bruceb

Today Mom and I went to Woodland Park Zoo with dhw and kalluna, and it was great. I'm pretty slow and Mom is slower yet, but we managed. Dave and Kathy are patient, and full of interesting things to talk about in between exhibits. :)

The zoo was crowded, what with Easter hoorah, but it was a very good-natured crowd. We saw a goodly number of animals, and were there to see gold lion tamarin monkeys and lemurs get Easter baskets of treats. Both were tremendously entertaining to watch.

I'm all tired and stuff, of course. But we came through it a bit better than we expected, and thoroughly satisfied.

Something really struck me on this pass through Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism: how little attention she pays to the role of business in the workings of the state in her own time (late 1940s to late 1960s, through successive editions). As far as she's concerned, the era of commercial influence on world affairs is over, with the superpowers' national budgets driving the Cold War era's imperialism and businesses gaining or losing depending on how much they can attach themselves to agendas that are fundamentally political rather than economic.

Certainly, that's not the way I'd describe the current state of affairs, to put it mildly.

This is where it gets interesting. It's true that the superpowers were spending vast resources on agendas that absolutely couldn't be rationalized within the prevailing commercial worldviews. But it's also true that the agendas were shaped, pushed, and parasitized on by individuals and groups who did have economic concerns, for whom politics was just a means to the really important stuff. She missed that because she didn't think to look for it. She clearly knew that that sort of relationship had been important in the past - it's all over part I of her book. But she thought that it had burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp of wartime destruction and postwar realignments. So there's no hint in work of what would, in a few decades, make the biggest economic and political crisis in nearly a century, even though the economic capture of the postwar order had begun...well, really, as she was doing the first edition of her book.

And this is where it gets practical. Knowing, or thinking she knew, that the eclipse of economically-driven social agendas by political ones was a major factor in the rise of modern totalitarian and other oppressive regimes, she focused on life under economic focus in its decline. She's concerned with long-term losses of influence here and rises there, and so on. Whereas when I look this week at, say, how the US' balance of internal power shifted after World War I and people with influence over the wartime mobilization struggled to keep hands on its controls for their own peacetime ends (and for that matter how "peace" wasn't always a very good word for what was going on), I am likely to pay extra attention to how economic authorities tried to persuade and intimidate political counterparts so as to use state power for business interests. Where an initial perusal suggests political control of economic influence without a strong counter-flow of influence, I'm much more likely than Arendt would have been to say "Oh yeah?" Because that's not part of the story of my time, nearly so much.

This is another thing I need to touch on for New Horizons: recognizing the limits of one's resources, and recognizing that this is both inevitable and okay. It's just something we have to deal with, and can.

Finally, I can only wonder what it is I'm overlooking that will make any readers I might have in 2040 say exactly this kind of thing about me. :)

I'll do this up at longer length another time, but...doing my New Horizons homework has freshly reminded me of one of the really major trends in 20th and 21st-century history writing is the increasing attention to individuals, and the decreasing emphasis on really big generalizations. It's a stock criticism of modern history (and the humanities in general) that thanks to vile political correctness, everything is now about blocs and factions, and individuals get lost in the shuffle. I find just the opposite in my reading.

Take a really good writer of accessible history - that is, not aiming at specialists and a purely professional audience, but written with undergraduates and non-scholars in mind. Barbara Tuchman, say, or Richard Hofstadter, or Samuel Eliot Morrison, or Jonathan Spence, or Hannah Arendt - genuinely good writers out to convey important information as well as to provide pleasurable entertainment. (Or, in same cases, instead of that.) The farther back I go, the more I find usages like "The whole nation was concerned by..." and "Nobody in the city could talk about anything but..." and "To Austria, the Jew was..."

Now take someone talented and writing in the same general way from the last decade or two - Eric Rauchway, or Lynn Pan, or E. Fuller Torrey, MD, and Judy Miller, or Stephen J. Diner, or Douglas A. Blackmon. There are generalizations, sure, but there's nothing wrong with that. Scenes need setting. But with the foundations, I find all these authors being a lot more specific, with usages like "The aristocracy mostly supported these claims, with dissent confined to..." and "The major newspapers all gave front page after front page to the story, but it got few column inches after the initial revelations in small-town papers, or the labor and religious press..."and "Priorities weren't just different but diametrically opposite further south, and we must approach an examination of circumstances south of the Mason-Dixon line with as few assumptions as possible based on experiences reported in Chicago or New York."

This is just what I want out of my histories: an understanding of specifics, as well of the context. There'll be no way I can do justice to historical complexity and variety in New Horizons, but I can try, and hope to point readers toward opportunities to go further.

This Flicker set is so cool! The photographer's printed out historical photos, gone to the spots they were taken, and held them up with the proper alignment so that they lie nestled within the current reality. Very high level of craftsmanship in service of a delightful concept.