(A P Herbert, Spring Song, quoted in To Lose a Battle, by Alistair Horne)

On May 10, 1940, German forces launched an attack against Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Few people among the Allies imagined that France would collapse in only six weeks: Churchill, for example, had a high opinion of the fighting qualities of the French army. But collapse is what happened, of course, and we are still all living with the consequences. General Andre Beaufre, who in 1940 was a young Captain on the French staff, wrote in 1967:

The collapse of the French Army is the most important event of the twentieth century.

If it’s an exaggeration, it’s not much of one. If France had held up to the German assault as effectively as it was expected to do, World War II would probably have never reached the nightmare levels that it in fact did reach. The Hitler regime might well have fallen. The Holocaust would never have happened. Most likely, there would have been no Communist takeover of Eastern Europe.

This campaign has never received much attention in America; it tends to be regarded as something that happened before the “real” war started. Indeed, many denizens of the Anglosphere seem to believe that the French basically gave up without a fight–which is a considerable exaggeration given the French casualties of around 90,000 killed and 200,000 wounded. But I think the fall of France deserves serious study, and that some of the root causes of the defeat are scarily relevant to today’s world.

First, I will very briefly summarize the campaign from a military standpoint, and will then shift focus to the social and political factors involved in the defeat.

France’s border can be thought of in terms of three sectors. In the north, the border with Belgium. Early French military planning had been based on the idea of a strong cooperative relationship with Belgium; however, in the years immediately prior to 1940, that country had adopted a position of neutrality and had refused to do any joint military planning with France. In the south, the border was protected by the forts of the Maginot Line (the southern flank of which was anchored by mountainous territory bordering on Switzerland and Italy). In between these regions was the country of the Ardennes. It was heavily wooded and with few roads, and the French high command did not believe it was a feasible attack route for strong forces. Hence, the Maginot Line had not been extended to cover it, and the border here was protected only with field fortifications.

The French plan was based on the assumption that the main German attack would come through Belgium. Following the expected request from the Belgian government for assistance, strong French forces were to advance into that country and counterattack the Germans. In the Maginot and Ardennes sectors, holding actions only were envisaged. While the troops manning the Maginot Line were of high quality, the Ardennes forces included a large proportion of middle-aged reservists, and had been designated as lower-class units.

The opening moves seemed to fit expectations. The Germans launched a powerful attack through Belgium, and the Belgian government made the expected requests for help. Andre Beaufre:

Doumenc sent me at once to Vincennes to report to General Gamelin (the French supreme commander). I arrived at 6.30 AM at the moment when the order had just been given for the huge machine to go into operation: the advance into Belgium. Gamelin was striding up and down the corridor in his fort, humming, with a pleased and martial air which I had never seen before. It has been said since that he expected defeat, but I could see no evidence of it at the time.

There was heavy fighting in Belgium…but the German attack on this country had served to mask their real point of maximum effort. Early in the morning of the 13th, it became clear that massive German forces were moving through the Ardennes, which had turned out to not be so impassable after all. A massive German air attack paved the way for a crossing of the Meuse river and the capture of the town of Sedan. French officers were stunned by the speed of the German advance–they had expected delays while the Germans brought up heavy artillery, not understanding that dive bombers could play a role similar to that traditionally played by artillery. And the bombing was psychologically-shattering, especially for inexperienced troops. The famous historian Marc Bloch had been exposed to many artillery barrages while fighting in the First World War: in reflecting on his service in 1940, he observed that he found aerial bombing much more frightening even though it was, objectively, probably less dangerous. (Bloch later joined the Resistance and was captured by the Germans and shot.)

The French command never really recovered from the unexpected thrust through the Ardennes and the fall of Sedan. Beginning on May 27, the British evacuated their troops at Dunkirk. On June 14, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned. He was succeeded by Philippe Petain, a hero of the First World War, who immediately sought terms with the Germans. The “armistice”–basically a surrender–was signed on June 20. By Hitler’s order, it was signed in the same railway car where the armistice of 1918 had been signed. Hitler was present in person for the ceremony: William Shirer was fifty yards away, and was studying his expression through binoculars: It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.

Many military factors were involved in the defeat–obsolete doctrine on armored forces, inadequate use of radio communications, a strange and cumbersome military organization structure, and a rigid and formalistic attitude among the members of the General Staff. But the roots of the 1940 debacle are not to be found only, or perhaps even primarily, in strictly military matters. A major role was played by certain characteristics of French society and politics of the time, and some of these factors are spookily similar to things that are going on in America today.

In her autobiography, Simone de Beauvoir reflects on the attitude of the French Left (of which she was a part) toward the rise of Nazi Germany…“there was no threat to peace; the only danger was the panic that the Right was attempting to spread in France with the aim of dragging us into war.” (Horne) A constant thread that runs through France in the 1930s is the extreme factionalism, often resulting in more fear and distrust of other Frenchmen than of the rising external enemy.

This was not only a phenomenon of the Left. Among conservative elites, for example, the phrase Better Hitler than Blum was popular. Leon Blum (Premier 1936-37) was a fairly mild Socialist, best known for his advocacy of the 5-day week. Something about him inspired crazed hatred on the part of French Conservatives and Rightists. “A man to shoot in the back,” wrote Charles Maurras, and he was by no means alone in such sentiments. As Julian Jackson puts it in his book The Fall of France: “Politics in France in the 1930s had reached a pitch of violence that had something of the atmosphere of civil war.”

Nor did the factionalism stop on May 10, 1940. Georges Mandel, the courageous Minister of the Interior, observed a Deputy (legislator) whose district had been bombed by the enemy…he went about the lobbies (of the Chamber of Deputies), screaming “I will interpellate the government on this outrage as soon as the Chamber meets!” Mandel remarked to his friend, the English General Edward Spears, about the disconnect of this behavior from reality. “Paris is bombed by the Germans? Let’s shake our fists at our own Government.”

A few months earlier, an interviewer had asked Paul Reynaud—who had just become Prime Minister of France—about his long-standing and bitter rivalry with Edouard Daladier.

“Nevertheless,” the interviewer said, “Daladier is certainly a man who loves his country.”

“Yes,” Reynaud replied, “I believe he desires the victory of France, but he desires my defeat even more.”

This may have been a bit unfair to Daladier, who was far from the worst of the leading French politicians of the day. But it gives an accurate impression of the state of things in the late Third Republic. And it may actually understate the state of things in America today, where for many politicians and journalists, the well-being of America and of Americans doesn’t seem to enter into the equation at all compared with the search for political advantage.

It is virtually impossible to win a war when politics is being conducted in such a manner…when the “enemy” across the aisle is hated more than the enemy in the bombers overhead. And can anyone doubt that a military attack or a major terrorist attack today would meet with considerable political response mirroring that of the French Deputy quoted by Mandel?

The tendency to view everything through the lens of domestic politics certainly had a malign influence on French military preparedness. Consider, for example, the matter of aircraft production. When the aggressive Guy La Chambre took over as Air Minister (in January 1938), he reportedly “found nothing but a disheartened industry of small workshops of which only one factory alone was equipped for mass production. As war approached and the production gap with the Luftwaffe appeared hopelessly wide, he tried to fill it by means of large-scale purchases from the United States; but even this measure of desperation met with intense opposition from the French aircraft manufacturers lobby.” (Horne) At roughly the same time, the Left was objecting to the restoration of a longer work week in order to increase armaments production. (In the event, some aircraft orders were placed in the US, but not nearly on the scale needed, and the work week was lengthened, but not without an epidemic of disruptive strikes.)

The 1930s were a time of frequent financial/political scandals. The most famous of these was the Stavisky affair: Serge Alexander Stavisky was able to sell bonds worth 200 million francs based on the assets of Bayonne’s municipal pawnshop. His political connections assisted him both in pulling off the scam and in getting his trial postponed 19 times. The result was a considerable weakening of confidence in France’s governing institutions. Similarities to the situation in America today are obvious and disturbing.

It is worth noting that there were divisions in France that had originated at the time of the Revolution, and had persisted. The hostility between anti-Clericals and Catholics was one of the most significant of these. See Lead and Gold for a discussion of how this played out in the First World War: “As absurd as it sounds, the political and intellectual classes in France feared the Catholic church more than the armies of the Kaiser.” Our political divisions in America today don’t go back nearly as far–but are they as serious, and becoming as entrenched?

There was rising xenophobia and anti-Semitism. With onset of the Depression (which came later in France than in the US and Britain), immigrants were viewed as competitors for jobs (even though France was in a demographic crisis, with both a low birth rate and the effects of the horrendous casualties of 1914-1918), and became targets of violence. France was faced with half a million refugees from Spain following Franco’s defeat of Republican forces in that country, and there were also refugees from other Nazi and Fascist countries. (Despite the xenophobia, “it must be said that France was more generous in providing asylum than any other European country or than the United States.” (Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley)

In the period just before Munich, fears of war were very strong, and many people chose to blame the Czechs…and the Jews. In Paris, Strasbourg, Dijon and elsewhere mobs attacked Jews and looted their shops, shouting: “Down with the Jewish war.” (Brendon)

By 1939, many Frenchmen had had enough of Hitler’s threats, and support for resistance against further aggression was growing…but there were still strong voices for appeasement. And these was a pervasive sense that something was deeply wrong with French society. Jean Renoir’s film La Regle du Jeu, opened in July 1939 but banned as “too demoralizing” by September, portrayed, in Brendon’s words, “a corrupt and disintegrating society held together only by deception. ‘We live at a time when everyone lies,’ says one of the characters, ‘drug ads, governments, radio, movies, newspaper.’”

The most splendid Parisian ball of the 1939 season took place on a warm July night at the Polish embassy. Brendon describes the scene:

Ministers and diplomats sipped champagne while an orchestra played and beautiful women in frothy gowns waltzed with military officers. “In the gardens white marble sphinxes gleamed beneath the stars…and pots of red fire threw on the scene the glow of a conflagration.” The Polish Ambassador, Julius Lukasziewicz, believed that Bonnet was “definitely seeking some legally valid escape” from French obligations, news of which accounted for increased “blustering” in Berlin. The shadows quivered. All thought war imminent and some were reminded of the ball “given by Wellington on the eve of Waterloo.” Watching a mazurka, Reynaud (who became Prime Minister just before the attack of 1940-ed) remarked: “it is scarcely enough to say that they are dancing on a volcano. For what is an eruption of Vesuvius compared to the cataclysm which is forming under our feet?”

See also my post When Formalism Kills, which cites Andre Beaufre on the mental world of the French General Staff of the time, and a related observation from Picasso. Also The French Army in 1940..and the American CDC in 2021. And finally, a thoughtful essay by Daniel Mahoney: Revisiting France’s Strange Defeat

cross-posted at Chicago Boyz

A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself.

The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you ourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history..

In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.

The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emotional hothouse. The trained, closed-minded theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his open-minded adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself..

Why are there so many people now who are willing–even eager–to become votaries of of ideological systems? I’d suggest that several factors are operative:

First, there are a lot of people who are lonely and looking for a sense of affiliation. Relatedly, a lot of people lack a sense of meaning…which was once more often provided by traditional religions and social roles–and political activism and belief can fill this need. Sebastian Haffner, who came of age in Germany between the wars, observed this phenomenon. When the political and economic situation in that country began to stabilize–for which he credits Gustav Stresemann–most people were happy:

The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries. There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.

But a return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk…

To be precise…it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

I think there are a lot of people in America today, and in the West generally, who have become accustomed to having ‘the raw material for their deeper emotions’ delivered by the public sphere.

Second, for some people the desire for affiliation shades into the darker pleasure of behaving with cruelty to those outside the charmed circle…while simultaneously feeling very virtuous about their behavior. See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism.

Third, people who are intelligent, but not at all creative, tend to latch on to the intellectual systems created by others and to hold to those systems create by others even more fiercely than the originators of those systems would do. This observation is from the writer Andre Maurois, and I think it is correct. I also think that the description ‘intelligent but not creative’ describes a high percentage of the current incumbents in academia and media organizations.

I previously posted about Koestler’s thoughts on closed systems at Chicago Boyz, where there is an interesting comment thread.

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed….You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will have to be engaged.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that she also said:

We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.

…which is, of course, entirely consistent with the assertion made by Barack Obama himself, shortly before his first inauguration: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

It should be clear by now that all aspects of American life and society are rapidly becoming politicized. Obama greatly accelerated this movement, but he didn’t initiate it. The “progressive” political movement, which now controls the Democratic Party, has for a long time been driving the politicization of anything and everything. The assertion “the personal is political” originated on the Left in the 1960s…and, if the personal is political, then everything is political.

Some people, of course, like the politicization of everything–for some individuals, indeed, their lives would be meaningless without it. In his important memoir of growing up in Germany between the wars, Sebastian Haffner noted divergent reactions from people when the political and economic situation stabilized (temporarily, as we now know) during the Stresemann chancellorship:

The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries…There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.

But this return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.

and

To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. They began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

I’m afraid we have quite a few people in America today who like having “the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions.” But for most people, especially for creative and emotionally-healthy people, the politicization of everything leads to a dreary and airless existence.

In her novel We the Living, based partly on her personal experiences in the early Soviet Union (which is probably why it is, IMO, the best of her books from a literary standpoint), Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of what day-to-day life in the politicized society is like. Her heroine, Kira Argounova, is a strong anti-Communist, but absent other options has found a job (which she got through intervention of a Communist friend) in something called “The House of the Peasant,” which is dedicated to “a closer understanding between workers and peasants,” under the slogan “The Clamping of City and Village,” celebrated with posters bearing slogans like “Comrades, strengthen the Clamping!”

Kira’s boss at the House of the Peasant is an older woman “thin, gray-haired, military and in strict sympathy with the Soviet Government; her chief aim in life was to give constant evidence of how strict that sympathy was, even though she had graduated from a women’s college…” But the boss lives in fear of “a tall girl with a long nose and a leather jacket, who was a Party member and could make Comrade Bitiuk shudder at her slightest whim, and knew it…” All the office staff members also live in fear of the Wall Newspaper, which carries criticisms of individual workers both for their personal behavior as well as their work performance:

Comrade Nadia Chernova is wearing silk stockings. Time to be reminded that such flaunting of luxury is un-proletarian, Comrade Chernova…Comrade E Ovsov indulges in too much talk when asked about business. This leads to a waste of valuable time…We hear that Comrade Kira Argounova is lacking in social spirit. The time is past, Comrade Argounova, for arrogant bourgeois attitudes.

After reading this last, Kira “stood very still and heard her heart beating. No one dared to ignore the mighty pointing finger of the Wall Newspaper…No one could save those branded as “anti-social element,” not even (Kira’s Communist friend) Andrei Taganov… At her desk, she watched the others in the room, wondering who had reported her to the Wall Newspaper…”

All workers in the office are expected to be members of the Marxist Club (ie, to be “engaged,” as Michelle Obama would put it), which meets after hours and for attendance at which the workers are not paid. The club met twice a week: one member reads a thesis he had prepared and the others discuss it. When it is Kira’s turn, she reads her thesis on “Marxism and Leninism,” which she has copied, barely changing the words, from the “ABC of Communism,” a book whose study is compulsory in every school in the country.

She knew that all her listeners had read it, that they had also read her thesis, time and time again, in every editorial of every newspaper for the last six years. They sat around her, hunched, legs stretched out limply, shivering in their overcoats. They knew she was there for the same reason they were. The girl in the leather jacket presided, yawning once in a while.

After mandatory discussion (“Kira knew that she had to argue and defend her thesis; she knew that the consumptive young man had to argue to show his activity; she knew that he was no more interested in the discussion than she was, that his blue eyelids were weary with sleeplessness, that he clasped his thin hands nervously, not daring to glance at his wristwatch…”), the meeting finally comes to a close. “We shall thank Comrade Argounova for her valuable work,” said the chairman. “Our next meeting will be devoted to a thesis by Comrade Leskov on ‘Marxism and Collectivism.’”

If this sort of thing sounds like a lot of fun to you, then you should be applauding the increased politicization of America. Of course, to a certain type of person–the type represented above by the girl in the leather jacket–such a society is something to look forward to.

The endpoint of such a society can be found in the words of the Nazi judge Roland Freisler, who, in sentencing Christoph Probst to death, sneered at his defense: “He is a “nonpolitical man…hence no man at all!”…the implication being that manhood and humanity are only to be found via participation in (approved) political activity. This is the ultimate development of the “the personal is political” line.

The politicization of American life has originated very largely in the universities–indeed, what has happened in these institutions has been a leading indicator for what is happening in the larger society. For just one of thousands of examples, see this video (continues here) about the indoctrination conducted by the University of Delaware as part of its “Residence Life” program. See also the notes of one of UD’s designated indoctrinators about his or her interview with a young woman who was showing more independence and spirit than is apparently desired by that institution. (The second interview) The degree of bureaucratic intrusiveness in this conversation could have come right out the the “House of the Peasant” in the above-referenced novel.

These UD examples are from 2006, and this kind of thing has metastasized over the ensuing 20 years.

The playwright and filmmaker David Mamet wrote an interesting book about the film industry, Bambi vs. Godzilla. His 1992 play Oleanna, which he describes as “a rather straightforward classical tragedy,” involves a girl who makes an accusation of rape against a male professor, said accusation being either questionable or outright false.

The play’s first audience a group of undergraduates from Brown. They came to a dress rehearsal. The play ended and I asked the folks what they thought. “Don’t you think it’s politically questionable,” said one, “to have the girl make a false accusation of rape?”

(I guess it was even more politically questionable for Shakespeare to have Lady Macbeth plotting murder.) Mamet describes his own reaction to the reaction of the Brown students:

I, in my ignorance, was stunned. I didn’t realize that it was my job to be politically acceptable. I’d always thought society employed me to be dramatic; further, I wondered what force had so perverted the young that they would think that increasing the political enfranchisement of a group rendered a member of that group incapable of error, in effect, rendered her other than human.

For if the subject of art is not our maculate, fragile, and often pathetic humanity, what is the point of the exercise?

But, of course, in the fully politicized society the role of art is the same as the role of science or education or car-building or grocery-shopping….to promote the interests of the dominant or ascendant power structure.

Note that the incident David Mamet describes happened way back in 1992. We are now in our second or third generation of university administrators and professors who have grown up in a highly politicized climate and take it as the normal way for human beings to live. It was inevitable that this toxic orientation would seep out into the larger society and increasingly dominate it, and now it has.

I wrote the original version of this post in 2014. Since then, the politicization has grown and metastasized. Sports, once a neutral meeting ground in which political affiliations mattered less than team loyalties, has now become extremely politicized. Hobby groups, from birdwatching to knitting, are now frequently boiling over with political tension. Dating and marriage increasingly follow political lines, and political differences often drive couples and families to disconnect. The HR function, which once fulfilled a very useful purpose in many corporations, now seems to be increasingly dominated by people like the girl in the leather jacket in Rand’s novel.

And increasingly, politicization cannot be avoided even by the expedient of keeping one’s mouth shut…one is required to affirmatively state agreement with the ruling ideology. I’m reminded of a story told by the Russian rocket developer Boris Cherok. In his wonderful memoir, Chertok mentions his friend Oleg, who was a talented poet as well as an Army officer. Irrespective of his military talents, Oleg’s prospects for promotion were not viewed as favorable, because his poetry was “very unsettling to the political department.”

And why? It was not because the Red Army had any dislike of poets. Nor was it even because his poetry contained criticisms of the regime–there were no such criticisms. No, the objection was because of what the poetry didn’t contain. As another friend of Chertok’s, Mira, explained the situation: The political workers consider his poems to be demoralizing and decadent. Not once does he mention the Party or Stalin in them.

There is also pressure to break personal or professional connections with those who are viewed with political disfavor. For example, this from Jonathan Kay:

A few weeks ago, shortly after I left my magazine gig, I had breakfast with a well-known Toronto man of letters. He told me his week had been rough, in part because it had been discovered that he was still connected on social media with a colleague who’d fallen into disfavour with Stupid Twitter-Land. “You know that we all can see that you are still friends with him,” read one of the emails my friend had received. “So. What are you going to do about that?”

“So I folded,” he told me with a sad, defeated air. “I know I’m supposed to stick to my principles. That’s what we tell ourselves. Free association and all that. It’s part of the romance of our profession. But I can’t afford to actually do that. These people control who gets jobs. I’m broke. So now I just go numb and say whatever they need me to say.”

Note that phrase “with a sad and defeated air,” and think about what things like this do to the human spirit. This particular example is from Canada, but there are plenty of similar cases in the United States.

The Democrats, together with their media and academic cheering squads, accuse Republicans in general and Donald Trump in particular of being Authoritarian. But it should actually be clear to anyone paying attention that by far the stronger authoritarian spirit–confirmed by actual authoritarian actions–exists among the Democrats: the push to censor social media, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the unlawful importing of what they expect to be future Democratic voters, the intent to neuter any challenges from the Supreme Court, Charles Schumer’s evident approval of the idea that the intelligence agencies are sovereign over an elected President…all of this is intended to keep control of government exclusively within the control of the Party and its affiliates. But today’s Democrats go beyond Authoritarianism: in many ways, they represent outright Totalitarianism. There is no aspect of American society that they do not wish to control and to reform according to their preferences. And they will seek to undermine the emergence and existence of any independent centers of influence that threaten their hegemony. This is why they don’t like Elon Musk and will–if they have the power–use tax and regulatory policy to prevent the emergence of any new Elon Musks.

Had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election–and especially if the Democrats had gained control of both houses of Congress–it is not at all clear that the march toward authoritarianism and totalitarianism would have been reversible. And the danger has by no means gone away.

I disagree with some aspects of Trump’s policies and behavior, and those of the Republican Party and MAGA in general, but Republicans and Trump supporters do not have the totalitarian spirit at their core in the way that today’s Democrats do. The idea that society should be designed and controlled by the government has been an increasingly dominant view in the Democratic Party at least since Woodrow Wilson and now could be fairly called a fundamental capstone of that party…and of its extensions in academia and the media. And such top-down design and control requires, of course, draining the old identity of the citizens.

See also my post The Bitter Wastes of Politicized America and Daniel Greenfield’s post The Paranoid Party.

Earlier versions of this post have appeared at Chicago Boyz, most recently here

But he was more than a little disturbed by some of those that shared his viewpoint. Describing one protest he had attended, he wrote:

From sometime during this spring of 1926 of from the winter before a recollection keeps rising to the surface. The protest meeting is over and I’m standing on a set of steps looking into the faces of the people coming out of the hall. I’m frightened by the tense righteousness of the faces. Eyes like a row of rifles aimed by a firing squad. Chins thrust forward into the icy night. It’s almost in marching step that they stride out into the street. It’s the women I remember most, their eyes searching out evil through narrowed lids. There’s something threatening about this unanimity of protest. They are so sure they are right.

I agree with their protest: I too was horrified by this outrage. I’m not one either to stand by and see injustice done. But do I agree enough? A chill goes down my spine..Whenever I remember the little scene I tend to turn it over in my mind. Why did my hackles rise at the sight of the faces of these good people coming out of the hall?

Was it a glimpse of the forming of a new class conformity that like all class conformities was bent on riding the rest of us?

Quoting Dos Passos and connecting his observations to our own time, Jay Nordlinger wrote:

I know these people. I saw them in Ann Arbor. I saw them in many other places afterward. Today, you can see them on campuses as social-justice warriors. You can see them wherever there is arrogant, intolerant extremism (no matter which direction it’s coming from).

The thing that frightened Dos Passos in the attitude of these protestors–who were, remember, his allies–is in my opinion quite similar to the thing that is so disturbing about so many of today’ s ‘progressive’ protestors. Dos (as he was called) was entirely correct to be disturbed by what he saw, but I don’t think he diagnosed it quite correctly. Though he refers to the protestors he observed as ‘those good people,’ quite likely many of them weren’t good people at all, even if they were right about their cause, but were rather engaging in the not-good-at-all pleasure of conformity and the enforcement thereof, and would given half a chance have gone all the way to the even-worse pleasure of bullying.

The writer Arthur Koestler (‘Darkness at Noon’), himself a former Communist, has written about the nature of intellectually closed systems–which can include, but are not limited to, political ideologies–and the characteristics of those who are attracted to such systems and allow themselves to be dominated by them; some excerpts here. The phenomenon discussed above–the unwholesome pleasure of behaving with cruelty while simultaneously feeling virtuous–is another factor which often drives political belief and, especially, political activism. We have seen a lot of that behavior in the abuse, intimidation, and sometimes outright violence that we have seen directed at Jewish college students in the last two years.

Whether or not Dos’s view of the motivations of the Sacco & Vanzetti protestors he saw is a fair one–and I am simply layering the explanation that seems to make sense to me on top of Dos’s description of his own subjective reactions–the spirt of conformity certainly drives a great deal of political and other wickedness. I remember a German man who was interviewed near the beginning of the TV series The World at War. Although he was anti-Nazi, he described the emotional pull he felt when viewing Party rallies as strong desire to be part of such a cohesive and committed group.

Here’s a related post: A desire to fit in is the root of almost all wrongdoing.

Although most assume that an immoral person is one who is ready to defy law and convention to get what they want, I think the inverse is often true. Immorality is frequently motivated by a readiness to conform to law and convention in opposition to our own values.

One feature common among today ‘progressives’,¦and maybe among those of Dos Passos’s time too, is coupling the feeling of courage that they get from believing that they are defying law and convention with the feeling of security they get from conforming to an in-group.

See also C S Lewis on The Inner Ring. Speaking at King’s College in 1944, Lewis said:

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naive or a prig, the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which we–and at the word ‘we’ you try not to blush for mere pleasure–something we always do.

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face, that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated faceâ, turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Closely related to the Pleasures of Conformity are the Pleasures of Bullying. See this post on that subject, and in particular on the persecution of a professor at Florida Atlantic University for the ‘crime’ of accepting grant money from the Koch Brothers.

Professor DeRosa’s picture has been plastered on the walls of college buildings by supposedly concerned students with demeaning messages that he’s a white supremacist and that his presence on campus is an outrage demanding action. In my opinion, it’ ridiculous to describe those engaged in these defamatory actions, as some commentators do, as snowflakes. They are dangerous thought police, who in this case have targeted a thoroughly decent teacher.

I have no doubt that many of these Social Justice Warriorsâ are people who, had they lived in earlier times, would have eagerly participated in the burning of witches, the accusation of innocent people as Communists, or the mocking and humiliation of any woman who dared deviate from her prescribed gender roles. For a lot of people, the ability to combine submission (to the group) with aggression (toward the designated targets of the group) is very attractive. There is often also an element of fear–a person who feels threatened may want to join what seems to them to be the largest, strongest, and most aggressive pack around. (See comment by Katherine O’Connor at this Story Rules Project post)

I am again reminded of a passage in Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen, after finding that she is pregnant by Faust, is talking with her awful friend Lieschen, who (still unaware of Gretchen’s situation) is licking her chops about the prospect of humiliating another girl (Barbara) who has also become pregnant outside of marriage. Here’ s Gretchen, reflecting on her own past complicity in such viciousness:

How readily I used to blame
Some poor young soul that came to shame!
Never found sharp enough words like pins
To stick into other people’s sins
Black as it seemed, I tarred it to boot
And never black enough to suit
Would cross myself, exclaim and preen
Now I myself am bared to sin!

There’s a lot of this ‘sharp enough words like pins to stick in other people, combined with the pleasure of preening, going on today. And many if not most practitioners thereof will, unlike Gretchen, likely never repent.

An earlier version of this article was posted at Chicago Boyz

In August of 1798, the French revolutionary government landed 1000 troops in County Mayo to support indigenous Irish rebels, with the objective of overthrowing British rule in Ireland. The Year of the French tells the (fictionalized but fact-based) story of these events from the viewpoint of several characters, representing different groups in the complex and strife-ridden Irish social structure of the time.

Owen MacCarthy is a schoolmaster and poet who writes in the Gaelic tradition. He is pressed by illiterate locals to write a threatening letter to a landlord who has evicted tenants while switching land from farming to cattle-raising. With his dark vision of how an attempt at rebellion must end “In Caslebar. They will load you in carts with your wrists tied behind you and take you down to Castlebar and try you there and hang you there,” MacCarthy is reluctant to get involved, but he writes the letter.

Sam Cooper, the recipient of the letter, is a small-scale landlord, and captain of the local militia. Indigenously Irish, his family converted to Protestantism several generations ago to avoid the crippling social and economic disabilities imposed on Catholics. Cooper’s wife, Kate, herself still Catholic, is a beautiful and utterly ruthless woman…she advises Cooper to respond to the letter by rounding up “a few of the likeliest rogues,” jailing and flogging them, without any concern for actual guilt or innocence. “My God, what a creature you are for a woman,” Cooper responds. “It is a man you should have been born.” “A strange creature that would make me in your bed,” Kate fires back, “It is a woman I am, and fine cause you have to know it…What matters now is who has the land and who will keep it.”

Ferdy O’Donnell is a young hillside farmer on Cooper’s land. Far back in the past, the land was owned by the O’Donnell family…Ferdy had once shown Cooper “a valueless curiosity, a parchment that recorded the fact in faded ink the colour of old, dried blood.”

Arthur Vincent Broome is a Protestant clergyman who is not thrilled by the “wild and dismal region” to which he has been assigned, but who performs his duties as best he can. Broome is resolved to eschew religious bigotry, but…”I affirm most sincerely that distinctions which rest upon creed mean little to me, and yet I confess that my compassion for their misery is mingled with an abhorrence of their alien ways…they live and thrive in mud and squalour…their music, for all that antiquarians and fanatics can find to say in its flavor, is wild and savage…they combine a grave and gentle courtesy with a murderous violence that erupts without warning…”’

Malcolm Elliott is a Protestant landlord and solicitor, and a member of the Society of United Irishmen. This was a revolutionary group with Enlightenment ideals, dedicated to bringing Catholics and Protestants together in the cause of overthrowing British rule and establishing an Irish Republic. His wife, Judith, is an Englishwoman with romantic ideas about Ireland.

John Moore, also a United Irishman, is a member of one of the few Catholic families that have managed to hold on to their land. He is in love with Ellen Treacy, daughter of another prominent Catholic family: she returns his love, but believes that he is caught in a web of words that can only lead to disaster. “One of these days you will say a loose word to some fellow and he will get on his horse and ride off to Westport to lay an information with Dennis Browne, and that will be the last seen of you”

Dennis Browne is High Sheriff of Mayo…smooth, manipulative, and devoted to the interests of the very largest landowners in the county, such as his brother Lord Altamont and the mysterious Lord Glenthorne, the “Big Lord” who owns vast landholdings and an immense house which he has never visited.

Randall MacDonnell is a Catholic landowner with a decrepit farm and house, devoted primarily to his horses. His motivations for joining the rebellion are quite different from those of the idealistic United Irishmen…”For a hundred years of more, those Protestant bastards have been the cocks of the walk, strutting around on acres that belong by rights to the Irish…there are men still living who remember when a son could grab his father’s land by turning Protestant.”

Jean Joseph Humbert is the commander of the French forces. A former dealer in animal skins, he owes his position in life to the revolution. He is a talented commander, but the battle he is most concerned about is the battle for status and supremacy between himself and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Charles Cornwallis, the general who surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, is now in charge of defeating the French and the rebels and pacifying the rebellious areas of Ireland. Seen through the eyes of a young aide who admires him greatly, Cornwallis is portrayed as a basically kindly man who can be hard when he thinks it necessary, but takes no pleasure in it. “The color of war had long since bleached from his thoughts, and it remained for him only a duty to be scrupulously performed.”

This book is largely about the way in which the past lives on in the present, both in the world of physical objects and the world of social relationships. Two characters who make a brief appearance are Richard Manning, proprietor of a decrepit and debt-laden castle, and his companion Ellen Kirwan:

He ran his hand along the stone. When was it this keep had been built? The fourteenth century or the fifteenth. The MacDermotts had held it in Cromwell’s day…When the Cromwellian army moved west from Sligo, the MacDermotts had been blown out of their keep, quite literally. The yawning crater in the east wall was the work of Ireton’s artillery…

And here stand I, Manning thought, inheritor of that conquest, sick at heart because other armies are moving along the same road. Faces flushed by candleflame in Daly’s gaming rooms, children, like himself, of Cromwell’s spawn, bank drafts written against the harvests of Muster and Connaught. Ellen Kirwan, taken by right of Cromwell’s conquest, peasant’s daughter brought gawky and long-legged into the big house, her legs spread to receive that ancient conquest, Ireton’s battering cannon. More wife than mistress now, fussing over him, reminding him to shave, knitting patiently by firelight as he worked and reworked the account books.

“It is a sorry mess that history has made of us,” he tells Ellen. “Old wounds and old debts. God help us all.”

The book is also about the way in which history is driven by words and abstractions. “Words have a splendor for us,” observes Malcolm Elliott, “and so we send them off into the world to do mischief.”

Ellen Treacy:

On a rise of ground from which she could see the distant bay, she stopped and sat motionless, the reins slack in her thin, capable hands. The bay was empty, not a sail or a hull in sight, the water lifeless and gray. History had come to them upon these water, three foreign ships riding at anchor, filled with men, muskets, cannon. History had come ashore at Kilcummin strand, watched by fishermen standing beside their huts. Poetry made actual. Not her mother’s, not Goldsmith’s or The Seasons by Mr Thompson…That other, older poetry, the black letters of an alphabet remote from English, with prophesies of ships from France, gold from Spain, the deliverance of the Gael. History, poetry, abstractions, words which had transformed and shattered her world.

An incredibly good, involving, thought-provoking, emotionally-affecting book. I recommend it very highly.

Given the recent advances of AI and robotics in our own era–and the positive and negative forecasts about the implications–I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at two short story collections on this general theme: Thinking Machines, edited by Groff Conklin, and The Robot and the Man, edited by Martin Greenberg. Both books date from around 1954. Here are some of the stories I thought were most interesting, mostly from the above sources but also a couple of them from other places.

(I was reminded of the first story by an article in the WSJ: Inside the world of AI song-making: Big Hits and a Seven-Figure Deal)

Virtuouso, by Herbert Goldstone. A famous musician has acquired a robot for household tasks. The robot–dubbed ‘Rollo’ by the Masestro–notices the piano in the residence, and expresses interest in it. Intrigued, the Maestro plays ‘Claire de Lune’ for Rollo, then gives him a one-hour lesson and heads off to bed, after authorizing the robot to practice playing on his own. He wakes to the sound of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’.

Rollo was playing it. He was creating it, breathing it, drawing it through silver flame. Time became meaningless, suspended in midair.

“It was not very difficult,” Rollo explains.

The Maestro let his fingers rest on the keys, strangely foreign now. “Music! He breathed. “I may have heard it that way in my soul. I know Beethoven did.

Very excited, the Maestro sets up plans for Rollo to give a concert–for “Conductors, concert pianists, composers, my manager. All the giants of music, Rollo. Wait until they hear you play!”

But Rollo’s response is unexpected. He says that his programming provides the option to decline any request that he considers harmful to his owner, and that therefore, he must refuse to touch the piano again. “The piano is not a machine,” that powerful inhuman voice droned. “To me, yes. I can translate the notes into sounds at a glance. From only a few I am able to grasp at once the composer’s conception. It is easy for me.”

“I can also grasp,” the brassy monotone rolled through the studio, that this…music is not for robots. It is for man. To me it is easy, yes…it was not meant to be easy.”

The Jester, by William Tenn. In this story, it is not a musician but a comedian who seeks robotic involvement in his profession. Mr Lester…Lester the Jester, the glib sahib of ad lib…thinks it might be useful to have a robot partner for his video performances. It does not work out well for him.

Boomerang, by Frank Russell. In this story, the robot is designed to be an assassin, acting on behalf of a group representing the New Order. Very human in appearance and behavior, it is charged with gaining access to targeted leaders and killing them. If it is faced with an insoluble problem–for example, if the human-appearing ‘William Smith’ should be arrested and cannot talk his way out of the situation–then it will detonate an internal charge and destroy itself. As a precaution, it has been made impossible for the robot to focus its lethal rays on its makers. And, it is possessed of a certain kind of emotional drive–“William Smith hates personal power inasmuch as a complex machine can be induced to hate anything. Therefore, he is the ideal instrument for destroying such power.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Mechanical Answer, by John D MacDonald. For reasons that are never explained, the development of a Thinking Machine has become a major national priority. After continued failures by elite scientists, a practical engineer and factory manager named Joe Kaden is drafted to run the project. And I do mean drafted: running the Thinking Machine project means being separated from his wife Jane, who he adores. And even though Joe has a record of inventiveness, which is the reason he was offered the Thinking Machine job in the first place, he questions his ability to make a contribution in this role.

But Jane, who has studied neurology and psychiatry, feeds him some ideas that hold the key to success. Her idea is basically to create a matrix of associations among words and concepts. As Joe Kaden explains it to a colleague, ‘rabbits’ and ‘lettuce’ might have high ratio number. Kaden envisages an analog approach, based on varying strengths of electrical current across a field with varying factors of resistance and seeking for the path of least-resistance. (It’s interesting that analog is now being considered as an alternative to improve LLM Inference speed and reduce power consumption)

The Thinking Machine is built, it shows much more ‘creativity’ than previous approaches, and it shows great skills as a kind of Super-LLM question-answerer.

When the Machine is demonstrated to an audience which includes not only its American sponsors but the Dictator of Asia, the Ruler of Europe, and the King of the States of Africa, the questions to be asked have been carefully vetted. But when it is asked an unvetted question–“Will the machine help in the event of a war between nations?”…the answer given is unexpected: “Warfare should now become avoidable. All of the factors in any dispute can be give to the Machine and an unemotional fair answer can be rendered.”

Of course.

Burning Bright, by John Browning. A large number of robots are used to work in the radiation-saturated environment within nuclear power plants. The internal mental processes of these robots are not well understood, hence, no robots are allowed outside of the power plants–it is feared that robot armies could be raised on behalf of hostile powers, or even that robots themselves will become rivals of humans for control of the planet. So robots are given no knowledge of the world outside of power plants, no knowledge of anything except their duty of obedience to humans. And whenever a robot becomes too worn-out to be of any continued usefulness, it is scrapped–and its brain are dissolved in acid.

One day, a robot facing its doom is found to have a molded plastic star in its hands–apparently a religious object.

(See this rather spooky response from a real LLM)

Though Dreamers, Die, Lester del Rey. Following the outbreak of a plague which looks like it may destroy all human life on earth, a starship is launched. A small group of humans, who must be kept in suspended animation because of the great length of the journey to a habitable planet, is assisted by a crew of robots. When the principal human character, Jorgan, is awakened by a robot, he assumes that the ship must be nearing its destination. It is, but the news is grim. All of the other humans on board have died–Jorgen, for some reason, seems to be immune to the plague, at least so far. And among those who did not survive Anna Holt, the only woman.

If it had been Anna Holt who had survived, Jorgen reflects, she could have continued the human race by using the frozen sperm that has been stored. “So it took the girl! It took the girl, Five, when it could have left her and chosen me…The gods had to leave one uselessly immune man to make their irony complete it seems! Immune”

“No, master,” the robot replies. The disease as been greatly slowed in the case of Jorgen, but it will get him in the end–maybe after thirty years.

“Immunity or delay, what difference now? What happens to all our dreams when the last dreamer dies, Five? Or maybe it’s the other way around.”

All the dreams of a thousand generations of men had been concentrated into Anna Holt, he reflects, and were gone with her. The ship lands on the new world--a world that appears to be perfect for humans. “It had to be perfect, Five,” he said, not bitterly, but in numbed fatalism. “Without that, the joke would have been flat.”

Man and robot discuss the world that could have been, the city and the statue to commemorate their landing. “Dreams!” Jorgen erupts. “Still, the dream was beautiful, just as this planet is, master.” Five responds. “Standing there, while we landed, I could see the city, and I almost dared hope. I do not regret the dream I had.”

Jorgen decides that the heritage of humanity can go on–“When the last dreamer died, the dream would go on, because it was stronger than those who had created it; somewhere, somehow, it would find new dreamers.” And Five’s simpatico words–combined with a cryptic partial recording about robot minds and the semantics of the first person signature, left by the expedition’s leader, Dr Craig–convince him that the robots can carry forward the deeper meaning of the human race. Five demurs, though: “But it would be a lonely world, Master Jordan, filled with memories of your people, and the dreams we had would be barren for us.”

There is a solution, though. The robots are instructed to forget all knowledge of or related to the human race, although all their other knowledge will remain. And Jorgen boards the starship and blasts off alone.

Dumb Waiter, Walter Miller. (The author is best known for his classic post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz) In this story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system. But when war erupted--featuring radiological attacks--some of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.

I was reminded of this story in 2013 by the behavior of the Swedish police during rampant rioting–issuing parking tickets to burned-out cars. My post is here.

The combination of human bureaucracy and not-too-intelligent automation seems likely to lead to many events which are similar in kind if not (hopefully) in degree.

Year of Consent, Kendell Foster Crossen. This 1954 novel is set in the then-future year of 1990. The United States is still nominally a democracy, but the real power lies with the social engineers…sophisticated advertising & PR men…who use psychological methods to persuade people that they really want what they are supposed to want. The social engineers are aided in their tasks by a giant computer called Sociac (500,000 vacuum tubes! 860,000 relays!) and colloquially known as ‘Herbie.’ There are also ‘psychotherapy calculators’, devices which can help people overcome their ‘communication blocks’, ie, any reluctance to accept the promulgated opinions and worldview. I reviewed the book here.

The Golden Egg, Theodore Sturgeon. The protagonist is a being from a superintelligent race which resides many galaxies away. Over time, this race has solved all their problems and have reduced themselves to only brains, each contained an invulnerable egg-like shell and with control over powerful forces. Their problem is boredom.

There was nothing for them. They hung in small groups conversing of things unimaginable to us, or they lay on the plains of their world and lived within themselves until a few short aeons buried them, all uncaring, in rubble and rock. Some asked to be killed and were killed. Some were murdered by others because of quibblings in remote philosophic discussions. Some hurled themselves into the blue sun, starved for any new sensation, knowing they would find there an instant’s agony. Most simply vegetated. One came away.

That one is our protagonist. Traveling across the galaxies, he eventually comes to earth. He observes humans, and decides he would like to try being one–not a difficult task given his superhuman abilities. Noting that there are two sexes, he chooses to be one of the males. To recreate himself in human form, he must first set up his apparatus.

The machine had no switches, no indicators, no dials. It was built to do a certain job, and as soon as it was completed it began working. When the job was done it quit. It was the kind of machine whose perfection ruined the brain’s civilization, and has undoubtedly ruined others, and will most certainly ruin more.

He has chosen his physical form by using his telepathic abilities to enter the mind of a nearby woman and exploring her concept of the ideal male. This works out well for him–but he chooses his clothing and his manner of speech by modeling a tramp named Chauncey, and this works out much less-well. When he meets a woman named Ariadne, she admires his handsomeness but is turned off by those other attributes. So he probes her mind and adopts the manner of talking common among Ariadne and her female friends. Which, he finds, does not make a positive impression at all.

I found the entire story, together with a short review, here.

Appointment in Tomorrow, Fritz Leiber. Similar to Mechanical Answer, this story is about a Thinking Machine that is perceived as an oracle…but with a twist. When the machine is asked a question:

the question tape, like a New Year’s streamer tossed out a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes, impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and, reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.

He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the answer.

The story can be found online in this collection.

Final Command, AE Van Vogt. Humans have become so excessively dependent on robots that the human leadership sees only one possible solution: destroy all robots.

Meanwhile, the robots are wondering what they need all those humans around for.

It is important to the story that the robots have developed a sort-of simulation of human sex.

The story is online here.

Into Thy Hands, Lester del Rey. Anticipating a war which will destroy civilization, a man named Simon Ames (’bitter as only a confirmed idealist can be’) determines to preserve human knowledge against the deluge. In addition to hopefully-secure storage of books and movies, his plan involves the construction of three robots embodying the main branches of knowledge. (Three robots are required because of memory limitations) Two of the robots have male forms, their memories are devoted to physical science and biological sciences, the third robots has a female form and is focused on the humanities.

Centuries later, one of the robots awakes and tries to understand who he is, where he came from, and what he is supposed to do.

He finds a film of the biblical Genesis story and wonders which of the characters he might be.

(Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz. Earlier version of this post and the comment threat is here)

Your thoughts?

And while much of the anger is politically-motivated, not all of it is. There are political assassination attempts…and approval for such attempts…but there are also incidents of very bad behavior on airliners and other public conveyances, and snarly interactions between customers and representatives of businesses…with the snarling sometimes on both sides.

Of course, there has always been a lot of anger–probably characteristic of all societies, certainly the case in American society. In the 1850s, a Senator was brutally caned by another Senator on the senate floor. Lynch mobs existed. There were insane attacks against German-Americans and all things German during WWI, in a toxic climate that had been established by Woodrow Wilson. And some of the same against Japanese Americans during WWII. But what is unique about present-day anger is both its multidimensional nature and its pervasiveness.

What are the reasons for all this anger?…what will be the consequences if it is not damped down?…and can it be damped down?

The first thing that will surely come to almost everybody’s mind as a reason is social media…and, particularly, the algorithms that encourage negative rather than positive interaction. There is some truth in this, but it’s too easy to treat it as the exclusive cause. Cable media is at least as bad, though cable news viewership seems fortunately to be on the decline.

Some of it is career and economic disappointment. There are strong feelings on the part of many college graduates that they did what they were supposed to do, and ‘society’ did not hold up its part of the bargain by providing them with the kinds of careers and incomes that they expected. And non-college graduates often feel disrespected as well an unfairly limited in their careers.

A friend once remarked that “if someone is bitter, then he is publicly announcing that in his own eyes he is a failure.” I thought this was a profound comment, and by that measure, there are a lot of people in America today who consider themselves to be failures–too often not leading them to seriously consider how they can do better, but rather toward envy and resentment toward others.

There is an expectation of perfection which leads to a continual sense of disappointment. For example: after the recent NYC helicopter crash, comments were flooded with accusations against the helicopter designers–‘how could anyone possibly design something that can fail like this?’ But things aren’t ever going to be perfect, and thus, there will always be something to be angry about. I’ve read that there are tribal societies that believe that nothing bad ever happens except through witchcraft…if someone gets sick or dies, well, bad things don’t just happen, he must have been witched. There is an unwholesome amount of this kind of thinking in America today.

The above is related to the myth of a golden age. I’ve seen many people asserting that there was some golden age in which Americans were naturally healthy, before we were poisoned by Big Food and Big Pharma. No historical memory of the infectious diseases that killed so many children before the age of 5, or the fact that women faced serious risk of dying in childbirth, or of a thousand not-so-healthy things. Of course, we should address problems with food and pharmaceuticals, but this doesn’t justify a denial of everything positive that has been done and from which we have benefitted. See Ruxandra Teslo on why she is glad she wasn’t born a century or two ago. See also the trend chart of words reflecting progress and future versus caution, worry, and risk-aversion–in English, French, and German–over the past four centuries at this Ruxandra post.

Indeed, the whole idea that people in earlier times have done things from which we have benefitted has been lost, even negated. We suffer from a malign form of negative ancestor-worship.

A huge factor is the focus on identity established through demographically–defined groups, identities usually emphasized for politically-tendentious reasons. I’m reminded of something Ralph Peters said:

Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characterized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well…Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted…We refuse to believe that the “civilized peoples of the Balkans could slaughter each other over an event that occurred over six hundred years ago. But they do. Hatred does not need a reason, only an excuse.

Also see @alexthechick on Tribalism.

Roger Simon argues that a primary cause of the outpouring of anger is the decline of religion. Maybe to some extent, but I’m pretty sure that lynch mobs included a substantial complement of believing, church-going people; the hanging of witches certainly did. The decline of formal religion, though, does contribute to the increase in the number of isolated, disconnected individuals.

A lot of people are looking for a source of identity, and while some of this traditionally came from religion, much of it came from family, which has clearly had a declining influence. There’s an ad for a matchmaking service that’s recently been on tv a lot, in which a woman expresses her disappointment with online dating services and says she “just wants to meet someone she can introduce to her friends.” I thought this was interesting: a few decades ago, it would have been “someone she could introduce to her parents.”

There are a lot of people who get their incomes from stirring up anger. This includes not only political operators, and online influencers, but a large number of NGOs which are largely about attacking some set of organizations and/or people. And a significant part of American academia is endlessly busy manufacturing new and revised group identities, and stirring up resentments based thereon.

Rob Henderson says, speaking of much of today’s political rhetoric “Notice it’s always “smash the system” and “demolish capitalism” and “eat the rich.” It’s never “help the needy” or “feed the poor.” You’ll see a thousand communists say “billionaires shouldn’t exist” but not a single one who says “poor people shouldn’t exist.”

The politicization of absolutely everything is certainly a major factor in the metastasization of anger in our society. As I remarked in this post:

One reason why American political dialog has become so unpleasant is that increasingly, everything is a political issue. Matters that are life-and-death to individuals…metaphorically life-and-death, to his financial future or the way he wants to live his life, or quite literally life-and-death…are increasingly grist for the political mill. And where that takes us is that:

People who disagree with your agenda are “attacking” you or “robbing” you. How commonly do you hear dissent described in precisely those terms nowadays?

When the government controls everything, there is no constructive relief valve for all this pent-up tension. It all boils down to a “historic” election once every couple of years, upon whose outcome everything depends. They’re all going to be “historic” elections from now on. That’s not a good thing. (link)

I think it is also likely that therapy culture has done more harm than good as far as the climate of anger goes. Several years ago, the blogger called girlwithadragonflytattoo (no longer available) had a post on anger at which she argued that–contrary to the common belief–expressing one’s anger is generally not a good idea, from the standpoint of one’s own mental health. A lot of people today seem to feel the opposite, or they are so angry that they don’t care what effect their anger-expressions have on their own well-being. I suspect that therapy culture has often encouraged this attitude.

The post by Dragonfly Girl reminded me of a post by Grim, in which he discussed anger in a political context, and channeled Andrew Klavan to point out that anger can make you stupid.

Grim: We need to be cunning. We need to think and act strategically.

Klavan: You want to win back your country? Here’s how. Fear nothing. Hate no one. Stick to principles. Unchecked borders are dangerous not because Mexicans are evil but because evil thrives when good men don’t stand guard. Poverty programs are misguided, not because the poor are undeserving criminals, but because dependency on government breeds dysfunction and more poverty. Guns save lives and protect liberty. Property rights guarantee liberty. Religious rights are essential to liberty. Without liberty we are equal only in misery.

Anger of course does have a purpose. In politics, it is anger at bad policies and their destructive impact that can motivate one to get involved and work hard for positive change. In relationships, anger at mistreatment can motivate one to fix it or get out of it. But anger needs to be controlled and moderated or it becomes the enemy of judicious thought and effective action.

One of the reasons for the French loss in the campaign of 1940 was the internal angers and resentments which existed in French society at the time.

Another excellent example of the effects of uncontrolled anger can be found in that piece of military history known as the Charge of the Light Brigade. This unnecessary disaster took place during the Crimean War, in 1854, and seems to have been driven in considerable part by toxic emotions on the part of British officers involved. While the details of the Charge are still being debated by historians, 161 years later, the general outline was as follows…

The Light Cavalry Brigade was commanded by Lord Cardigan, who in turn was subordinate to the overall Cavalry commander, Lord Lucan. The two men were related, and they could not stand each other, to the point where they avoided communication. Neither was popular in the army.

On October 25, the overall British commander in the Crimea, Lord Raglan, was situated on high ground, from which he had a far better view of the field than did Cardigan and Lucan. He and his staff observed that the Russians had captured some heavy British guns and were about to haul them away. An order was dispatched to Lucan under the signature of Raglan’s chief of staff:

Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. R Airey. Immediate.

The order was handed to Captain Louis Nolan, a superb horseman who was sure to deliver it as rapidly as possible. In addition to his equestrian skills, Nolan was an experienced military professional who had devoted considerable thought to cavalry tactics and written books on the subject. He believed the cavalry was being mishandled in the Crimean campaign and he viewed Cardigan and Lucan as men who lacked military professionalism and held their positions only because of their inherited social status. Nolan had also served in India, and the snob Cardigan was highly prejudiced against officers with that background, believing they lacked the social graces and elegance of attire which were important to him. (Indeed, on one occasion Cardigan had persecuted Nolan for ordering what he believed to be a socially-unacceptable kind of wine.)

As Nolan galloped away, Raglan called after him, “Tell Lord Lucan the cavalry is to attack immediately.” Nolan sent his horse diving down the hill and quickly reached the place where the cavalry was stationed.

“Lord Raglan’s orders,” Nolan told Lucan, “are that the cavalry should attack immediately.” His tone of voice can only be guessed at, but it is said that he was “already mad with anger”…at Lucan, at Cardigan, and at the whole British command structure and what he believed to be their incompetence.

“Attack, sir! Attack what? What guns, sir? Where and what to do?”

“There, my Lord! There is your enemy! There are your guns!” Nolan snapped back, waving his arm in a gesture “more of rage than of indication.”

Lucan could not see the British guns which were being hauled away; the only guns in sight were the Russian battery at the far end of the North valley, where Russian cavalry was also stationed. Certainly Nolan’s “impertinent and flamboyant” gesture had seemed to point in that direction. Lucan trotted over and passed on the order to Cardigan, who, “coldly polite,” dropped his sword in salute.

“Certainly, sir,” Cardigan responded. “But allow me to point out to you that the Russians have a battery in the valley on our front, and riflemen and batteries on each flank.”

“I know it,” replied Lucan. “But Lord Raglan will have it. We have no choice but to obey.”

Raglan and his staff, and the French allies, watched in horror as the beautifully-uniformed Light Brigade, which they had expected to turn in the direction of the captured guns, headed straight down the valley into the jaws of the main Russian battery position. Nolan, who had chosen to ride with the brigade, cut across in front of the commander, Cardigan, waving his sword and shouting something–he could not be heard because of the boom of the Russian guns, but almost certainly he was trying to warn Cardigan that he was going the wrong way. One of the first shells to be fired killed him (Nolan) in the saddle. Breaking into a gallop, the Brigade continued toward the Russian position, now under fire from three sides.

The Light Brigade did reach the Russian battery and kill most of the Russian gunners; the military value of this is questionable. When what was left of the Brigade returned to its starting point, 156 of its members had been killed or were missing, and 122 were wounded. 335 horses had been killed or mortally wounded.

“It is a mad-brained trick,” said Cardigan to a group of survivors, “But it is no fault of mine.”

So, what happened here? In part, the debacle was caused by technical/intellectual failings…Airey’s order could have been clearer, pointing out the direction of the designated target, which he knew Lucan and Cardigan could not see. But the main cause of the disaster, I think, was emotional. If Nolan had been able to contain his (apparently quite justified) anger at Lucan and Cardigan, and to coolly point out the direction of the target, then Raglan’s original order would surely have been carried out as intended. If Lucan and Cardigan had not disliked one another so strongly, they might have been able to discuss the order for a moment and recognize that their interpretation of it didn’t make any sense–the guns they had interpreted as their assigned target were not being “carried away.” And after the Charge had already begun, if Cardigan had been able to keep his fury at Nolan under control (he thought Nolan’s crossing in front of him meant the Nolan was trying to take command of the Brigade), he might have recognized that he needed to change directions. (In the event, Cardigan’s mind was possessed with rage at Nolan both during the charge and the return.)

When I cited the above example back in 2015, I said: “It is disturbing to think that the relationship among much of the American leadership today is just about as toxic as the relationships that existed among Lucan, Cardigan, and Nolan.” It hasn’t become any less toxic the intervening ten years, and it seems to me that the angers and resentments have penetrated considerably more broadly and deeply into American society.

What is your own view of the extent of anger within today’s America? (Comparison with other countries also of interest.) Am I overstating things–or understating them? Are there any signs of improvement, or is the problem just getting worse and worse? What, if anything, can be done to help address the situation?

(This was previously posted at Chicago Boyz, I was reminded of it by a discussion at another blog about the level of anger between the sexes. There is a worthwhile comment thread at the original CB post)

The book is Peter Gaskell’s Artisans and Machinery, and it was published in 1836. The technology with which he is concerned is steam power, which he sees in its then-present incarnation as merely “Hercules in the cradle…opening into view a long vista of rapid transitions, terminating in the subjection of human power, as an agent of labour, to the gigantic and untiring energies of automatic machinery.”

What Gaskell sees this infant Hercules as already having caused is this:

The declension of the most numerous class of artisans in Great Britain, from comfort, morality, independence, and loyalty, to misery, demoralization, dependence, and discontent, is the painful picture now presented by the domestic manufacturers. (he is referring particularly to the hand-loom weavers) ‘The domestic labourers were at one period a most loyal and devoted body of men,’ says an intelligent witness before the Select Committee of Hand-Loom Weavers in 1834. ‘Lancashire was a particularly loyal county.’ (These men had been prominent among those who had volunteered to defend Britain from Napoleon.) ‘Durst any government call upon the services of such a people, living upon three shillings a week?’

Gaskell notes that prior to the introduction of automatic machinery, the majority of artisans had worked at home. “It may be termed the period of Domestic Manufacture; and the various mechanical contrivances were expressly framed for that purpose…These were undoubtedly the golden times of manufactures, considered in reference to the character of the labourers.” The man retained his individual respectability and was often able to rent a few acres for farming, thus diversifying his employment and (with the addition of a garden) his family’s diet.

The new automated mills had relatively little requirement for adult male labor; most jobs could be done more cheaply by women and children, who indeed were often preferred because of their more nimble fingers. Those who continued as handweavers saw their incomes drop precipitously due to the competition from steam-or-water-powered machinery; it was John Henry versus the steam drill (although the birth of that legend was still in the future).

Before industrialization, the earnings of children were “entirely at the disposal of the head of the family”…thus home was “to the poor man, the very temple of fortune, in which he may contrive, if his earnings are not scanty indeed, to live with comfort and independence…the child of the domestic manufacturer was advantageously placed. It remained under its paternal roof during which the period in which puberty was developed; its passions and social instincts were properly cultivated, its bodily powers were not too early called into requisition; it had the benefit of green fields, a pure atmosphere, the cheering influences of nature, and its diet was plain and substantial.”

Gaskell contrasts this perhaps rather idealized picture with a dismal portrait of parents and children all going off to work as separate individuals, with little interaction beyond meals hurriedly snatched, if even that. “Parents have become the keepers of lodging-houses for their offspring, between whom little intercourse exists beyond that relating to pecuniary profit and loss. In a vast number of others, children have been entirely driven away from their homes, either by unnatural treatment…(or) for the sake of saving a small sum in the amount of payment required for food and house-room….The social relations which should distinguish the members of the same family are destroyed. The domestic virtues, man’s natural instincts, and the affections of the heart, are deadened and lost.” He argues that feelings of family mutual responsibility are destroyed to the degree that “When age and decrepitude cripple the energies of the parents, their adult children abandon them to the scanty maintenance derived from parochial relief.”

Gaskell does admit that the factory worker was in many cases more mentally-active than his domestic-manufacturing predecessor, that he often shows “a high order of intelligence, seeking his amusement in the club, the political union, or the lecture room,” but that “he is disbarred from all athletic sports, not having a moment’s time to seek, or bodily vigour capable of undertaking them; he has an active mind in a stunted and bloodless body.” The domestic craftsman, on the other hand, “possessed a very limited degree of information; his amusements were exclusively sought in bodily exercise, quoits, cricket, the dance, the chace, and numerous seasonal celebrations; he lived in utter ignorance of printed books, beyond the thumbed Bible and a few theological tracts…he had a sluggish mind in an active body.”

Gaskell writes positively about the “distinctions of rank” and especially about the role of the Squire as it once had been in rural areas. “The Squire …obtained and deserved his importance from his large possessions, low rents, and a simplicity and homeliness of bearing which, when joined to acknowledged family respectability, made him loved and reverenced by his tenants and neighbours. He mingled freely in their sports–was the general and undisputed arbiter in all questions of law and equity–was a considerate and generate landlord–a kind and indulgent master…tinged, it is true with some vices, but all so coated over with wide-spreading charity, that the historian willingly draws the veil of forgetfulness over them.”

Concerning the mill-owners, who have to some extent replaced the Squires as masters of men, Gaskell says that few of those who started in the business as rich men have succeeded, while “the men who prospered were raised by their own efforts–commencing in a very humble way, generally from exercising some handicraft, as clock-making, hatting, etc….having a very limited capital to begin with, or even none at all save their own labour.” He defends the mill owners against charges of wanton cruelty to employees, saying that many of the stories are exaggerated. But while being men of high energy and quick thinking, the owners are in Gaskell’s view “men of limited information–men who saw and knew little of any thing beyond the demand for their twist or cloth, and the speediest and best modes for their production.” Acquisition of wealth, though was not always attended by a “corresponding improvement in their moral and social character…The animal enjoyments–the sensual indulgences which were witnessed at the orgies of these parties, totally unchecked by any intercourse with polished society, should have had the veil of oblivion drawn over them, were it not that, to some degree, they tend to explain the depravity which in a few years spread, like a moral plague, over the factory artisans.”

Gaskell in the previous passage appears to be talking at least partly about sex, a subject to which he returns several times in the book. He comments on, but is not particularly condemnatory about, the fact that in rural areas, marriages had long often followed rather than proceeded the bride’s pregnancy. What he *is* concerned about is what he viewed as extreme promiscuity and “the almost entire extinction” of sexual decency he sees among millworkers…he blames this partly on the bad example of the mill owners, partly on the greatly reduced connection between parents and children, partly on the elevated temperatures which were maintained (for technical reasons) in the mills.

Interestingly, the author does not appear to share the (purported) Victorian view that women do not experience sexual desire. (Of course, the Victorian era had not yet begun.) On the contrary, “Man cannot be taught to forget that he is a man, or that the breathing and blushing being before him is a woman; that she is endowed like himself with an argent temperament–a desire for gratification…and that she has passions which, if roused into activity, would overwhelm all sense of shame or propriety. Neither can he be taught to forget that he has a fire within his own breast, which, if freed from the asbestos coating of moral decency, would overthrow all obstacles standing between him and the object of his desire; nor, that he has the capability of stirring into vigorous life his own and woman’s propensities.” Gaskell’s fear is that an industrialized and urbanized England would become–had largely already become–a sexual free-for-all in which family responsibilities and affections have ceased to exist.

So where does Gaskell see things going in the future? Mechanization, he is certain, will expand vastly beyond its beachhead in the textile trades. He quotes an eminent engineer: “The cottager looks upon the neat paling which fences his dwelling; it was sawed by steam. The spade with which he digs his garden, the rake, the hoe, the pickaxe…every implement of rural toil which ministers to his necessities, are produced by steam…Applied to architecture, we find the Briarean arms of the steam engine every where at work. Stone is cut by it, marble polished, cement ground…gratings and bolts forged…all owe to steam their most essential requisites.” And this widespread application of steam has driven prices down, permitting ordinary people to buy things–especially items of apparel–once restricted to the richest few. But Gaskell questions what benefit the masses of people are actually getting out of this. “The advantage to the poor man, according to (another contemporary commentator) is, that his wife can purchase a printed calico gown for 2s, 6d. This is a fact that he repeatedly insists upon. It seems to us a very poor compensation for poverty, expatriation, or the workhouse.” (Quite similar to the point sometimes made about cheap imported goods at Wal-Mart in our own time.) So, in Gaskell’s view, the reduced prices of so many items will not equal in their impact the reduction in employments and wages driven by the new technologies. There is no refuge from the process; commenting on a then-new improvement in spinning machinery, he says, “Spinning machines, when first introduced…at once destroyed domestic spinning: the Iron Man of Roberts will as surely destroy the factory spinner. It is utterly ridiculous to say that the extension of the trade will aborb the discharged hands–it is impossible.” And machines can even make machines (mirroring, again, some of the present-day concerns about artificial intelligence.) Automation will focus on the elimination of the highest-cost workers, so adult men, in particular, are in danger of becoming largely obsolete.

What is to be done to prevent a bleak future of impoverishment, family disintegration, and widespread misery relieved only by the temporary pleasures of the gin shop?

Gaskell disclaims any intention of stopping and rolling back the progress of technology. He mentions the possibility of taxing steam power (mirroring today’s proposals for the taxation of robots) and concludes that it is not feasible…it would “derange the entire commerce of the kingdom.” Similarly, restricting the hours of labor would have only a temporary benefit to employment in that it would “stimulate mechanical ingenuity” to recover the increased costs, and hence, “the crisis between human and automatic industry would be accelerated.” Nor does he see emigration to Canada and other countries…of which there was then a considerable amount happening among unemployed workers (some of it subsidized) as a fair or sustainable solution to the problem of technological unemployment.

His primary proposed solution to the problem of technological unemployment is the reclamation of the waste lands, of which he asserts that there are 31 million acres in Great Britain and Ireland, of which 15 million are capable of agricultural development. The money currently being expended for welfare and for subsidies of emigration could be better applied to investment in such a project: it could offer productive work to a large number of unemployed or underemployed. Gaskell also proposes that wherever possible (obviously, not in dense urban areas) workers should be provided with a small plot of land (about half an acre) and that these should be held directly from the landowner rather than indirectly from a tenant farmer.

Concerning factory operations, Gaskell seems some improvement in the current set of owners, some of whom are more concerned with the well-being of their workers than had been the pioneering developers of the industry. He also sees labor-management conflict as very detrimental, and opposes ‘combinations’ on the part of both workers and owners. He seems to want the mill owners to play a role more analogous to that which the Squire played in an earlier day; yet at the same time, he is very opposed to what Americans would call the Company Store…individual ownership of retail establishments in manufacturing areas would, he believes, not only drive down prices through competition but would promote the establishment of a Middle Class, which he sees as highly beneficial to both workers and owners. His proposed solutions don’t seem very convincing, and I suspect they were not that convincing to he himself, either.

Tyler Cowen, in his review of this book, says Gaskell is “optimistic about the long run, but not about the transition.” From my reading, I’m not really seeing that optimism even about the long run.

But things did work out considerably better than one might have thought from Gaskell’s analysis. Where Gaskell went wrong, I think, is in several areas. First, he underestimated the potential for economic growth and new industries–he never probably considered, for example, the possibility that people not in the upper classes might own their own carriages, with all the new demands for labor that would create. (And indeed, such widespread carriage-ownership would not probably have been feasible as long as the only motive power available was the horse!) Second, his argument that reduced working hours would do no good because such reductions would merely spur additional labor-reducing technological improvements misses the beneficent feedback loops that at least sometimes exists in practice between these factors. Third, he did not foresee the Victorian era and the social and religious trends that would have at least some impact on curbing the drunkenness and other types of social dysfunction that he saw among the urban working classes.

Gaskell explicitly states that he does not mean to portray the pre-industrial times as any kind of Arcadian paradise, but to a considerable extent he does just that. His almost entirely positive portrayal of the Squire would, I suspect, have been roundly mocked by those living within the domains of a fair number of real-life squires.

John Stuart Mill asserted that “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” To some extent, Gaskell’s positive portrait of the worker of pre-industrial times…”a sluggish mind in an active body”…argues the opposite case.

I’m reminded of something C P Snow wrote:

I remember talking to my grandfather when I was a child. He was a good specimen of a nineteenth- century artisan. He was highly intelligent, and he had a great deal of character. He had left school at the age of ten, and had educated himself intensely until he was an old man. He had all his class’s passionate faith in education. Yet,he had never had the luck-or, as I now suspect, the worldly force and dexterity-to go very far. In fact, he never went further than maintenance foreman in a tramway depot. His life would seem to his grandchildren laborious and unrewarding almost beyond belief. But it didn’t seem to him quite like that. He was much too sensible a man not to know that he hadn’t been adequately used: he had too much pride not to feel a proper rancour: he was disappointed that he had not done more-and yet, compared with his grandfather, he felt he had done a lot.

His grandfather must have been an agricultural labourer. I don’t so much as know his Christian name. He was one of the ‘dark people’, as the old Russian liberals used to call them, completely lost in the great anonymous sludge of history. So far as my grandfather knew, he could not read or write. He was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen.

The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below. It looks very different today according to whether one sees it from Chelsea or from a village in Asia. To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. The only question was, how to make it better.

(from The Two Cultures, 1959)

It’s a long book, but very well worth reading. The author was a physician, and there is a lot of data about the prevalence of various diseases among different segments of the population; possibly especially interesting to Michael Kennedy. There are a lot of historical details that I didn’t know; for example, I was certainly aware of the riots, machine-breaking, and other violence, but had never before heard that acid-throwing was a thing back then.

Tyler Cowen, in his review, notes that “So much of (Gaskell’s) discussion of handloom weavers could come out of an Atlantic Monthly article from 2015, albeit with different historical references.” As I’ve argued before, much of today’s discussion about the economic and social effects of robotics and AI seems quite lacking in historical perspective. Gaskell’s book is very helpful in developing such a perspective.

Previously posted at Chicago Boyz and also reposted here, good discussion threads at both links

The Valley of Decision. This 1942 book could be subtitled An Industrial Romance, as could the 1945 movie that ((starring Greer Garson and Gregory Peck) that it inspired. The story begins in 1873 Pittsburgh where the Scott family owns a steel mill, and continues through the generations up through the beginning of WWII.

North and South, an 1854 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is not about the American Civil War, but about the north and south of England at the time of the industrial revolution. A clergyman must abandon his career and leave his pleasant parsonage for reasons of conscience, and moves to an industrial city in the north. His daughter meets a millowner, whose business she finds brutal and who she initially dislikes…but a mutual attraction soon develops.

There is very good BBC TV series based on the novel.

Nice Work, by David Lodge. What happens when an expert on 19th-century British industrial novels—who is a professor, a feminist, and a deconstructionistfinds herself in an actual factory? This not being a time-travel novel, the factory is a contemporary one for the book’s setting in mid-1980s Britain. It is a metalworking plant called Pringle’s, run by managing director Vic Wilcox. Vic is not thrilled when his boss (Pringle’s is owned by a conglomerate) suggests that he participate in something called the “shadow” program, designed to make academics and businesspeople better-acquainted with one another, but he goes along with the request. Robyn Penrose, literature professor at a nearby university, is also not thrilled about her nomination to participate in the program, but she is concerned about her job in an era of reduced university funding, and also thinks she had better do as asked.

Gung Ho. This movie, which I haven’t seen, is about a closed US auto plant which is given one more chance after being acquired by a Japanese company.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream. A 1988 movie based on the true story of Preston Trump and his attempt to produce a revolutionary automobile.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. The main characters are leaders in the mining, steel, and railroad industries. They face an environment of tightening government control and hostility toward business and individualism.

The Dwelling Place of Light, Winston Churchill. This strange but interesting 1917 novel (by the other Churchill, the once-well-known American writer) is about a New England town, a textile mill and its manager, and the girl…daughter of an old family whose circumstances have declined…who becomes his secretary. (The review dates back to the novel’s original publication)

American Steel, by Richard Preston. Business history that reads like a novel: this is about the early days of Nucor Steel, featuring the building of a new steel mill and the introduction of the continous casting process to the US.

Three Business Novels by Cameron Hawley, who was a popular writer in the 1950s and 1960s: Executive Suite, Cash McCall, and The Lincoln Lords. Two of these books were made into moves.

God is an Englishman, by R F Delderfield. This book doesn’t center on manufacturing per se, but on the closely allied field of freight transportation. A British officer returning from India in 1850 has thoughts of going into the railroad business, but is advised by a railroad official that railway building was in a bubble and that most of the lines now being constructed would prove uneconomic. That official does, however, have an alternative suggestion: put the money on the horses. But not in the usual way.

There’s more future in horse-transport than the Cleverdicks would have you believe. The railroads can solve all the big problems but none of the small ones…If I were you, Mr Swann–and I wish to God I were and starting all over again–I would spend the next week studying the blank areas of that map there. Then travel about and take a look at the goods yards of the most successful companies, and see merchandise piled in the rain on all their loading bays for want of a good dispersal system.

I am very impressed by the author’s achievement in bringing a fictional business organization to life. The strategic issues and mistakes, the personalities of the various region managers (“viceroys”) and the interactions among them, the operational and financial crises, the whimsical internal names assigned to the re

On the Rails, by Linda Niemann. The author got a PhD in English but “the fancy academic job never materialized”, and she got a job as a brakeman with the old Southern Pacific railroad. It’s a book that is “is about railroading the way ‘Moby Dick’ is about whaling”, according to a Chicago Sun-Times reviewer. Although I think a better Melville comparison would be with “White Jacket”, Melville’s book about his own experiences as a crewman on an American sailing warship. Which is still very high praise. It is a beautifully-written book about an industry that few people have seen from the inside.

What else?

Related: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-political-roots-of-the-baby-bust/

This is How the AI Bubble Will Pop.https://www.derekthompson.org/p/this-is-how-the-ai-bubble-will-pop One of the arguments in the post is that the GPUs on which so much money is being spent are an asset type with a very short lifespan (because obsolescence) In the comments section, someone makes the interesting point that even after the GPUs are worthless or nearly so, the model that they were used to train is in effect a capital asset, regardless of whether or not the accounting treatment shows it as such.

Book ‘bans’ in Schools, from Neo.

Antibodies and their Production, The author says that if antibodies were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue. Some history about diphtheria and its devastating effects on child mortality. There seem to be a lot of people who need to be reminded of such things.

25 Interesting Ideas, about subjects ranging from the American religious revival (‘overrated’, according to the author) to the decline in alcohol use…and sex…among young adults to homebuilding, the stock market, and AI.

CDR Salamander: “We Don’t Need a New Force Design, or National Strategy..we need a national understanding”

From Virgina Postrel: How Job-Killing Technologies Liberated Women. My recent post on Domestic Technologies in 1925 is related.

cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where the is a discussion thread