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.
Read full review
Richard Thwaites once worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and pursues a good life, cautiously connected, in Canberra.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
A Liberal American Loses her Innocence Abroad
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 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 US attempt to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan America
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
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 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.
Richard Thwaites was a foreign correspondent for Australian Brooadcasting Corporation, 1978-1983.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Consistent, Conservative Pillar of Quadrant Magazine
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?
Richard Thwaites recalls the cultural Cold War as a background of distant artillery to his baby-boomer youth.
A Shanghai Jewish Microcosm
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.
Richard Thwaites has followed developments in China since the 1960s.
Secrecy and Absolute Control - China's Party Line
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.
Richard Thwaites was ABC correspondent in China, 1978-1983.
Economic and Social Gloom Stirred, not Shaken
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.
Richard Thwaites has worked with politicians, public servants and journalists.
The Real Macbeth in Scotland's History
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)