Posts Tagged ‘Voltaire’
“Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling”*…
The estimable Ted Gioia is exploring the possibility that we are at the cusp of a major change in the zeitgeist– the beginning of a new age of Romanticism…
I made a flippant remark a few months ago. It was almost a joke.
But then I started taking it seriously.
I said that technocracy had grown so oppressive and manipulative it would spur a backlash. And that our rebellion might resemble the Romanticist movement of the early 1800s.
We need a new Romanticism, I quipped. And we will probably get one.
A new Romanticism? Could that really happen? That seems so unlikely.
Even I didn’t take this seriously (at first). I was just joking. But during the subsequent weeks and months, I kept thinking about my half-serious claim.
I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.
- Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress.
- Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.
- Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment?
- As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.
- Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments—embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.
That’s the world, circa 1800.
The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out.
Resemblances with the current moment are not hard to see.
These considerations led me, about nine months ago, to conduct a deep dive into the history of the Romanticist movement. I wanted to see what the historical evidence told me.
…
I’m now structuring my research in chronological order—that’s a method I often use in addressing big topics.
I make no great promises for what I share below. These are just notes on what happened in Western culture from 1800 to 1804—listed year-by-year.
Sharing these is part of my process. I expect this will generate useful feedback, and guide me on the next phase of this project…
Because music is always my entry point into cultural changes, it plays a key role here in how I analyze past (and present) events. I firmly believe that music is an early indicator of social change. The notes below are offered as evidence in support of that view…
[There follows a fascinating– and compelling– account of those five years, featuring Napoleon, Haydn, Beethoven, Woodsworth, Coleridge, Herder, Schelling, the Marquis de Sade, Novalis, Ann Radcliffe, and others]
… Beethoven turns against Napoleon—and this is emblematic of the aesthetic reversal sweeping through Europe. Not long ago, Beethoven and other artists looked to French rationalism as a harbinger of a new age of freedom and individual flourishing. But this entire progress-obsessed ideology is unraveling.
It’s somehow fitting that music takes the lead role in deconstructing a tyrannical rationalism, and proposing a more human alternative.
Could that happen again?
- Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive.
- Imagine if people started resisting technology as a malicious form of control, and not a pathway to liberation, empowerment, and human flourishing—soul-nurturing riches that must come from someplace deeper.
- Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance and dictatorship over all other fields?
- Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code.
If that happened now, wouldn’t music stand out as the pathway? What could possibly be more opposed to brutal rationalism running out of control than a song?
But what does that kind of music sound like? In 1800, it was Beethoven. And today?…
Why it may be 1800 all over again: “Notes Toward a New Romanticism,” from @tedgioia in his terrific newsletter, The Honest Broker.
* Charles Baudelaire
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As we review vibes on the verge, we might send rational birthday greetings to an avatar of the Enlightenment against which the Romantics rebelled, Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he was born on this date in 1694. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
“Whoever pays the consultant gets pretty much what they want to hear”*…
For as long as there has been business, there have been consultants– outsiders hired hired by organizations to advise (on strategy or marketing or whatever), find opportunities, or fix problems. And like any large class of vendors, it’s been a mixed bag; some of those counselors have been helpful, some less less so, and some, downright harmful. What we come to think of as “management consulting” has grown up over the last century or so.
But over the last four decades consulting has changed in a way analogous (and not altogether unrelated) to the rise of the financial sector over roughly that same period (e.g., from about 5% of GDP in the U.S to nearly 8%; globally, the World Bank estimates that financial services have grown to 20-25% of the world economy). While there are still myriad consulting firms offering an astounding array of services, “consulting” has come to denote an industry dominated by firms like McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Deloitte– an industry that has had astonishing growth in recent decades. The worldwide market for consulting services is now worth somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year.
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington‘s new book, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies, traces that growth, and it’s too-often painful consequences…
The authors race through a medley of involvement in misconduct — price gouging vital medicines; corruption in South Africa and Angola; forest destruction from Brazil to Guyana; ICE detention camps; the asset-stripping of public services from health care to railways; brutal economic restructures of struggling economies; mass layoffs; tax-dodging; the 2008 crash; and the Enron scandal, to name a few. One quickly gains the impression that there isn’t a single major act of state or corporate malevolence in our lifetimes free of the big consultancies’ fingerprints.
But despite a roll call of cartoonish villainy, The Big Con is more of an academic intervention than a boilerplate attack on unscrupulous businesses. First, it challenges the consultancies’ fundamental value proposition: that the industry’s success is based on increasing efficiency and profits even in a narrow sense. Second, it interrogates and historicizes consultancies’ success, rooting it in the peculiar history of recent capitals. And finally, it makes a strident call not merely for undermining the power of McKinsey and similar companies, but for reinventing how we produce value in a time of huge challenges…
Collington and Mazzucato focus on several particular forms of business. There are the “Big Three” strategy consultancies; the “Big Four” accounting firms whose profit is today based far more in consultancy than in their original functions; the “outsourcing” firms that claim to offer specific services to government such as IT or security but in practice effectively perform the role of government; and smaller firms based in similar models.
This sector has been at the heart of a decades-long transformation in both business and government. In-house expertise and specialized knowledge have been eroded and replaced by dependence on consultancies and their short-term, one-size-fits-all methods.
Mass privatization is, of course, a far broader phenomenon than consultancies. NATO’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw private military and security contractors explode in size relative to the armed forces, resulting in both huge financial costs and human tragedy…
The privatization doctrine has also been enforced on the developing world, with brutal results. In every case, the public purse assumes most of the risks and the private sector profits most of the rewards.
Twin ideological doctrines have underpinned such a shift. In business, the “managerial revolution” — in which internal expertise is deprioritized, workers are ignored, downsizing solves everything, and all incentives are subordinated to short-term shareholder value — has been comprehensive. Recently the Boeing 737 MAX incident, in which passenger aircraft were effectively programmed to crash themselves, was attributed to the consequences of this revolution.
And in government, the historic experience of state-led innovation from NASA to the UK National Health Service (NHS) has been forgotten, and replaced with the inflexible view that the state is always less efficient than the private sector; public servants cannot be trusted to work for the common good; and where government has to exist it should resemble business…
A powerful– and painful– critique of consultants: Nathan Akehurst on The Big Con: “Consultancies Have Been the Handmaidens of Neoliberalism,” in @jacobin.
See also: “Need a consultant? This book argues hiring one might actually damage your institution” (source of the image above)…
While the modern consulting industry has a history stretching back over a century, Mazzucato and Collington write that the use of consultants really exploded after the 1980s. That’s when proponents of freer markets, like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, began dismantling government bureaucracies and regulations. More left-leaning “Third Way” leaders, like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, continued in their wake. “Public sectors were transformed under the credo of New Public Management — a policy agenda that sought to make governments function more like businesses and diminished faith in the abilities of civil servants,” Mazzucato and Collington write.
As governments lost the faith and capacity to do things themselves, they increasingly turned to consultants to help them accomplish tasks. Governments began using consultants for seemingly everything, from devising new tax rules to advising armies to overseeing the privatization of state industries to administering IT departments to devising strategies on how to cut carbon emissions.
At the same time, private corporations also increasingly turned to consultants to help them become more profitable. And here, Mazzucato and Collington portray consultancies as opportunistically surfing wave after wave of destructive capitalism. McKinsey & Company, for example, was involved in the Enron scandal and profited from the opioid crisis, helping Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” sales of its OxyContin painkiller.
“The Big Con is of course not responsible for all the ills of modern capitalism, but it thrives on its dysfunctionalities — from speculative finance to the short-termist business sector and the risk-averse public sector,” Mazzucato and Collington write…
@NPR
* Matthew Stewart (an author and philosopher who worked in consulting for seven years before turning away)
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As we look askance at avaricious advice, we might recall that it was on this date in 1767, in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia, that Voltaire wrote “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things”*…
What’s in a name?…
The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena…
From “a gene for” through “multiple personality disorder” and “scientific proof” to “underlying biological dysfunction”: “Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases.”
[TotH to @BoingBoing, whence the photo above]
* Confucius, The Analects
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As we speak clearly, we might send carefully-worded birthday greetings to Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he was born on this date in 1694. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics”*…
The second law of thermodynamics– asserting that the entropy of a system increases with time– is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. As Philip Ball reports, new thinking traces its true source to the flows of quantum information…
In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” No violation of this law has ever been observed, nor is any expected.
But something about the second law troubles physicists. Some are not convinced that we understand it properly or that its foundations are firm. Although it’s called a law, it’s usually regarded as merely probabilistic: It stipulates that the outcome of any process will be the most probable one (which effectively means the outcome is inevitable given the numbers involved).
Yet physicists don’t just want descriptions of what will probably happen. “We like laws of physics to be exact,” said the physicist Chiara Marletto of the University of Oxford. Can the second law be tightened up into more than just a statement of likelihoods?
A number of independent groups appear to have done just that. They may have woven the second law out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics — which, some suspect, have directionality and irreversibility built into them at the deepest level. According to this view, the second law comes about not because of classical probabilities but because of quantum effects such as entanglement. It arises from the ways in which quantum systems share information, and from cornerstone quantum principles that decree what is allowed to happen and what is not. In this telling, an increase in entropy is not just the most likely outcome of change. It is a logical consequence of the most fundamental resource that we know of — the quantum resource of information…
Is that most sacrosanct natural laws, second law of thermodynamics, a quantum phenomenon? “Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder,” from @philipcball in @QuantaMagazine.
* “Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.” — Seth Lloyd
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As we get down with disorder, we might spare a thought for Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he died on this date in 1778. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
“The method preferred by most balding men for making themselves look silly is called the comb over”*…
Balding has been the constant scourge of man since the beginning of time, and for millennia, our best solution was the comb-over. Brian VanHooker tells the story of how its once-ubiquitous popularity thinned, receded, and then got pushed to the side…
For decades now, having a comb-over to cover one’s baldness has been generally seen as unacceptable. There may be exceptions, but men with prominent, noticeable comb-overs are often regarded as desperate — instead of aging gracefully, they’re seen as hopelessly clinging to a time when they had a full head of hair. Worst of all, for people with advanced hair loss, the comb-over is entirely ineffective. Instead of disguising a man’s baldness, it only accentuates it, thus laying bare their lack of hair and, even worse, their insecurity.
This wasn’t always the case. For at least a couple thousand years, comb-overs were perfectly acceptable and worn by the most powerful men in the world. It was only during the latter half of the 20th century that it all came crashing (flopping?) down…
From Julius Caesar to Donald Trump, a tonsorial trip through time: “The Rise, Flop, and Fall of the Comb-Over,” from @TrivialHistory in @WeAreMel.
* Dave Barry
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As we resist the urge, we might send scandalous birthday greetings to Giacomo Casanova; he was born on this date in 1725. A Venetian adventurer and author, he is best remembered– as a product both of his memoir and of other contemporary accounts– as a libertine, a womanizer who carried on complicated and elaborate affairs with numerous women.
At the same time, he associated with European royalty, popes, and cardinals, along with intellectual and artistic figures like Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart. His memoir (written toward the end of his life, while he served as librarian to Count Waldstein) is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.
Casanova preferred a wig to a comb-over.
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