Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
I just got around to watching a few Conan O’Brien shows on my tivo and I saw this amazingly hilarious interview that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog conducted with Ralph Nader.
I love the moment when Triumph pans the camera around to the “media” that is there to interview Nader… some guy from Madison (Dan?) of course, and Triumph asks if they are going to compare their “Pure Prairie League” album collection.
Stephenson, Neal, Anathem
Author Neal Stephenson has forged a substantial body of fiction in the last 15 years by combining elaborate narratives and witty, humourous dialogue with a more serious consideration of scientific and philosophical issues. Having covered nanotechnology, cryptography, and the early stirrings of Newtonian science in his more recent books, Stephenson turns now to cosmology and the nature of human consciousness in Anathem. The biggest of big pictures.
Set thousands of years in the future, Anathem is an adventure story that fits perfectly into the science fiction genre. The conflict between science and culture has led to intermittent but repeated civil conflicts, resolved finally by isolating the scientific and mathematic minds into the equivalent of walled medieval cloisters (maths). Outside the walls society waxes and wanes, prospers and collapses, while inside the walls the life of the mind continues, year after year. Comparisons with the famous 50s science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz are inevitable.
This century will reconcile individuality with community. We will find the vision and the means to achieve kinds of community that becomes possible only after complete liberation of the individual from any but self-imposed obligation. Post-individuation communities will be dynamic networks of voyagers bound to one another by sovereign commitment to shared images of good. This will happen most rapidly and beneficially if the ground from which it springs is understood.
James Bennett offers an important contribution to such understanding in an article published in The National Interest, Winter 2004/05, drawing attention to the work of Alan Macfarlane. Bennett writes:
… Over the past thirty years an intellectual revolution has been taking place in historical sociology …
[Alan] Macfarlane and his associates have demonstrated very convincingly that English society back to Anglo-Saxon days has been characterized by individual rather than familial landholding; by voluntary contract relationships rather than by inherited status; and by nuclear rather than extended families. Individuals were free of parental authority from age 21 on, and daughters could not be denied their choice of husband (unlike on the Continent). The English nobility, regularly churned by elevation of commoners and marriage of younger sons to non-titled families, tended to mix freely with the rest of society, rather than being a separate caste, again as on the Continent. Rather than the English Reformation being the event that caused this change, it seems to have been (for the majority of the population) the event that brought formal theology and church government more in line with the pre-existing customs of the country. So the English “peasant” the Hollywood is fond of depicting turns out to be the figment of a 19th-century Marxist’s imagination.
Macfarlane’s body of work represents a momentous intellectual revolution. The implications of this revolution have not yet been fully realized, or even generally understood. It suggests that modernity and its consequences came particularly easy for the already-individualistic English.
[ef glyph 180] The Making and Riddle of the Modern World & other contents of Alan Macfarlane’s website, including ebooks on Yukichi Fukuzawa, F.W. Maitland, Baron de Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Malthus — provided as a gift from Alan Macfarlane. Thanks Alan!
My daughter is furious at her geography text; her teacher, she tells us, is ok and more balanced. The book, however, finds much wrong with globalization (and little good) and even more wrong (and less good) with the green revolution. Although she has a quiet strength and has always been concerned with ethics, she has not been impassioned in her teen years as were her sisters. Within the last year, however, she has developed enthusiasms – for bands few have heard, for certain styles, and for the free market. This is not because she reads (or cares much about) the blog on which her mother writes but because of a charismatic economics teacher (she took his enthusiasm with some salt, but came to believe he was generally right – it fit with her worldview and her belief in self reliance). Lately, she’s bought an appropriate t-shirt, since his were the first books she seemed to really like. Her uncle pioneered no-till practices and Borlaug’s influence (lightly) touches our community. She was not unaware both globalization and the green revolution were complicated and some effects weren’t positive. But she also assumed that over all, life wasn’t a bad result.
The Miami airport has a hallway filled with these things. Perhaps a little overdone in an OCD way, but for public art they could have done worse. Happily, fish are funny.
More of same below: