Sunday reading list

This week we analyzed hackers and power failures through a Virilioan (is that a word? It is now!) framework, noticed Zambian power failures, celebrated the first day of the Spring semester, quoted Arthur Mervyn, and remembered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This week, we found the following articles of interest:

Jill Lepore, "The Creed: What Poor Richard cost Benjamin Franklin" [The New Yorker]

The vast bulk of Franklin’s writing, and especially of his political pieces, is sober, stirring, and grave, as the occasion, and the times, all too often demanded. But he was also a sucker for a good joke, or, really, even a lousy one. He loved hoaxes and counterfeits and had the sort of fondness for puns that, if he hadn’t been so charming, would have been called a weakness. As it was, his enemies damned his “trivial mirth.” John Adams, who resented him, conceded, “He had wit at will,” and “talents for irony, allegory, and fable,” but characterized his humor as “infantine simplicity.” Franklin’s best satires are relentlessly scathing social and political commentary attacking tyranny, injustice, ignorance, and, at the end of his life, slavery. Yet reading his letters you get the sense that he couldn’t always govern his wit, as when, striving to collect himself, he began a new paragraph, “But to be serious.”

Nancy Shoemaker, "Oil and Bone: whale consumption in the lives of Plymouth colonists" [Common Place]

The tedium of our daily lives makes it easy for us to watch whales for pleasure. Standing in the oil aisle of the grocery store trying to decide between extra-virgin olive oil, pure golden olive oil, corn oil, peanut oil, or canola oil; carting home jugs of laundry detergent; turning bright electric lights on with a twitch of a finger; squeezing into and out of spandex in fitting rooms and then paying for our purchases with a small slice of plastic—we forget that there is more one could do with a whale besides capturing it with our cameras.

David Bosco, "Moral Principle vs. Military Necessity" [The American Scholar]

The brigands, thieves, and insurgents whose status [Francis] Lieber struggled to define were at least operating on the edge of a classic war between organized armies. America’s struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan offer no such order. Insurgents are now the heart of the matter, not a nettlesome complication. The disappearance of organized opponents undercuts reciprocity, the law of war’s most valuable ally. American troops are now rarely taken captive, and when they are, there is little expectation that they will be treated humanely. The moral calculus that led regular armies toward mutual moderation, at least in how they treated prisoners, has been upset. “The legal framework for regulating war,” contends Syracuse University professor William Banks, “does not contemplate asymmetric warfare waged by non-state actors and thus fails to regulate perhaps the dominant form of warfare for the 21st century.” Some of the provisions in existing codes, as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales famously put it, “have been rendered quaint.”

Jerry Weinberger, "Rebels with Causes" [City Journal]

Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Paine’s Rights of Man could not be more opposed on every matter of principle that they address. But these important pamphlets do have one thing in common: they almost never make the reader laugh (the quip about No-ability is certainly no thigh-slapper). In this, they differ from much of what was written by Paine’s sponsor, the wise Doctor Franklin, of whom Jefferson supposedly insisted that he not draft the Declaration of Independence lest it wind up containing a joke.

Hilary Mantel, "That Wilting Flower" [London Review of Books]

The internet has so vastly increased the potency of urban legends, so quickened the circulation of rumours, that we may soon be the most deluded generation ever born. It seems strange that some scientists are so angry with the sacred books of old-time religions, when so many challenges to rationality are generated by half-understood, miscommunicated information, much of it masquerading as science, available online and in the press. The internet is the great source of light and of darkness; it trashes the status of knowledge, undermines its ownership, and scants the principle of editing and review. The laconic conventions that govern online communication favour the proliferation of irony, of a two-way split of meaning in every line, so that the knowing prevail effortlessly over the naive. Fleeting and flitting, self-generating, double-faced, the internet is the natural home for anomalous phenomena, which have a primitive quality, yet track social paradigms; like science fiction, they dance like sprites around the scientific consensus, sometimes seeming to follow, sometimes to lead, sometimes to head off by themselves into an ancient inner landscape.

Bob Rodgers, "In the Garden with the Guru" [Literary Review of Canada]

One spark, often overlooked, but crucial, I found buried in The Gutenburg Galaxy, a book often passed over by those who prefer his later, more popular works. Philosophers have always asked what drives history. Is it revolutionary ideas, manifest destiny, great individuals, something called “the life force”? McLuhan denied none of these causes but, following one of his most influential mentors at U of T, Harold Innis, he asked: “How about tools?” We may think the end of the slave trade on the Atlantic was powered by humanitarians and abolitionists in England and America, and McLuhan would not disagree. But the main impetus, he would say, was the steam engine, a tool that reduced the need for muscle. This example is not one I have taken from McLuhan’s writings. As far as I know I arrived at it all by myself. But I would never have thought of it if I had not read McLuhan. That’s how his probes work.