A provincial, largely forgettable treatment of public life in California from 1990-2003. Starr, the state librarian for most of the term, ranges from establishmentarian to postmodern fellow traveler, writing as if to please the academy. As an assessment of important events, the book lacks context and reads like too many clipped essays strung together, especially on such matters as political economy or social issues like ‘diversity’. A major theme, the comparison of Los Angeles and San Francisco, is poorly constructed as the southern metropole should be compared to the greater Bay Area. Starr shortchanges the digital revolution, devoting a scant seven pages to the dot coms — focused on the downturn at that — and misses the cloud / collaborative trend that is more important than offshore production as a barometer of innovation. The book’s treatment of second-tier cities (i.e., San Diego, Sacramento, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs) is somewhat useful, and Starr is also helpful on the aerospace collapse, crime in LA, and a few other topics. But the decade’s principal triumphs are seen as large public works (often in the Southland), and much cultural analysis appears to be narrowly written for architects. There is little political narrative, even as the state was moving toward a single-party oligarchy. Starr’s primary question — wither California’s middle-class dream — is inconclusively answered. More rigorous historical treatment awaits.
Month: June 2021
5. Ellis, His Excellency (~ Mar 2005)
Washington was a physically dominating figure who was not well educated, but married into elite society. Possessing an outsized ego, he managed his image closely, particularly regrinding early military failures. After a successful French and Indian War, he accumulated land and aspired to fulfill the promise of the west, but debts to British cotton agents catalyzed his transformation to revolutionary. Ideology played no real role, although he did wrestle with the question of slavery. As a Revolutionary War general, he favored attack but realized survival was the victory, a la Fabius. He grew to recognize the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation during this time, and subsequently agreed to lead the Constitutional Convention and become the first president. He disliked partisan politics, reluctantly agreed to a second term, and all but dismissed Jefferson as a schemer. Hamilton was responsible for much of the administration’s success. Ultimately, says Ellis, Washington never conquers his ego but recognized posterity is the final judge and had the confidence to submit — unlike Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, etc.
3. MacCambridge, America’s Game (~ Feb 2005)
Shows how pro football surpassed college gridiron and then baseball to become America’s leading sport. Key to the league’s success was its collegial business administration. For example, TV revenues are pooled and shared, so that competitive merit is the distinguishing characteristic. In earlier postwar years, visiting teams received a share of the gate. The chronology includes closeup views of the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders. Technology and savvy use of electronic media played a key role, as did the accidental commissioner Pete Rozelle. TV, including Monday Night Football, also was a key driver — the NFL supplanted boxing and mastered the medium long before baseball grasped the possibilities. Football gained from the shifting cultural mores of the 1960s, but did not escape labor problems of the 1980s and 90s. The draft remains a key source of talent and public interest, although the rival AFL used superabundance of talent (athletes) to its advantage. The NFL now is an economic and social phenomenon as much as it is a sporting contest.
1. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin (~ Jan 2005)
The most pragmatic of the founding fathers, Franklin’s business skill as a printer and postmaster enabled him to retire at 42. An inveterate community organizer, he advanced from lending libraries to politics. The Philadelphian was not immediately a supporter of independence from Britain, but always an opponent of the Penn family. Franklin had a modestly successful diplomatic career, crowned by French intervention in the Revolutionary War in 1781. Given to egalitarian/bourgeois identification and values, Franklin purveyed homespun morals and humor and enjoyed practical experimentation. He was not a family man, frequently having affairs and trysts. He was image conscious and used studied silence to good effect.
10. Miller and Heiman, Strategic Selling (~ Dec 2004)
There are six steps to complex sales and long-term commercial relationships: 1) get to know all four buying influences (economic, user, technical, coach), 2) informational gaps are red flags, objectives to address. ‘Leverage from strength’ describes using advantages to remove flags, 3) buyers are receptive when in growth or trouble mode, but not ‘even keel’ or overconfident mode, 4) results are objective; wins are subjective; buyers need both, 5) matching your company’s characteristics with candidate characteristics identifies ideal customers and so reduces wasted prospecting, 6) the sales funnel (prospect, qualify, cover the bases, close) is a forecast tool. Action plans help improve current position (moving prospects down the funnel) and are to be done every 2-4 weeks for key accounts.
12. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (9 Jun 2020)
Evaluates shortcomings of mid-20th century historiography using examples from early modern England and Europe. Contemporary professional work has been too clever by half, failing the twin tests of common sense and explaining what happened and why on the past’s own terms. The historian may use a framework to study events, but not to determine their nature: history cannot be discovered or elucidated by rules. Particularly in times of convulsion – when history is most interesting – the narrative supersedes the analytic.
The Scientific Revolution marked a turning point in Western trajectory. Sixteenth-century aristocrats could no longer rise only by martial prowess, no more felt able to ignore the liberal arts. It was the reconstruction of a social class. By contrast, the myth of the contemporary English middle class muddles social change by misunderstanding the extent of the upper classes. Merchants buying in was an ancient habit; Tudor policy protected established groups even while promoting new ones; hierarchy was as important as ever. Economic change, absolutism, and Calvinism were more catalytic.
In the famous essay ‘Storm over the Gentry’, Hexter shows the gentry and peers were of the same class, so statistics are unhelpful. Political claims during the first half of the 17th century were grounded in ancient rights, not class interest; that is, classes do not inevitably pursue selfish ends. Religion may have been the prime mover, but politics was the medium. To get to the bottom of the Interregnum, the historian must ask what the Commons thought it was doing?
In fact, in an enduring conflict between the Stuarts and Parliament, the latter sought to husband its rights to legislate, to tax and supply, and to judge; but did not mean to topple the monarchy. The Petition of Right fell within the civic tradition. It was an effort to rebalance liberty and law, and after the Restoration politicians and notables cluster around the grandees as before.
See http://www.oeler.us/2021/06/22/the-historiography-of-the-english-civil-war/
Historiography of the English Civil War
Why has the matter of liberty and the rule of law on one hand and lawless rule and despotism or tyranny on the other slipped out of focus in the cleverest writing of the past fifty years about the causes of the English Revolution?
Briefly, it slipped out of focus some time before the First World War when advanced historians as well as other advanced people assumed that all the political traits of a society, such as liberty and law, merely reflected its socioeconomic substructure; therefore to find the ‘real causes’ of any large upheaval in a society on must first look at the socioeconomic substructure. In the English-speaking world such people were so habituated to the rule of law that they had ceased to set a high value on its and had lost the capacity to imagine what a hell life would be without it. When it vanished elsewhere in the course of revolutions, they scarcely noticed the effects of its absence. After all, it had not actually vanished for them, and its absence elsewhere had no effect on them because they still enjoyed its presence.
There was no easy way before the First World War for historians to conceive that lawless rule was possible in a socially progressive society. Liberty and the rule of law, it seemed, would be natural concomitants of social progress, evolutionary or revolutionary. Only it would be in a fuller liberty and a truly just, nonexploitative law. In some lands, in order to deal with the enemies of progress, liberty and the rule of law might have to be suspended or delayed a while, soon to be restored or inaugurated, however, in their ultimate purity. For the men who saw the world this way it was unimaginable that any but the naïve could seriously imagine that an ultimate goal of political life or end of political action was or ever could be the achievement or maintenance of personal liberty and rule of law, those doubtless useful but somewhat old-fashioned items in the arsenal of the war against exploitation and alienation.
By the late 1930s the evidence had become overwhelming that the advanced views of the previous decades on liberty and the rule of law were nonsense. One had to be willfully blind in 1939 to believe that the political order merely reflected the socioeconomic base of a community. By then the evidence was in that, on the contrary, those who held unlimited control of the instruments of political violence and were ready to deploy them vigorously could within limits imprint on the socioeconomic base what structure they willed. The twin nightmare worlds of Stalin and Hitler had been built on the foundation of class relationships to the instruments of production profoundly divergent one from the other. By 1955 Khrushchev addressed the Twenty-second Congress, and by 1963 the novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn had begun to appear in translation. By then to remain oblivious to the central importance of liberty and the rule of law in the ordering of human affairs ceased to be a mere intellectual defect and become a moral one. And finally, in 1974 the enormously rich people of the United States, and in 1976 the poor and backward people of Indian and Sri Lanka, showed beyond doubt that men of the most diverse cultures, of the utmost extremes of wealth and poverty, and of the most divergent relations to the instruments of production could be moved to decisive political action by the issue of liberty and the rule of law against arbitrary power and lawless rule.
And so the historiographic question is, how has it come about that in the midst of all this, in the midst of the hard evidence of their own experience, historians have wed themselves to views on the causes of the English Revolution that pay so little heed to the political concerns and motives for political action that conspicuously set men into motion then and now? It used to be said that historians reflect the views, biases, and preconceptions of their own day. Perhaps. If so, why the devil are present-day historians of England in the seventeenth century reflecting the views, biases, and preconceptions appropriate to the early 1900s, now obsolete for half a century? Why do they assume an intellectual stance suitable not to the political actuality of the past two decades hut more or less to the actualities from 1900 to 1925? That indeed is a problem of the English Revolution – a problem of his historiography, perhaps of the sociology or social psychology of knowledge, perhaps of the psychopathology of intellectuals. But in the mean time, let us historians drop this archaic nonsense. Enough already.
J.H. Hexter, ‘Power, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England’, Reappraisals in History (1979), pp. 216-217.
Rough water philosophy
In the pool, speed is ne plus ultra. In rough water, the priority is order of finish.
Speed, or pace, is therefore a means to the end. Other objectives include navigation, drafting (efficient pace), and positioning. To execute well, the athlete must gather contextual evidence and make good decisions.
Sources of evidence include course features (e.g., turn buoys), conditions, other athletes, and one’s own state. Of these, the latter is the noisiest.
The key to rough water success is sidelining background noise, in order to gather evidence and make good decisions.
Gentlemanliness
John Kekes on the ideal of a gentleman
Being a gentleman is not a matter of inheritance, wealth, or refinement. It needs to be earned by having a character with a sense of honor at its core. Character sets limits a gentleman will not cross and acknowledges responsibilities he will not shirk. It involves a commitment to a way of life that in some small or large way, by example or by action, contributes to making some lives better or protecting them from getting worse.
and
In The Idea of a University (1852), Cardinal John Henry Newman links gentlemen’s sense of honor to a university education. In our fraught times, education unfortunately often needs to be self-education, acquired by sitting quietly and alone in a room—digital technology silenced—slowly reading and reflecting on what some classic work of history, literature, or philosophy says about the possibilities and limits of life. And sometimes, not very often, it may happen that those who educate themselves discover not just how they might live, but how they must live if they want to be true to the ideal they have learned to admire from reading imaginatively reconstructed examples of others.
Marx on criticism
Ken Minogue ‘s Pure Theory of Ideology includes this quote from Marx:
[Criticism] is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute to exterminates …. Criticism appears no longer as an end in itself, but only as a means. its essential sentiment is indignation, its essential activity is denunciation
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/6/ideologists-amok