Newtonian science was sober-minded; Archimedes' science was not. Archimedes was famous for hoaxes, enigmas, and circuitous routes. These were not some external features of his writings; they characterized his scientific personality. Science is not--mathematics is not--dry and impersonal. It is where one's imagination is allowed to roam freely.
This selection is purely incidental to the subject of the book, but given my recent interest in the letter, this caught my attention. The letter is something you will see me going back to from time to time. I somehow feel we're really losing something in switching from letters to e-mails.
E-mails are short on ritual. There is no walk to the mailbox, no looking at the stamp, no slicing the envelope, no guessing the handwriting. They just pop up unbidden on your computer screen while you are engrossed in your daily business. Some of them, like little electronic terrorists, can blow your mind and change your life.
My review of Something About the Blues should be submitted sometime tonight and published within a couple of days.
I am already well into the next, utterly fascinating, book--The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist.
Here's a NOD from its preface (I keep reading, lately, about the crusaders, in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War; The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In; Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics; and now here):
In April 1204, Christian soldiers on a mission to liberate Jerusalem stopped short of their goal and sacked Constantinople, the richest city in Europe. . . . . The looted city had many more books than people. It was the first time Constantinople had fallen in the 874 years since Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome founded it in AD 330. . . . [T]he city held the literary treasures of the ancient world as its inheritance. Among the treasures were treatises by the greatest mathematician of the ancient world and one of the greatest thinkers who had ever lived. He approximated the value of pi, he developed the theory of centers of gravity, and he made steps toward the development of the calculus 1,800 years before Newton and Leibniz. His name was Archimedes.
(Published Dec. 31, 2007 in BC Magazine)
Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva team up, in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, to peel the layers of glittering wool from our eyes so that we may see the world of politics and financial markets for what they are. They show us the poor players upon the stage, to paraphrase Macbeth for a moment, as they strut and fret their hour upon the stage, telling tales full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And what a show it is! Cocks, with their long bright tail feathers, strutting down the runway. Big-horned deer duking it out on stage. That's what it all comes down to, the authors observe. In the end,
it's all sex and lies. Everything: Romance. Cars. Jobs. The debt bubble. The real estate bubble. The trade deficit bubble. The American Empire. They are useful only as evidence of conspicuous consumption; they wink to the opposite sex that the animal is fit for procreation and game for a little hanky-panky. If he can carry around all that extra baggage and still survive, he must be tough.Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a tragi-comedy, full of sharp observations, delivered with equally sharp wit. This book's dark and disturbing revelations could leave one depressed and disillusioned, were it not so damn funny.
But Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets isn't merely about sitting back in our seats to laugh at the poor saps on stage. They aren't blaming the actors either. Well, not entirely. Most of them are otherwise intelligent, responsible, rational individuals who have simply been caught up in the public spectacle and the irrationality of mass mentality. So along with the sharp observations and disturbing revelations are some pointers for the thinking individual--individual is key--to use the knowledge gleaned from the show to avoid getting caught up in the public spectacle and maybe even make some money to secure his or her future.
Bill Bonner is the founder and president of Agora Inc., a consumer newsletter and book publishing company and is the creator of The Daily Reckoning, a contrarian financial newsletter delivered via e-mail. Bonner has also written, with Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of An Epic Financial Crisis and Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century.
Lila Rajiva is a contributing writer and editor at Agora, and her work can also be found at Lew Rockwell, Counterpunch, Money Week, Dissident Voice, Himal South Asian, and Rational Review, among others. She is the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, and blogs at the Mind-Body Politic.
The first chapter, "Do-Gooders Gone Bad," is perhaps the lightest, but its opening paragraph hints at the central problem with which the book is concerned, whether in politics or in finance, and its dark humour sets the tone for the rest of the book.
It is a shame that the world improvers don't set off some signal before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be made. Instead, the most successful of them--such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler--actually gain market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the delusions of a stock market bubble; the higher the prices go, the more people come to believe they make sense.Bonner and Rajiva don't put much stock in do-gooders and world improvers, nor in the over-bloated and fickle financial markets.
But how can you talk about figures like Mussolini and Hitler, some people may rightly ask, and crack jokes? The answer, I suspect, is that humour is a useful distancing tool. They are not making light of the suffering caused by these figures, but they think about things most people prefer not to. In the context of the inevitable and very devastating U.S. housing bust on the horizon they remark that they make it their business "to think about precisely what most people can't bear thinking about." And to think about these things to understand why they happen again and again and again, and why the masses inevitably get caught up in the momentum no matter how nasty things get, one must "get close enough to see how things work--like a prairie dog peering into a hay bailer--but not so close that you get caught up in it yourself."
The authors cover a lot of ground in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets. They discuss modern world-improvers-cum-dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Empires intent on improving the world--Greek, Arab, Assyrian, Frankish, British and now American. Terrorism in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries created in large part by European Crusaders who decided to "bring the blessings of Christian governance to the desert tribes" to terrorism today inspired by America's attempt at bringing 'freedom and democracy' to the Muslim world. They cover mass hysteria and paranoia from the witch hunts in the late Middle Ages to the McMartin Satanic child abuse trials across America in the 1980s. They discuss the players in the financial world, from incompetent and grossly overpaid CEOs, to multinational corporations sucking the land dry in far-off countries, to advocates of globalization and the flat earth, to the IMF, World Bank, and the Federal Reserve, as well as the debt, real estate, and trade deficit bubbles. And then, of course, there is the role of propaganda and the media, from Germany to Britain to China and once again to America.
"So many humbugs, dear reader, and so little time," the authors remark at one point. And as for all the efforts of world improvement, they have this to say: "[t]he negative consequences at the end of an effort at world improvement are roughly equal and opposite to the positive aspirations at the beginning." The problem is that otherwise reasonable, intelligent individuals, be they "[i]mperialists, anti-imperialists, capitalists, communists--as soon as they get a grand scheme into their heads, a pet project for world improvement, they all seem to end up in the same place--bungling, botching, and butchering." If you "put them at the head of a country or an army, then they are off on some fool mission--bringing civilization to the barbarians, making the world safe for democracy, or ushering in the proletarian revolution."
To get at an answer for why this happens, the authors turn to the work of the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar has studied the human animal, as also other primates like monkeys, chimpanzees, and baboons, and has come to the conclusion that there is a "maximum number of people and things with which the human brain can cope effectively." Though humans are very social animals, being in possession of a well-developed neocortex to deal with complex reasoning, we really have the capacity to effectively deal with only about 150 people. Dunbar has studied 21 different hunter-gatherer cultures and found the average number of people in their villages to be 148.4. And groups in modern societies seem to have picked up on this as well, from communal groups like the Hutterites to cohesive fighting units in militaries from the classical Roman army to the modern army company.
This is one of the most interesting parts of the book, and crucial to the central argument. "Human beings, according to the sociobiologists, cannot understand much more than the things about which they are concerned for their daily existence." Yet in our modern society individuals are put in positions in which they are asked to plan for millions of people and deal with dollar figures in the billions and even trillions. Dealing with all manner of things outside of their immediate circle, people are liable to accept inadequate or wrong explanations. "The human brain," the authors argue, "is just not big enough for the big world. In order to think, people are forced to start simplifying and eliminating a lot of detail. They have to abstract ... theorize ... generalize." And that's how mob mentality begins. And the problem with the mob, with crowds, is that "[t]hey can only feel and act. They can't think, because they have no set of facts solid enough on which to build." And at that point, the authors warn, "[s]logans replace reason. And the private world of right and wrong has been replaced by the public spectacle, which knows no moral authority beyond its own desires."
Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets returns again and again to the public spectacle. The thinking individual, whether engaged in politics or finances, must avoid being caught up in it. The last two chapters of the book attempt to help the thinking individual steer clear of the public spectacle. Reading closely, there are some very helpful tips. The most important lesson, of course, is that independent thought will get you much further than following the masses, believing everything you read in the newspapers, or even looking for specific investment advice to follow in this book.
Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a great read for the independent thinker with a well-developed, and perhaps somewhat morbid, sense of humour. Readers looking for easy answers without being willing to work hard and think independently will likely get little or nothing out of it. And readers without the sense of humour to sit back and laugh at the public spectacle as it unfolds, and as it is reported in the media, will likely be offended and put the book down. The sharp wit and dark humour, as much as some of us may enjoy it, is perhaps the greatest potential drawback of this book. For readers who are willing to think independently, but don't share the sense of humour, a more serious approach might be necessary. For the rest of us, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a serious and hilarious guide to surviving the public spectacle in finance and politics.
See also:
I stumbled across an interesting site today to do with letter writing. I wrote not so long ago, in "Letters of Ted Hughes," that I am interested in the letter as an artifact. Rick Schrager has created "The Letter Project." Rick will write a letter to anyone requesting one. Because he does not know most correspondents, of course, the content may well be rather mundane. Stop by to check it out.
Modern methods of communication--from the telegram to the telephone and cellphone, from radio to television and internet-based chat programs and e-mail--are saving us a great deal of time. They connect more people, more quickly, across greater distances than ever before. Drafting our letters, if we may call e-mails that, now takes up most of the time, whereas in times past, in the days of letter writing, it was the long and sometimes risky journey that took the most time.
While we have certainly gained things, most notably time, through the digital world, I cannot help but feel we have also lost something significant. For one thing, because of the ease and speed of digital communications, we often care less about what, and how, we communicate. Letter writing was a craft. Time had to be taken to think things through and to find just the right words to express ourselves. And because feelings are often intensified over both time and distance, and the response to a poorly formulated and thus misunderstood letter took just as long to come back, letters were often both more clearly, and more passionately, expressed. Digital communication may be faster, but it is also, like much of modern life, increasingly evanescent, easily erased, and quickly forgotten.
There are so many good nuggets in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets that it's hard to choose just a few. I will post one more here, and then, within a few days, my review should be published and posted here.
. . . Iraq is full of potential terrorists with grudges. Had the Anglo-Americans bothered to look before they leaped, they would have seen a country that is a mix of tribes, clans, families, and religious groups--all of whom take it as an inherited obligation to avenge any wrong done to any of their own group by any member of any other group going back five generations. We cannot kill terrorists as fast as the State Department can create them, say some. . . . . Still, every great empire--from the Assyrians to the Mongols to the British--has taken Baghdad. America has to do it, too. It is the imperial script and America is right on cue.
On the American Empire.
... by the twenty-first century, the United States had already reached an advanced stage of empire--and an aging empire needs a little more than banal reality. It needs delusion to keep it going. It desperately needs an enemy to justify defense budgets and military meddling. What else can you expect? Americans need to believe that they are confronted by a vast army of terrorists ready to "destroy our civilization."
Is America sliding towards fascism? A look at some disturbing things happening with the media.
Here is an MIT security studies maven, writing in a column in the Outlook section of the Washington Post, that the new U.S. strategy of paying Iraqi journalists to place stories favorable to the U.S. in the media is perfectly kosher. A reporter, says Michael Schrage, should be helping the military along, not just chattering about it.
... 'Securing positive coverage for our troops in Iraq can be as important to their safety as 'up-armoring' vehicles and providing state-of-the-art body armor. The failure to wage war is a failure to command.'
Ah--the media war. Until now we thought the war meant those cluster bombs going off in Baghdad. But we realize we were mistaken. It must be the blood that got us confused! The real war, we now see, is on the front pages. Take cover!
There was a time when respectable marriages were based on more serious concerns--money, property, position, and so forth. . . . But in the Western world, arranged marriages have given way to deranged ones. People are expected to fall in love with each other--that is, they are expected to take leave of their senses, and while in this addled state, they are not only allowed, but encouraged, to sign a contract that is meant to last a lifetime.
On news... lots about the news in this book.
... if you think about it, the word newspaper is itself a conceit. It pretends that the news industry is a clean pane of glass through which we look out at the spectacle of public events. But it is not a pane of glass at all; it is a microscope in which particular events are magnified and distorted. News that neither encourages journalistic prejudices nor inflates the journal's profits is invisible. The press lords must think their typical readers are louts. And, if not before, soon after they begin reading the newspapers, they will be.
What is it about the Near or Middle East that keeps drawing world-improvers and do-gooders, two expressions used a lot in this book, to invade and conquer and reform?
Nor is it the first time that people have tried to do good in the Near East. At the end of the eleventh century, Europeans decided to bring the blessings of Christian governance to the desert tribes. The Crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were doomed from the beginning. The Crusaders had the will and the weapons to kick Arab butts; what they lacked was a real reason for doing so, for Christianity was already firmly rooted in the Holy Lands, as it had been for more than 1,000 years, even though Jerusalem had fallen to the caliph Umar Ibn al-Khattab in February of 638.
(Published Dec. 11, 2007 in BC Magazine)
ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide is a big book to read straight through. Whether you read it from front to back or dip into specific chapters depends on who you are and why you are reading it. In any case,Ecohouse is loaded with interesting and important — shocking, disturbing, inspiring, and enlightening — information, as well as very useful and practical technical guidance for building with both the health of our planet and the health of people — individuals, families, and communities — in mind.
This edition, for those who have not read the first and second, includes the introductions to all three. They are themselves well worth reading. In the introduction to this edition, Sue Roaf writes that the "theoretical concerns over climate change and fossil fuel depletion" covered in the introduction to the first edition were, by 2003, "firming up with the emerging reality of more extreme climate events and growing publicity over the issue of 'Peak Oil'." That is when the second edition was published. So why a third edition now?
Roaf provides several reasons for this new edition, and sees a fourth edition on the horizon. For one, "[e]ven in America the cozy talk amongst the educated architects of 'Sustainable Buildings' has turned to discussions of how we design for 'Passive Survival' in our own homes, when the power fails and the storms menace." Behind this not-so-veiled reference to America's lagging response, the point is that people are, in the face of irrefutable evidence of climate change, beginning to heed the calls for action. Secondly, there are now politicians around the world who are beginning to take notice because of the "growing economic impacts of climate change." And finally, more to the point in terms of the content of this edition, it has become clear that the technology to survive already exists. "What we desperately need now," Roaf writes, "is the 'Eco-society' that will enable the necessary changes to happen in time to ensure that everyone, especially the vulnerable, can 'future-proof' themselves against what lies ahead." This edition serves as a technical guide and inspiration to that end.
Sue Roaf, PhD was brought up in Malaysia and Australia, and studied at Manchester University, the Architectural Association, and Oxford Brookes University. Roaf has spent ten years in Iran and Iraq, working as a landscape architect, studying building technologies, and teaching at the University of Baghdad. She has been a professional Training Adviser for the Oxford School of Architecture and is now Visiting Professor and Architectural Consultant at both the University of Arizona and the Open University in the UK. Significantly, she designed and built her own ecohouse in North Oxford in 1995, a fact to which I will return. In addition to writing Ecohouse, she has also writtenClosing the Loop: Benchmarks for Sustainable Buildings and Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change: A 21st Century Survival Guide.
Five of the fourteen chapters in Ecohouse are a bit more on the conceptual side — "The form of the house": "The building as an analogy"; "The environmental impact of building materials"; "Pushing the building envelope"; "Building-in soul"; and "Health and happiness in the home." Yet even these contain various concrete examples, complete with illustrations and captioned photographs. Though all readers would be well advised to read the entire book, even if not all at once or in sequential order, these are arguably the chapters with greatest appeal to the lay reader or eco-enthusiast, as well as to the architect or builder just learning about eco-architecture. But the other chapters — "Ventilation"; "Passive solar design"; "Photovoltaics"; "Solar hot water systems"; "Using water wisely"; "Small-scale wind systems"; "Hydro power"; "Ground source heat pumps"; and "Lime and low-energy masonry" — contain a healthy amount of technical information and guidance, including formulae, charts, graphs, floor plans, diagrams and illustrations, and photographs. Less technical readers may find some of these a bit tiring on the brain.
Chapter one discusses the form of the house and useful analogies. It begins with a reference to a single analogy coined by the French architect, Le Corbusier, that has largely influenced twentieth-century architecture. He envisaged the building as 'a machine for living in.' This analogy, it is argued, is fundamentally flawed because "a machine is an inanimate object that can be turned on and off and operates only at the whim of its controller" and is a fixed, static object "amenable to scientific assessment," whereas "the driving force that acts upon the building to create comfort and shelter is the climate and its weather, neither of which can be controlled, predicted or turned on and off." This argument is a bit weak. Buildings are static, inanimate objects, even though they are acted upon by climate and weather, and I'm sure atmospheric scientists and climatologists would argue that climate and weather, at least to a point, can be predicted, though not yet significantly controlled. Buildings, the author continues, "are part of a complex interaction between people, the buildings themselves, the climate and the environment."
I suspect the argument is a bit weak because the author is actually after something both more complex and less tangible here, and has a hard time putting a finger on it without devoting too much time to it. The machine analogy fits into, and derives from, a worldview that sees humans as separate from and above nature. Building design within this conceptual — one could say philosophical or ideological — framework is disconnected from nature and can often seem calculated, sterile, inorganic and lifeless. Three basic and very sensible principles on which all buildings should be based are proposed, and I hope architects, builders, and city planners are taking note.
1) design for climate
2) design for the physical and social environment
3) design for time, be it day or night, a season or the lifetime of a building and design a building that will adapt over time
A number of other analogies are then offered that have the potential to create a shift in how the house is regarded. The analogies suggested are: our third skin; a heat exchanger; a tea cozy; a greenhouse; a swallow; an igloo; a bucket; a brick in a storage radiator; a Roman bath house; a periscope; a tree in the breeze; a cool-core building; an air lock in a space ship; and a Hobbit hole. In discussing these analogies, readers also learn about such interesting structures, and their form-based properties, as the ice-house, yurt, and igloo. The latter two, because of their unique characteristics, can help people survive some of the harshest winters in the habitable world. Most importantly, however, these analogies help the reader see more clearly how the form and function of a building fits into various environments.
A number of chapters are devoted to technologies that generate or save energy, such as photovoltaics (solar panels), solar hot water systems, small-scale wind systems, hydro power, and ground source heat pumps (GSHP). These chapters should prove very useful to owners of existing homes in making them more eco-friendly, as also to designers and ecohouse builders. The other part of the energy equation is also covered well. There is a good discussion of the energy that has gone into the various materials we use in constructing our dwellings, as also of the emissions for which they are responsible. The terms embodied energy and embodied emissions are used. The term embodied energy stands for all energy used to create an object, from "extraction of raw materials, transportation to processing plants, energy used in factories, transportation to site, and energy used on site to install the product," while the term embodied emissions stands for all emissions, mainly of CO2, but also of toxins, released during its creation.
When one considers how many distinct products go into a house, the mere thought of trying to determine not only the embodied energy and emissions of each product, but indeed of the entire house, may well result in an overheated brain and complete loss of motivation. It seems overwhelming. The ideal would be to have a comprehensive and straightforward list of products and their embodied energy and emissions. Figures of these things are not yet widely available, but it is argued, quite sensibly, that what we really need is to understand the factors affecting embodied energy and emissions so that we can ask the right questions when selecting materials. Ecohouse devotes a fair chunk of space to this topic, including a section on the embodied energy of different building materials from plastics, to metals, to timber. There is also a case study and a good recommended reading list on material selection and life-cycle analysis.
In "Building-in soul," material selection is revisited in a different context. Building one's own house, though expensive, is not nearly so expensive, "perhaps not one-fifth, so expensive as having something built for you." And it is further pointed out that "most importantly, you invest your soul in what you build, which is why self-built homes are so soul-rich to live in." What buildings are made of, it is emphasized, contributes greatly to their character.
Wood, earth, brick, concrete, steel, glass or plastic buildings are totally different from each other to see, to live in, to build and in the forms their construction logically and characterfully demands. . . . So, very important in terms of their pollution and environmental costs, are their manufacturing biographies and how they end their life — do they return to nature or become refuse?
Though this chapter goes well beyond the selection of materials, discussing such things as the character and identity of a building, especially one self-built, as well as its connections to a wider community, economy and ecology, it also does a good job — better than the earlier argument against the building-as-a-machine analogy — of getting to the root of the difference between the common mass-produced house and the ecohouse. Materials, we are told, "connect us to the world from whence they came: living and life-cycle bound by nature, or lifeless, dead industrial processes." And the following quote both provides a general rule for material selection and a summary of how to create a vibrant, connected, almost living house:
We use thousands of materials in modern building, but a general rule is that the nearer something is to life, the more compatible it is: the healthier to live with, the more recyclable back to earth, thence to living matter again. It also needs more care for longevity — but this care, like the care given to its making, is imprinted into its substance and emanates from it, to nourish those who live next to it. Mass-produced products can never do this; the imprint of care is, by definition, absent.
There is a bit too much talk of soul for me here, giving it somewhat of a New Age tone, but that is mainly a matter of word choice. I would have just stuck to the language of psychological and emotional connections, as that is what it really comes down to.
Significantly, Sue Roaf has designed and built her own ecohouse. This is significant in terms of credibility. It demonstrates that she has not only a good theoretical understanding of ecobuilding, but also direct, hands-on experience. She provides it as one of the case studies at the end and refers to it from time to time throughout the book. Part of the motivation for designing it, she says, "was to put paid to the notion that pursuing a high quality of life necessarily entailed irreparable damage to the environment," the challenge being "to prove that those in richer countries could maintain an acceptably high standard of living without polluting the planet at the cost of those in poorer countries."
The authors of Ecohouse predict that we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes by the middle of this century, and hope that "[t]he seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond." While the hope is admirable, how this will be achieved is not much discussed. Who can afford to build an ecohouse? Certainly not the bulk of homeowners even in so-called first-world nations in North America and Europe. Of those who could afford to, the vast majority have neither the desire nor the necessary knowledge. The vast majority of even well-to-do homeowners prefer to buy large, hastily-constructed, energy-profligate houses in suburbia or exurbia. These are most often cut-and-paste houses equipped with energy-greedy cooling and heating technologies, houses from which they drive — not walk — to work and the big box store. How we can combat these things is not adequately addressed in this book, nor how to make ecobuilding affordable to the common people.
Also not addressed, though they would have fit so nicely into the discussion of embodied energy and embodied emissions, are environmental racism and green-washing. It may be argued that this is a design guide, not a book of theory, but even a paragraph or two on these topics would have rounded the book out a bit more and at least acknowledged some of the darker aspects of eco- this and that. At whose expense are the products with the most embodied energy and emissions produced? Who suffers the most from the pollution both of producing these products and, increasingly, of recycling them? The feature documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, by Jennifer Baichwal does a decent job of illustrating this, though it has nothing otherwise to do with ecobuilding. It is often those in poorer so-called third-world or developing countries. Ecobuilders should pay as much attention to these aspects of material origins and selection.
Ecohouse is, despite these minor wants, a beautifully designed, well-written and thorough guide to the ecohouse. It is much recommended as both inspiration and a technical guide to architects and students of architecture, as well as designers, builders, city planners, and eco-enthusiasts.
See also:
Interesting, and funny, connection between world improvers and markets... mob mentality.
It is a shame that the world improvers don't set off some signal before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be made. Instead, the most successful of them--such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler--actually gain market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the delusions of a stock market bubble; the higher prices go, the more people come to believe they make sense.
A prediction:
By the middle of this century we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes. The seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond.
A little on hemp, a very useful product in construction, as almost anywhere else. Concerns not so much its use in construction, which the book does address briefly, but rather its qualities and ill reputation.
Hemp fibre is the strongest natural fibre known to man and is reputedly stronger, weight for weight, than steel. Hemp grows very fast, from nothing to 4m high in four months and is virtually disease resistant. It can be used in rotation with other crops and helps improve the soil. Hemp got a bad name in the 1930s after publicity campaigns by the petrochemical industry linking it to its narcotic derivative, cannabis, got it banned (in order to promote oil-based materials). Nowadays industrial hemp has virtually no narcotic content, but still needs to be grown under license.
I came across a review by Tom Paulin in the London Review of Books entitled Entrepreneurship which I found quite interesting. Anyone interested in Ted Hughes and his relationship with Sylvia Plath, in particular, but also with others, this, and the book it reviews, might be of interest.
For me it is not just an interest in Hughes and Plath, but also in the letter as an artifact, and in the disappearance of that form of correspondence and self-revelation. More on that some other time.
Anyway, the book in question is Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid.
This NOD is about harnessing the wind and its relations to solar energy.
The wind has been harnessed since antiquity to power windmills, pump water, generate electricity and cool buildings and people. The wind gains its power ultimately from the sun and wind power is essentially solar energy in another form, as it is the sun which warms air and creates the variations in pressure that drive the wind.
Today's NOD has to do with ecotechnology and, as the chapter title from which it is taken suggests, health and happiness in the home. It also has something to say about the tone and overall intent of the book.
Solar panels and ecokitchens, and the way we eat and the way we live our lives, are all important parts of a larger strategy to reduce our impact on this planet before we destroy it completely. This book, however ordinary the issues and ideas in it are, isn't about bling -- it's about survival.
Here are a three quotes from a chapter entitled "Building-In Soul." What they have in common, aside from that abstract thing the author calls 'soul', is the relation of the house to nature.
Buildings are substantive -- what they are made of is very much part of their character. Wood, earth, brick, concrete, steel, glass or plastic buildings are totally different from each other to see, to live in, to build and in the forms their construction logically and characterfully demands. . . . So, very important in terms of their pollution and environmental costs, are their manufacturing biographies and how they end their life -- do they return to nature or become refuse?
Not coincidentally, wood is a material from life. Iron is from the earth, but by way of intense heat and heavy industrial rolling. Plastic is from oil and coal deep beneath its surface, after so numerous chemical synthesis operations that it is totally removed from life. These materials connect us to the world from whence they came: living and life-cycle bound by nature, or lifeless, dead industrial processes. Whereas plastic needs industrial equipment suited to mass production to form, wood needs only a pocket knife. It is more appealing, accessible and healthy to work with. Indeed, you can put your heart into what you make out of it.
We use thousands of materials in modern building, but a general rule is that the nearer something is to life, the more compatible it is: the healthier to live with, the more recyclable back to earth, thence living matter again. It also needs more care for longevity -- but this care, like the care given to its making, is imprinted into its substance and emanates from it, to nourish those who live next to it.
Here's a NOD from the 3rd Edition of ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide:
Three principles upon which all building should be based are:Imagine if these three simple principles were considered before any building took place, whether of an individual house or a new housing development or subdivision.1. design for a climate
2. design for the physical and social environment
3. design for time, be it day or night, a season or the lifetime of a building and design a building that will adapt over time
(Published Nov. 27, 2007 in BC Magazine)
The spread of Islam, first through conquest, then migration, has had a tremendous impact on the world in which we live. Today, certainly by Hollywood and the Western media, that impact is usually framed in terms of terrorism. Again and again, Arabs in general and Muslims in particular are portrayed as backward, hateful, violent people fueled by an ideology that despises freedom and glorifies, indeed rewards, violence. If your impressions of Arabs and Muslims have been formed mainly by this kind of pejorative, simplistic, us-versus-them, clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, you may expect the story of the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries to depict a brutal and grotesque bloodbath.
When I first received an advance reading copy of Hugh Kennedy's The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, I approached it with a certain apprehension. I worried about the kind of bias it might contain. The subtitle can lead one to expect some kind of discussion on how the world is different now because of the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam. Although the preface and foreword put me somewhat at ease, I still kept waiting impatiently, no matter how interesting the narrative, to see what kind of conclusions would be drawn at the end. As it turns out, the subtitle refers more to how the world at the time was changed, than to what impact it has today. The Great Arab Conquests is a fascinating grand narrative told in a remarkably straightforward and balanced way.
Hugh Kennedy has taught at the University of St Andrews' School of History, is Professor of Arabic in the Department of the Languages and Cultures of Near and Middle East at SOAS (School of African and Oriental Studies) at the University of London, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2000. He has written a number of books before The Great Arab Conquests, including The Court of the Caliphs (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), Crusader Castles (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise And Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty (Da Capo Press; New Ed edition, March 30, 2006). Kennedy lives in St. Andrews, Scotland.
Map lovers will like the series of maps at the beginning of The Great Arab Conquests. The list of illustrations and maps precede even the preface and foreword. The maps are fascinating, but I wish Kennedy had added or overlaid modern maps too. With my limited knowledge of medieval geography, the historical maps were at times difficult to understand. People with more knowledge in this area will certainly find them very helpful. I did find myself flipping back to the maps many times when confronted with names of places conquered, places where major battles were fought, and places that held out for some time, resisted capture, or even reversed the spread of Islam.
The Great Arab Conquests is intended to appeal to both the academic and lay reader, a practice seemingly on the increase. It is not, it would seem, an easy task for someone accustomed to writing only for an academic audience. To make the book accessible to the lay reader, Kennedy has chosen to limit the "scholarly apparatus," contenting himself instead with "noting the main sources used, the origins of direct quotes and the most relevant secondary literature." He has also chosen to write the text in what he calls an "unashamedly narrative" form, a choice of words that indicates a certain discomfort with that form in academic circles. Whatever case may be made against it from a scholarly perspective, the narrative form does result in a more accessible, more fluid, more engaging and enjoyable read.
Academic and critical readers need not be concerned about the narrative form and lack of "scholarly apparatus" in the text itself. There is much of substance in the book, and the text itself is not diluted. The narrative is frequently, though not to the point of distraction, interrupted by qualifications and notes about the often fragmentary, confused and contradictory nature of the sources, as well as about biases. However, the bulk of the more academic discussion is in the preface and foreword, including discussion of the author's sources, the problems associated with that material, his use of and approach to it, and the state of relevant scholarship. There is also a good bibliography, and extensive notes.
In the foreword Kennedy makes a number of very interesting points about the use of sources. Some of these points are particularly relevant to current anti-Arab/anti-Muslim sentiments. Kennedy notes that historians since the 19th century "have wrung their hands and lamented the disorganization of the material, the apparently legendary nature of much of it and the endless repetitions and contradictions." However, what I find most relevant to today's sentiments are the wide-reaching challenges mounted in the 1970s and 1980s against the reliability of the early sources. "The result of this critical onslaught," Kennedy notes, "was that many historians, even those not convinced by all the revisionist arguments, have been reluctant to take these narratives seriously or to rely on any of the details they contain."
Kennedy argues that there are a number of reasons for a return to the early Arabic sources, including the fact that there exist sources outside of the Arabic tradition, notably the Syriac Khuzistan Chronicle and the Armenian history of Sebeos, "both written by Christians within a generation of the events they describe," that can be used to check against the Arabic literary tradition. There are also Greek, Coptic, and Latin sources, as well as archaeological records that can be used similarly. Kennedy makes brief mention of the archaeological evidence being at times "bedevilled by contemporary political concerns," but fails to discuss the wider implications of the time at which the wide-reaching challenges against the use of the Arabic literary tradition were mounted. It seems not at all unreasonable to suggest that the politics of oil and the rise of anti-Arab/anti-Muslim sentiment in the 70s and 80s may have contributed to the sudden reluctance to take the Arabic tradition seriously.
The question the text itself attempts to answer was asked in the 680s by the monk John Bar Penkaye. How, he asked, "'could naked men, riding without armour or shield, have been able to win... and bring low the proud spirit of the Persians?' He was further struck that 'only a short period passed before the entire world was handed over to the Arabs.'" For Penkaye, the answer was clearly that it was God's will. Kennedy attempts to update the answer for a world, thirteen centuries later, "where divine intervention is, for many people, not an entirely satisfactory explanation of major historical changes."
The text is arranged in separate chapters on the foundations of conquest and the various places conquered, from Syria and Palestine to Iraq, Egypt, the Maghreb, Transoxania, and Samarqand. There are also chapters discussing the furthest reaches East and West, sea warfare, voices of the conquered, and conclusions.
Particularly interesting, because the voices of the conquerors are almost universally the clearest and loudest, is the chapter on the voices of the conquered - "works, histories, apocalypses and poems, which give some insight as to how the people in the aftermath of the conquests regarded their new masters and what they considered to be the losses, and sometimes the benefits, that the conquests had brought them." The responses range in geography from "Spain in the west to the account of a Chinese prisoner of war in Kufa." They range in tone from a "denunciation of the Muslims as complete barbarians" by Sophronius, the Greek-writing patriarch of Jerusalem, to "Mar Gabriel's conviction that they were much better masters than his co-religionists, the Byzantines." The voices include Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, and are drawn from Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Chinese.
Many of the early Christian responses come to us in the form of apocalypses in which the coming of the Arabs, in a time also of plague and famine, was seen as one sign of the end times. Interestingly, there is a modern revival of apocalypses in America and elsewhere as citizens observe and/or participate in the various conflicts in the Middle East - the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the "war against terror" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and perhaps soon Iran. To see how widespread this revisiting of apocalyptic visions is, one need only do an internet search with some combination of the keywords 'end times,' 'terrorism,' and 'Islam'. Although most results seem to come from conservative Christian sources, all three Abrahamic faiths are represented. Kennedy does not address this modern recurrence of apocalyptic thought, instead remaining focused on the time of the conquests, but states that the "apocalypse is both faintly absurd and curiously moving. In it we can hear the voice of the subject population."
Other Christians saw the Arab conquests not as a sign of the end times, but as divine punishment. For John bar Penkaye "the Arabs were the instruments of God, sent to punish the Christians for moral laxity and, above all, for heresy; but for him both the Chalcedonian Church supported by the Byzantine authorities and their Monophysites were the real enemy." We must remember that at this time there were a number of Christian Churches, each claiming to be Orthodox, and there was much mutual enmity and even persecution. For John, the rule of Muslims "might be either good or bad depending on the behaviour of the Christians."
Still other Christians in the area, notably Mar Gabriel, the abbot of the Qartmin monastery in present-day Turkey which "survives as one of the most venerable centres of eastern Christian monasticism . . . regarded the coming of Muslim rule as an opportunity rather than a calamity." Through Mar Gabriel we know that some Syrian Orthodox Christians did not merely look on helplessly, but actually aided the Muslim conquest because their rule was considered preferable to Byzantine oppression. The Coptic Christian responses were mixed, reflecting both the idea that Muslim rule was a relief from the brutal rule of Cyrus, and the view that they were brutal barbarians sent as punishment from God. An equally mixed reaction is found, Kennedy notes, in the Latin Chronicle of 754 from Spain.
The Jews of the Middle East also had an apocalyptic literature, not unlike the Christians, but they looked forward to the coming of the Messiah, rather than the end of the world. "For the Jews," Kennedy writes, "the last years of Byzantine rule in Syria had been a time of distress and persecution," and "the coming of the Arabs, though attended by much violence and cruelty, promised some alleviation of their condition." One passage describes the second caliph, Umar (634-44), as a lover of Israel, who "'restores their breaches and the breaches of the Temple, he hews Mount Moriah, makes it level and builds a mosque there on the Temple rock.'" However, like many Christian sources (Kennedy writes), they also complained about the taxation.
On the whole, the author writes, "the most striking feature of these voices is the variety of responses," and though many people may have been dissatisfied, few turned that into active resistance. This leads to some answers to the original question of how it was that the Arab conquerors were able to carve out an empire, in just over a century, "similar to the Roman Empire at its height," and which only Tang China could rival. Kennedy attributes the success of the Arab conquerors in part to the fragmented response and the lack of a concerted resistance movement.
Many of the sources, Kennedy points out, also give the impression that "many of the areas conquered had suffered from a declining population in the century after the first appearance of the bubonic plague in the Mediterranean world in 540." Another factor was the series of wars fought between the Roman and Iranian empires. And then there were the internal battles among Christian sects. In many areas conquered by the Muslims, "the invaders benefited from internal tensions in the ancient empires, which meant that, in some cases, they were seen as liberators or at least as a tolerable alternative."
Part of the success, Kennedy suggests, lay also in the unique characteristics of the Muslim forces. Kennedy writes that "[e]nough has already been said about the religious motivation of the invaders, the power of the idea of martyrdom and paradise as incentives in battle," something that is, incidentally, all too frequently mentioned in our media in relation to Islam. It was this "combined with the traditional, pre-Islamic ideals of loyalty to tribe and kin, and admiration of the lone warrior hero. The mixture of the cultural values of the nomad society with the ideology of the new religion was formidable."
Contrary to what one might expect based on depictions and descriptions of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood movies and Western media, the early Arab conquests were not, on the whole, exceptionally violent. Though "[d]efeated defenders of cities that were conquered by force were sometimes executed," Kennedy writes, "there were few examples of wholesale massacres of entire populations." Also, the new subjects were not, in most cases, forced to convert. Muslim authorities established working relationships not only with the former elite, but also with the heads of churches and other religious institutions. "Attraction, not coercion, was the key to the appeal of the new faith," though the desire to escape the poll tax, join the new ruling elite, and qualify for a military career were powerful incentives. In the end, Kennedy writes, "conquest did not cause conversion but it was a major prerequisite."
In The Great Arab Conquests Hugh Kennedy wades through the mass of often fragmentary, confused, and contradictory sources to provide his readers with a cautious and balanced, yet powerful and engaging narrative of the great Arab conquests. He has resurrected the use of the Arabic sources and treats them with respect, using them not just for the reconstruction of specific events, a task for which they are not always well suited, but rather as the foundation myths and social memory of the Muslim society by which they were created. This fascinating book is equally useful to the academic and lay reader.
See also:
I still have no time to write the review... Nuts. Too much upheaval change at work. Should get to the review sometime this weekend.
Anyway, here's another NOD:
Enough has already been said about the religious motivation of the invaders, the power of the idea of martyrdom and paradise as incentives in battle. This was combined with the traditional, pre-Islamic ideals of loyalty to tribe and kin, and admiration of the lone warrior hero. The mixture of the cultural values of the nomad society with the ideology of the new religion was formidable.
A few days ago I came across Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read via my feed subscription to the complete review's Literary Saloon. This book just begs to be talked/written about without having read it. So, suspending my usual practice, here I go.
My gut reaction, when I first saw the title, was rather negative. But as usual, the negative first impression was followed by curiosity. When something disturbs me, I like to dig in and find out for myself what argument is being made and what lies behind it. As readers of Wordwork|play would quickly find out, it is a matter of principle for me to read a book, particularly a book about which I am going to speak or write, with the exception of some reference materials (dictionaries, thesauri, etc.), from front to back, including the preface, introduction, postscript, appendices and addenda. Behind this principle is the idea that a cursory or incomplete reading can easily result in things being taken out of context, leading to incorrect assumptions, reactions, and conclusions.
The complete review provides not only its own review of the book, but also a good overview of other reviewers' reactions. Most seem to think the book has some valid points and is presented well. Some seem to agree with his general argument, some disagree, though they find it entertaining, while others feel the argument makes more or less sense depending on the culture (esp. its relationship to reading and literature) to which it is applied.
Not having read the book, my reaction is probably closest to that of Anthony Daniels of the New Criterion:
His book is a vindication of ignorance. It is, however, extremely amusing and clever -- though I must add that I use the word "clever" at least partially in its English sense, that is to say meretriciously and ostentatiously intelligent rather than deeply so; it is more a search for applause than truth. (...) It is not easy to guess how far the author is being tongue-in-cheek. Nevertheless, there is a serious point behind the book, and it is wrong.But then I'm basing my reaction on an incomplete context.
Now if someone would like to send me a free copy of the book--I don't feel like actually spending money on it at this time--I'll read it for myself and form a more sound and studied opinion. Who knows, I may read something that will modify my reaction. I do agree on one point he is said to make in the book--just because we haven't read a book does not mean we can't begin discussion of the ideas contained therein. But judgment of the book and its arguments have to be suspended until it has been read in its entirety.
Egypt was very different. In the modern world we think of Egypt as an Arab country, in many ways a political and cultural centre of the Arab world. At the beginning of the seventh century, however, this was not the case at all. There seems to have been no substantial Arab settlement, no Arab tribes roamed the deserts and few Arab merchants did business in the towns.
Interesting quote to do with the technology used in the conquest of Damascus...
The Muslims do not seem to have had any siege engines, or any equipment more sophisticated than ropes and ladders, and even the ladders had to be borrowed from a neighbouring monastery. It seems that all the attackers could do against the substantial Roman walls of the city was to mount a blockade and hope that famine, boredom or internal disputes would cause the defenders to give up.
On the beginnings of the Muslim conquests...
Muhammad's military campaigns were, in one sense, the beginning of the Muslim conquests. His example showed that armed force was going to be an acceptable and important first element first in the defence of the new religion and then in its expansion. ... At the same time, diplomacy was certainly more important than military conquest in the spread of Muhammad's influence in the Arabian peninsula. It was the network of contacts he derived from his Quraysh connections rather than the sword which led people from as far away as Yemen and Oman to swear allegiance to him. Military force had ensured the survival of the umma, but in the Prophet's lifetime it was not the primary instrument in its expansion.
Here are two quotes relating to the Arabian desert I found quite interesting.
Much of Arabia is desert, but all deserts are not the same. If the Inuit have a thousand words for different sorts of snow, the nomads of Arabia must have almost that number for different sorts of sand, gravel and stones.
The desert landscapes of Arabia were well known to their inhabitants and, we can almost say, cherished. The poets of ancient Arabia delighted in naming the hills and valleys where their tribes had camped, fought and loved. For them, the desert was a land of opportunity, and a land of danger.
What makes the Arab Muslim conquests so remarkable is the permanence of the effect t