Anglosphere

Sherman — Stoic Warriors

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Sherman, Nancy, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind, Oxford University Press, 2005. 242pp.

A recent article in the New Yorker discussed the repeated use of torture on the TV program “24.” Portraying torture as an effective, speedy means of extracting critical information from prisoners is flawed, it claimed. The program’s producer, Joel Surnow, continues to make torture a key dramatic element in 24’s “ticking clock” format, despite informal requests from the US military to avoid doing so. The military is concerned that young soldiers will decide that Jack Bauer‘s repeated brutalities are indeed a useful emergency tool on the modern battlefield. A contrary point of view about whether “24” is innately conservative is outlined in this article in TCS Daily.

Two questions lingered after reading the New Yorker article. (1) Is torture ever useful for gathering information on an urgent basis? (2) Does the American public’s apparent comfort with the fictional torture in “24” indicate some unrequited desire for retribution and intimidation, and/or reflect an unacknowledged (and untapped) group resolve?

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“It seems as if the Anglosphere analytical framework is gaining a certain critical mass.”

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Jim Bennett notes exciting developments:

A century ago it was commonplace to use the idea of “the English-speaking peoples” as a conceptual category and analytical framework. But the idea eventually faded, partly because too many of the people who wrote about it used a social-darwinist, or even a racially-based analysis that became increasingly suspect and increasingly irrelevant as a predictor. The rise of an educated, English-speaking middle class in India, for example, demanded that the British authorities either launch India down the path to self-governing Dominion status along the lines of Canada, or abandon its fundamental principles, or eventually see India become an independent republic. So in away the first iteration of english-speaking consciousness became a victim both of the ideological confusions of its time, and its own success.

 

Now a new iteration of the idea and analytical framework, suitable for its times, is emerging. It promises to be an interesting period.

Read the whole thing.

The Great U-Turn and the Three Who Made It

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The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by John O’Sullivan; Regnery, 448 pages.

Cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings

John O’Sullivan is a journalist with a fine sense of history. Thus it is appropriate that he should write a book about a time, and a set of people, who are now crossing the threshold between being the subject of journalism, to being the subject of history. Of the three — Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II — two belong now to the ages, and Lady Thatcher has become less and less active as health issues reduce her speaking schedule. The students who will be entering university this year were born in 1988 — Reagan’s last year in office — and were two when Margaret Thatcher left government. They were sixteen when the white smoke heralding John Paul II’s successor issued forth over the Sistine Chapel; if they were not Catholics, and were incurious about current events, they might have barely registered his passing.

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Das — India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age

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Das, Gurcharan, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age, Penguin, New Delhi, 2002. ppbk edition.

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Recently, a friend with Gujarati origins returned from visiting his relatives in northwest India and brought me several books on the Indian economic renaissance. This particular book is part biography, part business tutorial, while effectively illustrating the dramatic challenges faced by India over the last century. Gurcharan Das is a former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India, sometime columnist for the Times of India and frequent commentator on Indian economic affairs. Educated in India and the US, and spending his formative business years in many countries, he’s the perfect intermediary for the general reader. After taking early retirement, he switched his focus to business consulting. That varied background has made a big difference to the quality of India Unbound. His experience bridges the generations, bridges East and West, and reflects experience with many facets of the Indian economy. It is a well-written book, a bit dated by the very rapid change in both India and the global economy (his Foreign Affairs article is a wonderful update), but all-in-all this book is an excellent introduction to India’s past, present, and potential future.

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Egalitarian Empires

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For centuries, scholars have debated the causes of the rise and fall of empires.

The most widely held model holds that empires arise due to the unusually aggressive nature of their parent-societies which sweep over their more pacific neighbors. Such empires support themselves by large-scale pillaging which drives them ever to new wars. When they overextend themselves or run out of pillage to fuel their war engines, the empires collapse.

People evoke this model readily when seeking to criticize the war du jour of a Western nation. They always claim the nation acquired its wealth from a modern form of pillage, that it needs pillage to prosper but that the current conflict represents the fatal overextension that will bring its doom.

Yet does this model reflect the true causes that drive the life-cycle of empires, even on an abstract and simplified level?

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