bent on influencing, dominating, or conquering other states and cultures.

The ancient Greeks originated “Western” self-conscious ownership of civilization (“Us”) versus barbarism (“Them”) in recording their wars with the Persians. The East-West paradigm persists today. Christian Popes later appropriated the theme as basis for launching the Crusades, decreeing that no “uncivilized” nation could possibly deserve, in God’s eyes, to occupy the Holy Land of Palestine.

The greater part of this book traces the development of justifications for Western colonialism during the centuries following the Spanish discoveries of the Americas. There were always dissidents who challenged the moral justification of empire and asserted what we would now call the “human rights” of individuals and communities to determine their own destinies, free of subjection. Mostly, these voices were overruled by louder ones claiming that it was actually a moral obligation, for the “civilized” colonial power to bring enlightenment (Christian or secular) to “savages” or “barbarians” who were capable neither of improving their own state nor of properly utilizing the resources of the land they occupied.

Bowden’s real purpose is critique of the contemporary imperialism espoused by the American neo-cons and their supporters around the world. He traces the history of overt US imperialism across three centuries, whether in the form of territorial conquest or in the guise of a “civilizing mission”.

As a Western-oriented critique, the book offers much that is challenging and hard to refute. But as a global analysis there are some large gaps. The assumption of a uni-polar, US-dominated global polity bears more testing, with regard to rising alternative powers such as China or other Asian or global communities that clearly do not accept a “Washington Consensus” for globalization.

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The Great Scientific Heritage of Islamic Cultures

2010-08-18T16:20:00.001+10:00

Science and Islam

a History

By Ehsan Masood, Icon Books, 240pp

Reviewed:2 May 2009

When most Westerners associate Islam with faith-based politics and socio-religious dogmatism, it is valuable to be reminded that the Quran, and the words of the Prophet Mohammed, have also provided inspiration for regimes of strenuously rational and empirical scientific enquiry.

In 833AD, Caliph al-Mamun of Baghdad conducted a stern inquisition throughout his Islamic realm. Scholars and officials were required, on pain of punishment or even death, to attest that the Quran was not the dictated word of God, but rather the work of men inspired by their understanding of God.

Perhaps lacking in subtle people skills, the Caliph was a passionate believer in scientific enquiry, and a student of the Greek, Persian and Indian philosophers. He represented a consistent strand of Islamic thinking: that curiosity about the world is the greatest sign of respect to the Creator.

Among many scientific projects, he had his researchers confirm from astronomical observations that the circumference of the Earth was 24,000 miles – six centuries before our European savants could accept that the world was round.

The great surge of Islamic knowledge-seeking began in the Persian Abbassid Caliphate period from 750AD, with a sustained and systematic program to collect and translate all the wisdom of the world. In four centuries of Islamic enlightenment, scholarship proceeded in conditions of religious tolerance. Many of the scholars were Christians, Jews or other non-Muslims, but were supported by powerful patrons. Islamic religious purists were not allowed to stand in the way of the quest for understanding of the world.

There is much here to challenge Eurocentric assumptions. In 2009, as we celebrate Charles Darwin’s 19th Century studies, it is salutary to read the 9th Century Baghdad naturalist al-Jahiz describing the evolution of species by natural selection – a full millennium earlier than Darwin.

The “algorithm” (the foundation of computer programming) is named for al-Khwarizmi, another 9th Century scholar, of Central Asian origins, who not only introduced the Indian base-10 number system to the West (what we now call Arabic numerals), but also established the foundations of “algebra” (another Arabic word) to radically extended the possibilities of calculation in every field of science.

Ibn-Firnas, of Moorish Cordoba, is reported making a successful hang-glider flight that lasted several minutes and also built a functioning projection planetarium using glass lenses in the floor, centuries before Leonardo or Galileo.

Masood notes that science can flourish under authoritarian rule, ancient or modern, but suggests a fundamental link between cultural self-confidence and the liberation of rational enquiry. Modern Islamic societies, Masood suggests, are still defined by their state of reaction to Western colonialism. Conservatism is a political artifact, and no more intrinsic to Islam than it is to Christianity.

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An Informed Re-think about Iran and the Region's Future

2010-08-18T16:10:00.001+10:00

The Devil We Know

Dealing with the new Iranian superpower

By Robert Baer, Scribe Publications, 277pp

Reviewed: 4 April 2009

The Devil We Know seems written to shock the American public: “Nearly everything the average American has been told about Iran is wrong”, says Baer. The view of Iran as a terrorist state ruled by mad mullahs has been out of date for many years. Behind the posturing of President Ahmedinajad, the Iranian regime is a rational actor with clear aims based on a substantial culture and history, and pragmatic tactical flexibility.

Comparing Shia Islam to Sunni Islam, Baer draws parallels between the Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity. Shiism is hierarchical, scholarly and disciplined, whereas Sunnism is individualistic and infinitely schismatic. Hence Shiite tactics, including terrorist actions, are purposeful and disciplined toward a political objective, whereas Sunni extremists such as Al Qaeda are more often motivated by irrational desire for revenge or “cleansing” destruction. Talking to the Shia is useful.

Sunni regimes such as Pakistan or most Arab states are endemically corrupt and incompetent, he asserts. The Shia regime in Iran, and its proxies including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraq, are far less corrupt and demonstrably more capable of maintaining effective and popular administration. Baer calculates that Western support for Sunni regimes is money down the drain. He presents a compelling analysis of the extension of Iranian influence over most of the Middle East, including non-Shia territories such as Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria.

Baer is no moralist. His assessment is based on what he has observed to work and not to work in the contemporary Middle East. He spent years in the CIA cultivating proxy actors in the Middle East who would serve the interests of the USA. Now he proposes that the only way to halt the profligate waste of American resources in a losing battle with Iran is to come to reasonable terms with Iran.

His prescription would USA mean abandoning several shibboleths: Israel would lose its apparently divine immunity and be required to return to its pre 1967-borders. Patronage and protection of the Arab oil states would have to be shared with Iran. Terrorism punishment objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan would have to be abandoned and those states allowed to fail on their own terms.

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Rise and Fall of Gordon Barton, Anti-Establishment Buccaneer

2010-08-18T16:01:00.001+10:00

Gordon Barton

Australia’s Maverick Entrepreneur

By Sam Everingham, Allen & Unwin, 432pp

Reviewed: 7 March 2009

Australia today owes more to the structural reforms of the 1970s and 1980s than to the superficial rebel-hip that younger people like to imagine characterized the 1960s. The entrepreneur Gordon Barton, while never holding any public office, played an extraordinary role in catalyzing social and economic change in Australia.

He was a buccaneering self-made capitalist who repeatedly challenged comfortable industry cartels that loafed along under government protection. His epic legal challenges to government regulation set precedents that ultimately led to major micro-economic reforms, particularly of Australia’s transport industries.

Barton founded, funded, and for many years led the Australia Party, whose socially-progressive but non-socialist agenda created the first effective third force in Australian federal politics. It was Australia’s first political party with no Class War history.

Barton also bankrolled and protected first the Sunday Oberver, then the Sunday Review, then Nation Review, which in the pre-Internet world provided Australia’s most important non-establishment journalism in a period of concentrated, conservative control of the mass media. Along the way, he gave the Australian publishing industry a timely kick in the tail during a turbulent period of ownership of Angus and Robertson.

Barton had to mount challenges all the way to the Privy Council in London to strike down state-based laws that prevented his interstate road haulage business competing with the state-owned railways.

Many more years and colossal legal costs were expended in challenging Federal aviation regulations that prevented introduction of airfreight services – again, to protect the incumbents. Later there would be challenges to Post Office monopoly privileges on courier services, and to the coastal shipping cartel that gave power to the seamen’s and waterfront unions as well as the uncompetitive shipping lines.

In many cases the reforms Barton forced through, against vested interests with entrenched political support, opened up opportunities for other market entrants and precipitated structural reform we now take for granted.

Over time, Barton’s addiction to risk and to personal drama undid much of his personal life and his fortune. Repudiated by the corporations he had built, he spent his declining years pottering about a small villa in Italy looked after by a son and daughter, dying in 2005.

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Richard Thwaites worked in publishing and in journalism through the 1970s

Of Smugglers, Grave-Robbers and Shameless Curators

2010-08-17T22:35:00.001+10:00

Loot

The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World

By Sharon Waxman, Times Books, 414pp

Reviewed:14 February 2009

Sharon Waxman, an American, studied the Middle East at Oxford then worked as a “culture correspondent” and foreign correspondent for the New York Times. This book applies journalistic reporting on places and personalities in a struggle within the world of museums and professional collectors: when should foreign objects held in museums be returned to their place of origin?

The Enlightenment idea that people become more civilised by appreciation of the classical past – essentially Greece, Rome and antecedents in the Near East - inspired development of the public museum. From the time of Napoleon, this evolved from blatant displays of looted treasure and colonial curios into the sophisticated systems of archaeology, conservation and historical research now epitomised by the Louvre or the British Museum.

The Louvre and the British Museum were founded on overt imperial acquisitions, while the New York Metropolitan Museum continues to receive items of dubious provenance donated by those social-climbing hedge-fund operators not yet in gaol. For at least a century, the prevailing motto has been “Don’t ask, don’t tell” on the provenance of prized items.

Legal and illegal acquisitions seem always to have run in parallel, but formal legality has not discouraged new generations of cultural nationalists from demanding return of precious artifacts to their land of origin.

Waxman gives a fair account of the claims of those restitutionists of Egypt, modern Greece, Turkey and Italy. The happiest case histories undo blatantly unlawful acquisitions involving networks of grave-robbers, smugglers, shady dealers and shameless curators.

Sadly, some of the cultural treasures recovered with heroic effort have since been lost again through corruption, incompetence, or lack of curatorial resources in the place of origin. Such cases strengthen the arguments of the big museums that they hold items not only for themselves but in safe trust for humanity.

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Richard Thwaites has worked, among other things, as a publisher's editor

Betrayed Americans Forsaken in Soviet Russia

2010-08-17T22:21:00.001+10:00

The Forsaken

by Tim Tzouliadis, Little Brown, 472pp

Reviewed: 10 January 2009

Tim Tzouliadis traces the horrifying fate of several thousand American citizens caught in Stalin’s Russia during the years of the Great Terror.

Most of the Americans had gone to the USSR voluntarily in the 1930s, either as Communist idealists hoping to build a socialist new world order, or as contract “experts” fleeing the unemployment of the Great Depression in capitalist America. They ranged from artists and assembly-line workers to architects and engineers. Most sold up their belongings and took their families with them.

The largest group comprised several hundred Ford Motor Company employees hired to run the Soviet Ford car plant at Nizhni Novgorod. At the time the USA did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and consequently no Embassy or Consulates to represent them.

Most were tricked or bullied into giving up their American passports and acquiring Soviet ones. As Stalin’s internal terror campaigns escalated from 1936, the lost Americans became targets. Attempting to leave, or even expressing a desire to go home, became acts of treason earning death or deportation to the burgeoning Gulags, from where less than ten percent would ever return.

There are many appalling accounts of culled from correspondence, from Soviet archives, from survivor accounts, and most sadly from the records of the US State Department and other official sources. Most chilling are the accounts of how these Americans were treated by other Americans.

President Roosevelt is portrayed as almost willfully blind to the character of Stalin and his regime.

Not for those who prefer a rose-tinted world view, this book will confirm any conviction that civilization lies not in the mobilization of power over the people, but in the restraint of power by the people.

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Ken Myer's Lasting Legacy of Power and Philanthropy

2010-08-17T22:06:00.001+10:00

The Many Lives of Kenneth Myer

By Sue Ebury, Miegunyah Press, 621pp.

Reviewed: 12 December 2008

Even in egalitarian Australia, private philanthropy underwrites many of our prized cultural institutions.

Kenneth Myer’s contribution to public life began soon after his return from wartime naval service which had taken him to China and Japan, as well as formative experiences in the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. With his younger brother Baillieu (‘Bails’) he set up the Myer Foundation (via a special Act of the Victorian Parliament) along the lines of philanthropic foundations he had observed in the USA, as a tax-effective vehicle for either public or anonymous support for worthy causes.

Myer supported a truly impressive range of institutions through the Foundation, through personal donations, and through highly active participation in boards and committees. His earliest involvements were with the ANU’s John Curtin School of Medical Research and the development of Asian Studies, which became his life-long special interest.

Later he was instrumental in the founding of the Department of East Asian Studies at Melbourne University, and in securing the independence of the Howard Florey Institute for medical research, also in Melbourne.

Kenneth Myer’s personal legacy is obvious in the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne's Alexandra Gardens, but few now would realize what an important role Ken Myer played over three decades in development of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Victorian Arts Centre, the construction of the National Library whose Council he served on for twenty years from 1960 and chaired for seven. In his final years living in Sydney he gave major financial support to the Asian art collections of Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Power House Museum. He had also played a supportive role in establishment of the National Film and Television School.

To a general reader this book provides many insights into the way big things can be done in Australia. Mostly, it seems to be by maintaining the right networks and connections, and by seeding bold public initiatives with personal commitment of time and funds – what Ken Myer called “risk philanthropy”.

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Richard Thwaites studied in the Myer-supported East Asian Studies Department at Melbourne University, and later was on ABC program staff during Ken Myer’s chairmanship.

Chaos as a Modernising Force for China?

2010-08-17T21:47:00.001+10:00

The Chinese Cultural Revolution

a History

By Paul Clark, Cambridge University Press, 352pp

Reviewed: 29 November 2008

Chairman Mao launched his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, ostensibly to challenge conservatism and elitism within the Chinese Communist Party and to create a new culture of Perpetual Revolution in China. Its scope was limitless, challenging and disrupting all cultural norms in China’s social, economic, political and even scientific fields, as well as in the arts and intellectual life.

This is a very specific, almost clinical, review of what was going on in the production of Chinese public culture over that period – mainly the mass media of film and public performance, but also painting, sculpture and literature. The “consumption” side of the analysis is limited, since Chinese audiences had very little choice, heard no independent critical voices, and experienced saturation marketing of state-prescribed products.

Clark argues that this period is not simply to be written off as an unmitigated disaster. His case is that the peculiar circumstances of massive state intervention, absolutist control over the arts, and insistent didactic purpose, also stimulated or facilitated some significant development and “modernization” of arts practice in China.

It’s a controversial, almost revisionist case to be making in relation to the Cultural Revolution, which Westerners generally associate with bizarre extremes of dogmatism, vandalism, and dictatorship, backed by personal violence against any artist thought possibly sympathetic to “class enemies”.

Clark argues that the long denial of public self-expression generated a sub-culture of private and mainly passive resistance, which would flower dramatically in artistic innovation as the reins began to slacken from the late 1970s. Well, yes. The lotus does grow from the mud.

He aims to show that the Cultural Revolution was not a “sidetrack” on China’s road to modernity, but firmly “part of the process”. Since the same could be said of civil wars, religious revolutions, invasions, natural disasters and other cataclysms in the history of any human society, I found the argument interesting but not compelling.

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Richard Thwaites lived in China 1978-83, when the Cultural Revolution was known as “The Ten Years of Chaos”

The Virtues of Wondering and of Skilled Biography

2010-08-17T21:32:00.001+10:00

The Age of Wonder

How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

By Richard Holmes, Harper Press

Reviewed: 20 September 2008

Richard Holmes he turns a brass spyglass on a range of those ``natural philosophers'' who, through extraordinary effort and courage, established foundations for modern science. A number of these key British figures were discovering ``the beauty and terror of science'' during the so-called Romantic period, roughly between Captain Cook's first voyage to the Pacific and the emergence, around 1840, of the first generation of researchers to call themselves ``scientists''.

His characters were pioneers, moving their intellectual world from belief-based examination of a universe that was assumed to be a fixed creation, towards broad recognition that the scientific method of rigorous observation, hypothesis and testing provided the only reliable basis for continual expansion of knowledge. The ``wonder'' they shared was the intellectual excitement of a generation which realised that the process of discovery has no natural limit, so long as humans continue to speculate, to observe, and to test.

Sir Joseph Banks looms over much of this book, from his early role as a self-funded naturalist with Captain Cook's Pacific voyage (1768-9), through 40 years as president of the Royal Society, the principal sponsor of British science and exploration. Banks's journals detail how his anthropological research in Tahiti included spending most of his nights ashore observing, and practising, the Tahitian customs of sexual freedom. His intimate relations went far beyond sheer personal indulgence and deeply challenged his cultural assumptions.

Years later, after he had founded the British Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Sir Joseph shows up as a reliable supplier of good-quality Indian hemp to the poet (and natural philosopher) William Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge would also write ecstatically of the psychedelic effects of inhaling laughing gas (nitrous oxide) as the guest of Sir Humphrey Davy, who succeeded Banks at the Royal Society. Davy became part of the circle including Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth whose Romantic quest was for new ways of thinking, seeing and feeling.

The decades toward 1840 trace a transition from the gentlemanly practice of natural philosophy for its own sake, towards recognition of the new profession of ``scientist'' as a person applying scientific method to a practical economic or social purpose. The term ``scientist'' was in fact coined by the poet Coleridge (as was the term ``psychosomatic'').

The Age of Wonder makes a highly readable, informative and stimulating narrative of individuals making history, and made by their time a time with many parallels to our own.

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Richard Thwaites is a Canberra reviewer who is still wondering.

1434 - Chinese Odyssey Falls Off its Own Map

2010-08-17T21:16:00.001+10:00

1434

The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the Renaissance

By Gavin Menzies, Harper Collins

Reviewed: 6 September 2008

The publishing encourages readers to believe that there is a difference between Fiction and Non-Fiction.

In Gavin Menzies’ two works 1431 – The Year China Discovered America, and now 1434 – The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the Renaissance, readers are being sold, as non-fiction, works that mix facts and wild speculation with an abandon that would embarrass the better historical novelists.

A large Chinese merchant fleet visited India in 1433-34, and part of the fleet continued westward as far as the Persian Gulf trade terminus of Hormuz. It followed trade routes developed and maintained for centuries by Arab maritime trading societies.

The Chinese records tell us that the Admiral, Zheng He, died before reaching Hormuz and command passed to another admiral who completed the trade mission and returned to China with a rich fleet in 1434.

Gavin Menzies asserts that Zheng He’s commission from the Ming Emperor Yong Le was not merely to engage in trade, but rather to endow the Western barbarians with sufficient Chinese wisdom that they would flock to Beijing to recognize China’s global supremacy.

He suggests that Zheng He’s fleet carried copies of Yong Le’s state encyclopedia containing “more intellectual knowledge than any university in the world at that time”. Part of the fleet sailed up the Red Sea, through a canal to the Nile, and across the Mediterranean to Venice. His fleet bore encyclopedic gifts, ample translators, and apparently some thousands of slave girls who, on reaching the Adriatic Sea, would elope with sailors and populate Croatia.

Since there is absolutely no evidence of any magnificent Chinese fleet sailing to Italy and igniting the Renaissance, Menzies supports his thesis with attenuated chains of inference. On the slimmest of evidence or most unreliable documentation, he will say on one page that a certain connection with China “could” have happened. On the next page the link has become “would” have happened, and by the next chapter the far-fetched possibility is quoted as a factual assumption to underpin some even more far-fetched argument.

The sheer bulk of outright errors, misrepresentations and unsupported assertions is so great that it would be maddening to undertake a full refutation.

He refers frequently to a 1418 Chinese map, that he calls “Zheng He’s map”, showing most of the modern world, including the Americas, as evidence of Chinese pre-Columbian knowledge of the entire globe. Only by chasing up the source of this map in an external reference can one confirm that the map is a “copy” made in China no earlier than 1763 (by which time its contents were common knowledge to seafarers), and probably a twentieth century fake. There is no 1418 map.

It’s difficult to sort the wheat (and there is some) from so much chaff.

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Richard Thwaites has been reading Chinese history for forty years.

Manning Clark's Tragic Grandeur - in letters

2010-08-17T20:51:00.001+10:00

Ever, Manning

Selected Letters of Manning Clark 1938-1991

edited by Roslyn Russell, Allen and Unwin

Reviewed: 9 August 2008

Historian Professor Manning Clark was a catalytic figure in the formation of Australian self-image. His quest to construct a coherent sense of what it means to be Australian could strike cynics as tendentious, and strike angry sparks from either radical or conservative historians with competing visions of Australian history. Even those who reject his historical interpretation owe him at least the debt of provocation.

What value then is this volume of selected letters, authorized by the family and far from comprehensive? The material is exclusively Clark’s outgoing letters. Like the sound of one hand clapping, we read Clark’s intense or humorous responses to voices that we can only infer. The effect is starkest in relation to the central correspondence of his life: that with Dymphna, his great love, wife and life’s companion through significant domestic drama. What Dymphna might have said or written to Manning at certain times would likely have scorched the page, had family and publishers agreed to print it.

This collection can better be read as a progressive self-portrait, a verbal analog for the self-portrait series of visual artists such as Rembrandt and van Gogh. The earliest letters (from Oxford, 1938) portray an earnest young post-graduate seeking out how to draw maximum academic nourishment from the British tradition, while sensitive to the slights offered so casually by the British to the “colonials” in their midst.

Over the decades, there are such cultural romances with Britain, with Ireland, with continental Enlightenment Europe, with (Potemkinised?) Soviet Russia, and finally with the Harvard world of the American liberal intelligentsia.

The letters reveal a man always in the process of self-construction and deconstruction – he refers often to himself in the third person in ways that might seem vain if they were not humorous and self-deprecatory.

From the 1950s until his death in 1991, Manning Clark gave public support to many “progressive” causes and was considered radical, almost dangerous, by conservative academics and political commentators.

The clergyman’s son sets out like a character in Pilgrim’s Progress, determined to be recognized for good works and to overcome human frailty in himself, while suspicious of anything smelling of superficial piety. By the end of his life, significant achievements and public recognition seem not to have assured him that he has justified his life through his works. Manning Clark, fact or fiction, emerges from this volume with a quality he often ascribes to the human condition – a tragic grandeur.

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Truth about China's Human Rights Record

2010-08-17T20:38:00.003+10:00

CHINA:

The truth about its human rights record

By Frank Ching, Rider Books

Reviewed: 19 July 2008

In this short and accessible book, Frank Ching has provided a timely reality check. Many who seek good relations with China are uneasy about how to reconcile China’s economic and cultural strengths with its persistent disregard for a range of individual human rights that we claim to support.

This book offers a sober and thorough review of the broad environment of rights and restrictions that constrain the daily lives of all China’s citizens and of non-Chinese who interact with them.

Frank Ching is an American journalist of Chinese family who has been reporting on China for thirty years. He recognizes where improvements have been made to human rights in China over time, but the overall picture remains bleak.

The heart of the matter is that the Communist Party refuses to allow any limitation to its monopoly of power. “The basic problem with China’s legal system is that there is no culture of the rule of law”. The system remains heavily biased against the individual and in favour of anyone holding state authority, from internet censor or police constable upwards.

The Communist Party’s obsession with monopoly of power also motivates restriction of religious freedoms. Nominal freedom of religion in the Constitution is hemmed in by legal requirements for any religion to “promote unity” and to be subject to the guidance of the state. Ching’s up to date report makes clear that without changes in fundamental attitudes by those holding ultimate power, China is likely to remain near the bottom of the world’s human rights tables.

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Richard Thwaites is a former Australian Broadcasting correspondent in China.

Can Law or History Redeem Indigenous Australians' Grievances?

2010-08-17T20:26:00.001+10:00

Rights and Redemption

History, Law and Indigenous People

By Anne Curthoys, Ann Genovese and Alexander Reilly, UNSW Press, 277pp

Reviewed: 5 July 2008

This is a scholarly but very readable examination of the ways in which Australia’s legal system has adjudicated the claims of Indigenous individuals and communities. Most of such claims are rejected because they can not be framed or supported, strongly enough, in terms that satisfy court evidentiary standards of admissibility and relevance.

The book draws upon interviews with participants in key legal processes. Unusually, this includes members of the judiciary and the legal professions, sometimes anonymously.

A clash of cultures limits legal process. Common law emphasises material proof and strict documentation. It devalues oral tradition, on which Indigenous claimants may rely to establish their case. Claimants and those opposing their claims may each enlist historians, anthropologists or other professionals to provide facts and interpretations to bolster their cases.

This book is not about the merits of claims or the justice of outcomes, but about the problems of method and purpose that divide lawyers, historians, and anthropologists in the processing of Indigenous claims and grievances.

The historian’s commitment to a broad and contextual understanding of events can be at cross purposes with a lawyer’s brief to accept information only where it advances one side of a case. Historians infer broad truths from scant hard evidence but a rich context, whereas lawyers select evidence for the limited purpose of a specific argument before the court. Judges have been reluctant to accept historians’interpretations of events or documents, believing that to be the judge’s own responsibility.

There is inter-disciplinary rivalry between expert advisers to the law. Legislated rights do not deliver much without more clarity on how Courts are to evaluate claims and counter-claims. Redemption seems limited to the public politics of reconciliation, and to the continued pursuit of truthful history.

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Blumenthal's Rage against the havoc of Bush and Backers

2010-08-17T20:16:00.001+10:00

The Strange Death of Republican America
Chronicles of a Collapsing Party
By Sidney Blumenthal, Union Square Press.
Reviewed: 28 May 2008

Sidney Blumenthal, a committed Democrat and senior adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, makes no pretence of impartiality in this chronicle of the U.S. Republican Party under the Bush Administration. Don’t expect much generosity toward Bush and his Republican Party supporters.

George W Bush is always in the cross-hairs, but Blumenthal does distinguish between those surrounding the Republican Administration who are simply misguided (such as Colin Powell, James Baker, Condoleeza Rice and George Bush senior) and those he considers to be irredeemably malevolent, dangerous to US democracy, and thus dangerous to the world.
The principle demons to emerge are Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, with a large cast of supporting trolls headed by Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet, and others whose names have passed through the headlines and, in most cases, to eventual ignominy.

Blumenthal says the press generally failed in their duty to keep the Administration accountable. He is passionate about the ideals of an American Democracy that he believes is being corrupted by power-hungry cynics. The exemplars are Cheney and Rumsfeld, both veterans of the Nixon Administration..
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Richard Thwaites has been a journalist and has served politicians of many colours..

What (we think) China Thinks - China's Charm Offensive

2010-08-16T23:27:00.001+10:00

Charm Offensive
How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World
By Joshua Kurlantzik, Melbourne University Press, 305pp

What Does China Think?
By Mark Leonard,Fourth Estate, 164pp.

China’s Brave New World
and other tales for Global Times
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Indiana University Press, 210pp

Reviewed: 3 May 2008

China's "Charm Offensive" to build "soft power" has changed the international landscape, mainly at the expense of the United States. Kurlantzik has a background in conservative opinion (US News and World Report, The Economist, New Republic). His book seems intended to get the juices running among those who see diminution of United States supremacy, in any field, as catastrophic.

Chinese initiatives are less “charm” than a hard-headed campaign for influence and respect, based on offering the elites of foreign regimes an alternative to dependence on the West – economic development without pesky democracy. Kurlantzik seems to think it is a contest for "popularity".

Mark Leonard's book presents a fascinating range of views about China’s future, as advocated by serious and recognized thinkers within China. Importantly these people, many of them with contemporary Western education, are working within the Peoples Republic’s system of academic institutions and official think-tanks, competing for support for their views from the ultimate authority in all things: the Chinese Communist Party.

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Richard Thwaites is a former ABC correspondent in China.

Lifting the Veil on Beijing's Forbidden City

2010-08-16T23:16:00.001+10:00

The Forbidden City
Geremie Barmé,
Profile Books
Reviewed: 29 March 2008

Professor Geremie Barmé is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary sinologists. . Few anglophones could be better qualified to produce a cultural overview of the role of the Forbidden City through 600 years of Chinese history.

Don’t look to this book for a strict chronological history or a systematic museum guide. Barmé addresses the Forbidden City’s “a metaphorical life”, holding that over the centuries the reality of a sequestered imperial administration has fed the perception of China as perpetually enigmatic and inscrutable.

Tales of palace intrigue here only skim the simmering cauldron of dynastic power politics between eunuchs; the wives, concubines and their factional supporters; the royal siblings; the military and civilian officials; the foreign powers co-opted with dire consequence. Read the full review

Richard Thwaites was Beijing correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1978-83.