Also, it is possible to discern a slight relationship between the woman called “Jihad Jane,” an American accused of terrorist activities, and Koestler’s protagonist Hydie Anderson. But as I noted in the post

today’s Hydies are unlikely to share the educational and religious depth of the woman Koestler imagined

To put it mildly, judging from appearances in this case. Looks like I called that one right!

(Once-through cooling, which has been used since the days of James Watt, means simply that water is used to condense steam and is thence returned to the source from whence it came. The cooling water is not polluted, but is warmed up a bit. IIRC, the returned cooling water is somewhere in the range of 85-90 degrees F, i.e., less than the temperature of the typical hot tub.)

The state of California has taken other actions which make it difficult for the capacity of these 19 plants to be replaced. California has a moratorium on new nuclear power plants and coal plants. New natural gas plants, which are less polluting than coal plants (and emit less CO2, for those who care about this issue) are also banned in much of California.

A project to build large-scale solar plants in the Mojave Desert is encountering opposition from environmentalists who object to the construction of transmission lines to carry the power to San Diego. And California Senator Dianne Feinstein is apparently also opposed to this solar project on grounds that it threatens a species of turtle. There is also environmentalist objection to wind turbines because of the danger they pose to birds and bats.

If you live in California, expect your electricity bills to rise significantly. If you run an energy-intensive business located in that state, you probably need to think about alternative locations.

Although unfortunately, these California polities are merely the currently-most-extreme version of the policies that the Democratic Party, in its war on energy, wants to impose on the country as a whole.

The only possibility we as a nation have to overcome our very serious debt problems and to restore anything like full employment is to grow our way out of the problem. The Democrats’ war on energy is one of the primary threats to such growth.

Erin O’Connor on California’s universities and their role in the state’s economic debacle.

Climategate: it was an academic disaster waiting to happen. Interesting and contrarian thoughts about the role of peer review.

Richard Fernandez wonders if World War III has already started…without many people even noticing. (via Isegoria)

Solar arbitrage in Germany. (via Maggie’s Farm) It’s hard to believe he will really get away with this, but still pretty funny. See also this related post from Evolving Excellence: Better Call the Waaaahmulance!

AnoukAnge writes about ambition. (One of the great literary works that deals with this subject is Goethe’s Faust…memo to self: a blog post on the treatment of ambition within Faust could be very interesting)

AnoukAnge also has a nice photographic essay on color…including the psychological connotations and cultural-symbolic meanings of various colors.

Speaking of color, this year’s winning images have been chosen for GE’s In Cell Analyzer photography contest. The In Cell system used used by scientists for better understanding disease processes and for drug development; as it happens, it also produces images which are appealing and even beautiful, in a psychedelic sort of way. There’s a nice video, with music, at the bottom of GE’s post about the contest.

One more photography-related link: British industry in the 1950s and 1960s. (via Brian Gongol)

Selfish as always
I’ve started missing you now
Want to say so
Don’t know how
Want to hug you
Don’t know if I should
Hope you understand
I’d take your place if I could

In 1942, at the age of 22, Leo Marks joined the secret British agency known as Special Operations Executive, and soon became the organization’s Codemaster, responsible for the security of communications with SOE’s resistance and sabotage agents in occupied Europe. He usually briefed these agents…soon-to-be-legendary individuals like Violette Szabo and Forest Yeo-Thomas…before their departures and they all left indelible impressions on him. His memoir is a very emotional book: frequently heartbreaking, sometimes very funny. There is a lot about the technical aspects of cryptography, but these sections can be skipped or skimmed by those who are primarily interested in the powerful human story. Poetry, much of it written by Marks himself, played an important part in SOE’s cryptographic operations and hence plays an important role in this book.

When Marks joined SOE, communication with agents was accomplished using a poem code. Each agent chose a poem and memorized it precisely: a copy was retained at SOE headquarters. When the agent wished to send a message–a very hazardous operation, as the Germans maintained a large network of radio direction finders–he or she would mathematically combine the letters of the message with the successive letters of the poem. The process would be reversed at the other end, yielding–if all went right–the clear text. But if the agent made a single mistake in the encoding, the message would probably be un-decipherable, and the agent would be required, at great personal risk, to retransmit it. Marks found this to be disturbing and unreasonable:

If (a wireless operator in occupied territory), surrounded by direction-finding cars which were after him like sniffer dogs, who lacked electric light to code by or squared paper to code on–if that agent hadn’t the right to make mistakes in his coding without being ordered to do the whole job again at the risk of his life, then we hadn’t the right to call ourselves a coding department.

His resolution to do something about this problem became definitive after he briefed “my first frightened agent.”

When Paul and I shook hands they needed galoshes…He suddenly asked what would happen if he made ‘a bit of a mistake’ and sent us a message we couldn’t decode.

I was careful to keep looking at the code-card. There was nothing more that I could say to him. But there was one thing that I could do.

Marks went to the Grendon wireless station to meet the girls who worked as code clerks and to begin the task of training them for the much more difficult work of breaking indecipherable messages. It was only two days later that he received a message on the teleprinter:

WE HAVE BROKEN OUR FIRST INDECIPHERABLE MESSAGE. THE CODERS OF GRENDON

Another huge problem with the poem-code was that it was potentially very insecure: if the Germans could guess the poem being used, they could readily decode the message…with adequate resources, they could try hundreds of poems against each message until they found the key that fit the lock. Marks reasoned that if poems that had never been published anywhere could be used instead of the old standards, the task of the enemy could be made much more difficult. He began writing poems when the inspiration struck him (the poem quoted at the beginning of the post is one example of his work) and encouraged the coders of Grendon (known as FANYs because they were members of a paramilitary organization called the Field Auxiliary Nursing Yeomanry) to do the same. One day the female brigadier who supervised the FANYs walked into a room where a dozen of her charges were quietly and totally absorbed in “the ladylike pursuit of composing poems.” Unfortunately, she picked up an example of their work, which began:

Is de Gaulle’s prick
Twelve inches think

When the brigadier’s complaint reached Marks, he responded that the poem was excellent: the imagery was unusual, the words easy to memorize, and the content not at all what the enemy would be expecting.

Shortly before an agent departed for enemy-held territory, Marks met with him/her to review the selected poem and the coding procedures. He was well aware that many of these agents would not be coming home. Each agent was given the option to carry a lethal pill (the “cyanide” in the title of the book) to be taken–if there was time–in the event of capture. Some of these agents were…

Noor Inayat Khan, the Indian-American daughter of a leading Sufi mystic and a writer, particularly of children’s books. (One of her books is still in print.) She had abandoned the pacifist principles taught by her father in order to join the fight against Naziism. Marks describes his first meeting with her:

I longed to be able to walk into a briefing room and switch on the detached receptivity with which an analyst treats his patients…But as soon as I glimpsed the slender figure seated at a desk in the Orchard Court briefing room I knew that the only thing likely to be detached was one (if not both) of my eyeballs. No one had mentioned Noor’s extraordinary beauty.

After the briefing, Noor departed for France by light plane. After serving the Resistance as a radio operator and evading capture several times, she was eventually caught by the Gestapo and killed.

Francis Yeo-Thomas, who before the war had been general manager of the Molyneux fashion house in Paris. One of SOE’s leading agents, “Tommy” made many trips back and forth to Occupied France, and he and Marks became well acquainted. The much-younger Leo Marks asked for Tommy’s advice often, and admired him unreservedly. “I had never met anyone I trusted so completely or whose trust I valued more.” Marks remembers Tommy congratulating him on his promotion and putting his hand “firmly on my shoulder.” Writing 50 years later, Marks adds “It’s still there, Tommy. Hope you know it.”

Marks recalls a strange and disturbing dream in which Tommy appeared, along with Churchill, Tommy’s girlfriend Barbara, and two kinds of codes known as WOKs and LOPs:

I dreamed that Churchill was in danger of dying, and that Tommy was stating his case to God. Tommy offered the Lord a WOK, and then a LOP, and then himself, if Churchill could be spared. Christ and Moses were present as members of the Executive Council. Barbara was taking notes, and I was holding a copy of the FFI code-book in case Jehovah wanted that too. “No,” said Barbara, “Tommy’s life will be enough,” and a tear fell on her notebook. A heavenly choir began chanting “Hosanna” in Morse.

Violette Szabo, who struck Marks as “a dark-haired slip of mischief” on their first meeting. She had problems remembering the French nursery rhyme she had been given as a code poem, and Marks suggested as an alternative a poem he had written himself…although he never told her that he was the author. The poem, “The Life That I Have,” later became well-known after its inclusion in the movie which was made about Violette in 1958.

She carried out two missions into France…on the first one, she celebrated her success by treating herself to a shopping expedition in Paris. On the second mission, she twisted her ankle while running from German troops, and held the enemy off with her submachine gun while her partner made his escape. She was captured and executed: her George Cross award for bravery was presented by the King to her daughter Tania.

Francis Cammaerts, like Noor a pacifist who had reconsidered his views. Marks found Cammaerts to be a very frustrating student of coding methods: he finally realized that his pupil was constitutionally unable to mechanically conduct a series of operations for which he did not understand the underlying reasons–once Marks explained the theory behind the coding to him, Cammaerts did just fine. Which was fortunate, because Cammaerts became one of SOE’s most important and successful agents, organizing resistance activities in the south of France on a large scale.

I met Mr Cammaerts in the summer of 2001, and in a future post will have much more to say about this interesting and noble man.

Despite the improvements brought about by the unique poems and the growing cadre of girls dedicated to breaking “indecipherable” messages, Marks remained frustrated with the poem-code approach. He lobbied for an approach based on a one-time pad: a code to be inscribed on a piece of silk and with each element used only once. Such a code was theoretically unbreakable by cryptographic means: moreover, it could not be memorized (being a random string of letters) and hence could not be tortured out of a captured agent. Why silk? For one thing, it burns very quickly. Much of the book deals with the political maneuvering that was necessary to get the silk codes adopted and the necessary materials produced in large quantity. The poem-codes were still retained as a backup, for cases where the silk was lost. The SOE poem-code project continued throughout the war. Here’s another Marks creation that I like:

Have you never known
A glass-bottomed day
When your minutes can be seen
Flowing beneath you
In every direction
But the one you mean?

And mother’s pride
Is safe inside
An envelope of ice
And doesn’t even hear
A cock crow thrice?

Marks was often inspired to commit poetry when meeting a new colleague…especially if the colleague was someone he instinctively disliked. After meeting a Signals administrator named Miss Saunders, he wrote:

A long line of lips
The eyes an eclipse
Arteries hardened
Nobody pardoned
Who holds the key
To that self-locking face
Who stole your grace?

(Despite this inauspicious start, Marks and Miss Saunders soon became friends.)

Marks often enjoys laughing at his younger self. He observed that even the girls who were the best, most consistent coders occasionally went through times when their error rates increased substantially. Analyzing the data, he “sensed a pattern to the lapses which I couldn’t define.” He asked for help from Captain Henderson, an attractive Canadian woman who was personnel officer for the FANYs. Marks described the error problem, and Captain Henderson suggested that it might have something to do with periods. After realizing that the naive Mr Marks had no idea what she was talking about, she directed her secretary to hold all calls for the next half hour while she educated the Codemaster in the basic facts of female biology.

Though the book is leavened with much humor, the heartbreak is never very far away. Just about the time of the German surrender, Marks noticed “an old man watching me from the doorway” of his office. He was about to ask the man if he an appointment, but then he realized…

It was Tommy. He had been in Buchenwald.

After the European war ended, SOE was quickly disbanded. Marks wandered through the empty offices, and on the wall he wrote one last poem:

We listen round the clock
For a code called peacetime
But will it ever come
And shall we know it when it does
And break it once it’s here
This code called peacetime

Signalmaster, Signalmaster
Whose Commandments were in clear
Must you speak to us in code
Once peacetime is here?

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Some related links:

My post about Noor Inayat Khan
My post about Violette Szabo
Tania Szabo’s web site
The women of SOE

Havenstein was a “decent, hard-working, intelligent and well-intentioned public servant” who, as president of the Reichsbank, had much control over Germany’s financial policies during WWI and in the early interwar era. These policies ultimately led to the great hyperinflation of 1922-23. Sebastian Haffner, a teenager during this era, describes what it was like:

By the end of 1922, prices had already risen to somewhere between 10 and 100X the pre-war peacetime level, and a dollar could purchase 500 marks. It was inconvenient to work with the large numbers, but life went on much as before.

But the mark now went on the rampage…the dollar shot to 20,000 marks, rested there for a short time, jumped to 40,000, paused again, and then, with small periodic fluctuations, coursed through the ten thousands and then the hundred thousands…Then suddenly, looking around we discovered that this phenomenon had devastated the fabric of our daily lives.

Anyone who had savings in a bank, bonds, or gilts, saw their value disappear overnight. Soon it did not matter whether it ws a penny put away for a rainy day or a vast fortune. everything was obliterated…the cost of living had begun to spiral out of control. ..A pound of potatoes which yesterday had cost fifty thousand marks now cost a hundred thousand. The salary of sixty-five thousand marks brought home the previous Friday was no longer sufficient to buy a packet of cigarettes on Tuesday.

The only people who were able to survive financially were those that bought stocks. (And, of course, were shrewd or lucky enough to buy the right stocks and to sell them at the right times.)

Every minor official, every employee, every shift-worker became a shareholder. Day-to-day purchases were paid for by selling shares. On wage days there was a general stampede to the banks, and share prices shot up like rockets…Sometimes some shares collapsed and thousands of people hurtled towards the abyss. In every shop, every factory, every school, share tips were whispered in one’s ear.

The old and unworldy had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well. Overnight they became free, rich, and independent. It was a situation in which mental inertia and reliance on past experience was punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction was rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the sixth-former who earned his living from the stock-market tips of his slighty older friends. He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties, and supported his embarrassed father.

Haffner believes that the great inflation–particularly by the way it destroyed the balance between generations and empowered the inexperienced young–helped pave the way for Naziism.

In August 1923 the dollar-to-mark ratio reached a million, and soon thereafter the number was much higher. Trade was shutting down, and complete social chaos threatened. Various self-appointed saviors appeared: Hausser, in Berlin…Hitler, in Munich, who at the time was just one among many rabble-rousers…Lamberty, in Thuringia, who emphasized folk-dancing, singing, and frolicking.

The inflation was finally brought to a halt by currency reform, in the shape of the rentenmark–but unhealed social wounds to the social fabric remained.

I don’t think we’re at serious risk of a Weimar style hyperinflation, but I do think we’re at risk–not immediately but over the next couple of years–of a less-extreme but still very damaging inflation. And I think the point about the influence of economic on society is a more general one. Persistent long-term unemployment and underemployment can also do great harm to the social fabric.

My (very long) review of Haffner’s important and well-written book, from which the above excerpt was taken, is here.

The Age of Longing (published in 1950) is set in Paris, “sometime in the 1950s,” in a world in which France–indeed all of western Europe–is facing the very real possibility of a Soviet invasion. Hydie Anderson, the protagonist, is a young American woman living in Paris with her father, a military attache. Hydie was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection:

Hydie sipped at her glass. Here was another man living in his own portable glass cage. Most people she knew did. Each one inside a kind of invisible telephone box. They did not talk to you directly but through a wire. Their voices came through distorted and mostly they talked to the wrong number, even when they lay in bed with you. And yet her craving to smash the glass between the cages had come back again. If cafes were the home of those who had lost their country, bed was the sanctuary of those who had lost their faith.

Through her friend Julien DeLattre, Hydie is introduced to a number of Paris intellectuals and and East European emigres. Members of the former group are mostly in denial about the danger of a Soviet attack…many of them have indeed convinced themselves that Communist rule wouldn’t be all that bad. For example, there’s Professor Pontieux (modeled on Sartre)…”He did not believe that the Commonwealth of Freedomloving People had solved all its problems and become an earthly paradise. But it was equally undeniable that it was an expression of History’s groping progress towards a new form of society, when it followed that those who opposed this progres were siding with the forces of reaction and preparing the way for conflict and war–the worst crime against Humanity.” Vardi, another intellectual, says that if he had to choose between the (American) juke box on one hand, and Pravda on another, he isn’t sure which he would pick.

Madame Pontieux, modeled on Simone de Bouvoir (with whom Koestler had a brief affair) is less ambiguous about her choice among the alternatives. “You cannot enter a cafe or a restaurant without finding it full of Americans who behave as if the place belonged to them,” she complains to an American official. When the Russian emigre Leontiev suggests that France would not survive without American military support, pointing out that “nature abhors a vacuum,” she turns on him:

“I am surprised at your moderation, Citizen Leontiev,” Madame Pontieux said sarcastically. “I thought you would tell us that without this young man’s protection the Commonwealth army would at once march to the Atlantic shore.”

“I refuse to believe it,” responds Madame Pontieux. “But if choose one must I would a hundred times rather dance to the music of a Balalaika than a juke box.”

(The French intellectuals Koestler knew must have really hated juke boxes!)

Julien is romantically interested in Hydie, but she is not attracted to him, despite the fact that he seems to have much to recommend him–a hero of the French Resistance, wounded in action, and a successful poet. On one occasion, she tells him that she could never sleep with him because they are too similar–”it would be like incest”..on another occasion, though, she tells him that “what I most dislike about you is your attitude of arrogant broken-heartedness.” Parallel to Hydie’s loss of religious faith is Julien’s loss of his secular faith in the creation of a new society. He does not now believe in utopia, or any approximation to same, but he does believe in the need to face reality, however unpleasant it may be. Hydie argues that the Leftists of their acquaintance may be silly, but at least they believe in something:

“Perhaps they believe in a mirage–but isn’t it better to believe in a mirage than to believe in nothing?”

“Definitely not. Mirages lead people astray. That’s why there are so many skeletons in the desert. Read more history. Its caravan-routes are strewn with the skeletons of people who were thirsting for faith–and their faith made them drink salt water and eat the sand, believing it was the Lord’s Supper.”

At a diplomatic affair, Hydie meets Fedya, a committed Communist who works for the Soviet Embassy. She is powerfully attracted to him: things get physical very quickly and, from Hydie’s point of view, very satisfactorily. (Fedya is one of Koestler’s best-developed characters. His boyhood in Baku is vividly sketched, and Koestler–himself a former Communist–does a good job in showing how a political faith can become core to an individual’s whole personality.)

The affair blows up when Fedya humiliates Hydie sexually in a way that could only have occurred to a Dialectical Materialist–and, indeed, humiliation was not Fedya’s intent, he was “only” attempting the demonstrate to her the truth of Pavlovian conditioning as an explanation for human behavior. Hurt and furious, she pours out her heart to Julien…who now feels free to tell her the truth about Fedya, a truth he felt unable to divulge while Fedya was Hydie’s lover.

Fedya’s real job, underneath his diplomatic cover, is to collect lists of names–the names of the key people to be killed or imprisoned immediately after the Soviet invasion. Hydie is, of course, horrified, and is particularly appalled that so many people already knew about Fedya’s activities–and did nothing to stop them–while she was blissfully unaware.

Julien tells her, as does her father the Colonel, that nothing can be done about Fedya because of diplomatic immunity and because the French government does not want to create an international incident by deporting him. Refusing to believe this, Hydie arranges a meeting with a senior French security official. The improbably-named Jules Commanche (who, like Julien, is a hero of the French Resistance) also tells Hydie that nothing can be done, and that if she attempts to make an issue of it, the Soviets and their fellow-travelers will simply paint her as nothing more than a hysterical jilted lover. Hydie remains unwilling to accept the conclusion that Fedya must be left alone to continue his activities:

“How can you, a Frenchman, say that it is not a crime when a man walks around marking down your compatriots with a pencil–like a man branding cattle for the slaughter-house? Don’t you see–don’t you see what is waiting for you?”

“Well, we both know what is waiting for you. A comfortable airliner, when things get hot–and some nostalgic regrets for the sunny cafes on the Champs-Elysees…”

For his own part, Commanche plans a heroic but militarily-futile death in resisting the coming Soviet invasion: he does not wish to survive what he sees as the inevitable destruction of European civilization. After sharing his own sense of hopelessness with Hydie, he asks her for a date, which she rejects.

In an anguish of anger and despair, Hydie buys a gun and goes to Fedya’s apartment. After asking him for a drink, she draws the weapon and tells him why he must die.

He summoned all his patience and self-discipline for a last attempt to bring her back to reason. He forced himself to make his voice patient and gentle; and, after the first few words, its sound made him indeed regain his calm–and even feel a kindly pity for the unhappy fat-legged girl.

“I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no ugliness–only a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginning–and that you will lose because you are at the end…That is why I was not afraid of your little revolver, because you can’t have the courage to shoot me. To kill, one must believe in something.”

Nevertheless, Hydie pulls the trigger…

One one level, this book is sort of a romance novel, with the theme “chicks like self-confident guys.” This is no doubt true, but emphasizing this point wasn’t Koestler’s main reason for writing Age of Longing. Koestler’s deeper theme is that the decline in religious belief in the West (and Koestler himself was certainly no traditional religious believer) has created a hunger for faith which will likely be filled by those who carry their convictions with great certainty. As Jules Commanche explains to Hydie:

“You cannot cure aberrations of the political libido by arguments…Now the source of all political libido is faith, and its object is the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lost Paradise, Utopia, what have you. Therefore each time a god dies there is trouble in History. People feel that they have been cheated by his promises, left with a dud check in their pocket. The last time a god died was on July 14, 1789, the day when the Bastille was stormed. On that day the Holy Trinity was replaced by the three-word slogan which you find written over our town halls and post offices. Europe has not yet recovered from that operation, and all our troubles today are secondary complications. The People–and when I use that word, Mademoiselle, I always refer to people who have no bank accounts–the people have been deprived of their only asset: the knowledge, or the illusion, whichever you like, of having an immortal soul. Their faith is dead, their kingdom is dead, only the longing remains. And this longing, Mademoiselle, can express itself in beautiful or murderous forms, just like the frustrated sex instinct…Only the longing remains–a dumb, inarticulate longing of the instinct, without knowledge of its source and object. So the people, the masses, mill around with that irksome feeling of having an uncashed check in their pockets and whoever tells them ‘Oyez, oyez, the Kingdom is just round the corner, in the second street to the left,’ can do with them what he likes.”

A few thoughts on Commanche’s speech and its applicability to our times…

First, I think I disagree with Commanche/Koestler that loss of belief in personal immortality is of the essence here. Indeed, Fedya is an atheist, but his faith is strong. What matters more (from a societal standpoint) is the belief in the society’s moral authority, in its future, in its system of symbols. And it is specifically these things that have been systematically undermined by so many forces in our society and especially in academia. (When people with PhD’s are willing to accept the idea that gravity is a “social construct”–see The Sokal Hoax–is it any wonder that many ordinary people feel disoriented?)

Second, I think that while our present problem does involve people chasing new gods and promulgators of new faiths–Gaia-worship, Obama-worship…our more serious problem involves those who are no longer seeking and have abandoned themselves to cynicism. I find Hydie, as drawn by Koestler, to be a fairly appealing person, despite her naivete and self-centeredness. I suspect that a present-day Hydie would be much less likeable. I’m reminded of some lines from Kipling, in which he describes the fall of a soul into Hell:

The Spirit gripped him by the hair, and sun by sun they fell
Till they came to the belt of Naughty Stars that rim the mouth of Hell.
The first are red with pride and wrath, the next are white with pain,
But the third are black with clinkered sin that cannot burn again.

There are probably more people now at the clinkered sin that cannot burn again stage than there were when Koestler wrote.

Julien, in explaining to Hydie why he cannot write anymore, says:

Fallen angels don’t write poems. There is lyric poetry, and sacred poetry, and a poetry of love and a poetry of rebelling; the poets of apostasy do not exist.

The book ends on a note of almost unredeemed darkness:

Her thoughts travelled back to Sister Boutillot standing in the alley which led to the pond…Oh, if she could only go back to the infinite comfort of father confessors and mother superiors, of a well-ordered hierarchy which promised punishment and reward, and furnished the world with justice and meaning. If only one could go back! But she was under the curse of reason, which rejected whatever might quench her thirst without abolishing the gnawing of the urge; which rejected the answer without abolishing the question. For the place of God had become vacant and there was a draught blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.

Sixty years later, I think we now begin to see who the New Tenants might be, and it is not comforting knowledge.

Hydie’s (pre-Fedya) sexual frustration is, of course, symbolic: it reflects the West’s loss of self-confidence, but it can be interpreted at a more literal level as well. Does a societal loss of self-confidence also play out at the individual level of attraction or lack of same?

A commenter at this blog reported that a significant number of female British medical students have been converting to Islam. This writer, herself a Muslim, says that “Since 9/11, vast numbers of educated, privileged middle-class white women have converted to Islam”…she identifies these converts as including women at “investment banks, TV stations, universities and in the NHS.” Her concern is not that they are converting to Islam…something I’d presume she would applaud…but that they are converting to “the most restricted forms” of the religion. (And it is, of course, among the believers in the most absolute form of any religion or political system that one is likely to find the most obviously self-confident believers.)

David Yeagley, the American Indian who blogs under the traditional name Bad Eagle, has quoted a Commanche saying: “A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” The link from the preceding paragraph suggests that in Europe, at least, there are more than a few female hearts on the ground concerning the future of Western civilization.

I don’t think Koestler’s protagonist would have been attracted to a fundamentalist Muslim in the way that she was drawn to the communist Fedya. The gap in values would have been far wider: while Communism is a bastard child of the Enlightenment, radical Islam is counter-Enlightenment, and does not make the kind of universalist, humanitarian, and secular promises that the Communists made–the cruelty is closer to the surface.But the loss of Western self-confidence has greatly accelerated since Koestler wrote, and today’s Hydies are unlikely to share the educational and religious depth of the woman Koestler imagined.

I said earlier that the book ends on a note of almost unredeemed darkness…Koestler does permit his readers a small glimpse of hope. One of the book’s characters is the British nuclear physicist Lord Edwards, known as “Hercules the Atom-Smasher” because of his powerful physique. Edwards/Hercules is a Communist sympathizer and fellow-traveller who has repeatedly modified his views on the expanding-universe question to conform to the latest “politically correct” edicts from Moscow.

In this passage, Lord Edwards is talking with the French poet Navarin. It has now become clear that the Soviet invasion is imminent.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I call that treason,” Hercules the Atom-Smasher shouted over the rattle of the wheels; then with a deep contented sign that seemed to release his chest from some long-standing oppression, he settled back into his corner, and decided then and there to go once more into that wretched question of the expanding universe; but this time in the light of purely mathematical evidence.

Just the opposite seems to have occurred.

Whereas five years ago the FDA typically approved a new generic drug within 16 months of the manufacturer’s application, the typical delay is now more than 26 months. The budget for the FDA’s generics office is only $51 million for 2010: up from 2009, but still clearly insufficient to meet the need. It’s hard to think of many ways that an additional $30 million or so could be invested with better near-term payoff on the nation’s collective medical bill.

Executives at a generics meeting joked that the government spends less on reviewing applications for new generic drugs than the New York Yankees spend on the payroll for the left side of their infield.

There was certainly some validity in many of the critiques. But there were also threads of criticism which were driven by an aristocratic contempt for people doing useful tangible work…an attitude that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. Whereas Morris/Ruskin respected the craftsman, there were others who regarded anyone working with his hands as a “menial”…and often extended this attitude to the owner or manager of a large factory. To many aristocrats, banking and trade were considered inferior to land-owning…and manufacturing was considered inferior to banking and trade.

My perception is that by 1900 or so…at least in the United States…mass-production methods were increasingly accepted by the Criticizing Classes, and the focus of criticism moved more exclusively to wages, working conditions, and ownership. Many socialists were quite happy to see the continuation and expansion of mass-production manufacturing as long as it was run by the workers or by “society”–indeed, Lenin was a strong supporter of Taylorism. And the famous Fabian socialsts Sidney and Beatrice Webb were very strong supporters of what they called the Machine Age.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, this attitude among intellectuals and social critics–general support for technology in general and mass-production manufacturing in particular, combined with a desire to change the ownership and control of those activities–largely continued. But in the 1960s, something changed. Technology was now often regarded as threatening or outright evil, and mass-production manufacturing was viewed as “dehumanizing.” The term “anomie,” popularized by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, was frequently used to describe the spiritual environment created by industrialization.

A revealing and bizarre example of this hostility to industry is provided by the fate of the GM-Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. This was a nationwide contest which encouraged boys to make a model Napoleonic-era coach(during the first phase of the program, 1931-1947) or a model car (1947-1968). Substantial prizes, including college scholarships as well as cash amounts up to $5000 (in 1933!) were awarded to those judged to have done the best work. Ruth Oldenziel describes the kind of craftsmanship that was involved:

Contest rules demanded that all parts be handmade, which necessitated the ability to build a miniature Napoleonic coach..from scratch, to read complicated patterns, to draft accurately, carve wood painstakingly, work metal, paint, and make upholstery with utmost care…(a typical model) demanded an extraordinary amount of dedication and time–about three hours a day over ten months…

By 1960, eight million American boys and young men had participated in this contest. GM undertook this effort for PR reasons, of course, but also as a sourcing vehicle for the skilled workers that they needed. Schools were heavily involved in promoting the activity.

But in the mid-1960s, many schools became hostile to the program. One winner recalls that “when GM came to my high school principal and requested permission to make a presentation to an assembly of 2000 in my honor, the corporation was turned down.” Oldenziel:

By the sixties male teenagers no longer projected their future years into corporations, as canvassing corporate representatives were shocked to find out. Someone close to the organization remembers that “in the late sixties, [GM's] presentations at inner-city high schools were not that well received.” He thought that “often the disillusioned, turned-off young of that era felt little motivation to exercise the kind of self-discipline required for the creativity and craftsmanship it took to win even a college scholarship” and concluded, “I hate to say it, but I think a few of our Field Representatives felt fortunate to escape from some of those school assemblies in one piece–it got that bad.”

The program was terminated in 1968.

While the were certainly things to criticize about this GM program…the exclusion of girls, the total focus on styling/appearance rather than mechanical aspects of the auto industry…it’s pretty clear that the hostility that killed the program wasn’t driven by anything so specific–rather, by a broad-spectrum hostility toward business, industry, and technology. Indeed, the idea of having large numbers of teenagers spending long hours working on something other than “social change” was probably a threat to some leaders of the “counterculture.”

I have also read that circa the same period, there was considerable worker sabotage in the auto assembly plants (for example, dropping bolts in places where they shouldn’t go in order to create a hard-to-find, hard-to-fix rattle.) Some of this was certainly a reaction to the antediluvian and obnoxious management practices that were then common among U.S. auto manufacturers, but it’s hard to believe the hostility wasn’t also driven by the overall change in the social climate.

Generalized hostility toward industry, or at least a complete lack of appreciation for same, has certainly driven many public-policy decisions. For example, here is a story about people in the towboat industry in Seattle who have had to wait between four and five years to get permits for minor facilities improvements. This is not just about bureaucratic delay and inefficiency–there is something else going on.

“It’s all cultural,” says Eugene Wasserman, executive director of the Neighborhood Business Council. If it were biotech, it would get the green light.

“Biotech is cool. Propellers and pilings are uncool,” is how the government’s attitude is summed up by columnist Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times.

Several years ago, I observed a local example of the cool/uncool phenomenon noted by the columnist above. A county government had an “incubator” program for new, technology-oriented small businesses..free or low-cost office and lab space, that sort of thing. Someone who was starting a metalworking business to make a new product applied…he was turned down, because the county government wanted “cool” computer-related businesses. (There were no environmental issues: this was clean light manufacturing.) Government officials, who most likely knew very little about any technology whatsoever, chose the currently-fashionable technology, which was web sites, not lathes and milling machines. (Wonder how many of the companies that they did sponsor are still around?)

In her interesting book My River Chronicle Jessica DuLong (who became ship’s engineer on an old restored fireboat running on the Hudson) describes a bitter fight about the proposed construction of a large cement plant on the river. She herself sounds a bit ambivalent about the matter, as she is both a lover of the river’s natural beauty and a strong supporter–I almost said a lover–of industry. Here, she quotes another writer on just how bitter things became:

Plant supporters were portrayed as being less intelligent, less educated, or having a ‘bizarre nostalgia’ for the days of industry. Plant opponents were often stereotyped as being rich, gay antiques dealers from New York City.

The fight lasted six years, and the plant lost. (DuLong notes that opponents of the plant frequently mentioned the painting of the Hudson River School, and points out that many of these painters had in fact elided then-existing industry from their works, so that the “pure” image of the river drawn from these paintings was in fact partially a mythical one.)

Stopping the plant was another watershed event in Hudson River history, solidifying the shift away from the river’s industrial past and toward a future economy based on landscapes, heritage tourism, and a deep sense of place.

I wonder how many among the fervent opponents of the plant are now among those calling for a restoration of “good manufacturing jobs?”

Manufacturing in the United States has been harmed not only by certain top-level Federal and State government policies (the treatment of capital investment and depreciation in the tax code, for example) but by thousands and thousands of local conflicts and decisions like those mentioned above–and these, in turn, have been driven by cultural factors.

A couple of days ago, our blogfriend Bill Waddell wrote about public attitudes toward manufacturing. Excerpt:

A guy I met in Australia a few months back who has spent his lifetime in manufacturing, mostly in engineering products and devices that bring electric power to millions of people, told me that Down Under, when he and his wife attend social events as soon as people find out he works in manufacturing, they change the subject. They don’t even ask whether he is the janitor or the CEO. Knowing that he works in manufacturing triggers either scorn or pity – but either way his career is not perceived to be something worth discussing any further.

I mentioned a while back some comments from the former CEO of one of the big auto-parts manufacturing companies (I think it was Eaton) who noticed that people he met at cocktail parties tended to be turned off by his occupation and much more interested in discussing his long-ago college experiences. And someone recently told me that women surveyed about their preferences in men (on a dating website) listed “works in manufacturing” as a dealbreaker second only to “is bald.”

Culture matters. These pervasive negative attitudes toward manufacturing have been inculcated by many prominent and influential voices over the past four decades, and they will not be easy to reverse.

(The information about the GM Craftsman’s Guild is from Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America, edited by Roger Horowitz. Ruth Oldenziel is a professor at the University of Amsterdam.)

On the other hand, here’s Joel Kotkin: Complaints of China’s ascent and the U.S.’ collapse are overly pessimistic

I’m reminded of a point that was made in a 1930s book on military strategy (edited by then-colonel George C Marshall: The enemy always has problems of his own of which you are unaware.

Not that China–still less India–is the enemy. Surely the economic development of the Far East is a good thing…indeed, it is wonderful that so many hundreds of millions of people have been rescued from desperate poverty, and surely it is good for us to have millions of more creative contributors to global economy. I’m more concerned with our own level of economic growth, and whether it can be sustained at a level necessary to deal with our problems without declining living standards and permanant long-term unemployment than I am with scorekeeping vis-a-vis China and India. Economically-dynamic countries should indeed be viewed as competitors, but also as customers, suppliers, and sources of knowledge and ideas. (For military as well as competitive reasons, relative position cannot be totally ignored, given the nature of the Chinese regime.)

So what say you? Who is more convincing, Citi or Kotkin?

(Kotkin link via Newmark’s Door)

When Czechoslovakia was occupied by German troops in 1938, many Czech pilots made their way to the West and served with the Royal Air Force. After the war, surviving/returning pilots were imprisoned by Czechoslovakia’s new Communist government, which feared that they had been contaminated by Western ideas.

Franta Slama is a Czech air force captain. His younger protege and friend, Karel Vojtisek, is an aspiring fighter pilot. After the humiliating surrender of the airfield to an ungracious German officer, Franta and Karel escape the country via motorcycle. Franta leaves behind his girlfriend, Hanicka, and his beloved dog Barcha. Karel is not in a relationship, but is girl-crazy to a degree even greater that typical for his age.

In Britain, a Czech fighter unit is formed and Franta and Karel learn to fly Spitfires. After being shot down by a German bomber, Karel makes his way to a house and meets Susan, an Englishwoman whose Royal Navy husband has been missing for a year and will probably not return. Susan sleeps with Karel, probably as much out of kindness as anything else, and Karel falls obsessively in love with her.

When Susan meets Franta, though, she is powerfully attracted to him. Franta tries feebly to resist, but his resistance does not last for long. Karel is practically unhinged to discover that his commander and best friend has won the woman that he loves. As their friendship breaks apart, the two men must of course continue flying missions together.

Will Karel and Franta survive the war?
Will their friendship ever be restored?
Who will wind up with Susan in the end?
What has become of Hanicka in wartime Czechoslovakia?

I’m not tellin’…watch the move. Perhaps not a great film, but a very good one. Excellent acting (including a stellar performance by the dog who plays Barcha), with well-done flying sequences. In Czech, with (readable) subtitles.

Robert Avrech’s short review of the film is here.

Most LORAN users have now converted to GPS: however, there are signficant concerns about the increasing level of navigational dependency on this satellite-based system. For one thing, GPS signals are necessarily weak and can be jammed relatively easily. This was much less of a threat for LORAN because of the very high power (up to 4 megawatts) of its terrestrial transmitters.

Various proposals have been advanced for GPS backup systems, one of which involves radio signals transmitted from blimps. An alternative that was on the table was e-LORAN, involving the upgrade of the system’s accuracy to about 8 meters: indeed, significant money has already been invested in e-LORAN development. I’ve seen estimates that the cost of completing e-LORAN deployment would have been about $250MM, which is roughly the same amount of money being spent to dismantle the existing LORAN infrastructure. (LORAN operating costs were quite reasonable, about $35MM/yr.) I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever we wind up doing for GPS backup turns out to cost a lot more.

Anyhow–thanks, LORAN, for 68 years of reliable service. Mariners and pilots may want to raise a glass in appreciation of the scientists and engineers who developed this sytem and the Coast Guardsmen who maintained it.

(photo here)

–the electrical power grid

–natural gas transmission and distribution (in addition to its direct use in heating/cooking, natural gas is an important fuel for electrical generation)

–the various telecommunications infrastructures–wireline telephone, cellular, cable and broadcast TV, and Internet (my sense is that wireline phone is still considerably more reliable than cellular and cable)

–the water system (very dependent on the electrical system for pumping, although gravity-fed tanks provide some short-term independence)

–the street and highway network

–oil pipelines

–the freight-rail network…not very visible to most people–indeed, many still seem to think that the railroad industry is in eclipse–but if it disappeared for a month, you’d know it.

–the airline and air-freight systems and the air traffic control system that supports them

–the ocean transportation and inland barge industries

What did I leave out?

Roger, a wealthy but awkward and widely-disliked student, is hopelessly in love with O’s girlfriend, Desi. Hugo enlists him in a plot which he sells to Roger as a way of luring Desi away from O…but his real intent is to destroy both O and Michael, with Desi as collateral damage.

Does the plot sound a little bit familiar?

This is, of course, “Othello,” set in an American prep school instead of in Venice, and with the title character as an athlete rather than a military commander.

O is Othello (Mekhi Phifer)
Desi is Desdemona (Julia Stiles)
Hugo is Iago (Josh Hartnett)
Roger is Rodrigo (Elden Henson)
Michael is Michael Casio (Andrew Keegan)
Emily is Emilia (Rain Phoenix)
The basketball coach, nicknamed “Duke,” is the Duke (Martin Sheen)

No attempt is made to use Shakespearean language, which was probably a wise decision. While this adaptation may sound contrived from the above description, I think it actually works very well. (The film was released in 2001.)

There are a few interesting differences between the film and the original play, as well as some interesting angles for transforming Renaissance Venice into a modern high school:

(1)In the movie, Hugo/Iago is the coach’s son, which plays an important role in his jealousy of O/Othello. There is no such relationship or motivation in the play.

(2)In the play, Iago’s hate of Othello and of Michael Casio is driven largely by Othello’s decision to choose Casio, rather than Iago, as his principal lieutenant. The recognition/elevation of Michael is also an important factor in the movie–however, in the play, Othello’s promotion decision is based largely on factors which Iago, with some justice, sees as extraneous: book-learning and family/social connections rather than combat experience. Hugo/Iago suffers from no such social-class disadvantage in the movie.

(3)In the play, Iago convinces Othello that he, Iago, understands more about the true nature of Venetian women than Othello the Moor–an outsider to Venice–possibly can, and that hence, Othello had better listen to Iago’s advice. In the movie, this turns into an assertion by Hugo that O…the only African-American in the school…needs to pay attention to Hugo’s greater experience with white women (”They are all horny snakes,” he warns O.)

(4)In the play, Michael Casio is portrayed in a very positive way. In the film, he comes across as more than a bit of a jerk.

(5)Like the play, the movie ends with the murder of Desi and Emily/Emilia and the suicide of O/Othello…but whereas in the play, Michael survives and is designated as Governor at the end, in the movie he is shot and it is left ambiguous whether or not he survives. I think Shakespeare perhaps intended the elevation of Michael Casio at the end to symbolize the continuity of society and of proper authority: there is no such symbolism in the film. The ending of the film is at least as dark as that of the play, and that’s pretty dark.

An interesting sound track, ranging from hip-hop to opera.

Certainly not a substitute for the original, but very well worth seeing, in my opinion.

There is at one quite explicit sex scene, plus of course the violence at the end.

Has anyone else seen this film? Thoughts?

Moody’s Investors Service fired off a warning yesterday that the triple A sovereign credit rating of the US would come under pressure unless economic growth was more robust than expected or tougher action was taken to tackle the country’s budget deficit.

and

Crucially, projections of the overall debt-to-GDP ratio for the US are seen as rising from 53 per cent in 2009 to 73 per cent in 2015 and 77 per cent by 2020. Moody’s, however, says this understates the US debt level.

“Using the general government measure, including state and local governments as well as the federal government, which is used internationally, this ratio would be well over 100 percent in 2020.”

‘Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,
Strange, and sad, and tall,
Stood all alone at dead of night
Before a lighted hall.

‘Twas the Bridegroom sat at the table-head,
And the lights burnt bright and clear —
‘Oh, who is that,’ the Bridegroom said,
‘Whose weary feet I hear?’

The complete poem is here.

Not being a Victorian, some of the words are unfamiliar, and not being a Christian, I’m not sure I understand all the symbolism…but what a vivid, beautiful, powerful poem.

As Michael Ledeen observes: This fear is extremely broad-based. It is not limited to social class nor to domestic or foreign policies. Banks are not lending, companies are not hiring, because they are afraid of what Obama will do next.

It is very clear that Obama/Pelosi/Reid view America primarily as a playing field for a neo-Hobbesian struggle of group against group. And the winning and losing groups at any given moment are determined not only by the elements of the “progressive” creed, but also by the social prejudices of the the leading promulgators of that creed…and by the political exigencies of any given moment.

If you are a union worker in a well-paid industry, for example, you probably thought you were in good shape with the Obama administration…

Yeah, a pro-union President, that’s nice…But wait…here’s a proposal to put a special tax on our contractual health care benefits! That’s not an expense we were counting on! Oh…okay, now they’ve dropped that idea. Hope they don’t change their minds again.

Which they might, if the political tradeoffs point in that direction.

If you’re an investment banker (a very significant proportion of whom supported Obama), you probably felt that underneath the populist rhetoric, Obama and his advisors held you in a lot higher regard than he did the factory workers and small-town residents (remember those “bitter clingers?”) and ditto, that he had a lot more respect for you with your Ivy League MBA than he had for people with state college degrees who are running manufacturing companies. Almost certainly true…but it doesn’t mean that he won’t sacrifice your interests for a small boost in the polls. On the other hand, he may decide that Wall Street contributions matter even more than next month’s polls, and throw you another bailout instead of throwing you under the bus. Either way, your future depends more and more on Obama’s attitude toward you and less and less on your own business ability.

If you’re a small businessperson, you’ve heard a lot of talk about how valued you are and how much the government is going to help you. But you have friends whose businesses have been crippled and even destroyed by ill-thought-out regulations…like the dreadful Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act…and you know that the people running Congress don’t care enough to make responsible adjustments. So you wonder when your turn to be sacrificed will come up.

The reality is that Obama, with the complicity of Pelosi and Reid, is in the process of creating an economy and a society in which the primary factor affecting the success of every individual and every business is the attitude of the federal government toward that individual or business. See, for example, this: Remember when we used to care about P/E ratios? Now we’re all political science majors. And don’t kid yourself that this explosive expansion of the political realm affects just corporations and Wall Street players. It will, if allowed to continue, affect and increasingly dominate the lives every of every individual in the country.

A commenter at the Michael Ledeen link quotes Thomas Jefferson: “When the people fear their government there is tyranny. When government fears the people there is liberty.” We now have an environment in which increasing numbers of people have very valid reasons to fear what their government will do to them…and in which the attitude of government toward the majority of the people is, increasingly, one of contempt.

In a previous post, I quoted Benjamin Franklin:

There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice—the love of power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but, when united in view of the same object, they have, in many minds, the most violent effects.

The whole direction of the country, under the direction of Obama/Pelosi/Reid, is toward the uniting of ambitiona and avarice in precisely the manner feared by Franklin. When moneymaking is principally accomplished by grabbing hold of the power of the state and using it to club rivals over the heard, it is no longer a mutually-beneficial positive-sum game. The uniting of ambition and avarice erodes the spirit of a country as well as its productivity.

We are in the hands of a group of people who for the most part know nothing about business or about any form of economically-productive activity, who know nothing about technology, who wilfully fail to understand the seriousness of the threats of international terrorism and of rogue regimes, whose offices and/or credentials have given them a total lack of humility, and who–despite the aforesaid credentials–are mostly very shallowly educated. There is plenty of reason for fear.

(Disclosure: I’m an Apple shareholder)

Thoughts?

Yesterday the Assistant Village Idiot posted an email from a friend (an executive now living in China) which deals with this issue in a very insightful manner. Recommended reading; discuss there or here.

The machine has been wound up since the beginning of time, and it runs without friction

(The “machine” Anouilh is talking about here is tragedy, in the Greek sense)

Googling, I came up with two very different translations from the original French:

This version:

You just sit back and watch it go. It’s a well-oiled machine in perfect order. It’s been up and running since the beginning of time.

…is pretty different from what I remembered, while this version:

You don’t need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction.

…is pretty close though not identical.

I don’t read French and I’m not sure which version is the more accurate translation…I think I prefer the second, in terms of spoken English…but they are remarkably different, aren’t they?

In the introduction to his translation of Goethe’s Faust, Walter Kaufman makes some interesting remarks about the problems of translation. As an example, he takes the story of Joesph in the Bible. In the King James version, the father’s reaction after Joseph’s coat is found covered in blood is rendered as:

And he knew it, and said, It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces.

…whereas according to Kaufman, a more accurate translation from the original Hebrew would be more like this:

He knew it and said: my son’s coat! an evil beast devoured him! torn–torn is Joseph!

Clearly, the emotional temperature of the two translations is quite different.

About the King James version as a whole, Kaufman says that

The King James Bible is not only an imposing work of English lierature but also, on the whole, amazingly accurate. Even so, its style, mood, and atmosphere are often antithetical to the original. The austerity and laconic simplicity of the Hebrew gives way to a richly ornamental medium, and agonized outcries are refurbished “to be read in churches.”

Related: Some of Heine’s poems, in translation.