THE CONVERSATION PIECE

Category: Uncategorized

  • Social Media and the Commodification of Human Identity 

    By Tommie Worrall

    “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” 

        — Aldous Huxley, “Ends and Means” 

    Author’s Note: This article does not aim to offer any concessions to opposing perspectives on the issue of social media. This is a stone-cold diatribe – an unwavering condemnation of all digital mediums of cultural exchange. The author is in no way inclined to defend that which he views as having a decidedly atrophying effect on human society. 

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    The contemporary western world has fundamentally compromised all current and future generations. One may cite myriad examples of how this has been achieved: through the systematic destruction of the natural world, the impoverishment of the third world, through the legitimisation of a system of political and economic backwardness which prioritises said destruction…the list can continue indefinitely. 

    Within this dystopian mire that our everyday existence has become, we are not even afforded the luxury of normal human development. Late-stage capitalism dictates that every aspect of our lives is managed and maintained by someone other than ourselves: our time, our resources, and now even our identities are no longer our own. What I would like to emphasise in particular in this article is the latter issue – that we are no longer in control of the development of our own identities. Our thoughts, attitudes, and aesthetics now seem to be determined entirely by somebody else.

    I wish to clarify prior to further elaboration that I fully acknowledge the role of community in the growth of individual identity development. Our nature as social beings demands that our ego develops only after years of interaction and comparison with others; that is to say, we discover who we are largely thanks to inspiration and feedback from other people. This process of the death of the self-crafted identity that I am describing is not a vilification of the conventional role that others play in the development of identity; it is a condemnation of the fact that, in our unique set of circumstances in the modern western world, one is now largely removed from the process of the development of his own self. 

    I attribute the death of the individual to social media: that great, all-pervasive network of communication which has forcefully imposed its values of vanity, consumption, and alienation upon the masses in flashy, user-friendly style. There are few that can resist its temptation, and few that can live without it, try as one might; the burgeoning class of administrators and professionals in the United States is virtually required to possess, and consistently engage with, user profiles on LinkedIn, while local businesses will likely remain obscure outside of their town of origin unless they take to advertising on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. 

    Still, by far the largest demographic that has taken to (or rather, been coerced into using) social media is adolescents. Indeed, so much of the modern adolescent experience has been digitised that the common caricature of the American teenager now portrays them, often without exception, with a smartphone in their hands, obstinately unwilling to disengage from their online world. This is where the trouble begins – and where classic identity development ends.

    What has heretofore occurred among the juvenile population of the West, in accordance with the theories of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, goes as follows: if all has gone well in one’s life up to the point of adolescence, they have successfully developed the competence and confidence necessary to act within and upon the world around them and pursue the activities for which they possess a combination of ability and curiosity. At this point, however, the adolescent finds themself in the midst of a crisis of the greatest possible magnitude: Who are they? – and furthermore, how do they fit into society as a unique individual? The adolescent, in the burning frustration of their youth, finds that they cannot yet answer this question. In order to do so, and thus resolve their “identity crisis,” the adolescent tries on various roles, experimenting with and employing a variety of different – and often nonconformist – attitudes, behaviours, and activities, until the embryo of a unique identity is formed. In this stage of life, the adolescent is able to personally select the values, convictions, and persuasions that they want to adopt, and personally reject those which they find distasteful. They are the master of their own identity.

    Under the modern social media paradigm, however, the adolescent is no longer granted the privilege of taking part in the development of their own identity. Indeed, as the contemporary youth agonises over who they are, and who they wish to be, their social media feeds inundate them with pre-scripted, pre-crafted identities to adopt without a second thought. These are commodity identities, able to be acquired without any effort on the part of the adolescent other than mimicking the carefully curated content on their screen. Western youth are now able to develop a personality without engaging at all in the self-examination inherent to the process of identity formation – they are able to adopt beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that have already been decided for them.

    The digital content that bequeaths these prefabricated identities to our youth, however, is not unique to each individual. These identities are, like material commodities, intended to be acquired by as many consumers as possible. As a result, their proliferation is more important than their quality, and they are woefully mediocre. Commodity identities are a series of one-dimensional, watered-down caricatures, each crafted with their own superficial aesthetics, attitudes, and buzzwords so as to be instantly recognisable and transmissible – and as more and more adolescents adopt them, they are becoming ubiquitous. It is one thing for a material good to be adopted by majority groups, but an identity with no variation whatsoever is quite another; never before has such a level of identity homogenisation existed within human society. 

    True, adolescents have always divided themselves according to the similarities found in their nascent identity patterns (think of the clichéd groupings of jocks, nerds, goths, et cetera), but the members of such groupings were all recognised to be individuals, each with their own distinctive ideas and aspirations; a circle of friends that all were identified as, let us say, “nerds”, would have undoubtedly all possessed a certain bookishness, but each friend would have had their own unique intellectual interests, one being interested in the humanities, another in the sciences, and so on. Each friend would have brought different ideas, values, and aspirations to the grouping, despite their shared attributes. Now, however, the uniformity of adopted personalities has virtually eliminated such differences; the interests, mannerisms, and even patterns of speech of each member of an in-group are now totally identical, having already been scripted online for use in the real world. 

    What, then, has the West left to its progeny? – A hopeless future, one under which they are not even afforded the ability to develop as unique individuals, consigned instead to adopt shallow, prepackaged identities that hold as much depth as a puddle holds water. If our youth are relegated to an existence as carbon copies of one another, if they are denied the possibility to distinguish themselves personally, behaviourally, and intellectually, then we have truly entered into a period of unique cultural decline, unlike anything that human society has hitherto experienced.

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  • CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION: THE DEGROWTH IMPERATIVE

    By Beatrice Sturmdrang

    INTRODUCTION:

    When considering any number of potentially viable ways to mitigate, mollify, or lessen the harmful effects of anthropogenic climate change, one is immediately stuck by the obviousness of several possibilities. Some of them are already more or less being adopted, to varying degrees of consistency and efficacy. The transition to electric vehicles, for example, is already well underway, although critics deride the electric cars, such as Teslas, as symbolic of eco-capitalism, or a maintenance of the status quo with a green veneer. It is not enough to simply introduce yet more forms of consumption when the most salient and grave problem facing humanity stems from the very fact that the earth’s resources are finite, we must radically alter the relationship that humanity has with the natural world. Rather than allowing us to continue to extract resources at even greater degrees of efficiency, while avoiding the consequences (as the panglossian techno-futurists assured us), our prodigious technological development (and dependency) has only manifested in such a way as to all but guarantee the elimination of crucial natural resources from this planet.  

    DEGROWTH:

    Instead of focusing in on one specific tactic for the effective mitigation of anthropogenic climate change, this essay relates and underwrites ideas that have gained some cache in academic circles in recent decades, all subsumed under the larger category name: DEGROWTH. Degrowth is an abstract, varied, but widely agreed upon set of parameters that policymakers could implement to effectively transition the national and world economies from those that prioritize and necessitate infinitely expanding, linear growth, to economies designed to safeguard and promote the wellbeing of actual people. Shortly after its invention and rise to prominence as a metric in the 1930s, the concept of the Gross Domestic Product as an indicator of the economic health of a nation gain traction and currency among western economists. It is still widely used and relied upon despite it not being an accurate reflection of quality of life. The ultra-wealthy classes of corporate leaders and financiers, and the politicians who cross-pollinate between and among these elite groups, have benefitted from the deliberate misrepresentation of GDP as an indicator of a nation’s general wellbeing. To quote Kate Raworth, whose book Doughnut Economics presents and elucidates an economic system that prioritizes human needs over profits and growth, “the answer to inequality, we were told by the infinite growth proponents (such as Walt Rostow), was more growth.” 

    Exponents of the promise of economic degrowth blame the infinite-growth paradigm that the West has been operating in for the last sixty-plus years for the frog-in-boiling-water state that we find ourselves in relative to climatic change. It is clear that the western world, or the developed world (the nations who were colonial powers in the 19th century, and earlier in some cases) has pursued industrial development that is plainly unsustainable; unsustainable not in the figurative sense, but in a practical, literal sense. Unlimited growth models have catastrophically failed to foreground the importance of human dignity and wellbeing in their system of profit-seeking and blind innovation. Proponents of a degrowth model ask: “What would our economy look like if the ultimate goal of all economic activity were to enable people to flourish by having all their basic needs met?” This model would allow for blitzkrieg decarbonization, which would go a long way toward righting the ecological ship, so to speak. Degrowth frameworks can be used to promote and leverage an array of climate-conscious policies that can have such varied goals as reversing biodiversity loss, reforestation, and the radical reduction of energy use, among many others. 

    THE WASTE OF CONSUMERISM 

    If growth, and profit, are the sole incentives being pursued by businesses, the desire to market a quality product can quickly be replaced by the desire to market the cheapest, poorest quality item, made in the most remote, dismal factory with modern slave labor, to cut costs as much as possible. This has led to widely-known practices such as programmed obsolescence, which is rampant in many industries but in the consumer electronics sector in particular, which consists of the engineering of products to be of deliberately poor quality to create an artificial need to repurchase the device before its natural life-cycle would normally end. It is precisely this kind of logic that has been driving the rapid globalization of the world, which is more or less the recolonization of the global south by the economically hegemonic global north.  

    A fully implementable degrowth agenda would target harmful sectors such the fossil-fuel industry, private aviation services, intensive agribusiness, advertising, and more. State actors tasked with implementing degrowth agendas would require enforcement arms with enough leverage to hold large corporate entities accountable for their flagrant disregard of planetary limits and human life generally. Any industries deemed unnecessary or unproductive for meeting human needs will be targeted by degrowth task-forces. The emphasis will move away from enriching a minority of wealthy shareholders and financiers,  and toward providing, at a society-wide scale,  a socially conscious economic framework out of which opportunity, leisure, and human agency are each available for all citizens, regardless of their financial status. With the newly assumed social responsibility of modern degrowth states, it stands to reason that robust sets of public services will be provided for out of the limited revenues generated by the taxes on regressive businesses and negligent corporate actors. Services that are crucial for the maintenance of any even moderate quality of life, such as education, healthcare, and housing, all of which have been left to the greed and caprice of the private sector in our pro-growth system, which sees private equity frequently buyout struggling hospitals to sell off the real estate and lease it back to the hospital at astronomical rates of return, and then leaving the hospital to slowly fall into bankruptcy after being exploited for the benefit of a few investors in New York, all of the crucial human services will be provided for every citizen in a degrowth model; they will be the foundation, the bedrock upon which modern liberty and fraternity is built. A reworking of the distributive effects of our current economic orthodoxy is desperately needed if we can even properly conceive of a society that truly offers freedom to its citizens. It is only when we can radically alter our relationship to economics and the world around us that we can begin to properly adapt and react to the newly emerging climate crises and threats. 

    WHY DEGROWTH? PRACTICAL BENEFITS AND CONCLUSION

    There are currently housing developments in urban settings, such as Vienna, the first twelve floors of which are dedicated to conveying a visual representation of urban renewal in the form of ecologically minded city-planning. The normally utilitarian and uniform array of balconies has been replaced by a stunning, deliberate arboreal installation that draws the eye of the passerby and the online viewer with equal astonishment. These buildings also serve as socially progressive, public housing in Vienna. This is a really instructive example of the kind of innovative, socially conscious public projects that degrowth, if properly pursued, will come to embody. As an inspiring forerunner, these gorgeous Vienna housing towers serve two ends: they provide a social good, in the form of shelter for economically insecure Viennese, and they act as air-quality control mechanisms by the profusion of plant life into the urban environ. It is precisely this kind of forward thinking that can propel us out of the danger zone and into a new paradigm of successful adaptation and climate mitigation. It is hard to remain optimistic in the face of such colossal blows to climate adaptation as second the Trump presidency, yet, reading and thinking about programmatic solutions, that are far reaching and well-designed, like shifting toward a degrowth economy, can help keep the hope alive, and hopefully the human race as well.

    CITATIONS:

    Hickel, J., Kallis, G., Jackson, T., O’Neill, D. W., Schor, J. B., Steinberger, J. K., Victor, P. A., & Ürge-Vorsatz, D. (2022, December 12). Degrowth can work – here’s how science can help. Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x 

    a, b, c, 1, & d. (2023, August 22). Degrowth and the global south: The twin problem of global dependencies. Ecological Economics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923002094#:~:text=138)%20argues%20degrowth%20should%20be,the%20discourse%20as%20a%20whole. 

    About doughnut economics. DEAL. (n.d.). https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics 

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  • REVIEW: The Siege, By Ismail Kadare

    Ismail Kadare’s novel, the Siege, is a plaintive, raw work of subdued historical realism. Starting with a slow burn at first, the reader is able to remain grounded to the historical setting by Kadare’s inclusion of plentiful detail of the day-to-day minutiae of maintaining a siege. Outside of the clear historical framework that the narrative exists within, Kadare manages to weave in a startlingly human tale of individuals caught up in the gravity of systems with their own logic and progression, against the pull of which they remain powerless. In this sense, the role of fate is present throughout the entirety of this surprisingly poignant look at human reality.

    An impressionistic portrait of the murky moral waters that men swam in for much of human history, the Siege presents the problem of taking a fortified castle from the point of view of the aggressors, the Ottomans. Kadare intentionally places the narrative focus on the Ottoman side, with Albanian narrative progress occurring only at brief interludes between chapters. The vast majority of the novel is spent describing the goings-on of a handful of characters in the Ottoman camp. The protagonist is a sort of ersatz Herodotus in Ottoman dress, the stultified, uncharismatic Melva Çelabi, a chronicler sent to set down the events of the Siege into writing. The deuteragonist happens to be the man in charge of this mass of animated wills, wants, and needs whose circumstances led them, one way or another, into the Ottoman military machine, one Urgulu Tursun Pasha. And the tritagonist, and perhaps the most fascinating character, the Quartermaster General, equal parts mysterious and philosophical, uses Çelebi’s limited intellectual interests and political understanding as a sort of foil for his own philosophical whims and expatiations.

    Although the Albanian defenders eventually triumph, by outlasting the Ottomans, there is nothing romantic in Kadare’s depiction of the months of grim violence that the Ottomans and Albanians inflicted on each other. If the reader wasn’t aware of the author’s geographic provenance, it would be hard to tell on which side the author’s sympathies lie—this is how honestly, unflinchingly, and humanly the Ottoman characters are written. If anything, because of the paucity of narrative attention placed on the plight of the defenders one could be forgiven for assuming the writer to be Turkish, if he had to be one or the other nationality. In achieving a large degree of historical authenticity, the author doesn’t sacrifice the quality of the characterization of the major players of the Siege, with a startlingly humanized portraiture of the militarized, oppressed, terrified ranks of the Ottoman Empire. 

    A sense of the unstoppable forward march of forces beyond human comprehension or control is present throughout, and one cannot help but observe that the characters, like Çelebi or Tursun Pasha, don’t seem to struggle much against their fates. The soldiers in the Sultan’s army don’t have much choice, in the same way that any human being finding themselves in a hierarchy where violence is the essential relational element has a compromised ability to choose their path. One cannot forget that the novel deals with a time when human destinies were almost always forced upon them. This makes the problem of assigning moral blame to the perpetrators of the violence that features so prominently throughout the Siege even more difficult; it isn’t enough to simply and lazily apply a universal condemnation of violence in any form, as though each and every actor in the Ottoman camp were acting on their own accord in everything they did; as though the Azabs wanted to climb the burning ladders again and again and have hot pitch poured on their heads and burn and die horribly. The perpetrators of the violence, in the case of the rank and file Ottoman soldiers, are also themselves victims of hideous violence.

    One could argue that since the Ottomans are the ones attacking this fortress, and therefore the aggressors, they should not be considered victims for receiving the violence of defenders. This might be true for the commanders, but even then the truly responsible parties aren’t present at the scene of the battle; the Sultan and his divan back in Edirne are the ones who decided that these many thousands of men would die for nothing. It is, therefore, a complex task to make sound moral judgements when assessing the level of guilt of the various participants in the Siege. At the same time, these soldiers, the same Azabs who are so unjustly sent to their deaths time and again for the sake of taking the citadel, and others, are participants in the systematic rape and killing of captive Albanian women. There is no ambiguity or moral complexity here, this is simple, sheer barbarism. The author does not shy away from depicting the foulness human beings are capable of. There are parts of the book that are simply chilling in the juxtaposition they convey between the mellow, casual nature of the conversation between a group of friends drinking in the Ottoman camp, for example, including our chronicler, the milquetoast Thucydides, and then the same individuals discussing the way supply and demand applies to the village girls being used as human sex slaves. Everything, from the horrific to the prurient, is treated as equally mundane; Kadare doesn’t linger on the atrocities committed, everything is simply described, without exposition, moralizing, or any other incursion of the author’s sensibilities into the work. 

    In constructing the character of the Pasha, the author never gets into outright sympathetic territory. The Pasha always falls far short of decency, although he seems to exist more squarely within standard ethical parameters than the vast majority of his army. He is cold to his wives in the harem, treating them more like chattel than humans, and he remains consistently gloomy, surly, and short with his subordinates, although this last observation is far from unique for a military commander. He diverges from the common conception of a military general in one important respect, however. Generals, in the late medieval period and later, were typically men of major stature in the social structure, placed rather high up on the pyramid, and were therefore often insulated from the costs of war, including defeat, compared to their rank and file soldiers, whose blood was spilled regardless of the outcome of the battle. In the case of Tursun Pasha, the author made a deliberate choice to have his fate bound up with the result of the siege from the very beginning. For the Pasha the affair was all or nothing; either he would win the battle and return to Edirne to be rewarded with wealth and glory, or he would lose everything and be disgraced. In an interesting way, despite the obvious lack of even a hint of charm, warmth or likable traits, the Pasha’s dire situation puts him in an at least quasi-sympathetic light compared with the rest of the Ottoman cast. I found more to root for in the character of the Pasha, despite his presiding over a terrifying assemblage of bloodthirsty wretches, than the chronicler Çelebi, by leaps and bounds.

    All that said, it is very much worth noting that, upon reflection, one finds nothing redeeming whatsoever about nearly any single character on the Ottoman side. There is legitimately almost nothing positive that one could say about a single one of them. Perhaps Çelebi is the least reprehensible given his lack of participation in either the murder or the rape that occurs throughout the events of the Siege, but even he is only sort of neutral at best. He witnesses countless episodes of stunning, caustic brutality and is never bothered more than when he feels he has committed some kind of impropriety or faux pas in the company of his social betters. However, the way that these characters are presented with their inner thoughts and motivations leaves their humanity on clear display for the reader; they aren’t painted as uni-dimensional villains. It would have been easy to write the Ottoman characters, most of whom regularly commit acts of barbarous cruelty, in such a way as to neglect their emotional complexity as characters. Kadare consistently employs enough nuance to make the Ottoman characters morbidly fascinating to watch. A view of the inevitable march of technological progress is presented in the dialogue between Çelebi and the Quartermaster General, one that alludes to the terrors of our own age, forming part of the philosophical underpinnings of the novel. However, the larger burden of the book seems to rest on simply showing how humans behave in war, how it debases and corrodes their spirits, how it reduces them to barbarity, and how, despite all of this, they return again and again like moths to flames, to sow chaos and destruction at the behest of remote leaders and functionaries. 

    A fictional account of the protracted siege of an Albanian mountain fortress by marauding Ottoman ghazis, the work avoids any quaint massaging of the Albanian national spirit in its dealings with the Balkan nation’s national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti—Skanderbeg. While readers might expect Skanderbeg to take a more prominent role in the story that unfolds throughout the three hundred pages of Kadare’s novel, the author’s decision to limit his involvement in the events to little more than allusions and brief mentions almost has more impact than if he had written him in as a main character. While never actually appearing as a character in the novel, the fearsome reputation of the commander who harassed and defeated the Ottoman army all over the Balkans paid dividends for the defenders of the fortress in the Siege. One doesn’t get a sense of the themes of either national mythos or the resilience of the Albanian people occupying the fore in the Siege, which is noteworthy given the ease with which the tale could have slid into proverbial pandering to nationalist sentiments. 

    Kadare’s portrayal of the Ottoman characters, who are foregrounded in the book’s narrative, is at once nuanced, honest, and fair in its depiction of the actions of struggling masses of hierarchically organized humanity. Preoccupations with the logistical necessities of a prologued military action such as a siege are clear throughout. One can dismiss previous romantic or fanciful visions of what a siege consists of, minute to minute, hour to hour and so on. There are accounts to settle, budgets to balance, dead to bury, food and supplies to procure, systems of hygiene to institute, and more solidly unsexy aspects of siege warfare to expand upon. Kadare blends the historical foundation with the character-driven narrative progression in an adroit synthesis of world-building and pathos. 

    “Those among the council members who were familiar with administrative accounts realized that the secretary was making his quill squeal more than was actually necessary. To judge by the serious face he made at such times, it wasn’t hard to guess that these silent pauses in which his pen scratching was the overriding sound gave him his sole opportunity in life to assert his own importance. Once someone started talking again, his very presence would be forgotten (201).” This is a perfect example of the space and effort Kadare dedicates to humanizing even the most minuscule characters that appear, even if only in a scene or two, throughout the book. He is driven to catalogue the small preoccupations, motivations, and characteristics of the fleeting extras that dot the pages. All this detail and attention paid to sometimes inconsequential characters helps to create a narrative richness and believability; a sense of authenticity. 

    The blind poet, Sadedin, about whom a comparison to Homer is made partway through the book, muses cryptically about the futility and sadness about the world later on in the novel. “What is there to see in the world?” “An orphanage for fallen stars and nothing else!” (283) This quote seems to encapsulate the central thrust of the novel almost more than any other; the hopeless, doleful tone of the continued assault of the exhausted attackers combined with the succession of terrible events leading up to the final defeat of the Ottoman engine of war (by a symbol of nature, rain) creates an impression of a world hunched over with pain. There is a deep, persistent sadness echoing throughout this whole work. The Albanians defenders hold off the attackers, but it is known by both parties that the sieges will resume the following year, as though there is some providential teleology being played out again and again.  None of the players rejoice in the roles they’ve been given, nothing is glamorized or painted in romantic tones, there also is very little hope on the side of the Ottoman camp. A fatalism permeates the whole of the story, underwritten by the philosophical musings of the Quartermaster General, whose commentary lurches between the ontological and the topical. This novel is for people who not only love history, but also love humanity in all its hope, despair, ugliness, and its many shades of grey. 

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  • JEREMIAD: PART I: FILM AND FLEETING GOLDEN AGES

    In the coming months, I will be publishing a series of pieces on what I perceive to be decades of acute cultural decline across nearly all mediums and forms. This first article tries to look at the relationship between art and commercialism, using film as an analytical lens. The series is informally called, the Jeremiad. 

    CULTURAL DECLINE

    There has been a clear decline in the quality of artistic output across a number of mediums. From film to music, even video games have suffered from seemingly the same slow depletion of quality. It is worthwhile, when considering this phenomenon, to examine the link between commercial appeal and critical acclaim. One finds a conflict between popular tastes and artistic merit throughout much of cultural-object-producing history. There have been significant exceptions to this, one could name, in the realm of TV, the Sopranos as a rare intersection between commercial viability and critical approbation. There are other pertinent examples. For instance, in the field of music, the albums of the Beatles are another rare example of art that fits popular demands while also passing, rather impressively, critical litmus tests.

    THE PERIODIZATION OF MINI GOLDEN AGES

    There are several examples of periods where there was a consistent stream of content made, whether in film, music, or other disciplines, in which the concern for commercial viability didn’t preclude the creation of boundary-pushing, exemplary art. The way films get produced and the degree of control and oversight production companies have over the entire process is hugely impactful in this regard. The US film industry in the 1970s saw the emergence of a comparatively large number of directors whose devotion to cinema eschewed commercial considerations for the most part. One can point to the works of Scorcese, Cassavetes, Cimino, Altman, Bogdanovich, and others in this period who attainted that elusive combination of financial backing and creative freedom that seems scarcely to exist in the Hollywood of our time. That isn’t to say that the 60s didn’t see the creation of any number of well-funded films of considerable artistic merit and vision, but in the 70s something qualitatively different was occurring; directors were being, in many cases, given more or less free rein to push their projects into whatever direction they saw fit. Take Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, for instance—this film was wildly ambitious and outrageously over budget. Having been initially estimated to cost somewhere between 12 and 15 million, the picture ended up being more than twice the projected cost to make. While not without certain critical misgivings upon release, the film has since been solidly, uncontroversially preserved in the western film canon as one of the greatest films of all time. This was a box office hit with references to a novel of Conrad’s, and the poetry of Elliot. Can one conditioned to our moment’s commercial marginalia even imagine this? The salient point here is that, historically, commercial viability did not necessitate works that were artistically or culturally barren. 


    THE CASE OF JAPAN

    We might, for the sake of broadening our range of data a bit, turn to the case of Japan, a nation whose film industry followed a somewhat similar trend, with key differences here and there but with a downward curve to match our own. This is a country that, in the 60s, boasted an absurd number of talented, exceptional filmmakers. From Ozu to Kurosawa, Ichikawa to Kobayashi, Mizoguchi and more, the post-war domestic film industry simply blossomed. The 70s saw the rise of more artistically challenging films by directors like Oshima and others, followed by the 80s filled with delightfully bourgeois Itami pictures. Past critics have blamed the rise of television for the decline of Japanese cinema, but in reality a confluence of factors likely contributed to the evolution of a more overtly business-minded production model in major studios. Kurosawa, in attempting to make Kagemusha, in 1980, had to turn to foreign investment due to a few films that did not perform well domestically, these being Dodeskaden and Dersu Uzala. It was the only the pull that George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola had with 20TH Century Fox that allowed the film to be finished at all. Toho had given up on Kurosawa’s vision, writing it off as a financial mistake and cutting their losses. This is indicative of a significant shift in the priorities of the financial backers of films in Japan. All it took was two box-office flops for Kurosawa, who more or less introduced Japanese cinema to the rest of the world with Rashomon and Seven Samurai, to become persona non grata in the domestic film market. 

    MY ATTEMPTS AT EXPLANATIONS

    In continuing to pursue the initial line of thought, one might reasonably ask: “What accounts for the diminution of perceived value (in the eyes of the studios) of artistically bold, creative directors in both Japan and the US (whose market expansion in the post-war period followed a somewhat similar pattern up until the 70s and 80s when there was a divergence)?”  In both cases we see the previous existence of a vital, rich period of creative expression and achievement, during which the money people are more or less on board with whatever the director’s whims were. Of course there were exceptions, Orson Welles was unable to find funding for many projects after Citizen Kane, and he lost control of the next picture, the Magnificent Ambersons, with the rushes being mutilated by the money people to the tune of around 40 minutes, but in general, the 50s and especially the 60s were periods of immense creative output. In the US, which was particularly harmed by the stagflation of the 70s, if anything, more auteurs seemed to retain creative control over their pictures than before, whereas in Japan things started to shift in favor of the budget-minded producers and studios. Ironically, Japan, whose manufacturing and industrial strength would flower in the 80s while the US’s economy became offshored and financialized, seemed to miss the twilight golden age that the US had in the 70s. With the collapse of United Artists in 1980, after the economically disastrous Heaven’s Gate by Michael Cimino, the monied interests in the studios launched a campaign to regain control over the pictures directors made, and this is reflected in the relative dearth of visionary films in the 80s and the surplus of commercial effluent. One might not be crazy to wonder why Japan, experiencing an economic boom in the 80s, wouldn’t have also had a period of artistic fertility in film. This isn’t to say that there weren’t exceptional films made in the 70s and 80s in Japan, but, compared to the 50s and 60s, things were trending downward. While there are differences in each case, in both the US and Japan we see a triumph of the financial backers over the creatives; the directors lost ground and the big studios consolidated more control than ever. The era in which Spielberg and Cameron and Scott made their names was one of unprecedented oversight and restriction compared to the previous decade. 

    ONWARD TO NEW FORMS

    In Japan, however, while film languished, new media like anime started to come into its own with foundational films like Lupin III and the Castle of Cagliostro in the late 70s. New forms were being born as well, video games would come into their own in the following decades, with Japan as a nexus of innovation. There is no doubt that in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, there were good films made in both countries, but they were fewer and farther between, mixed in with all manner of hyper-commercial drivel. The independent film industry would produce some great pictures in the US, and 90s and early 00s Japanese horror has some gems. The fact remains, however, that never again would we see frontier- expanding films at the same rate in either the US or Japan. 

    OUTLIERS AND LATE BOOMS

    There are countries whose film industries bloomed creatively during the exact period where they became comparatively desiccated in the states and Japan. Korea and Hong Kong are both perfect examples, with an inverse curve. These places experienced economic periods of prosperity later than Japan or the US. If my theory about the ephemerality of artistic golden ages produced by economic booms holds true, the South Korean studios will begin to gradually pick away at director’s prerogatives over the coming years, if they haven’t started already. Since the late 90s, Korean directors have produced some of the greatest films of the last 30 years, with Lee Chang Dong and Kim Ki-duk being favorites of mine. 

    THE ROLE OF THE RICH

     Inevitably, when thinking about root causes here, one will arrive at the fact that the values and priorities of the patrons of art will have a huge impact on its creation. If a society has an affluent class who, despite their tireless efforts to extract rents and profits, cares about art, if not out of a genuine connection than at least as a status symbol, then that wealthy class will not be averse to using some of their considerable funds to stimulate the production of art. If, as seems to be the case now, all the rich people are philistines (or STEM-oriented misanthropes, or some combination of both), the productive levers that allow the flow of art to drip uninterrupted will not be pulled. 

    See the next installment of this series to see my take on our brave new world of philistinism and panglossian techno-futurism. 



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  • REVIEW: Timothy S. Miller, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire. Baltimore, MD; The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1985.

    With The Birth of the Hospital In the Byzantine Empire, Dr. Timothy Miller has produced a work of assiduous scholarship. Miller provides a thorough, comprehensive account of the birth of the hospital in the East Roman Empire of the 4th century, its evolution through the 13th century, and its decline and ultimate destruction at the hands of the Turks in 1453. Exploring the relationship between the nascent Xenon and the Orthodox Church is arguably the secondary objective of this meticulously researched work. An illuminating description, of astonishing detail, of the emergence of the hospital out of early Christian philanthropic institutions is contained therein. Dr. Miller draws on a wide range of sources to support his contentions throughout, including monastic typika, hagiographical text, imperial edicts, iconographical and archaeological evidence. His level of erudition is made evident by the intimidating frequency of ancient greek terminology throughout the text. Miller’s survey emphatically asserts the importance of the Xenon, and its place within the complex web of interdependent social, political, religious, and economic spheres that formed the society of the East Roman Empire. 

    Classical Greek medicine from Hippocrates to Galen had a profound influence on the development of the medical profession from the early Christian age through to the middle ages; the emergence of the hospital in Byzantium can also be attributed to the influence of Hellenic physicians of antiquity. It is in this context that Miller places the early Xenones. The cultural and religious assimilation of medicinal traditions originating from pagan ancient Greece into mainstream Byzantine theological doctrine regarding philanthropic institutions under the purview of the church is discussed in detail by Miller in support of his arguments in this volume.  In support of this acceptance of secular medicinal expertise by the Episcopal leadership, Miller points out a general shift away from belief in the power of healing miracles (examples of early pagan temples where afflicted would go to receive guidance from the god of healing, or early christian healing via prayer are both given by Miller) and toward the gradual assembly of a body of accepted medical practice, which was both clinical and secular in nature, that was embraced by the Christian Church in the 4th century as the best method of charitable healing.  In his exploration of the terms used to refer to early Byazantine philanthropic institutions, Miller attempts to impose a degree of philological clarity on the ambiguity stemming from the variety of words found in Hagiographical sources as well as typika. In the chapter on Eastern Christianity, Miller gives specific examples of ecclesiastical support of the practice of medicine in the context of Agape, or charity. He clearly expresses the importance of the acceptance of secular medicine by Christian institutions throughout the book, though with particular detail in this chapter. The relationship between Byzantine Ecclesia and historically pagan medicine is further illustrated by Miller’s inclusion of various christian metaphors which invoke medical terminology to express religious concepts. A prime example of this is the emergence of the phrase “The Great Physician” into the parlance of greek theologians, as far back as the third century, to refer to Christ. “Since greek society considered good doctors the most charitable of men, it was fitting for Greek Christians to see christ as the paramount physician.” (P. 58). 

    In support of his main arguments, Miller demonstrates a rigorous capacity for historiographical inquiry. In tracing the development of the hospital in Byzantium, Miller asserts the claim that not only did the hospital, in the modern sense, originate in the Byzantine Empire, but the most advanced medical institutions in the whole of human history before the 19th century were forged through a unique mixture of religiosity, professionalism and statecraft. One of his main arguments is that the Xenones of Byzantium have more in common with modern hospitals than any charitable institution from antiquity to the industrial revolution. Miller finds evidence for autopsies, as well as bloodless surgery for the removal of kidney stones, among other feats of early medicine that occurred centuries ahead of their time. The specific inclusion of evidence supporting the performance of autopsies by Byzantine physicians is further indicative of an unprecedented level of clinical advancement. In addition to the considerable time devoted to the Xenones themselves, Miller fastidiously elucidates for the reader the political and social undercurrents of support and opposition surrounding these early medical institutions. He supplements his arguments with an almost endless assortment of historical and historiographical data. In developing the argument of the technological superiority of the Xenones, (compared to the philanthropic institutions of the Latin West) Miller describes how the level of optimization of function and efficiency reached by Byzantine hospitals by the 12th century was such that they had instituted, at the Pantokrator Xenon at least, in addition to the normal course of treatment of patients in varying stages of convalescence, a system akin to a modern residency, wherein physicians in training observe doctors at the hospital to learn the craft. This fact gives substantial support to the position, advanced by Miller, that Byzantine hospitals were unrivaled by anything in the Latin West nor the East until modernity. According to Miller, certain 12th century Xenones even had physicians assigned to treat clients on an outpatient basis. This supports the contention that Byzantine hospitals attained a degree of sophistication and efficiency, in function as well as administration, unmatched anywhere in history until the mid 19th century. 

    Miller emphasizes that the development of institutions like the Pantokrator Xenon in Byzantium, analogous to modern hospitals in function, would have been almost impossible without the support of the Christian church. In the case of the Pantokrator, the hospital (Nosokomeia) itself was only one part of a larger, monastic structure. Its inclusion therein is a perfect metaphor for the growth of the hospital in Byzantium within the framework of religious charity. While highlighting the stimulating effect which the acceptance of secular medicinal methods within the episcopal leadership of Byzantium had on the development of philanthropic institutions like Xenones, Miller identifies cooccurring practical catalysts which necessitated the allocation of resources toward the creation, administration and maintenance of hospitals in Byzantium. “Practical demands, not Christian views on secular medicine and its physicians, actually brought the first hospitals into existence.” (p. 67) 

    In Chapter 5, Miller places the emergence of the first hospital qua hospital in the fourth century, in the East Roman Empire. “The decades of the fourth century, then, witnessed the birth of the hospital.” (p. 68). While Miller spends a portion of the book exploring the crucial role of the early christian church in the creation of the hospital, he also incorporates into his arguments various social, political, demographic and economic reasons that led to the establishment of early hospitals in Byzantium. “The altered world of the fourth century forced bishops to address social problems and physical suffering on a grand scale. In attempting to meet these needs, bishops and their advisors developed the panoply of philanthropic institutions including the hospitals which emerged by the end of the century.” (p. 69). The financial hardship experienced by city governments in the 4th century, Miller explains, was exacerbated by wealthy local politicians pursuing senatorial positions which, if attained, exempted them from taxation. Miller also illustrates how religious strife in the form of Christological controversies that emerged out of the Council of Nicaea, Arianism in particular, accelerated the proliferation of philanthropic institutions such as Xenones throughout the eastern territories. “Even the most spiritual pastors, however, were no doubt aware of the political implications of successful charitable operations.” (p. 74).  “As part of their efforts to win popularity among the demos, factions promoted conspicuous charitable activities…” (p. 76) The efficacy of Miller’s central argument is supported by the inclusion of a nuanced analysis of the precise combination of social, political and religious forces that created the hospital. 

    The involvement of the Imperial state in the administration and promotion of Xenones is advanced by Miller in his examination of the role of the Emperor in legislative decisions. He explores the part Emperor Justinian played in the evolution of the capacity of Xenones to effectively administer medical treatment when he mandated, by fiat, that the public physicians (archiatroi), renowned throughout Byzantine society, were henceforth required to practice at the Xenones. Miller highlights the fact that this reform of the public physicians essentially redirected all of the Empire’s urban medical expertise into the Xenodocheia. He goes on to describe how the reforms outlined in Justinian’s innovative legislation made hospitals the best funded and most important philanthropic institutions in the entirety of the Empire: “As a result of Justinian’s reforms the hospitals became the largest of the christian charities.” (p. 105).  Justinian fused the best practicing secular physicians to the Xenon system. This lead to the Xenon system becoming the nexus of Byzantine medicine from 550 to the early 13th century. Miller asserts that the bureaucratic system of professional development and duty which Justinian inaugurated in the mid sixth century by assigning physicians to Xenones has no analogue anywhere in ancient or medieval history.

    The christian virtues of love and charity, according to Miller, are at least partly responsible for the survival of the hospital in Byzantium during the chaos of the brutal conflicts that took place in the 7th century. Other elements of Byzantine society which allowed the Xenones to survive were, according to Miller, the political and ideological conceptions of the role of the Imperial state and the Episcopacy in facilitating the health and wellbeing of Byzantine society. Miller devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between Xenones and Orthodox monks. There are sections of the text which one has to summon a certain amount of willpower to traverse, the monastic chapter is a case in point. Notwithstanding this criticism, Miller artfully develops his arguments throughout with adroit use of source material. In the chapter The Hospital In Action, Miller is able to effectively conjure up an image in the mind of the reader of what these Xenones must have looked like. What at first seems like a rather narrow scope of subject matter, becomes, by virtue of the care and detail with which Miller explores the intersection of different socio-religious and political elements within Byzantine society which impacted the development of the Xenones, an elaborate historiographical mosaic.

    In establishing a qualitative assessment of Miller’s work, it is important to evaluate the degree to which the thesis is supported by argument and evidence throughout. The purpose of this study was to establish the origin of the hospital in the modern sense, with evidence, firmly in the East Roman Empire, in the mid 4th century. In addition to this primary goal, the work also sought to prove that Christianity; the christian virtue of philanthropy in particular, was responsible for accelerating the development and evolution of the hospital. Miller’s tertiary objective was to provide an account of the various political, social, and economic forces that impacted the development of the hospital, as well as advancements in the corpus of medical knowledge in Byzantium. While Miller succeeds at each of these, he is especially successful at the second. The rigorous investigation of the role of the church in providing a culture which embraces secular medicine inherited from classical Hellas, in allocating resources to expedite the development of the Xenones, and in fostering a social climate wherein medical practitioners are valued members of the wider Christian society, is the aspect of this work where Miller exceeds his aim. The level of historiographical nuance and depth is remarkable in Miller’s account of the gradual transition from early philanthropic institutions to extraordinary feats of organization and charity like the Pantokrator Xenon. This fascinating work is a composite of medical, religious, and social history. Miller expertly addresses each of the central arguments he laid out in the opening pages, but the work on the Church stands out as the most noteworthy aspect of this well -researched survey. Although seemingly limited to medical history at first glance, The Birth of the Hospital In the Byzantine Empire is a worthwhile read for anyone seriously interested in the Eastern Roman Empire. 

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  • Review: Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War For Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, New York, Hyperion, 2005

    The Byzantine Empire, when Constantinople fell to the marauding Ottomans under Mehmet II, had already been reduced to a mere shadow of its former splendor. After centuries of decline following the death of Emperor Andronikos I, and tensions with the West leading to Byzantium’s diplomatic isolation from the rest of Christendom, the Empire was in no position to counter Ottoman aggression. What had long been the preeminent polity not only in the Mediterranean, but arguably the World, had been irreparably truncated by foreign conquest, civil war, intrigue, and the gradual loss of military power. The Great Schism had irrevocably severed Byzantine religious and diplomatic relations with much of the Latin West. This rupture would reach a climax during the events of the Fourth Crusade, when the city of Constantine the Great would be viciously sacked and looted by fellow Christians. The events of Crowley’s book occur nearly two centuries after the reclamation of Constantinople from Latin occupiers by Michael VIII Palaiologos. 

    A descendent of Michael VIII, Emperor Constantine XI, would find himself called to fulfill a difficult destiny. The fall of an Empire that had lasted for more than a Millennium, and the heroically doomed attempts to save it, give Crowley’s work a Homeric undertone; there is a sense of tragic grandeur throughout 1453. In the course of human history few events rival the fall of Constantinople in terms of the widespread, far-reaching consequences it would have. It has, indeed, echoed through time. Considered by many historians to be the definitive end of the Middle Ages, the Fall of Constantinople sent shockwaves across the late-medieval West. It confirmed the emergence of an ambitious, technologically advanced Islamic polity, with designs on further Westward expansion, and shifted geopolitics by closing a vitally important East-West trade route. Even the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt would be made apprehensive by the young Sultan Mehmet II, and rightly so. For several centuries, following the collapse of the world’s oldest Christian Empire, the Ottoman advance would continue into Europe and the Levant before being thwarted at Vienna.

    Roger Crowley uses a range of historiographical accounts to piece together a rich and cinematic description of the fall of the greatest city of the Middle Ages. The level of detail contained in the book is astonishing. Various sources are synthesized into a larger, cohesive narrative. A clash of civilizations, with inverse trajectories; one at the close of its existence and one near the beginning, is featured within Crowley’s engaging tale. One finishes the book with a sense of the irresistible march of time, the rise and fall of great kingdoms; and no small part of Weltschmerz. Faith plays a prominent role in the lives of each side of this immortal battle; the Orthodox citizens of the beleaguered city of Constantinople, praying for intercession from God, and the culturally diverse Ottoman army, with soldiers of different faiths united, often against their will, under the banner of Islam. Despite the presence of a number of Christian troops who had been captured by the rampaging Ottoman threat and forced to serve the Sultan, there remained a large core of Muslim faithful among his troops. 

    1453 is the story of a people at the end of their history. The Empire that began with Constantine ended thusly with Constantine. There is an undercurrent of prophetic fatalism that Crowley insists, believably, was present in the civilians who experienced the siege. The amount of personalization and anecdote are part of what makes 1453 so captivating; seemingly incidental details add much to the characterization of the victims of the Ottoman sack. Crowley’s skillful account of the grueling six-week ordeal can be characterized as a successful attempt to convey events as they must have seemed to the participants themselves. Heartbreaking scenes such as when Emperor Constantine, valiantly defending his city against all odds, breaks down into tears after receiving critically bad news serve as enriching examples of pathos. 

    Far beyond a simple historical regurgitation of names, dates and sequences of events, 1453 devotes a considerable portion of its 266 pages to giving the reader a comprehensive look at the religious, social and psychological state of the citizenry experiencing this cataclysmic event. It painstakingly recounts the religious rituals observed, the motivations for perseverance, the undulations of morale, and in some cases the eschatological resignation of citizens so tired and scared they they come to feel that hope is a curse. Crowley brilliantly succeeds at providing a powerful snapshot of the psyche of a people on the verge of destruction. The fervent prayers in St. Sophia; the observance of divine liturgy hours before the final Ottoman attack; the exhausted families reverting to superstition and taking solace in prophecy; all these disparate pieces come together to create an extremely poignant impression.  The psychology of the average citizen is explored in the passages that discuss the emotional effect certain meteorological anomalies had on the people inside the city: “Alarmed, people ran to see what was happening and cried aloud when they looked up at the dome of St. Sophia. A strange light was flickering on the roof. The excitable Nestor Iskander described what he saw: “at the top of the window a large flame of fire issuing forth…those who had seen it were benumbed; they began to wail and cry out in Greek: ‘Lord have mercy!” (p. 178-179). Crowley isn’t interested solely in the broad narrative contours; he endeavors to paint a vivid picture of the hopes and fears of regular people inside the city walls. The overall emotional impact of the story is magnified considerably by these intimate portrayals of humanity in the midst of catastrophe; particular attention is paid to the role religion played in the final moments of Byzantium’s existence.

    One comes away from reading 1453 with a more intimate sense of what the inhabitants of Constantinople, who witnessed the final brutalization of their capital, must have experienced. This is unusual as far as historical non-fiction. The trend is to focus exclusively on the political and military leaders. While Crowley does go into detail about both Mehmet II and Constantine XI, these leaders do not absorb the entirety of the narrative focus. Import is assigned to other facets of the siege as well. The Hungarian iron founder Orban receives several pages dedicated to the description of his incredibly difficult craft, cannon forging, which provided the Ottomans with a crucial technological edge. One would be hard-pressed to find a historian who’d claim the Ottomans could have conquered Constantinople without artillery. On another note about the narrative color Crowley employs in his telling, the complex and multi-national character of the Ottoman forces is explored to great effect.  Terms like Seraglio, Janissary, and Vizier are introduced to the Ottoman-naive reader. 

    The book concludes with a disclaimer, citing the lack of consistent eyewitness testimony  as requiring of scholars a parsing out of the more unbelievable accounts from the realistic ones in formulating a coherent sequence of events for the siege. The fact that 1453 is not an academic work, being relatively accessible and not shrouded in technical didacticism, does not make it any less impressive; in fact it is arguably more effective as a narrative piece as a result. Although 1453 is fairly straightforward, the writing is sophisticated, and not without scholarly merit. Crowley highlights the historical importance of the fall of Constantinople by placing emphasis on the wider ideological and religious struggle which was renewed and intensified across Europe after 1453. The Ottomans, under Mehmet II, would make it as far as the Italian peninsula before the death of the conqueror. The expansion of the Ottoman Islamic polity gave rise to fervent Islamophobia in the West despite the indifference that Western leaders, secular and religious, showed to Constantinople’s plight in the years leading up to the siege of 1453. On finishing 1453, one is struck by the degree to which Europeans lamented the loss of a city which they did almost nothing to protect. Repeated diplomatic missions were embarked upon by Byzantine Emperors seeking assistance with the Turkish threat. In the end, a tiny force of foreigners would be there to aid in the defense of the city in the weeks leading to the fall. Crowley describes the term Saracen falling out of lexical prominence as the catch-all word for Islamic peoples, being replaced by Turk. The spirit of Jihad was nourished by the conquest of Constantinople, and the Ottoman political program took on an imperialistic dimension. 

    The adjective Cinematic, used before in this review, remains the most salient term with which to describe the style of 1453. Scenes have been etched into my memory, as though I saw them in person, or at least on a screen: Mehmet II, aware of the faltering resolve of his army, rallying support for a final attack with evocations of the Islamic law of 3 days of plunder for any city taken by force without surrender; Constantine XI, the final Palaiologoi Emperor, sharing a final moment with friend George Sphrantzes on the land wall on the eve of the final Ottoman incursion; these are only some examples. Then there’s the intense scene of Mehmet entering Hagia Sophia to find one of his men destroying the floor, the mercurial Sultan supposedly having him executed that day. It is a testament to any medium for scenes to be portrayed memorably; in this case, 1453 is a rousing success. Although in its later chapters it becomes painful to watch the exhausted defenders succumb to their fate, the refusal to capitulate; the stalwart perseverance with which Constantine XI faced his Empire’s destruction, in the face of a foe so irreconcilably different as to be incomprehensible to the Byzantine Christian; the inner strength with which the byzantines confronted pure moral and religious terror; these are all immensely inspiring to the reader existing in a mundane realm of screens and social media. 

    The heroic defense, while it lasted, some 6 weeks, was in every sense a collaborative effort. The Byzantines were joined by several thousand Italians; Venetians and Genoese, each with vested interests in keeping Constantinople out of the hands of the Ottoman juggernaut which had already taken all of Asia Minor and much of the Balkans. The tertiary main character of Crowley’s account is Giovanni Giustiniani. This Genoese nobleman came to defend Constantinople on his own accord, and at his own expense. He came along with 700 well armored soldiers, and played a critical role in repulsing wave after wave of Ottoman troops. In particular, the fastidiousness that he and his men summoned when they painstakingly repaired the damaged outer walls again and again, filling them with dirt, branches, barrels and anything they could find, proved invaluable to stopping the momentum of the siege up until the very end. Crowley emphasizes how his injury, and subsequent departure from the city at the last minute, marked a turning point in the siege. The 700 Genoese, seeing their leader gone, decided all was lost and followed him, creating an opening in the defense which the Ottomans immediately sensed and exploited. Whether this is true or not, that Giustiniani ended up tipping the scales after his injury, the way it is folded into the larger narrative serves only to add to the dramatic flair of Crowley’s telling. A single quasi-criticism emerging from this would be the fact that the role of the native Greek defenders seemed relegated to the background while various Italians occupied much of the foreground. Crowley obviously felt that it was important to highlight the multinational character of the defenders, but the point of focus, at times, seemed to linger on Giustianni and his Genoese contingent to the exclusion of the Constantinopolitan residents. 

    Crowley attributes the dearth of Ottoman first-hand accounts to the preliterate character of Ottoman society at the time of the siege. Despite this, narration from the perspective of Constantine XI is extremely limited. Crowley alleges the historical record is unclear about the precise death of the final Byzantine Emperor, and while the book goes into some detail as to Constantine’s behavior during the ordeal of the siege, Mehmet II features more prominently in the narrative. Crowley’s work attempts to provide the reader with a psychological profile of the young Sultan; exploring his motivations, his preoccupation with the city, and his self-identification with figures from history, such as Alexander (somewhat ironically), in what seems like a manic self-aggrandizement common to despots. The degree to which the work explores the character of the respective leaders is lopsided; Constantine XI receives only a fraction of the attention and narrative focus. The reasons for this are decidedly opaque, but, perhaps it was intentionally done to avoid the possibility of accusations of islamophobia in our overly politicized culture. If there is one single criticism that would warrant voicing, it is that 1453 would benefit from a symmetrically allocated narrative focus between the two leaders. 

    Ultimately, a thoughtful assessment of 1453 observes an account of the fall of Constantinople with superb narrative emphasis. Crowley succeeds in producing an extremely engaging, entertaining, and emotionally devastating chronicle of the final days of a once great city, inhabited by still great people. Although the survivors of the Ottoman conquest would go on to become a Byzantine diaspora, there would never again be a Byzantine Empire. The decision to employ a narrative style that holds the experience of the unnamed denizen as equally important to that of the leader makes the tale all the more engrossing, after all, the world is no longer made up of Emperors or heroes of legend; only celebrities and anonymous denizens; the age of immortal deeds is over, perhaps it ended with the Fall of Constantinople.

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  • Review: Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. New York, NY. Oxford University Press, 2001.

    Stephen Kotkin is not sympathetic to the promises of socialism, a fact that is made abundantly clear throughout the 220 pages of Armageddon Averted, a historical autopsy of the decline and fall of the U.S.S.R. However, he is surpiringly even-handed and measured in his treatment of the principle actors in the collossal drama that unfolded during the last few years of Gorbachev’s rule and the Yeltsinite parade of nepotism, venality, and elite self-enrichment. While some of Kotkin’s politics clearly influence his diagnoses, which is true for all historians, he doesn’t dissemble or disguise his faith in the capitalist system, which is refreshing and makes it easier to make allowances for bias when assessing his work. No mere laundry list of everything evil and awful about the late Soviet system, Kotkin presents a thoughtful, analytical examination of what he sees as terminal illnesses having infected the Soviet body politic. In so doing, he brings a novel perspective in his assertion that, contrary to popular periodizations of the phenomena, the collapse did not end with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but continued throughout the 1990s and into Putin’s early rule.

    In Armageddon Averted, Kotkin makes an effort to rebuff certain assumptions and tropes that have melted into the popular understanding of the Soviet collapse. For example, Kotkin challenges narratives that continue to have some weight: that Russia’s transition to capitalism didn’t work because oligarchs stole everything (there is some truth to this), or that privitization and market reform didn’t work at first because of mistaken advice from the West, or predatory loans from the IMF, among others. Kotkin seems unable to mention Russian oligarchs without downplaying the scope of their influence on Russian political and economic life. These narratives, and others are subjected to scrutiny throughout parts of the work. They are replaced by a consistent postulation that is reiterated time and again in the work; that endemic liabilities and inherent problems of design caused the failure of the Soviet Union. A central question that Kotkin attempts to answer is why, when the Soviet Union possessed untold military capability and nuclear ordnance, was none of its might employed to try to hold onto power and territory. Significant time and page space is dedicated to exploring the fact that the Soviet Union seemed to, to quote Dylan Thomas, “go gently into that good night” rather than make use of war as a Clausewitzian “politics by other means.” 

    Kotkin lays much of the blame for the Soviet Union’s dissolution on Mikhail Gorbachev. In a chapter titled ‘The Drama of Reform,” he opines: “Thus, the “real drama of reform,” obscured by fixation on the conservatives, featured a virtuoso tactician’s unwitting, yet extraordinarily deft dismantling of the Soviet system—from the planned economy, to the ideological legitimacy for socialism, to the Union.”(84-85)  The purportedly inadvertent shift from a unitary system to a federal one is described as occuring after Gorbachev, for political reasons, purposely marginalized the Secretariat. According to Kotkin, Gorbachev had this conception of the political conflict between a reforming impulse and a conservative impulse, in Soviet high office, as being the essential explanation for why Perestroika faced obstacles. Kotkin insists that, ironically, Gorbachev’s very attempts to reform and save the system are what lead to its rapid deterioration and destruction. When hamstringing the Secretariat, Gorbachev had the image of Krushchev’s ouster by the party apparat fresh in his mind; a reformer is expelled from power by entrenched, conservative bureaucrats, this is the lesson that was absorbed. 

    At the same time, while Gorbachev is situated at the decision making nucleus at the heart of the late-stage Soviet behemouth slouching towards destruction and dissolution, Kotkin presents him in a nuanced manner without ever oversimplifying the nature of his role. The Gorbachev presented in Kotkin’s book is a man grappling with the growing gulf between his own ideological loyalties and the obvious contradictions of a system he tries desperately to reform, change, and finally terminate. This is not a completely unsympathetic portrayal. Kotkin makes sure to emphasize the amazing political skill and adroit calculus the final General Secretary uses to push Perestroika and Glasnost through an often recalcitrant party and state apparatus. He also painstakingly points out the fact that Gorbachev, when confronted with failure and defeat, the seccession of the satilite republics and impending fall of the Russian Soviet Republic, he deliberately chose to avoid projections of hard power to prevent dissolution or simply retaliate. While Kotkin expresses his ideological, political, and social qualms with the system Gorbachev tried to save, he also gives credit to the leader’s restraint. 

    Significantly less of the book is dedicated to the Yeltsin presidency and its incubation of Putin’s political career. The focus is predominately on Gorbachev’s 1985-1991 reign, although Yeltsin’s rise is mentioned and several snapshots of his rule are included, such as the bombing of parliament in 1993, or his drunken antics. If there is any aspect of Armageddon Averted that might benefit from additional attention it would have to be Yeltsin’s presidency, and his relationship with Putin. Most of Kotkin’s book is exceptionally well-written and clearly well-researched.  The occasional flippant sentence might chafe certain readers like “But analysts who continued to attribute Russia’s boom to the dumn luck of sky-high oil prices needed to spend a weekend in Nigeria, where they should inquire about the middle-class bonanza (200).” This is both funny and callous and maybe funny because of the callousness, but it seems out of place in a serious examination like Armageddon Averted. Occasional glimpses of what seems like anti-russian sentiment are shown as well, with sentences like “….anti-corruption struggle, which in Russia always risked becoming a settling of political and economic scores (204).” This is certainly a true statement, but it is not uniquely true for Russia; it happens all over the world, including in our great nation. A fair, I think not undeserved, criticism of Kotkin’s treatment of Russia’s problems is that he seems to hint that corruption is somehow congenital to Russians at times (even if it is). Kotkin describes, in the chapters on privitization post-Gorbachev, a carnival of frenzied, kleptocratic officials enriching themselves at the expense of the Russian people and state.

    The difficulties of Russian legal reform, working from the inherited juridical architecture that survived the Soviet collapse, are explored in some detail in the chapter “Democracy Without Liberalism?” The transition phase from late-stage Sovietism to fledgling Yeltsinite “democracy”, in its physical plant, was a kind of liminal zone between then and now; Soviet infrastructure was absorbed wholesale to serve the new dispensation; the massive, sprawling KGB compounds in Moscow were simply repurposed, along with most of the other offices. Kotkin uses this as a metaphor for his argument, which is extended throughout much of the book, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to structural, institutional shortcomings, and that a critical mistake of the Russian Federation was that it used what remained of Soviet institutions, likely from political and economic inertia, to form the foundation of the “new” system. 

    “Russia’s challenge was not cultural or economic but institutional, a problem of governability, especially of its governing institutions.” (168) A major theme of Kotkin’s book is demonstrated here in miniature. One might even say the central burden of the work is to locate the main problem of the late Soviet empire in its institutional composition, that the system itself was doomed. Kotkin also places importance on what he deems a misplaced faith in the reformability of party-led socialism on the part of Gorbachev and his generation. The post-Stalinist conviction that Lenin had been different, that Stalin was a deviation from the promise of socialism plays a role here. Kotkin writes: “In fact, Lenin had not been less dictatorial or less ruthless than Stalin. But the myth that Lenin had been different, the myth of a redeemable party-led socialism, turned out to be of overriding importance. It had, in the post-Second World War conjuncture, the dissolving impact on Soviet structures that the First World War had on the then intact Habsburg state.”(174)

    One argument that Kotkin posits repeatedly throughout Armageddon Averted is that Soviet Socialism, no matter what the specific conditions of its existence, was fundamentally, absolutely, unreformable. He even goes as far as to say it was “proved” that it was impossible to reform the system. This line of argument is easy, with historical hindsight, to make with an air of certainty, but not without a certain obvious weakness, namely, that the proposition —Because A (the collapse) happened under B conditions (Gorbachev’s rule) then C (the system is irredeemably doomed; unreformable) is the only possible outcome for any other scenario—simply doesn’t hold logical water. The fact that the reforms initiated by Gorbachev failed to reinforce Soviet socialism against the pressures causing its destruction is evidence of the unviability of Gorbachevian reform Socialism, not of an abstracted universal certainty of failure regardless of internal and external conditions, which Kotkin seems to imply here. 

    Perestroika is presented as a success in the sense that it, contrary to its stated aims, put a metaphorical dagger in the staggering body of Soviet socialism, and allowed the festering elite bureaucracy to feed itself on the remains. “In this light, perestroika should be judged as a stunning success. Reform socialism also, unintentionally, incited Soviet elites to tear their system apart, which they did with gusto. In this light, too, perestroika was a success.”(181) One can sense thinnly masked delight at Kotkin’s repeated highlighting of the inadvertent nature of Perestroika’s counterproductive results. Kotkin conveys the fact that, unlike the common assumption that the Soviet elite was displaced by the rapacious opportunists who profited from privitization, the Soviet elite was largely preserved during the transition, becoming, in large part, the Yetsinite elite. The widespread corruption that had been a blight on the Soviet system simply continued after the transition to the Russo-market anti-liberal 90s system.  

    In the epilogue of Armageddon Averted, Kotkin gives readers a short analysis of the Putin years, Russia’s startling rise to economic relevance, and Medvedev’s presidency. The relationship with China is emphasized and comparisons are drawn between the two large powers whose authoritarian market economies both took off in the 2000s. The legacy of Soviet bureaucratic bloat is portrayed as mostly erased by the Putin era economic resurgence, or at least made irrelevant. Overall, the book does an excellent job of giving readers a powerful impression of a system in its death throes and the difficult transition that followed its demise. His clear, lucid historical writing illuminates the contours of Soviet degradation and inertia. Kotkin’s command of the subject matter is impressive, and though he is not ideologically hospitable to the ideals of Marxism or socialism, he manages to keep a sense of balance when discussing the downfall and dissolution of one of the most powerful Empires in human history, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.


     

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  • Review: De Madariaga, Isabel. Catherine the Great: A Short History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

    Isabel De Madariaga’s Catherine the Great: A Short History provides the reader with an account of the crucial narrative contours of the rise and reign of Empress Catherine II of Russia. The work is a survey of a period of Russian history that is critically important yet largely overlooked. While not a detailed study or examination, De Madariaga’s Short History attempts to familiarize the reader with those salient historical episodes and developments that, taken in aggregate, coalesce into the Catherinite epoch. The clear object of De Madariaga’s work here is to give readers a reasonable summation of Catherine’s reign that can serve well as a stepping stone for further research and reading. The author executes these goals with a powerful sense of history and a clear command of the material. 

    Throughout A Short History, in dealing with Catherine II’s reign, De Madariaga casts the Empress in a consistently sympathetic light. The Catherine that is portrayed herein is a reluctant autocrat or a reformer in absolutist clothing. While some attention is given to various diplomatic and military crises, the overall emphasis of the work is placed on Catherine as an intellectually curious ruler with constitutional inclinations dealing with the obstacles of the entrenched, vested interests of the gentry that keep her from enacting her most liberalizing policies. Of all the aspects of Catherine’s rule, the most time and detail are given here to the various legislative and administrative reforms she was able to complete. The intellectual appetites of Catherine are discussed at length. Though De Madariaga never attempts to deny that Catherine ruled in  the one nation that had codified and legitimized Serfdom just as it was being phased out in the rest of Europe, an effort is made to signal to the reader just how enmeshed in enlightenment thought Catherine was during her rule. Her frequent correspondence and friendship with figures such as Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire are highlighted throughout this summative work. It is clear that the author wants to draw attention to the degree to which Catherine contemplated systems of government outside of Tsarist autocracy or considered modifications thereto. It is recounted with some repetition how intimately familiar she was with Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Care is taken to inform the reader that Catherine even wrote some 700 pages of notes thereon. One could almost argue that the central burden of the work is to provide a counterargument to the prevalent narrative of Tsarism, even Tsarinaism, as unidimensional despotism; De Madariaga insists that, while Catherine shared many things in common with her autocratic successors and forbears, she was indeed a complex figure and presented, in policy choices and in concrete reforms, shades of a liberalizing tendency and even hints of constitutionalism. However, in her generous treatment of Catherine’s rule, De Madariaga seems to largely overlook the fact that nothing at all was ever done to improve the lives of the Serfs during her rule. 

    De Madariaga uses enlightenment German cameralism as a lens through which to appraise Catherine’s hints at reform. The legislative commission, as well as the Instructions, are both evidence of cameralist influence. She portrays Catherine as laying out a foundation of precedent for future reform and liberalization in Russia through the inauguration of corporate rights for each of the free estates. She admits that Catherine’s legislative achievements fell short of her aims but insists that her desires for reform were genuine. Her defense of the lack of reform during Catherine’s reign is partially based on the idea that Catherine herself was not to blame for the continued bondage of the Serfs; her ability to enact policies that would threaten the power or wealth of the nobility was limited by her political reliance on the former for legitimacy and support. Her goal for administrative reform was, according to Madariaga, essentially a complete reworking of the entire administrative apparatus of regional, provincial, and local government. The Legislative Commission that Catherine convened called for the appointment of representatives from each of the social estates, except the Serfs (except for 90 percent of the population). This, along with the creation of juridical and legal avenues for townspeople and free peasants to advocate for redress of grievance, none of which existed before, are certainly to be lauded, but whether these are reasons enough to justify giving Catherine the benefit of the doubt as much as Madariaga does in the text is uncertain. 

    Significant attention is also paid to the scale of legislative reforms attempted during Cathrine’s reign. The twin Statutes to the Townspeople and the Nobility formed the bulk of a chapter that, while providing the reader with detail and analysis, seemed to wander in the weeds a bit in terms of facts and figures and other indulgences in hyper-specificity and tedious detail. The reasonable reader of history cannot deny that, prior to Catherine, even the nobility had no formal representation in the Russian body politic; the old duma of the Boyars was dissolved long before her reign. It is understandable that the author would thus decide to dedicate significant time to the uniqueness of the political representation permitted by the legislative commission. It also bears mentioning that this representation, however unprecedented and quasi-democratizing, was limited, imperfect, and entirely confined to the free estates; Serfs were given no concessions. A criticism of Madariaga’s framing here can be made based on the fact that she largely neglects to emphasize how nearly all of Catherine’s reforms systematically ignore the plight of the Serf, even after the Pugachev uprising. 

    One area of the book that seems comparatively underdeveloped is the space devoted to Catherine’s rise. While the first chapter does establish the basic historical context in which Catherine’s seizure of power occurs, certain elements and aspects are glossed over. A prime example of this is Madariaga’s terse treatment of the plot hatched and executed to remove Peter III from power by taking his life. “According to the available evidence she was not informed of the plot to murder her husband; on the other hand she must have realized that if he remained alive he would be a constant threat to her hold on the throne, and that her supporters were unlikely to let him live.” (3) This kind of hedgy and equivocating statement alerts readers quite early on to Madariaga’s desire to spend more time on the admirable aspects of Catherine II, which are many, to the possible detriment of a more balanced view overall. While the work stops short of outright hagiography, this example of downplaying unsavory aspects of Catherine’s personality in favor of sympathetic traits is not the only one present in this survey.  In Madariaga’s dealings with Catherine’s innovations in the field of ethnic resettlement and assimilation, there are yet more jarring examples of the deliberate absence of seemingly warranted criticism. Only one paragraph is devoted to the creation of the Pale of Settlement and the double tax on Jews living in the Empire. “Yet, in spite of the broadly tolerant character of Catherine’s legislation, one of the most repressive features of nineteenth-century Russian policy towards the Jewish community dates from her reign. This was the setting up of the so-called Pale of Settlement” (141). In an earlier paragraph on the same page, De Madariaga describes the origin of Catherine’s “tolerant policy toward the Jews…” as coming from her lack of religious zealotry. Only a few paragraphs later, she describes the disproportionate tax levied on the Jewish townspeople and residents. Her insistence on coupling admissions of targeted ethnic repression with professions of Catherine’s tolerance read as incongruous and indicative of a wider pattern of emphasizing the positive aspects of Catherine’s reign and minimizing or explaining away the negative ones. 

    De Madariaga devotes considerable time to discussing the tenacity and single-mindedness with which Catherine faced the succession of crises that assailed her government. From the diplomatic intrigue, the clandestine plots to bet on a successor other than the Empress, the various Wars with Turkey, and the confusing geopolitical evolution of alliances to the massive cossack and peasant uprising led by Pugachev, each challenge Catherine faced is represented in Madariaga’s work with a detailed description of the methods the Empress used to overcome them. A picture of Catherine as a dedicated, serious ruler who relied on loyal military figures like Potemkin yet kept enough of her own initiative and strategic acumen to maintain herself in an advantageous position emerges from the narrative. Her willingness to bet on risky military solutions to diplomatic problems is presented, such as her adoption of the policy of armed neutrality to deal with the threats from the British Navy. Catherine’s Imperial character begins to truly show when she demonstrates to the other European rulers her complete willingness to commit Russian men and material to the projection of hard power in the Black Sea and elsewhere. In evaluating De Madariaga’s portrayal of Catherine as a ruler, it is important to note that the aspect of her reign that is most comprehensively dealt with, and that which has the most space dedicated to its exploration in the text, is Catherine’s various legal, administrative, and social reforms. While many dimensions of Catherine’s reign are confined to one chapter or only a page or two, the legislative and administrative reforms that she enacted are analyzed and described in a number of separate chapters. Understanding Catherine as a policymaker, influenced by Enlightenment thinkers yet still largely wedded to absolutist ideals, is made possible by the author’s detailed study of the Instructions and the dual Statutes to the Townspeople and the Nobility. 

    In distilling the grand narrative of Catherine’s thirty-year reign into an eminently readable and largely enjoyable survey, De Madariaga succeeds in producing an engaging, thoughtful account of a pivotal era in Russian History. While acknowledging Catherine’s penchant for favorites, the book refrains from a gossipy, tabloid depiction of her love life. Catherine is treated largely as any contemporaneous sovereign would be; an analysis of her policy decisions, the changes during her reign, and the impact she had on the course of Russian history are included. A certain respect for Catherine as an intellectual, as a strategist, as a stateswoman, and as a human being, is obvious in Madariaga’s treatment of the Empress. Madariaga explores the life of a sovereign who, rising through a coup, with no legitimate claim to the throne, went on to rule for more than thirty years, presided over the rise in influence of Russian military power, instituted the most comprehensive administrative reforms in Russian history as well as the first steps toward representative government, albeit imperfectly, fostered the emergence of the thitherto dormant Russian intelligentsia, and led a life of passion, learning, and romance. While the work is less than even-handed in its assessment of the downsides of Catherine’s rule, it never fails to take Catherine’s reign seriously and to impart to the reader the importance of the victories, reforms, and velleities of a complex and contradictory ruler. Ultimately, Isabel De Madariaga’s Short History is engaging, far-reaching in its areas of focus, and detailed in its examination of the reign of Catherine the Great.

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  • The Democratic Party: Where Social Movements Go to Die

    by Tommie Worrall

    Less than one month remains until the 2024 primary election and the progressive political scene in this country is, to put it mildly, an utter disgrace. Would-be Marxists are being swayed by the vague and hollow promises for reform made by the status quo duo of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, while liberals and social democrats shame, slander, and cancel those of us on the left who know better than to buy into their cheap rhetoric. We are told, rightly, that many of our hard-won rights are on the line, but wrongly that they can be secured by casting our ballots for the Democratic Party. 

    Liberal fear-mongering would have us believe that voting for another blue candidate is the only possible way to maintain our current civil liberties and regain those which we have lost. It is implicit in this scare tactic rhetoric that the demands of social movements, such as the securing of protections for marginalised groups and the return of federal abortion rights, will be heeded, if only another democrat can win the presidency. Not only is this position erroneous, it is also dangerous: it rejects the possibility of collective action, instead depending solely on the goodwill of the principal representatives of the Democratic Party for change. This is a group which has, historically, never sided with the people uncoerced; only when the legitimacy of the Party or its executive have been up in the air has any Democrat ever genuinely endorsed reform. 

    When the people do organise collectively with the hope of securing rights or demanding reform, the Democratic Party panics. It cannot completely drop the progressive facade that it has so cunningly crafted for itself, but neither can it stand idly by while the masses join together to call for things it is not willing to grant: better working conditions, livable wages, investment in communities, et cetera. This would entail a moral, and, more importantly to the Democratic Party, a financial commitment to the working class; in other words, a diversion of billions of dollars from their original targets (currently, the right-wing regimes of Israel and Ukraine) to the communities at home struggling to make ends meet under the crushing weight of poverty. This would be a nightmare scenario for Democrats and Republicans alike; not only would U.S. military aid to its quasi-fascist allies cease to expand at a linear rate (thus destroying the harmonious balance of the military-industrial complex), the loss would empower the downtrodden masses whose unrelenting desperation keeps them apolitical at one end of the scale and reactionary at the other. The power balance of inequality would be completely disrupted. 

    The Democratic Party’s solution to this potential catastrophe has been to gradually co-opt any and all movements of mass dissent in the United States until they can be rendered impotent or be dissolved completely. Its ultimate goal is to move the peoples’ demands to the right and to replace organisation in the streets with organisation around the ballot box, substituting radical struggle for watered-down election campaigns. This was certainly the case in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. What began as a series of popular uprisings fundamentally opposed to our country’s systems of oppression (the law enforcement apparatus, structurally-embedded racism, et cetera) ended as a politically moribund crusade for the Biden campaign and cosmetic changes: corporate diversity, socially-conscious consumerism, and the like. As soon as the Democrats began openly vocalising their “support” for Black Lives Matter, it was a sure indication that the movement would no longer bear the fruits of change. Within a matter of weeks, the streets were emptied of protestors, demonstrations ceased to make headlines, and calls to replace the police with community-based organisations were relegated to comments sections on social media. Establishment co-optation had effectively put the movement down. 

    This sedation of the Black Lives Matter movement was not an accident of nature: its downfall can be explicitly traced back to the actions of the Democratic Party. The Democrats’ propensity for destroying social movements is something of a historical pattern; the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights movement, the Anti-War movement, the LGBTQ Rights movement…all of these movements, within their respective time periods and beyond, were, and continue to be, transformed from mass demonstrations of frustration with the system into tranquil extensions of the electoral process by none other than our bureaucrats in blue. When the American left refers to the Democratic Party as the “graveyard of social movements,” it does so knowing that this historical tradition is still alive and well with the Party’s current representatives, and that it will continue to exist if we continue to be lulled into complacency. 

    Rejecting the Democratic Party is thus a moral imperative for anyone who wishes to see the goals of our social movements realised before they are forever consigned to the annals of history. They are not gone yet; our demands are still ripe for acquisition, if only we are ready to reach out and grasp them. But we must do so ourselves, independent of and in opposition to the Democratic Party and the institutions of capitalism.