Miscellany for the Masses

Some interesting new books and links

At my cottage, I have a plaque on a tree. It reads: “On this site, in 1897, nothing happened.” I like it because it’s true. And absurd. At least on its face.

In reality, it can indeed be meaningful that nothing happened. Sometimes the fact that nothing happened can even be more important than anything else. Look at the Cold War. Decades were spent preparing for thermonuclear incineration but nothing happened. That nothing deserves a plaque.

So I was immediately sold when I came across Nothing Happened: A History by historian Susan A. Crane.

The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember.

"Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating.

When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered.

Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.

I can understand how others might not share my enthusiasm, but this nothing is now my list of Books I Really Want To Read.

I should note that because a book is on my list of Books I Really Want To Read, it does not mean I will read it. I have a second list — Books I Am Likely To Read. The two lists do not match. I have that second list for the simple reason that I also have a third list — Books I Must Read In Order To Write My Next Book.

With that clarification out of the way, the next new addition to my list of Books I Really Want To Read is Rule Nostalgia.

It’s only just been released in the United Kingdom, presumably to coincide with Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee celebration, which is providing ample live-action illustrations.

Longing to go back to the 'good old days' is nothing new. For hundreds of years, the British have mourned the loss of older national identities and called for a revival 'simple', 'better' ways of life - from Margaret Thatcher's call for a return to 'Victorian values' in the 1980s, to William Blake's protest against the 'dark satanic mills' of the Industrial Revolution that were fast transforming England's green and pleasant land, to sixteenth-century observers looking back wistfully to a 'Merry England' before the upheavals of the Reformation. By the time we reach the 1500s, we find a country nostalgic for a vision of home that looks very different to our own.

But were the 'good old days' ever quite how we remember them? Beginning in the present, cultural historian Hannah Rose Woods takes us back on an eye-opening tour through five hundred years of Britain's perennial fixation with its own past to reveal that history is more complex than we care to remember. Asking why nostalgia has been such an enduring and seductive emotion across hundreds of years of change, Woods separates the history from the fantasy, debunks pervasive myths about the past, and illuminates the remarkable influence that nostalgia's perpetual backwards glance has had on British history, politics and society.

Rule, Nostalgia is a timely and enlightening interrogation of national character, emotion, identity and myth making that elucidates how this nostalgic isle's history was written, re-written and (rightly or wrongly) remembered.

In psychology, it is a truism that memory, far from being an inert record of past events, is a constantly evolving organ whose function is to serve present needs— and accurately remembering the past is only occasionally the best way to serve those needs. Collective memory is best thought of the same way. History is constantly being edited and revised and amended — and forgotten — in ways that best serve present needs. As a result, collective memory is to history as memory is to biography — related, overlapping at points, but far from the same thing. And that basic fact is why I find popular perceptions of history to be so interesting and histories of how people remembered the past in the past utterly absorbing.

So Rule Nostalgia is on my Books I’d Like To Read List. Or it will be just as soon as it’s published in Canada. (In the meantime, here’s a good review by the great historian Richard Evans.)

The idea of race as it now exists in our individual and collective minds is not scientifically defensible. Nor is it very old, having really evolved just since the 18th century. And yet, even in that short time, race has made itself a contender for the title of History’s Most Destructive Idea. Race justified the Atlantic slave trade (it was largely for that purpose). It infected and distorted science. It underpinned Jim Crow. It was the rocket fuel of Naziism. It is responsible for every indignity ever prompted by racism.

None of that is controversial. But what do we do about it? That is controversial.

A minority school of thought — I’m a proud member that school — argues that ameliorating the harms done by the idea of race isn’t enough. In fact, if those efforts strengthen the idea, deliberately or inadvertently, they may do more harm than good. Therefore, wipe it out. Erase it from our institutions and minds. What was invented and inculcated can be dissolved and erased.

Which brings me to Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism) by Sheena Michele Mason.

This book presents a skeptical eliminativist philosophy of race and the theory of racelessness, a methodological and pedagogical framework for analyzing "race" and racism. It explores the history of skeptical eliminativism and constructionist eliminativism within the history of African American philosophy and literary studies and its consistent connection with movements for civil rights. Sheena M. Mason considers how current anti-racist efforts reflect naturalist conservationist and constructionist reconstructionist philosophies of race that prevent more people from fully confronting the problem of racism, not race, thereby enabling racism to persist. She then offers a three-part solution for how scholars and people aspiring toward anti-racism can avoid unintentionally upholding racism, using literary studies as a case study to show how "race" often translates into racism itself. The theory of racelessness helps more people undo racism by undoing the belief in "race."

I have to say the word “eliminativist” makes me cringe on aesthetic grounds. Can’t we come up with something better? Or why not stick with a golden oldie like “abolitionism”? Abolish, abolitionist, abolitionism. Clear, strong, wonderful historical resonances. What’s not to love? Anyway, writerly qualms aside, this one’s on my list.

One of the most provocative things read about this week is a discovery powered by airborne lidar (“light detection and ranging”) in Bolivia’s Amazon jungle.

Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways.

…Humans have lived in the Amazon Basin — a vast river-drainage system roughly the size of the continental United States — for around 10,000 years. Researchers thought that before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, all Amazonians lived in small, nomadic tribes that had little impact on the world around them. And although early European visitors described a landscape filled with towns and villages, later explorers were unable to find these sites.

By the twentieth century, archaeologists had yet to confirm the rumours, and argued that the Amazon’s nutrient-poor soil was unable to support large-scale agriculture, and that it would have prevented tropical civilizations — similar to those found in central America and southeast Asia — from arising in the Amazon. By the 2000s, however, archaeological opinion was beginning to shift. Some researchers suggested2 that unusually high concentrations of domesticated plants, along with patches of unusually nutrient-rich soil that could have been created by people, might indicate that ancient Amazonians had indeed shaped their environment.

The hypothesis gained steam when, in 2018, archaeologists reported3 hundreds of large, geometric mounds that had been uncovered because of deforestation in the southern Amazon rainforest. These structures hinted at ancient organized societies capable of thriving in one location for years — but direct evidence of settlements was lacking.

Using a helicopter with lidar, researchers mapped the terrain hidden beneath vegetation. And confirmed the existence of extensive, complex settlements.

It’s thrilling to think discoveries on this scale are still possible in a world mapped down to an inch everywhere. It’s also humbling. These were major human habitations mere centuries ago yet they have been so thoroughly erased it takes this level of technology and investigation to merely identify their existence. Look on my works, ye Mighty, indeed. (How long would it take for our grand civilization to be similarly obliterated? Alan Weisman wrote an intriguing book about just that.)

And finally, before we sink into existential despair, let us remind ourselves we are rich. Seriously. In historical terms, it is highly likely that anyone with the ability to read this is among the richest humans who ever lived. And we owe that good fortune mostly to changes in just the last two centuries.

So how did we get rich? Here’s a fun interview with two economists who recently published How The World Became Rich.