For our west coast book club I’m currently listening to Moby Dick, wonderfully narrated by the great Frank Muller in 1987.

From chapter 1:

[W]hen I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

And chapter 5:

[A] good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

“It’s almost never a good sign when Thucydides is in the news.”

I already quoted Jonathan Kirshner on Thucydides. Now Aeon has a good piece on The Peloponnesian War, and a little broader in its sweep:

The Melians represent one instance of a broader psychological phenomenon depicted by Thucydides: a fervid attachment to justice, especially in times of war, can carry with it certain delusions. In Thucydides, the just are self-deceived, both because they think that they will prosper on account of their justness, and because they overrate their own attachment to justice.

Sparta is a case in point. […]

At best, the Spartans are hypocrites, trumpeting the causes of justice and liberation while quietly acting out of fear and self-interest. Yet the truth is worse and more complicated. The Spartans are moved by a passion for justice, which burns hot when they mete out punishment. Those who threaten the interests of the city – including their own best slaves, whose only fault is their excellence – incur the wrath of the Spartans. They are self-deceived because they do not seem to realise that their passion for justice has grown into a monstrous taste for punishment. The crimes of the Spartans receive a fraction of the attention paid to the fate of the Melians, partly because the Spartans committed their atrocities without the Athenians’ famous (or infamous) rhetorical flourishes.

Meanwhile, the Athenians may appear not to be self-deceived. After all, they talk tough about the weakness of justice in affairs among cities, and aren’t shy about pointing it out to others. In a conference at Sparta before the outbreak of the war, envoys from Athens offer a tripartite defence of the Athenian empire. First, human passions – especially fear, but also desires for honour and profit – compel cities to rule to the limits of their power. Second, experience confirms this account of the psyche. Only weaker cities appeal to justice; the strong simply act, securing their interests as they can. Third, because human nature and experience together compel cities to seek expansive rule, no city should be blamed for so acting. Necessity excuses the Athenian empire.

Yet, Thucydides exposes the delusions of the Athenians no less than those of the Spartans. If the Athenians grasp the weakness of justice among cities, they overestimate the power of reason – including their own. …

… Again and again in the History, the Athenians browbeat their enemies at the bargaining table. It is unclear whether the Athenians care more about realising their strategic aims or vindicating their own cleverness.

It is not enough, in other words, for the Athenians to realise their ambitions; they also want the satisfaction of seeing the other cities acknowledge the truth of their worldview. …

… [F]or all their vaunted realism, and even when they focus their deliberations on material realities, the Athenians make bad decisions, or fail to understand their own motivations. …

More broadly, this misunderstanding of their situation extends to the nature of their empire itself. Pericles, the pre-eminent Athenian statesman, admits that the Athenian empire is ‘like a tyranny’. Yet he does so only in the final speech (before his death), with the plague raging through his city. Even then, he cannot help urging the Athenians to hope for glory. He claims that, even in defeat, Athens will be remembered for having ruled over more Greeks than any other city.

In one sense, at least, Pericles was not mistaken: we do still recall the exploits of the Athenians. Yet our remembrance is owed less to Pericles than to Thucydides. But, where Pericles poetically declares that ‘heroes have the whole earth for their tomb,’ Thucydides depicts the end of the Sicilian expedition: the Athenians leaving behind the unburied and the wounded, drinking their own blood in the river Assinarus, and dying, ignominiously, in the stinking quarries of Syracuse. And where Pericles promises his fellow citizens that they will leave behind them ‘imperishable monuments’, Thucydides leaves us his far more ambiguous History of the war.

[…]

It is ironic, then, that so many with greater confidence and less self-awareness apply their own purposes to a work concerned with the vast human capacity for self-deception.

Noah Millman, describing… almost everything:

Organizations that are governed by the profit motive have an obvious if manifestly imperfect check regularly imposed on them by reality. Organizations that profess missions beyond the bottom line have to provide that check themselves. If they abdicate that responsibility, they in effect confirm that the profit motive is the only reliable reality check, and encourage those who are in a position to strip them of their other professed missions in favor of the profit motive to do so.

Ed Yong:

So much crucial work is accomplished one person at a time. No one corners an ER doctor who saves a patient and says, “Great job, but how could you scale that up?” And yet, when it comes to communication or social change, value and success are so often defined quantitatively—more eyeballs, more clicks, more subscriptions. But I strongly believe that in this era of crisis, many of the most important initiatives are high-touch and small-scale, deeply personal and necessarily so.

Catherine Shannon:

Across cultures, mirrors have been used by soothsayers, sorcerers and witches for scrying, divination and attempts to peer beyond the visible world. In folklore and occult practice, the mirror is not merely reflective but permeable — a portal where something might appear, or someone may return.

Even the postmodernists have their own warnings. In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a “heterotopia.” The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. “I see myself there where I am not,” he wrote, “in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”

Some other heterotopias, according to Foucault, include the honeymoon trip, psychiatric hospitals, vacation villages, prisons, the theater, the cinema, museums, libraries, brothels and the cemetery. In these settings, the normal order of things breaks down and certain truths are exposed. Each of these places could serve as an apt metaphor for the screens, monitors and social media applications that relentlessly reflect us back to ourselves. This technology is a mirror, but it is also a museum, a theater, a prison.

[…]

Closely tied to mirrors and the uncanny is the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, a theme long explored in literature and film, from Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double” to Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In German and Eastern European folklore, the doppelgänger is an omen, a usurper, the shadow self, and a sign that identity is unstable. The self is split, haunted, mimicked and stalked by its own likeness.

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

[…]

Mirrors encourage us to choose the fantasies of ourselves over the realities of others. It’s best we look away.

I’ve been reading a lot of William Carlos Williams’ poetry lately. So it was a happy surprise at the bookstore last week when I discovered Wendell Berry’s The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford. I’ve only thumbed through it a bit, and noticed this passage last night:

In his introduction to The Wedge of 1944, in contradiction of one of my own principles and much to my dislike, Williams said, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” In the years between 1944 and now, that metaphor of the machine has grown upon us until it has ceased to be a metaphor and has become an equation or an identity, so that organisms, including ourselves and our minds and the world itself, are now conventionally spoken of as machines, and this has helped to make us cold-hearted and destructive. But Williams’ explanation of his metaphor is perfectly acceptable to me: He meant, as he went on to say, that a poem, like a machine, should have no redundant parts. It should not be overloaded. He is speaking practically. A robin does not need four feet or a long bushy tail. You can’t transport a cow in a wheelbarrow. A line, a sentence, or a poem can have its back broken by too many details or too many words. There is pleasure, and there is beauty too, in any work accomplished with an exacting sense of enough.

Here, for example, is “The Term”:

A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length

and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the

wind slowly over
and over in
the street as

a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to

the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling

with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.

It is easy to see how an unwary young imitator could mistake this for free verse, simple and easy. It certainly is not pretentious. Nobody could call it magnificent. But if we are not an unwary young imitator, we begin our second thoughts about the poem when we feel its considerable power. Its power comes from its overturning of expectations. At first we may think we are reading a poem that is merely descriptive or “imagist.” By the end of the fourth stanza, we may suspect that the poem is developing a metaphor. But the metaphor, “the length / and apparent bulk / of a man,” turns out to be a sort of reverse simile: “Unlike / a man it rose / again…” It becomes a poem about the finality with which a man can be crushed by a machine. Quietly, without breaking stride, the poem assumes poignance and gravity dramatically disproportionate to its occasion.

The occasion of this poem is small, without any significance that is immediately apparent. It is odd, too. I suppose this is an instance of the “anti-poetic.” But the image of the blowing paper does not shock us by being anti-poetic. It shocks us by becoming suddenly poetic— and a lot more poetic than we expected. What the unwary imitator needs to see is that the poem’s sudden access of power is made possible by its strict economy, which may register on our senses at first merely as unpretentiousness. But not a word is wasted. Excess at any point would have spoiled everything.

I read very little Cory Doctorow. I have his Enshittification book on the shelf; haven’t read it yet. But I can’t pass up an interview that crosses my podcast path:

My thesis is that for the last 25 years, we’ve been systematically dismantling the sources of discipline in firms, such that the worst people at the worst companies who have the worst ideas make the most money. I call it an enshitogenic policy environment.

You know, when we decided that we were going to let companies buy their direct rival — a thing that’s illegal under American antitrust law — we eliminated their competition. And when we let firms merge to monopoly, well, it became much easier for them to capture their regulators.

When we expanded IP law to make it increasingly illegal to modify technology, so that, for example, if you put too many ads in it, people can’t make an ad blocker for it— Almost everyone who has a web browser has an ad blocker. No one who uses an app has an ad blocker because reverse engineering an app is a felony under a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So an app is just like a website skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to defend your privacy while you use it.

So you take away all those constraints. And these companies that have always had a mix of impulses, both within the individuals who run them and among the factions within them, they start to yield to temptation. And the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money.

[…]

And what happened was in 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA. And section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for modifying technology if it’s been designed not to be modified. And that means that anyone who designs a digital product just has to kind of wrap it in the right kind of IP to make it illegal to fix it.

So a printer comes with ink that costs $10,000 a gallon. It’s the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without getting a special permit. It would be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. But there’s a cartel of four firms that control the inkjet market because, again, we stopped enforcing antitrust laws. We let all those companies buy their direct competitors and they’ve rigged the price. And because they’ve added the right kind of IP to the printer to make it illegal to reverse engineer it, it’s against the law for me to sell you the tool that just reliably disables the thing where your printer checks whether the ink is generic. And so you have to buy their colored water.

Every single sentence from that interview is worth quoting. 

In fact, listening to Cory Doctorow is remarkably similar to going to church and hearing a sermon that helps you make sense of your entire life.

Here’s another bit that stuck out:

The squeeze that they put on was not to become operationally sustainable. It was to extract more profit after saturating a market. So I want to say that there’s a big difference between a company that squeezes you in order to extract more revenue and a company that squeezes you because they’re doomed and they’re basically, like, grabbing onto you and pushing you under the water to kind of buoy themselves up to get a few more sips of air before they sink too.

I’ve worked in healthcare as a surgical tech for close to 18 years. I hate it. Don’t misunderstand me; I like Medicine, and I like working in surgery. I hate working in “healthcare.” For years I have complained about working in a career field which for two decades has made not one single change that benefits its workers on the ground. (You probably don’t have to imagine what this is like.) And for years, when I have wanted to speak generically about what working in healthcare feels like, I’ve said it feels like being on a giant, secretly sinking ship where the suits-in-the-know are just getting as much out of it as they can before it goes under or they get out.

Without some secret knowledge, it’s difficult to make sense of anything. The general trend is this: hospitals (those no longer exist) “healthcare delivery networks” known as Entities systematically chip away at any and all incentives for long term employment. These Entities proceed to slowly lower the bar across the board — pay, PTO, health insurance, retirement benefits, all get worse, steadily and then all at once driving employees either out or mad, replaced largely by untrained personnel, locums, and travelers. These entities publish in local newspapers about how the travelers are bleeding them dry — and yet they change not one single thing to incentivize long term employment while spending billions to buy up more land and expand the empire.

I have no idea how this works. And that ignorance is just part of the job now. Someday I’ll get around to writing an overly self-indulgent post about my job, which can range from a tooth extraction to a total joint replacement to massive trauma to an organ harvest and all things between these. But what I have really wanted, short of actually righting the ship, is for some investigative journalist to tell me how the fuck this “healthcare” system works.

I think just such a journalist has been sitting under my nose.

Malcolm Guite:

So I went back to my college early before term started. And eventually, in desperation, went to see the college chaplain, who was, it happens, an American Episcopalian priest. So I told him this had happened to me and I didn’t know what to do with it.

He said, “Well, of course this happened to you; you’re in trouble. You recited these Psalms as though they were a background. But God is the prime mover and the ground of all being and the Word in whom and through whom all things are spoken and sustained into being. It’s not up to you to call him background. And you named his name in the poetry he himself has given us — you could hardly be surprised that he came.”

[…]

So I carried on like this and then later on a Roman Catholic friend of mine actually took me to hear a Franciscan friar preaching in Cambridge. … He was preaching, it was absolutely brilliant. He began talking about how a babe in the womb is entirely dependent upon its parent and hangs from the thread, as it were, of the umbilical cord and can do nothing. And even if the baby is born, it doesn’t actually physically have the strength even to turn itself over. All it can do is cry and hope to be heard and to be nurtured and nourished and fed. It’s utterly, utterly helpless.

And I thought, God, that’s exactly the way I am with this holy presence, you know, I’m hanging on a thread. Then he said, “You think I’m going to tell you that that’s how we all are with God, the transcendent creator. And in one way, it would be true if we regard him simply as the transcendent creator; we are utterly dependent. However, I’m here to tell you the exact opposite. I’m here to tell you that the utter helplessness of the babe, who can only cry and hope to be picked up and heard, is how God comes to us.”

… And he says, “This is what God does … and if you think he’s helpless, was helpless in The Womb of Mary and even more helpless, subjected to the dangers of the stable, lying in the straw, defenseless, certainly not going to strike us — think how completely vulnerable he is in this wafer. You know, there’s no arms or legs. You could take the wafer, the consecrated wafer, the presence of himself to you, and you could put it to the floor, you could spit on it and grind it under your foot. That’s the risk he takes to come to you.

Somehow in the midst of all of that, the penny dropped and I didn’t cease to think of God as completely holy, but I also thought of God as completely human. And … I realized for the first time in my life, I think, certainly my adult life, I felt it was okay to be a human being. Because in the days of my atheism, I was completely cowed by the scale of the universe. And there’s a lot of brutal atheist preaching which is using the cosmos as a big stick to beat you with into submission.

And suddenly, I thought, no, wait a minute, what if the maker of all this is in this and comes to me as a fellow human being? I then later realized, you know, takes the vulnerability to the nth degree and allows himself to be crucified in order to show what that love is, and then offers us resurrection.

He also reads his poem “Jesus falls the third time”:

He weeps with you and with you he will stay
When all your staying power has run out;
You can’t go on, you go on anyway.
He stumbles just beside you when the doubt

That always haunts you cuts you down at last
And takes away the hope that drove you on.
This is the third fall and it hurts the worst,
This long descent through darkness to depression

From which there seems no rising and no will
To rise, or breathe or bear your own heartbeat.
Twice you survived; this third time will surely kill,
And you could almost wish for that defeat

Except that in the cold hell where you freeze
You find your God beside you on his knees.

Very few people alive today, I think, can articulate the Christian faith — as informed by the Bible and by every moment of the life you live — in a more wonderful, beautiful, wholehearted, agedly wise and at the same time thoroughly childlike way than Malcolm Guite.

Also of note, on his writing of new Galahad and the Grail, which I cannot wait to read with the boys when they are old enough:

I was so cowed by the extraordinary achievements of the high modernists, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, David Jones, where the kind of thing they write is incredibly effective if you know what’s going on, but it’s bristling with footnotes and everything depends on getting an allusion to something that’s an allusion to something else. And I just suddenly got sick of it. I thought I don’t want to write this kind of coterie, university, elitist thing.

So I kind of thought I need to purge myself of that. But I still want all the subtleties and beauties of high English literature. So I began to be really interested in the poets and writers who can do all the brilliant things but don’t alienate their audience and reader in the course of it.