"Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee".
Books read:
The Raw Youth, by Dostoyevsky, Macmillan Company, 1950
The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler,
Ambivalent Conquest,
Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky
The Man who loved only numbers by Paul Hoffman
From Tank town to High Tech, June Nash, 1989
Malambo
Intellectuals, Paul Johnson, ISBN 0-06-016050-0, 1988
Slaves, Peasants and rebels
The Raw Youth, by Dostoyevsky, Macmillan Company, 1950
Do you think you know Dostoyevsky? I don’t think I know. The Raw Youth is one of his best I would say. After reading “Crime and punishment,” and “Brother Karamazov”, I can read Raw Youth with speed and delight. Dostoyevsky is a psychiatrist in his own sense besides being a writer. All my expectations for the future of the protagonist failed once Dostoyevsky took turns at random corners. Very hard to generalize the book but the book is full of emotions.
The main character is Dolgoruky, a illegitimate son of Versilov. His father is Makar Ivanov Dolgoruky. Dolgoruky is smart but not as disciplined. His mother and sister lives not luxuriously. Versilov helps the expenses besides Liza earning a bit. There is a old prince Nikolay Ivanitch. He is rich and his daughter Katerina Nikolaevna wanted to put his father in mental clinic to inherit his wealth. The events rise around the letter which Katerina Nikolaevna wrote to his lawyer requesting to double check the method that it works well. In the end the prince comes to Dolgoruky for refuge in his apartment. He refuses…
The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler,
p.19 Despair – salable and self-indulgent – has dominated the culture for a decade or more. The Third Wave concludes that despair is not only a sin (C.P Snow) but htat is also unwarranted.
p.22: George Steiner has written “ To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to contrain the life of understanding.”
p.26: The first wave of change – the agricultural revolution – took thousands of years to play itself out. The second Wave – the rise of industrial civiliazation – took a mere three hundred years. Today hisoty is even more accelerative, and it is likely tjat the Third wave will sweep across hisotyr and complete itself ina few decades.
p.41: The precondition of any civilization, old or new is energy. First Wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries” – human and animal muscle- power or from sun, wind,and water…. All second wave societies, by contrast, began to draw their enegy from coal, gas and oil – from irreplaceable fossil fuels.
p.57: Correct in identifying this dehumanization of interpersonal bonds, Marx was incorrect, however, in attributing it to capitalism… For the obsessive concern with money, goods, and things is a reflection not of capitalsm or socialism, but of industrialism.
p.62: Every civilization has a hidden code – a set of rules or principles that run through all its activities like a repeated design. As industrialism pushed across the planet, its unique hidden design became visible.
p.64: The principle of standardization ran through every aspect of daily life.
p.65: A second great principle ran through all second wave societies: specialization.
p.67: In second wave societies even political agitation was conceived of as a profession. Thus Lenin argued that the masses could not bring about a revolution without professional help.
p.69: The rise of the market gave birth to yet another rule of second wave civilization – the principle of concentration.
p.71: “Big” became synonymous with “efficient,” and maximization became the fifth key principle.
p.76: To undertand who will run things tomorrow when the Third wave becomes dominant, we must first know exactly who runs things today.
p.91: Thus elections, quite apart from who won them, performed a powerful cultural function for ht eelites. TO the degree that everyone had a right to vote, elections fostered the illusion of equality.
p.98: What we call the modern nation is a second wave phenomenon: a single integrated political authority superimposed on or fused with a single integrated economy.
p.100: [imperial drive] for them life went on, one way or another. The fruits of overseas conquest enriched the ruling class and the towns rather than the mass of ornidary people who lived as peasants. In this sense, First Wave imperialism was still petty – not yet integrated into the economy. The second wave transformet this relatively small – scale pilferage into big business. … here was a new imperialism aimed not at bringing back a few trunkloads of gold or emeralds, spices and silks. Here was an imperialism that uiltimately brought back shipload after shipload of nitrates, cotton, palm oil, tin, rubber, bauxite, and tungsten.
p.102: At Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, this superior technology was displayed with withering effect in 1898 when Dervish warriors led by the Mahdi were defeated by British troops armed with six Maxim machine guns. An eyewithness wrote: “It was the last day of Mahdism and the greatest. … It was not a battle but an execution.”
p.105: Cultures that had subsisted for thousands of years in a self-sufficient manner, producing their own food supplies, were sucked willy-nilly into the world trade system and compelled to trade or perish.
p.107: In 1492 when Columbus first set foot in the New World, Europeans controlled only 9 percent of the globe. By 1801 they ruled a third. By 1880, two thirds. And by 1935 Europeans politically controlled 85 percent of the land surface of the earth and 70 percent of its population. Like Second Wave society itself, the world was divided inot integrators and integrates.
p.117: Darwin himself wrote unfeelingly of the massacre of the aborigines of Tasmania and, in a burst of genocidal enthusiasm, prohphesied that “At some future period … the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” The intellectual frond-runners of Second Wave civilization had no doubt about who deserved to survive.
p.128: Unless a civilization has some explanation for why things happen – even if its explanation is nine parts mystery to one part analysis – it cannot program lives effectively.
p.133: The greater the divorce of producer from consumer – in time, in space, and in social and psychic distance – the more the market, in all its astonishing complexity, with all its train of values, its implicit metaphors and hidden assumptions, came to dominate social reality.
p.224: Today, once more, egos are breaking like eggshells against the wall. Now, however, the guilt is associated with the fracture of the family rather than the economy. As millions of men and women clamber out of the strewn wreckage of their marriages they, too, suffer agonies of self-blame. And once more, much of the guilt is misplaced.
p.243: Seen from the outside they [big corporation] present a commanding appearance. They control vast resources, employ millions of workers, and they deeply influence not merely our economies but our political affars as well.
p.252: a corporation no longer responsible simply for making a profit or producing goods but for simultaneously contributing to the solution of extremely complex ecological, moral, political, racial, sexual, and social problems.
p.314: When we leave the vast heavens the enter the world of microscopic particles or waves, we find similarly puzzling phenomena. At Columbia University Dr. Gerald Feinber haas even hypothesized particle s called tachyons that move faster than light and for which – according to some of his colleagues – times moves backward.
p.353: At the Paris Exposition of 1855, according to a contemporary account, newly-invented threshing machines were dramatically demonstrated. “Six men were set to threshing with flails at the same moment that the different machines commenced operations, and the following were the results of an hour’s work:
“Six threshers with flails ……………………… 36 liters of wheat.”
“Belgian threshing machine ……………………… 36 liters of wheat.”
“French threshing machine ……………………… 36 liters of wheat.”
“French threshing machine ……………………… 36 liters of wheat.”
“English threshing machine ……………………… 36 liters of wheat.”
“American threshing machine ……………………… 36 liters of wheat.”
p.376: Nobody knows. Even today, 300 long years after the fact, historians cannot pin down the “cause” of the industrial revolution. As we have seen, each academic guild or philosophical school has its own preferred explanation. The technological determinists point to the steam engine, the ecologists to the destruction of Britain’s forests, the economists to fluctuations in the price of wool. Others emphasize religious or cultural changes, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and so on.
p.389: Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown. … Faced with an absence of visible structure, some young people use drugs to create it. “Heroin addiction” writes psychologist Rollo May, “gives a way of life to the young person. Having suffred under perpetual purposelessness, his structure now consists of how to escape the cops, how to get the money needs, where to get his next fix- all these give him a new web of energy in place of his previous structureless world.”
p.396: If so, it would not be the first time un home nouveau was supposedly detected on the horizon. In a brilliant essay, Andre Reszler, director of the Center for European Culture, has described earlier attempts to forecast the coming of a new type of human being.
p.428: Pentagon officials, for example have lost track of $30 billion in foreign weapons orders and do not know whether this reflects colossal errors in accounting, or a failure to bill the purchasers for the full amounts due, or whether the money was dribbled away on other things entirely.
p.452: For today the single most important political conflict is no loger between rich and poor, between top-dog and underdog ethnic groups, or even between capitalist and commmunit. The decisive struggle today is between those who try to prop up and preserve industrial society and those who are ready to advance beyond it. This is the super-struggle for tomorrow.
p.456: Some generations are born to create, others to maintain a civilization.
p.459: The responsibility for change, therefore, lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.
Ambivalent Conquest, Inga Clendinnen, Cambridge University Press, 1987
“When the Spaniards discovered this land, their leader asked the Indians how it was called; as they did not understand him, they said uic athan, which means, what do you say or what do you speak, that we do not understand you. And then the Spaniard ordered it set down that it be called Yucatan… (Antonia De ciudad Real, 1588)
The book speaks of the Yucatan province of Maya Empire during the Colonial period. First part of the book is about the Spaniards in Yucatan that being explorers, conquerors, settlers, missionaries as well as the conflict between them. Second part is about Indians. Missionaries very few in the beginning of the colonialization of Yucatan and one of the first friars to appear in Yucatan was called Fr Diego de Landa later become Bishop of Yucatan. When he was fresh and young, he went to bushes to convert Indians and apparently saved many souls. But later when he become powerful he killed and tortured as many as he saved. His argument was “it takes long time to convert them truly without force and by then everyone would go to hell”. I would say Friar Diego de Landa was one of the Crusaders in Latin American continent. Alas, there were not any Immanuel Kants born at the time to stop the Crusade in New Spanish at that time.
I had an impression that the indigenous people in Latin America were very subservient. The reason is that they were subjugated to the kings under great empires then moved to different kind of encomenderos until late 19th century. Why they seemed to be submissive? Or am I incorrect in my judgment?
p.46 Shortly after he had achieved his conquest he petitioned Pope and Crown that the establishment of the new Church in the Indies be entrusted to the Franciscans, whose simplicity, self-forgetfulness and devotion to poverty fitted them for the massive task. Pope and Crown concurred.
p.47: In those early days – as, indeed, later – ‘teaching’ focused more on training in correct external behaviour than on the transference of knowledge; on bowing the head, on kneeling, on maintaining a hushed silence and stillness in the manner of Spanish piety.
p.54: The Xiu ‘conspiracy’ was the last overt Maya attempt – if attempt it was – to resist the conversion programme by offering violence to its agents, and its successful resolution strengthened the Franciscan preference for psychological manipulation over physical punishment.
p.56: That violence came not only from individual encomenderos, but was endemic to the corruption and brutality of the whol system of government in the peninsula, with local administrators wining at such offeces, or impsing trivial penalties ‘because they are neighbours and because on is a judge on year and the other on e the next year one sentces the other to pay two maravedis for some offences and for others they are set at liberty…’
p.59: There were two possible solutions. [who was to rule?] The friars seized the initiative. Under the shaky warrant of Lopez Medel’s recommendations that Indians be gathered together, they proceeded to concentrate scattered Indian settlements. Depleted villages had new populations grafted on them: others were forcibly cleared and burnt. Often with no more warning than the underalded arrival of a solitary firar, Indians were ordered out of their houses, which were then put to the torch, along with their carefully nurtured fruit trees and their few meagre possessions. Then the dazed and weeping Iians were herded off to the new sites the friars judged ‘convinient’.
p.63: With the winning of that very public battle the Franciscans had forced acquiescence in their own definition of the proper and legitimate scope of ecclesiastical authority in Yucatan. But Yucatan would continue vulnerable to the uninformed and destructive interference of outsiders – like the Archbishop of Mexico- for as long as it lacked a bishop.
p.77 The unashamed violence of the Franciscan inquisition is at once the best evidence for the political domination they had achieved in the peninsula, their anger at Indian betrayal, and their sense of the desperate urgency of the situation. Landa was later to justify his disregard of legal formalities on the grounds that:
“all [the Indians] being idolaters and guilty, it was not possible to proceed strictly juridically against them… because it we had proceeded with all according to the order of the law, it would be impossible to finish with the province of Mani alone in twenty years, and meanwhile they would all become idolaters and go to hell…”
p.92: The suspiciously dilapidated state of the ‘idols’ offered to the friars was explained; and the lies, evasions, and omissions of the confessions, so often gratuitous on any rational analysis, proved the Maya to be not only strangers to truth, but its enemies.
p.114: The friars also had the impediment, for impediment it was, of being able to use force on their converts. Even missionaries who lack that power and who must rely on persuasion have been profoundly shaken when they discovered who their messages have actually been received, and transformed in the receiving. The Franciscans were convinced that their labours would be aided by God Himself. They lacked all recognition of the profound and systematic otherness of others. They had no sense of the intricate interrelationships between different aspects of Indian life, rather seeing here the hand of the Devil, there the tender intervention of Christ, and so they could have no sense of the difficulties in the way of the reception and understanding of their message.
p.124: He [Landa] had known, and had nkown with complete certainty, the ‘truth’: the Indians were idolators, blasphemers and murderers. It had been his task and his duty to lay bare that truth. But he also knew that in performing that task he had been forced into moulding the evidence of their iniquities. He had pointed ot mountains of idols as proof of the Indina’s idolatry: he knew that some of those ‘idols’ were not idols at all, but odd frafments oand shards collected from abandoned sites by desperate men… He had presented the confessions as true accounts, but he knew their confusions and contradictions, and what sustained pressure it had taken to get even a limited measure of coherence.
p.140: One probably had something to do with preferred conditions of work and of household size. Most Maya lived in multi-generational households of a father and his sons, married and unmarried, and it was that group of related males which made up the usual milpa team.
Throughout the colonial period individual towns jealously guarded their individual histories in their Books fo Chilam Balam.
p.156: “In times of crisis human victims died, but even then a dog or other animal could sometimes replace a man: Maya deities did not demand extravagance.” In war a village would be plundered for its stored food, and those villagers who could not escape into the bush were enslaved, but the dwellings were left intact and the sacred standing maize was left untouched.
p.158: What appears to be being implemented here is a Maya strategy to bring their traditional authority structures into parallel with (and so laternative to) the Spanish system, which required some adjustment and some innovation in those traditional forms.
p.177: The difficulties in the way of understanding are formidable. We have somhow to detach ourselves from our Christian-drenched notions of ‘sacrifice’ as the offering up of something of value – comfort, possessions, bodily integrity, life-as a token of submission or propitiation before a notable jealous and watchful personal god… We cannot assume the Maya shared in those notions so ‘natural’ to us. For the friars, the killing of a human was a surpreme offence.
p.182: As for the ‘blasphemous’ details the firars found so appalling, I have already suggested thtat the ‘cenote cult’ is a historia’s fiction built on an Indian invention. Its acceptance involes altogether too much lugging of bodies – some with crosses still attached – around the countryside ; to casual a pollution of drinking water; too relaxed a response to insult both by the humans whose slaughtered children were tossed back into the home cenote as by the rain gods offered corpses whose bloods and hearts had been consumed elsewhere.
Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky
I have read “Manufacturing consent”, “Rogue state”, “Year 501” and many articles by Noam Chomsky before. He is extraordinary in his ability to draw logical conclusion and analyze his opponent’s arguments. In journalism these skills are virtue and journalists are required to have it. The book is “advertised” in UN chamber by Hugo Chavez.
I was reading Paul Johnson and Noam Chomsky simultaneously, and it seems they belong into opposite rival gangs of Intellectuals. Noam Chomsky is more “lefty” in his views and his contra-arguments are basically impossible to oppose. Paul Johnson is more to the right and his view are biased in a way that you can feel his feelings in his arguments which I don’t precisely like.
p.4: [Bush planners] decisions may not be irrational within the framework of prevailing ideaology and the institutions that embody it. There is ample historical precedent fro the willingness of leaders to threaten or resort to violence in the face of significant risk of catastrophe.
p.11: In the official rhetoric of the National Security Strategy, “Our fores will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United states.”
p.12: But the justifications for preemptive war, whatever they might be, do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an imagine or inveted threat, so that even the term preventive is too charitable.
p.19: The propaganda impact persisted past the end of the war. After the failure of intense efforts to discover WMD, a third of the population believed that US forces had found WMD and more than 20 percent believed Iraq had used htem during the war.
p.48: An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson’s observation on the world situation of his day: “We believe no more in Bonaparte’s fighting merely for the liberties of the seas, than in Great Britan’s fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth, and the resources of other nations.”
p.71: The standard interpretation is different: the “democratic peace” reflects “some happy combination of liberal norms and institutions such as representative democracy and market econmies.”
p.90: In early 1964, the State Department Policy planning council expanded on these concerns: “The primary danger we face in Castro is … in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftiest movement in many Latin American countries… the simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half.”
p.100: President Carter assured Americans that we owe Vietnam no debt htat have no responsibility to render it any assistance because “the destruction was mutual.” Others thought we should not be so soft-hearted.
p.120: Privatization has other benefits. If working people depend on the stock market for their pensions, health care, and other means of survival, they have a stake in undermining their own interests:opposing wage increases, health and safety regulations, and other measures that might cut into profits that flow to the benefactos on whome they must rely, in a manner reminiscent of feudalism… If there was to be any hope of maintaining political power, the Bush forces were vitually compelled to adopt what Anatol Lieven calsl “the classical modern strategy of an endangered right wing oligarch, which is to divert mass discotent into nationalism,” strategy which is second nature to tehm in any event, having worked so well during their first twelve years in office.
p.156: Voilence is a powerful instrument of control, as history demonstrates. But eh dilemmas of dominance are not slight.
p.161: In the terminology of the Foreign Office, local management was to be left to an “Arab façade” of weak compliant rulers, while Britain’s “absorption” of these virtual colonies would be “veiled by constitutional fictions,” a device considered more cost-effective than direct rule. With variations, the device is familiar elsewhere.
p.183: The British governor had explained to the people of Kenya in 1946 that Britain controls their land and resources “as of right, the product of historical events which reflect the greatest glory of our fathers and grandfathers.” If “the greater part of the wealth of the country is at present in our hands,” that is because “this land we have made is our land by right – by right of achievement,” and Africans will simply have to learn to live in “a world which we have made, under the humanitarian impulses of the late nineteenth and twentieth century.”
p.188: A US Army manual defined terrorism as “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature … through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.”
p.189: The reasons do not seem obscure: the official definitions of terrorism are virtually the same as the definitions of counterterror. But counterterror is official US policy, and it is plainly will not do to say that US is officially committed to terrorism.
p.201: Perhaps the former director of Human Rights Watch Africa, now a professor of law at Emory University, spoke for many others around the world when he addressed the International Council on Human Rights Policy in Geneva in January 2002, saying that “I am unable to appreciate nay moral, political or legal difference between this jihad by the United States against those it deems to be its enemies and the jihad by Islamic groups against those they deem to be their enemies.”
p.214: In the critical year 1958, President Eisenhower and his staff discussed what eh called the “campaign of hatred against us” in the Arab world, “not by the governments but by the people.” The basic reason, the National Security Council advised, was the perception that the US supports corrupt and brutal governments and is “opposing political or economic progress” in order “to protect its interest in Near East oil.”
The Man who loved only numbers by Paul Hoffman
I like the book a lot. The book is about a Mathematician called Paul Erdos, a Hungarian born Jew. He was so smart to prove the Continuum theory and he worked 19 hours a day until his late in his life. He did not have a house or home, so he lived traveling from one mathematicians to other. All he did was mathematics and even he could not take care of himself, so was in someone’s care. Sounds so redundant but fires me up to do more mathematics since I think I am getting stupider every day. I should do more math…
p.85 “equation fir me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God” said Ramujan.
p.103: Under orders from Stalin to fill quotas of prisoners to be sent to the GULAG< the majority never to return, the liberators pick men in the streets at random for the malenkii robot [small labor] wrote Lazlo Babai.
p.117: Andre Weil, number theorist extraordinaire, put it: “God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.”
p.118: Russell, on the other hand, was crushed: “I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty was more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers wanted me to accept, were full of fallcacies…. I was continually reminded of the fable abou thte elephant and the tortoise. Having contructed an elephant on which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to contruct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no momre secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.
p.119: paradox of a la barber of Seville.
Tank town to high tech, June Nash, State University of New York Press, 1989
Globalization is dynamic force inflicted on local communities to change and thrive. The force itself can be benign as well as malevolent. This book talks about a small community of Petersburg in MA from its inception till later day. In meanwhile, the book focuses on the social changes taking place as a result of globalization. Although boring, the book giver deep insights into the social changes reflecting both negative and positive effects. Also proposes certain solutions to the social problem created as a result of globalization. I don’t think particularly uses word globalization. The criterion of globalization can be a power of union and as globalization progress, the unions have no but little power. It gave facts about how powerful the multinational firms are as compare to “barefoot” laborer.
p.11 Hegemony is, in Gramsci’s (Williams 1960:587) terms: … an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotations.
p.12 Corporate hegemony works in America, as sutart Hall and Tony Jefferson (1983:39) indicate it does in Great Britain, “by inseting the subordinate class into the key institutions and structures which support the power and social authority of the dominant order.”
p.13: Equal opportunity and upward mobility are important validations for corporate hegemony. And if mobility is often translated into horizontal geographical movement, or if certain minorities never entered the circuits of monbility , that is blamed on individual failure or natural conditions. So long as one could assume equal opp[ortunity , each and every individual is expected to maximize his or her own potential.
p.14: Hegemonic control is found in all societies where unequal social relations are successfully reproduced without the constant use of force. The existing power structure is able to incorporate threatening elements in such a way that the configuration of cultural traits is not disturbed.
p.15: The success of hegemonic control depends upon the ability of the power elite to respond to new interest groups as they make claims on the society.
p.22: The consensus sustaining corporate hegemony draws upon institutions that redistribute wealth accyumulated at the source of production. Redistribution, following Polanyi’s (1947) model, requires a central pooling of resources controlled by individuals or groups whose political power is strengthened in the process of allocating shares to a wider polity.
p.115: The basic rules of hegemony can be decoded form the corporate managerial tactics of the thirties and forties. First and paramount is management’s assumption of leadership of any initiatives stemming from the rank and file and appearing to have a broad support. Second is the containment of potitical activicsm in the unions. Finally there is the grounding of these strategies in generally accepted principles that are part of the American way of doing things. All of these rules require a management that reduces opposition to and inforces the dominance of management over the work force in the workplace and in the community.
p.229: The philosophy of the corporation embracing the central values in corporate hegemony draws on the social-Darwinian struggle for survival. War is a challenge that brings out the best competitive quatlities, and through this engagement, the success of the firm, and it follows, the community and family is ensured.
p.236: On March 28, 1985, the Pentagon imposed a ban on bidding on new defense contracts by the Space Systems Division of Gernal Electric Company, following an indictment charging that the firm’s Space systems division defrauded the government of $800000. Nicholas Boraski, general manager of Pittsfiels’ GE plant, sent an open letter to the Pittsfield Ordnance Systems division charging employee misconduct in the allocation of time on time cards. In an interview with Berkshire Eagle rreporter Margaret Pantridge (June 5, 1985) John F.Welch claimed that GE was singled out because of its visibility. He reiterated the charge that it was “low level engineering folks” and that the corporation was unable to find the guilty person. The corporate ombudsman urged employees to report any suspected violation. The company paid a fine of $1,040,000 hardly more than the alleged $800000 false charges.
p.325: Deindustrialization theory poses a nationalistic model of change that, from a Third world perspective, involves industrial growth. Bluestone and Harrison (1982) attack both sides of this global transformation, althouthg thei policy concerns ar eproimarily twith the impact of “widespread systematic disinvestmento the nations’ productive capacity”.
p.338: The future struggles of American workers are more likely to be organized outside of the workplace and in neighborhoods and communities were the unemployed and homeless meet with the poorly paid underclass of workers and heavily mortgaged homeowners to work out a new social contract.
Malambo:
“The Rimac, and the barrio of Malambo its banks, shapes the narrative of this compelling historical novel thatprobes the brutal clash of ethnicity, religion and class in sixteenth and seventeenth century Peru. Set against the backdrop of Spanish colonialism and the Spanish Inquisition in the ‘New World’ Malambo peels back the layers of Perys society to focus on the sublte connections among indigiounous peoples, Africans, jews, chirstians ndad others, whose cultural fusion pervades Latin American hisotyr and culture.”
The book was dry throughout but gave interesting details at times. The reading in my opinion cannot be for pleasure unless one is interested in colonial societies in Latin America. Main characters are: Tomason – a painter, Catalina Ronceros – old widow who wants to marry De la Piedra, De la Piedra – a master of slave trade, Pancha Parra – girls who is left with Tomason and later become herb woman, Altagracia M – a mistress of her master and servant, Nazario Bernabe – husband of Altagracia and coachman, Venancio – a fisherman who wants to marry Pancha. Anyway, the book was confusing at times and was not well-structured.
Intellectuals, Paul Johnson, ISBN 0-06-016050-0, 1988
After reading the intellectuals by Paul Johnson, I diagnize myself as lazy bum. John Paul Satre read above 300 hundred books a year and Ernst Hemmingway read well above 200 a year. Satre said “Every single of my theories was act of conquest. I thought one day with help of them all I will conquer the world.”
Paul Johnson said “it is just about two hundred years since the secular intellectuals began to replace the old clerisy as the guides and mentors of mankind.” Indeed, I agree with him in this issue. But what I don’t agree with him is that “they should be kept well away form the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.” I believe we need the advice of intellectuals in our decisions especially if the decision would affect lives of many.
In my opinion, Paul Johnson has his own bias against certain intellectuals and judge them according to set-up norms of his own, rather than giving proper and full explanation in intellectual’s behavior. I found the book quite ill-judge in many ways and somehow distorting the truth in others. Otherwise, it reveals “negative” side effects of being an intellectual in great extend.
If there exists after life in any kind of form like heaven and hell, I might to prefer to go to hell not because I am lunatic but for purpose of being not bored eternally. The reason is many intellectuals seem to thrown to hell who are surely to fall into hell whom I love to argue, discuss and question indefinitely.
p.1: For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings chould be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes. Their hero was Prometheus who stole the celestial fire and brought it to earth.
p.3: Rousseau insisted that reason itself had severe limitations as the means to cure society. That did not mean, however, that the human mind was inadequate to bring about the necessary changes, because it has hidden untapped resources of poetic insight and intuition which must be used to overrule the sterilizing dictates of reason.
p.12: Extravagance of personality is one way in which the pill can be sugared and the public induced to look at works dealing with ideas.
p.28: Like Rousseau, Shelley Believed that society was totally rotten and should be transformed, and that enlightened man, through his own unaided intellect, had the moral right and duty to reconstruct it form first principles.
p.77 Karl Marx’s beds were sold to pay the butcher, milkman, chemist and baker. They found refuge in a squalid German boarding house in Leicester Square and there, that winder, the baby Guido died. Jenny left a despairing account of these days, from which her spirits, and her affection for Marx, never really recovered.
p.137: Tolstoy’s case is another example of what happens when an intellectual pursues abstract ideas at the expense of people. The historian is tempted to see it as a prolegomenon, on a small, personal scale, of the infinitely greater national catastrophe which was soon to engulf Russia as a whole. Tolstoy destroyed his family, and killed himself, by trying to bring about the total moral transformation he felt imperative.
p.150 [Hemingway] In his best work he always avaided preaching at the reader, or even nudging his elbow by drawing attention to the way his characters behaved.
p.152: trying to live a good and honest life, according to the values of each and usually failing. Tragedy occurs because the values themselves turn out to be illusory or mistaken, or because they are betrayed by weakness within or external malice or the intractability of objective facts. But even the failure is redeemed by truth seeking, by having the ability to perceive the truth and the courage to stare I tin the face.
p.227: He formed and for many years maintained, the habit of reading about three hundred books year. The range was very wide; American novels were his passion.
p.232: Sartre was preaching freedom to people who were ungry and waiting for it. But it was not an easy freedom. “existentialism” said Sartre, “ defines man by his actions… It tells him that hope lies only in action, and that the only thing that allows man to live is action.” So Man comitts himself tto his life, and thereby draws his image, beyond which there is nothing.”
p.236: Every single one of my theories, he says in La Nausee, “was an act of conquest and possession. I thought that one day, with the help of them all, I ‘d conquer the world.”
p.253: Edmund Wilson was always a man capable of hard, persistent and systematic reading… No man ever read more thoroughly and thoughtfully than Wilson; in his judge-like way, he read as though the authoer was on trial for his life.
p.268: The cruelty of ideas lies in the assumption that human beings can be bent to fit them. The beneficence of great art consists in the way in which it build up form the individual illumination to generality.
p.302: As has been shown repeatedly, the memoirs of leading intellectuals – Sarttre, de Beauvoir, Russell, Hemingway, Gollancz are obvious examples – are quire unreliable. But ht most dangerous of these intellectual self-glorifications are thoese which disarm the reaser by what appears to be shocking frankness and admission of guilt.
p.308: Orwell was an intellectual in the sense that he believed, at any rate when young, that the world could be reshaped by the power of intellect. He thus thought in terms of ideas and concepts. Orwell: “I felt I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.”
p.309 Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and repect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivaled only by the monstorous crimes of the German Nazis and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cuase of the higher truth it upheld.
p.311: What Orwell came reluctantly and belatedly to accept – the failure of utopianism on account of the fundamental irrationality of human behaviour – Waugh had vociferously upheld for most of his adult life.
p.311: Gollancz believed in government:”men cannot live together without rules” but these “should be kept to the bare minimum of safety”. “No form of government ordained from God” was better than another and “the anarchic elements in society” were so strong it was a “whole time job to keep the peace.”
p.322: The White Negro, which proved to be his most influential piece of writing, indeed a key docemntet of the post-war epoch. In this he analysed ‘hip consciousness’. The behaviour of young, self-assertive and confident blacks, as a form of counterculture; he explained and justified it, indeed urged its adaptation by radical whites.
p.338: As Bertrand Russell put is, “how comes it that human beings, whose contracts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?” There are two rival explanations. One is the theory that men are born with innate ideas. As Plato put it in his Meno: “There are, in a man who doens not know, true opinions concerning that which he does not know.” The most important contents of the mind are there from the beginning, though external stimulation or experience, acting on the senses, is required to bring this knowledge into consciousness. Descarted held that such intuitive knoweldeg is more dependable than any other and that all men are born with a residuum of it, though only the most relective realize its full potentially. Most Continental European philosophers take this view to some degree.
As against his there is the Anglo-Saxon tradition of empiricism, taught by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. It argues that, while physical characteristics can be inherited, the mind is at birth a tabula rasa and mental characterists are all acquired through experience.Theses views, usually in a highly qualified form, are generally held in Britain, the United States and other countries which follow their culture.
Slaves, Peasants and rebels, Stuart B. Schwartz, University of Illinois Press, 1992
The book is about Brazilian Slavery. I read 4 chapters in this book out of total six. Chap2 concerns “sugar plantation labor and slave life”. Slave trade was originated when the Indian population decreased considerably. Besides, there was some pressure from Crown to protect Indian people.
Slaves resist especially when the gender balance was not kept or the condition deteriorated. “Chap 4 Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil” illustrates it well. Many run away to build their own village similiar to one they had in mother AFrica. One of them was Palmares. The population was Palmares was increased dramatically but later reduced due to constant assault. Eventially it was brought down by alliance of Portugese and native Indians in 1694.
p.xi I argue that the expansion of Brazil’s slave based export economy was accompanied by a parallel expansion of internal markets for foodstuffs supplied by large and small producers, many of whom could be called peasants, and that these turned increasingly to slavery for their labor needs.
p.13: Schwartz (1978) demonstrated the transition on northeastern sugar planations and argued that the causes were to be found in Brazil and were essentially a combination of Indian demographic decline, shifting levels of supply and price for the two kinds of laborers, the productivity and skills of Africans, and the increasing efficiency of the slave trade.
p.41: This demographics regime had a profound impact on planter perceptions and policies as well as on slave actions and reactions. Most planters, for example, saw no reason to stimulate stable families to promote a natural growth of the population. Since a slave could produce in fourteen to twenty – four months enough sugar to equal his or her value at purchase, as long as the trade remained open, planters believed that the risks and costs of raising crioulos (Brazilian born black) children for fourteen years until they could become full workers was not worth the effort.
p.44: While considerable attention has been devoted to the house slaves and those in skilled or managerial positions, in reality these made up less than twenty percent of the total slave force. Entry into these relatively few skilled and favored positions therefore was a desired privilege that could be controlled and manipulated by the slaveowners to extract cooperation and good service.
p.48: A certain amount of slave autonomy made the system operate more smoothly, but planters also realized that a slave tradition of self-reliance and authonomy was a potential danger to that system.
p.103: Throughout the Americas wherever slavery was a basic institution, slave resistance, the fear of slave revolt, and the problem of fugitive slaves plagued colonists and colonial administrators. This resistence took a number of forms and was expressed in a variety of ways. Day to day recalcitracen, slow downs, and sabotage were probably the most common forms of resistance, while self-destruction through suicide, infanticide, or overt attempts at vengeance were most extreme in a personal sense.
p.104: Where were the run-away communities located? Far from possible white retaliation... What kind of societies did fugitives create? More or less egalitarian ones based on African traditions.
p.105: Patterns in the Atlantic slave trade and a planter preference for young adult males over women resulted in a chronic sexual imbalance. These problems made for a population that had less to lose by flight or other forms of resistence, at least in the view of observers in nineteenth-century Brazil who advocated stable families and a balanced sex ratio among the slaves as a means of control.
p.108: Portuguese military expedition in 1692 finally destroyed this mocambo by laying siege to the stockaded village. The final battle cry of the defenders: “Death to the whites and long live liberty.”
p.122: Palmares was not a singly community but a number of mocambos united to for a neo-African kingdom.
p.138: In this chapeter I examine a form of fictive kinship, compadrio or ritual godparentage, within Brazilian familial and spiritual life. By examining the manner in which slaves participated in the system of ritual godparentage, I seek to view the slave family within a context wider than genrational, consanguineal, and legal dimensions tha usually set the limits fo rthis type of study.
p.140: The fundamental law code of Portugal and its empire, teh Ordenacoes filipinas (1603) ordered all slaveowners to baptise their African slaves above ten years old within six months and those under that age within on emonth of acquiring them or forfeit htem ot hte crown.
p.147: But the battismal records indicate that in ideological and religious terms at least some masters made distincltions between Indians adn Africans.
p.155: By the mid-nineteenth century, exceptions to the perception or rule of incompatibility began to increase because religion and the theological meaning of compadrio had lessimpact in the lives of the slaveowning class. In 1871, hte Law of Free Birth would have changed the rules governing this relationship. In 1871, the Law of Free Birth would have chnged teh rules governing this relationship. After that date, all children born to slave mothers were considered free and in a stateof tutelage until reaching the age of majority.
p.161: teh pervasive and pernicious nature of slavery as a social and economic system, and as a sturcture that, so long as it remained viogrous, determined the contours of all else in Brazilian life. In effect, to consider the history of slavery in brazil is to deal with the history of Brazil itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment