More books on how the world turns (Sept 2022)

“The Ancient City” Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges -an account of ancient Greek and Roman political and religious conceptions for cities. This is pretty fascinating stuff; Fustel de Coulanges deduced this from deep study of classical literature as well as the archaeology of the time, and the anthropology of Vedic practices which are broadly similar to those of the other Indo Europeans, as they share a common origin. Roughly speaking, he saw the original inhabitants of ancient places to be the later aristocracy; people who had household gods, a sacred fire and who inherited the gods of his ancestors, and performed rites meant to propitiate his ancestral spirits and the sacred boundaries. Marriage was joining the cult of the man’s family, and families were propagated religiously: aka adoption meant conversion to the family cult. Eventually in political organization,  as tribes grew into something resembling a town, there were sacred gods of the city, perhaps the household gods of the King. As new men (plebs) came to the city, they’d join the city cult, and have a patron in a local aristocrat. He traces various social revolutions where the plebs were given more rights and duties, and the fading of old practices in favor of new ones, eventually culminating in Christianity where all men shared the same religion and it was mostly separated from civic duty. It’s a vivid account: the ancient city was, according to him, basically a fanatical religious cult with many duties and sacred rites, and very little of what we’d think of as freedom: even in cities with democratic systems of government. One could think of it as a sort of development of human psychology beyond the primitive hunter gatherer band; religion being used to mediate conflict between people. You could also think of it as something completely consistent with the evidence presented in Julian Jaynes “Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” -one of those crazy, compelling ideas that captures many people’s imaginations. All of this seems pretty nuts to modern people, but Fustel de Coulanges seems to have done well in the eyes of modern Classicists, so I’m going to assume it more or less works this way. I wonder what this kind of thinking would look like applied outside of the Indo-European context: while European paganism and Hindu practices are deeply related, maybe comparing it to something like Shinto would be productive.

“Caesar: a sketch” Froude -the story of the most interesting man in the world brought to life by one of the great scholars of the classics. The political, social and legal contexts are left out of the classical accounts (Plutarch, Tacitus, Cicero, etc); it seems you’d really need to be a classical scholar to understand what was going on at the time, and why someone like Caesar was even possible in a Republic that had lasted for hundreds of years. His absurd achievements in war and politics are documented with loving detail, and a clear picture of his visionary nature and powerful personality emerges. When you look at the eald enta geweorc idlu stodon ruins of the Roman imperium, built thousands of miles and across oceans from Rome, two thousand years ago when news traveled by postilion and boat: truly it was the work of giants.

“Julius Caesar” -William Shakespeare. I read this after Froude, as this is the source for most contemporary views on Caesar as tyrant comes from. “Et tu Brutus” comes from this; not from any ancient source. Similarly his Caesar comes off as a sort of supernatural cypher as he does in popular culture; more a force of nature than a real man with understandable motivations and political angles. It is of course tragic and beautiful and it makes me want to sit down and go through the complete works. I had avoided this in the past for watching them in person, but they’re quick to read (assuming it’s not bedtime) and rewarding in their own rights.

“The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention” William Rosen -this one was a slow burn for me. Bill Dreiss recommended it to me when I still lived in Berkeley, after looking at the University’s antique microscope collection, but I only read a chapter or two here and there as I felt it. It’s an idiosyncratic history bouncing from medieval monks (the centers of technology in their day), to psychometrics on inventors, each chapter bouncing about to various inventors and iron-mongers, making it, in hindsight sort of suited to that sort of ad-hoc reading. Effectively a history of the industrial revolution leading up to steam engines, its also the disconnected stories of all the myriad scientists and inventors who pushed things forward, culminating in the steam locomotive.

“On the Syrian Goddess” by Lucian. A quick read, I found it at the excellent Global Grey ebooks repo, which is a nice little one-woman resource of cleaned up and well formatted open source books. Lucian is a sort of fedora atheist stand up comedian of his time; a Syrian himself, he wrote in Greek. Mostly in Attic Greek, this one was in Ionian Greek, I guess to make fun of Herodotus. I sort of picture him as a sort of George Carlin making fun of David Attenborough documentaries in a twee British accent. Contains an interesting account of the Assyrian version of the Great Flood which provoked some wikipedia forays.

“Mimes of the Courtesans” by Lucian. Also found in Global Grey. Remembering Lucian was a stand up philosopher, this is a series of dialogues between whores. Another quick and amusing read. Kind of makes you think; the courtesan was a familiar character to ancient Roman civilization. Not quite a prostitute in our modern senses; I think they called those meretrixes, and they were considered lower caste (prostibulae basically means “lower class”). Courtesans are more like high class escorts or the type of women who loaf in bikinis on rich men’s boats or something. Regular meretrixes were of no interest to upper class men who could buy their own sex slaves. Courtesans were women who could actually be amusing conversationalists in addition to the obvious. Of course the Romans while they’d accept the presence of Courtesans at parties, considered all of them, actors and actresses alike to be prostitutes (news flash: this is still true). Part of the comedy here probably is some complex social class thing I’m not going to fully understand without reading a half dozen Classics sociology books, most of the amusement is men acting like fools. Some may be horrified by the stock figure of the mom whoring out her daughter in these anecdotes; I have a hard time with that -current year moms in our “civilized” world generally do worse without encouraging their daughters to make the gentlemen pay.

“The Characters” Theophrastus –a nice list of the weirdoes one might encounter among gentlemen at the peak of Ancient Greek civilization. One might still encounter most of these people today among the leisured classes. I would have liked to have the same thing among working and merchant classes. Jean de La Bruyère wrote something loosely inspired by this which is also worth your attention. Reminds me a bit of Chesterfield’s letters to his son.

“The Perfectionists” Simon Winchester -this one came about looking for more information on Maudsley and all that. It is a decidedly mixed bag. Some of it is excellent; the story of Rolls Royce or Frank Whittle for example. The Hubble, GPS, microprocessors, atomic clocks is just meh. Chapters 7-10 are basically the nucleus of a different book; these have nothing to do with precision engineering -they’re various kinds of physics more or less unrelated to the earlier chapters on maschinenbau. Still, beggars can’t be choosers, the earlier stuff is quite nice.

“The Secret Team” L Fletcher Prouty. Prouty was a former air force colonel in charge of the spooks during the Kennedy administration. He is most famous as being the inspiration for “Mr. X” in Oliver Stone’s JFK movie. He is, of course, denounced in the usual ways; “conspiracy theorist” and is the type of guy who’d be writing at Unz these days. I dunno if the guy in charge of the CIA during the Kennedy administration thinks it was a CIA coup, maybe we should simply listen to what he has to say. This book is beyond reproach though: it’s basically a personal history of how the spooks work, and how they interact with the rest of the government: within the letter of the law, but with maximum deception. It presents the way the spooks orchestrated the Bay of Pigs, favoring Kennedy in the election and cultivating the relationship and idea months before he was actually elected; even pointing out the investments in sugar done by CIA insiders right before the invasion. This book was written towards the end of the Vietnam war and also describes the escalating spook nonsense that got us into the war in the first place. Not some hidden mastermind idea: just bureaucratic incompetence, in-fighting, inertia and narrative control. One of the key issues he raises repeatedly is that the spooks are reasonably OK and useful for intelligence, but it’s their clandestine activities which are a problem. They often spin up on otherwise unviewed intel input and serve no national purpose: more or less imagine if the DMV had the ability to overthrow local county governments to impose traffic rules which help them meet some internal bureaucratic figure of merit like number of registered drivers who live in apartments: that’s what they spooks are and why they do what they do.

“Background to Betrayal” by Hilaire Du Berrier. Du Berrier is one of those larger than life characters who almost couldn’t possibly exist: he ran away from home to join a flying circus,  flew for Hailie Selassie against Mussolini in Ethiopia, spied on the communists in the Spanish civil war (was nearly shot for his troubles), hung out with Hemmingway, Pound and Man Ray in Paris, flew for Chiang Kai Shek against the Japanese and communists, was captured and tortured by the Japanese in WW-2, was involved in the Algerian and Vietnam wars. He had almost perfect insights at every historical moment in time; predicting the GWOT in 1999.

“Byzantium: the early centuries” by John Julius Norwich. The early centuries of Byzantium are basically the Roman empire falling apart, religious controversy and innovations, and Justinian kind of sort of putting something new together (while almost blowing the whole thing up) thanks to a couple of important administrators and generals. I had read “the decline and fall” volume of Norwich’s 3 book series, like a couple of decades ago, mostly for further accounts of the fourth Crusade, and the invasions of Robert Guiscard both of which are absolutely fascinating to me. There are some nice asides here, including Chersoneus, which I had visited back when that was legal for Americans to do. Norwich is a great pleasure to read; you could imagine him in tweed telling you stories like this over a Sherry in the embassy library. Looking forward to cracking “the Apogee.” His book on Venice is also excellent. Apparently there are also books on the Normans, various random Princes, France, the Mediterranean and various other things I’ll eventually have a look at.

The Mind of Napoleon. compiled by J. Christopher Herold. Curtis Yarvin suggested this. I guess the easiest way to describe it is “Hitler’s table talk” except as written by “Ole Boney,” and compiled from random places rather than post turnip digestion at the Fuhrertable. Unlike Hitler’s tedious gasbagging, Napoleon was very much to the point, most of the things recorded here have the character of aphorism (there is a book of his aphorisms as well); even when he waxed prolix it was only a couple of paragraphs. This is the sort of thing anyone interested in any kind of leadership or organization should page through.

“The Education of Cyrus” by Xenophon (translation by Wayne Ambler). Is it the world’s greatest management book? History of ancient Persians? Idealized leader philosophy book? Probably some of each. Xenophon wasn’t around when Cyrus was in clover; he probably acquired his historical knowledge of Cyrus from the Persian court, a member of which he famously served with the 10,000 as a mercenary in Anabasis. It isn’t possible he spoke to anyone who knew Cyrus who died 100 years before Xenophon was born, so I assume he got a bunch of history and ideals from the Persian courts. It’s a very warm portrayal of a very great man, even if the man portrayed was semi-fictional in nature. It rings true psychologically, and I’m sure was somewhat informed by Xenophon’s generalship experiences.

“Moralia“ Plutarch. Moralia is much lesser known than Plutarch’s Lives. This is a shame, as there are better translations of it, and it’s a relatively quick read. I won’t say I like it better (Montaigne did), as that would be like saying you like the Book of John better than the Bible; they’re not comparable sets. But it is something very much worth people’s attention.