As mentioned last week, <a href="https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/04/10/what-ive-been-reading/ “In Defense of Globalization” (Jagdish Bhagwati) , along with Diversity in Development: Reconsidering the Washington Consensus There’s a draft of a review article over the fold. Comments much appreciated.

Moving on, I’ve read an advance copy o“Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner) The book contains a chapter defending the (mildly surprising) conclusion that having a black-sounding name like DeShawn is not a disadvantage in the US, once you take account of the class, education and family backgrounds variables typically associated with such a name. My first thought is that, in view the name Levitt and Dubner have given their baby, they must be pretty confident on this point. My second is that, if you haven’t already, you should read Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing
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In a stunningly original essay in today’s Australian, Stephen Matchett assails ” Elitist dismissal of mass entertainment as intellectual ‘prole food'”, when it is in fact, “recognisably subversive”[1]. He’s quoting one Alan McKee, who turns out to be a fellow Brisvegan and (via Google) a colleague of mine at UQ. Reading between the lines, I suspect McKee has more to contribute than this hackneyed point (he makes a valid observation about omnivorousness and cultural capital later on), but he’s not well served by this piece.

No doubt there are people out there who still adhere to the idea of a fundamental and unbridgeable gap between art and mass culture, but I’ve followed debates on this and related topics around the blogosphere for a few years now without running into them (probably, they’re waiting for this Internet fad to pass before they get a computer). The real problem now is to articulate some sort of criteria from distinguishing good from bad that does not rely on the failed assumptions of high art.

fn1. I see this point being made all the time in cult-stud writing. No doubt it explains why the recent collapse of capitalism, in the face of withering postmodernist critiques, began in the United States, the home of mass culture.

I’m not sure if this is an occult link with the Zeitgeist, or just a manifestation of the reallocation of attention that leads new parents to notice other people’s babies, but a month ago, I finally got around to ordering “The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield) which arrived at Easter. In the ensuing couple of weeks I’ve seen not one but two uses of the same idea, with both Protestantism and Toryism dying strange deaths. Maybe this is happening all the time and I’ve just started noticing.

“Fever Pitch” (Nick Hornby) is a great read, but a book about the internal monologues of an obsessive soccer fan is obviously going to be hard to film. Who but the Farrelly brothers, and their brilliant writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel would have the great idea of turning it into a romantic comedy {and, of course, switching the pun to baseball]?

“The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield). A classic I’ve meant to read for years, but only just got to has a strikingly apposite quote in relation to the Tory party’s incitement to army mutiny in relation to any order to enforce Irish Home Rule on the Ulster Unionists. Dangerfield has this great line

The Tory philosophy, up to the beginning of the war, might be summed up in this way: Be Conservative about good things, and Radical about bad things. This philosophy, so far as can be seen, has only one flaw: it was always the Tories who decided what was good and what was bad.

So while donning the mantle of conservatism in defence of the House of Lords, the Tories were prepared to tear up the constitution to defeat Home Rule. The same line seems applicable to the Bush Administration today.

“In Defense of Globalization” (Jagdish Bhagwati) Bhagwati is a smart guy, but he hasn’t yet learned that, on the internets nothing is as it seems. On the lookout for a good anecdote about globalization he finds one that seems too good to be true

In fact, while the rich-country while the rich-country claim to be providing “countervailing power” against the far richer corporationsin their midst, it is ironic that some of the the truly small NGOs in the rich countries themselves have voiced their fears over “unequal” competition from the far bigger and richer NGOs. A hilarious example is provided by a report in mid-2001 of “calls today for multinational pro-anarchy pressure groups to be investigated for monopolistic practices after the NW3 branch of the Radical Left Movement for Socialist Revolution Socialist Revolution was disbanded due to lack of interest.” The report goes on to say that the group’s spokesperson, Nigel Wilkinson, “believes that global anarchy movements such as the ones responsible for the G7 riots in Seattle are to blame for forcing out smaller, independent operations like his…. These large American anti-capitalist movements have effectively taken over the militant scene in this country.” As if this were not amusing enough, the report goes on to say: …”Wilkinson has seen his group’s membership dwindle by almost 70 percent over the last two years, from a peak of three members to one himself

Turning to the reference we find the source is Urban Reflex currently running the headline

Audience Stunned As Pop Star Appears On Stage Fully Clothed

Bhagwati may have been taken in on this one, but in other respects his book is sharp and well-argued. Some more comments before too long, I hope.

As well as these, I very much enjoyed“Singularity Sky” (Charles Stross), and I’ve been alternatively entertained and appalled by the TV version of <“Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Oxford World’s Classics)” (Thomas Hughes, Andrew Sanders) Actually that combination also sums up my response to last nights Swans-Lions game.

In the April edition of Prospect (subscription required), Roderick Swanston has an interesting review of The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. Swanston attributes to Taruskin an agenda that

is conservative, even Hegelian, and implies an evolution of music from the 6th century AD to the present. Key works and composers are included that have in some way contributed to music’s progression.

I haven’t read the book, and at 280stg, I’m not likely to, but the raw numbers are pretty convincing. Of five volumes covering the last 1500 years, Taruskin devotes two to the 20th century, and, according to Swanston, his focus is almost exclusively confined to art music derived from the classical tradition.

This allocation of attention states a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting. The 20th century was saturated in music, as is the early 21st, but 20th century[1] art music plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole. If you covered the entire field, from ABBA to zydeco, on any of these criteria, contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rock (another sub-genre inspired by historicism). Speaking personally, I couldn’t name more than a handful of living writers of art music, and even if I stretched it to include people who’d been active during my lifetime, I doubt that I could name ten. No doubt there are readers here who could do better, but we’re still talking about a marginal phenomenon, unless you assume that cultural significance is heritable property, passed on by classical art music to its institutional successors.

Nor could it be said that art music has handed on the baton of progress to other forms of music. The 20th century saw a profusion of musical forms and styles, and these have developed over time, crossed over and intermingled, but not obviously for the better (or, for that matter, for the worse).

If you want a grand-historical theory for music, Giovanni Battista Vico is your only man. The wheel turns.

fn1. As always, the term “20th century” can’t be used in a strictly chronological sense. For most purposes, as Hobsbawm says, the 20th century began in 1914, and composers with an essentially 19th century approach were still writing well after that. On the other hand, the view that progress manifested itself through formal innovation was around much earlier. A reasonable starting point for the 20th century proper would be Schoenberg’s atonalism.

I’ve been badly overstretched for the last few months, with an excessive amount of travel, and one symptom has been a failure to keep up with regular features like this one. I’m gradually getting my life under some control, so I thought I’d try to restart some conversations about books and writing. I have a huge pile of books on my desk, some of which I’ve promised to review. In this category, theres“Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner), “In Defense of Globalization” (Jagdish Bhagwati), and Diversity in Development: Reconsidering the Washington Consensus.

I’ve also become interested in philosophical issues relating to causality, which are closely linked to my concerns about uncertainty (in a world with no uncertainty, causality is essentially trivial). Books I’ve found helpful include“Reasoning about Uncertainty” (Joseph Y. Halpern)“Facing the Future: Agents and Choices in Our Indeterminist World” (Nuel D. Belnap, Michael Perloff, Ming Xu, Nuel Belnap)“Causation and Counterfactuals (Representation and Mind)” (The MIT Press) and“Causality : Models, Reasoning, and Inference” (Judea Pearl)

On the leisure front, I’ve been enjoying Iain Banks series of novels about The Culture, most recently Excession

I hope to extend this post during the week, adding a range of comments on these books over the fold. But feel free to jump in first with your thoughts, recommendations for further reading etc.

At Troppo and elsewhere, there’s been a lot of discussion of postmodernism, the English curriculum and so on. Nothing appears to have changed[1] since the last round of this stuff nearly three years ago, when one of my early posts began:

The postmodernists have been copping it from all directions lately, mostly in relation to their claimed infiltration of the High School English curriculum in New South Wales and elsewhere.

fn1. Nothing except that linkrot has long since consumed all the links, and the comments are similarly lost
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Blood Matters by Matthew Klugman is a fascinating history of the Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service in Victoria. As well as being of great interest in itself, it yields lots of insights into the role of volunteers and social social solidarity, particularly in relation to the “gift of blood”.

The story ends in the 1990s, when organisations that had served Australia well for decades were swept away in a tide of managerialist and market-oriented reform. The Victorian service was merged into a national body, while Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, the government organisation that had processed blood was privatised on terms that were grossly unfavorable to the public. It’s arguable that this is all for the best. Certainly the quality of Australian blood supplies remains high, and the ethic of blood donation is still strong. But I can’t help feeling that in this, and many other respects, we are living off social capital accumulated in the past.