nonfiction
This entry will not display properly no matter what I do; v. frustrating
Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War:
Published in 1969, it is extremely detailed in terms of military history and covers both Arab and Israeli failures and atrocities, though there’s nothing uncontroversial in this area. Arab nationalism and Zionism were both locked in opposition and mutually reinforcing as Jews poured into Palestine, spurred by the Holocaust and the world reaction to it, and the British tried to appease their Arab clients without pissing off the far more pro-Jewish and then pro-Israeli Americans. The UN proposed a partition, which the Arab states didn’t accept and which initially proposed to leave a substantial (approaching close to half the population) Arab minority in the Jewish territory. Instead, the Arab states invaded (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt), but were hampered by poor equipment, limited manpower, and a focus on making sure that no independent Palestine came into existence; they preferred to divide the territory among themselves and the existence of Israel didn’t necessarily seem that much worse than a Palestinian state, not that any of the leaders could say so publicly. Things got worse for them in terms of materiel because of an arms embargo once the war started, whereas the Jews were used to buying weapons on the black market and successfully got a lot through, with the help of substantial funds from Jews in the US and elsewhere and of trained military personnel (including a number of Christians), many of whom had learned their skills fighting against the Nazis.
Though the nascent state was in real danger of disappearing, things got better for Israel as the fighting went on. Nonetheless the entire Jewish state was mobilized for war, as the Arab countries weren’t, and the war footing couldn’t go on forever. With a lot of international pressure, mostly against the militarily more successful Israelis, it didn’t. But it turns out that an absence of peace can last a very long time, especially since the Arab states didn’t do much to integrate Palestinian refugees. Although the number of Jews expelled from Arab states was roughly equivalent to the number of Arabs expelled from Israeli territory, Israel made many more efforts to integrate the former (though they apparently remained a seriously right-wing, anti-Arab voting bloc), while Arab states kept the refugees segregated in camps, creating a reserve army of potential anti-Israel fighters. Weak states have trouble making peace, and the first two Arab leaders who seriously conducted peace negotiations were murdered (King 'Abdullah in 1951 and Anwar Sadat).
David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity: Sprawling and fascinating, though already subject to challenge on questions like “did whites captured by Native peoples routinely decide that Native ways of living were better?” The core of the book is the argument that there is no natural evolution from farming to autocracy to (hopefully) democracy/republican government. Instead, lots of governance formations have been possible and tried over the course of history, and sedentary farming is not correlated with the rise of kings in the way we casually learned in school; matters are far more contingent and complex, though raider-kings are often seen on the periphery of settled cities. “Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.” Different peoples seem to have rejected authoritarian politics, or allowed them at some times of the year and not at others. Some forager cultures valued leisure over hard work; others did the opposite (e.g., in Northwestern California). The domain of ritual authority, which enables claims of exclusive ownership-of secret knowledge, usually-has regularly contended with egalitarianism in other areas of life. We are not as stuck as we think. Even the use of torture to cement a community can play out in different ways-in Europe torture showed the power of the sovereign over everyone, but in Wendat cultures in what’s now America, torture was applied to non-member warriors to highlight that violence was entirely unacceptable within the community.
They survey lots of different periods and kinds of evidence, finding plenty of cities without kings in the historical record. Part of this is about asymmetrical standards of proof: “Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority.”
Among the fascinating claims: Archaeologists now treat mass killings “as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way.” At a ruler’s death, members of the royal household would be slaughtered in “the first few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom,” and then the process would fade to nothing or to symbolism. This assertion of power over the household was a process of “turning violence into kinship,” related to slavery (where people who cared physically for other people were defined as property) and to the way that “all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household.” They speculate that monarchy’s appeal
has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same. It is also worth observing that monarchy is probably the only prominent system of government we know of in which children are crucial players … [I]nfants, pure objects of love and nurture, are only politically important in kingdoms and empires....
If you like this kind of thing, you might like the book. There’s also an extended discussion of the development of bureaucracy and accounting, which can be tools against inequality or for it. “[R]educing everything to numbers … provides a language of equity-but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas.” But that doesn’t mean they have to be expelled from the community-consistent with Graeber’s anarchist leanings, they suggest that, “[a]s anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair.” Only large-scale sovereign power “and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ … allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.”There’s also a fascinating discussion of specialization. Although “it is often simply assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government-military, administrative and judicial-pass into the hands of full-time specialists,” they argue that almost no early states were actually staffed by full-time specialists; they didn’t have standing armies. Still, “[i]f ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.”
Despite its length, the book could have used more development of its claims about women’s work and women’s power. It argues that the key technologies of early civilizations- “fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on”-were likely women’s technologies, and that the concentration of power in individual hands was “accompanied by the marginalization of women, if not their violent subordination,” but doesn’t give as much attention to whether this, like other aspects of society, was actually flexible. Still, I liked the discussion of Minoan civilization, which seems to have involved a lot of female power, despite scholarly interpretations that downplay it “as clearly different, but ultimately impenetrable (a gendered sentiment if ever there was one).”
I haven’t even gotten into the discussion of whether the freedom of movement-the freedom to leave a situation you don’t like-is the foundation of all other freedoms and the thing that, once gone, often leads to autocracy. Or the question of how Native thinkers in America influenced Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, filtered through their preconceptions but also challenging their claims of moral authority. There’s a lot here, is what I’m saying.
Katrine Marçal, Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men:
Not exactly the book I thought I’d get, but interesting nonetheless. Ideas of masculinity kill men, and inventions-she starts with the example of the wheeled suitcase, invented multiple times but successful only once women started traveling a lot despite its apparently obvious superiority over non-wheeled cases. Electric cars had a good shot over internal combustion cars at the outset, but they were perceived as too feminine. They were first to get roofs (to protect a coiffure) and to position levers and controls to be less likely to catch on clothing. Even the electric starter on a standard internal combustion car was initially presented as convenient for women. At the same time, it was the adoption and standardization of these changes that paved the way, so to speak, for the car to become a widespread consumer product. “So long as gas cars needed cranking, they were of no use to anyone who needed to get to work on time, and thereby remained an object of leisure or sport.” The “feminine” touches turned out to be usability requirements.
Sexism does plenty of dumb things like that; I liked her discussion of midwives’ use of wooden horns to listen to the fetal heartbeat. Women are associated with wood, not metal; with the rise of doctors, European midwives were banned from even using metal instruments. It was easier to justify higher pay and status for male doctors that way. And yet, as she points out, “[a] task isn’t by definition more demanding simply for requiring the use of tools,” as the process of repositioning a baby in the wrong position for vaginal birth clearly shows. “The ‘feminine’ is equated to the low-paid as a direct result of our refusal to view what a woman does as technical.” Something natural and passed from mother to daughter surely can’t be difficult or innovative and deserving of reward! When women engage in care of elders or children and do it well without much formal training, “we take that as proof that the jobs are ‘low skilled’ and therefore shouldn’t be well remunerated,” but if a man is “naturally” good at something, that’s often the explanation for why he should be paid well. Authority figures recording or discussing workers often discuss men’s “skills,” but women’s “speed” and “accuracy,” as if they were things that just happened-bodies without minds.
Likewise, she traces failed expectations about robot replacement of workers to gendered ideas about the body. Quoting a roboticist, she notes that “AI researchers long regarded intelligence as the ability to tackle ‘the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging,’” such as chess and math theorems. Those researchers concluded that, if machines could play chess, they could obviously do everything else. But they couldn’t. “[M]any of the jobs robots have the most difficulty with are the very same jobs that we don’t value particularly highly on the labor market”: care work. Mordantly, she speculates that we might be on the cusp of a shift in which these attributes are redefined as male precisely to the extent they are seen as valuable, like the shift in computer programming. “Our grandkids will be taught that ‘emotional intelligence,’ ‘intuition,’ and ‘caring instincts’ have always been inherent to human nature, at least since Jesus washed the feet of his disciples ….” At the same time, our high tech is still “assembled largely by female human hands in India and China,” and the devaluation of women’s work can hold back technological developments by keeping women’s work too cheap to bother replacing. “Who will want technology to solve problems that remain invisible, since they are currently being taken care of by women for free?”
The book is great at emphasizing that these are choices; that government force is behind them; and that we can choose differently. Amusing/heartbreaking riff near the end: “There is a basic economic assumption in our society that women will perform care work without pay, demands, or gripes, so if nature is a woman, then she obviously has the same duty of care. She must always stand by and care for us, no matter how we behave. Otherwise she is a bad mother: BURN WITCH, BURN! … We want her to be beautiful and vulnerable, and only then are we inclined to protect her.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War:
Published in 1969, it is extremely detailed in terms of military history and covers both Arab and Israeli failures and atrocities, though there’s nothing uncontroversial in this area. Arab nationalism and Zionism were both locked in opposition and mutually reinforcing as Jews poured into Palestine, spurred by the Holocaust and the world reaction to it, and the British tried to appease their Arab clients without pissing off the far more pro-Jewish and then pro-Israeli Americans. The UN proposed a partition, which the Arab states didn’t accept and which initially proposed to leave a substantial (approaching close to half the population) Arab minority in the Jewish territory. Instead, the Arab states invaded (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt), but were hampered by poor equipment, limited manpower, and a focus on making sure that no independent Palestine came into existence; they preferred to divide the territory among themselves and the existence of Israel didn’t necessarily seem that much worse than a Palestinian state, not that any of the leaders could say so publicly. Things got worse for them in terms of materiel because of an arms embargo once the war started, whereas the Jews were used to buying weapons on the black market and successfully got a lot through, with the help of substantial funds from Jews in the US and elsewhere and of trained military personnel (including a number of Christians), many of whom had learned their skills fighting against the Nazis.
Though the nascent state was in real danger of disappearing, things got better for Israel as the fighting went on. Nonetheless the entire Jewish state was mobilized for war, as the Arab countries weren’t, and the war footing couldn’t go on forever. With a lot of international pressure, mostly against the militarily more successful Israelis, it didn’t. But it turns out that an absence of peace can last a very long time, especially since the Arab states didn’t do much to integrate Palestinian refugees. Although the number of Jews expelled from Arab states was roughly equivalent to the number of Arabs expelled from Israeli territory, Israel made many more efforts to integrate the former (though they apparently remained a seriously right-wing, anti-Arab voting bloc), while Arab states kept the refugees segregated in camps, creating a reserve army of potential anti-Israel fighters. Weak states have trouble making peace, and the first two Arab leaders who seriously conducted peace negotiations were murdered (King 'Abdullah in 1951 and Anwar Sadat).
David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity: Sprawling and fascinating, though already subject to challenge on questions like “did whites captured by Native peoples routinely decide that Native ways of living were better?” The core of the book is the argument that there is no natural evolution from farming to autocracy to (hopefully) democracy/republican government. Instead, lots of governance formations have been possible and tried over the course of history, and sedentary farming is not correlated with the rise of kings in the way we casually learned in school; matters are far more contingent and complex, though raider-kings are often seen on the periphery of settled cities. “Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.” Different peoples seem to have rejected authoritarian politics, or allowed them at some times of the year and not at others. Some forager cultures valued leisure over hard work; others did the opposite (e.g., in Northwestern California). The domain of ritual authority, which enables claims of exclusive ownership-of secret knowledge, usually-has regularly contended with egalitarianism in other areas of life. We are not as stuck as we think. Even the use of torture to cement a community can play out in different ways-in Europe torture showed the power of the sovereign over everyone, but in Wendat cultures in what’s now America, torture was applied to non-member warriors to highlight that violence was entirely unacceptable within the community.
They survey lots of different periods and kinds of evidence, finding plenty of cities without kings in the historical record. Part of this is about asymmetrical standards of proof: “Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority.”
Among the fascinating claims: Archaeologists now treat mass killings “as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way.” At a ruler’s death, members of the royal household would be slaughtered in “the first few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom,” and then the process would fade to nothing or to symbolism. This assertion of power over the household was a process of “turning violence into kinship,” related to slavery (where people who cared physically for other people were defined as property) and to the way that “all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household.” They speculate that monarchy’s appeal
has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same. It is also worth observing that monarchy is probably the only prominent system of government we know of in which children are crucial players … [I]nfants, pure objects of love and nurture, are only politically important in kingdoms and empires....
If you like this kind of thing, you might like the book. There’s also an extended discussion of the development of bureaucracy and accounting, which can be tools against inequality or for it. “[R]educing everything to numbers … provides a language of equity-but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas.” But that doesn’t mean they have to be expelled from the community-consistent with Graeber’s anarchist leanings, they suggest that, “[a]s anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair.” Only large-scale sovereign power “and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ … allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.”There’s also a fascinating discussion of specialization. Although “it is often simply assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government-military, administrative and judicial-pass into the hands of full-time specialists,” they argue that almost no early states were actually staffed by full-time specialists; they didn’t have standing armies. Still, “[i]f ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.”
Despite its length, the book could have used more development of its claims about women’s work and women’s power. It argues that the key technologies of early civilizations- “fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on”-were likely women’s technologies, and that the concentration of power in individual hands was “accompanied by the marginalization of women, if not their violent subordination,” but doesn’t give as much attention to whether this, like other aspects of society, was actually flexible. Still, I liked the discussion of Minoan civilization, which seems to have involved a lot of female power, despite scholarly interpretations that downplay it “as clearly different, but ultimately impenetrable (a gendered sentiment if ever there was one).”
I haven’t even gotten into the discussion of whether the freedom of movement-the freedom to leave a situation you don’t like-is the foundation of all other freedoms and the thing that, once gone, often leads to autocracy. Or the question of how Native thinkers in America influenced Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, filtered through their preconceptions but also challenging their claims of moral authority. There’s a lot here, is what I’m saying.
Katrine Marçal, Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men:
Not exactly the book I thought I’d get, but interesting nonetheless. Ideas of masculinity kill men, and inventions-she starts with the example of the wheeled suitcase, invented multiple times but successful only once women started traveling a lot despite its apparently obvious superiority over non-wheeled cases. Electric cars had a good shot over internal combustion cars at the outset, but they were perceived as too feminine. They were first to get roofs (to protect a coiffure) and to position levers and controls to be less likely to catch on clothing. Even the electric starter on a standard internal combustion car was initially presented as convenient for women. At the same time, it was the adoption and standardization of these changes that paved the way, so to speak, for the car to become a widespread consumer product. “So long as gas cars needed cranking, they were of no use to anyone who needed to get to work on time, and thereby remained an object of leisure or sport.” The “feminine” touches turned out to be usability requirements.
Sexism does plenty of dumb things like that; I liked her discussion of midwives’ use of wooden horns to listen to the fetal heartbeat. Women are associated with wood, not metal; with the rise of doctors, European midwives were banned from even using metal instruments. It was easier to justify higher pay and status for male doctors that way. And yet, as she points out, “[a] task isn’t by definition more demanding simply for requiring the use of tools,” as the process of repositioning a baby in the wrong position for vaginal birth clearly shows. “The ‘feminine’ is equated to the low-paid as a direct result of our refusal to view what a woman does as technical.” Something natural and passed from mother to daughter surely can’t be difficult or innovative and deserving of reward! When women engage in care of elders or children and do it well without much formal training, “we take that as proof that the jobs are ‘low skilled’ and therefore shouldn’t be well remunerated,” but if a man is “naturally” good at something, that’s often the explanation for why he should be paid well. Authority figures recording or discussing workers often discuss men’s “skills,” but women’s “speed” and “accuracy,” as if they were things that just happened-bodies without minds.
Likewise, she traces failed expectations about robot replacement of workers to gendered ideas about the body. Quoting a roboticist, she notes that “AI researchers long regarded intelligence as the ability to tackle ‘the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging,’” such as chess and math theorems. Those researchers concluded that, if machines could play chess, they could obviously do everything else. But they couldn’t. “[M]any of the jobs robots have the most difficulty with are the very same jobs that we don’t value particularly highly on the labor market”: care work. Mordantly, she speculates that we might be on the cusp of a shift in which these attributes are redefined as male precisely to the extent they are seen as valuable, like the shift in computer programming. “Our grandkids will be taught that ‘emotional intelligence,’ ‘intuition,’ and ‘caring instincts’ have always been inherent to human nature, at least since Jesus washed the feet of his disciples ….” At the same time, our high tech is still “assembled largely by female human hands in India and China,” and the devaluation of women’s work can hold back technological developments by keeping women’s work too cheap to bother replacing. “Who will want technology to solve problems that remain invisible, since they are currently being taken care of by women for free?”
The book is great at emphasizing that these are choices; that government force is behind them; and that we can choose differently. Amusing/heartbreaking riff near the end: “There is a basic economic assumption in our society that women will perform care work without pay, demands, or gripes, so if nature is a woman, then she obviously has the same duty of care. She must always stand by and care for us, no matter how we behave. Otherwise she is a bad mother: BURN WITCH, BURN! … We want her to be beautiful and vulnerable, and only then are we inclined to protect her.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.