The Gravity's Rainbow Support Group (GRSG) began in June, 202o as a "reading group" of two people as a support mechanism to plow though Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (a book you should never try to read alone) during the pandemic. The GRSG took the challenge out of reading challenging books and provided a way to keep to two now-retired college chums (Indiana University) from the 1970s, Francis Walker of Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Murray Browne of Decatur, Georgia in touch. Basically, we kept a good thing going.
This page is the third installment of our reading-discussion notes of books we assigned ourselves in 2022. Like in the pages past, (See Gravity's Rainbow Support Group and Gravity's Rainbow Support Group - 2021) it is full of favorite quotes and passages. Don't expect coherent prose or well thought arguments, but our musings may provide insights to your own understanding of these books.
First up
The Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
Thanks to our Kansas friend Bruce Woods, this book was recommended. We were left scratching our heads wondering why this book wasn't already on our radar. Published in 2017, Mishra gives a wide-sweeping historical account explaining the paranoid hatreds that grip our world tracing its roots of the competing thoughts of Voltaire and Rousseau. Interesting that Rousseau became inspired on the road to visit Diderot not unlike the apostle Paul blinded on the road to Damacus. Buckle up because Mishra provides plenty to think about:
Ressentiment
A major theme in the book, Mishra explains ressentiment on pages 13 and 14.
"But in between justice and ressentiment is a rich gray area where schadenfreude can serve a valuable purpose."
Memorable passages
p. 41 - George Santayana " (America) has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom even when covered with slaves."
p.45 - "The easy availability of assault weapons in the United States was always likely to assist the privatization and socialization of violence."
p.65 - "The appeal of democracy, broadly defined as equality of conditions and the end of hierarchy would grow to the paradoxical point where Fascists, Nazis and Stalinists would claim to be the real democrats realizing a despair principle of equality." (Of course, this is true in 2022 as Republicans use the argument that they are preserving democracy as they block the Voting Rights Act and the John Lewis Bill)
From Orwell's Homage to Catalonia -- to the Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, "capitalist democracy is no more than a centralized swindling machine."B
This week in Georgia. On Monday (1/10/22) in the Georgia General Assembly praised UGA and predicted an upcoming victory over Alabama in the College Football Championship. My (Murray) reaction on Tuesday was "Now that the Georgia has won the National Football Championship it can get back to the business of suppressing voter's rights."
p.68 - Dostoyevsky and the dangers of the Crystal Palace, glass and iron structure built by Joesph Paxton in 1851 in London. An embodiment of utopian future, but with acute dangers. (Kind of like Disney World)
P.80 - Blue collar Christians in the Rust Belt, post-communist Poland, Muslims in France push Victimhood.
From Francis
Page 90 –This one sounds a bit like social media and its overbearing effect on people.
"Everyone is tyrannized by the fear of other people’s opinion. The airs of politeness conceal a lack of fidelity and trust. Survival in the crowd seems guaranteed by conformity to the views and opinions of whichever sectarian group one belongs to. The elites engage meanwhile in their own factional battles and presume to think on behalf of everyone else." --It continues--
Page 91 "Such a society where social bonds are defined by a dependence on other people’s opinion and competitive private ambition is a place devoid of any possibility of individual freedom."
Page 98 - The top-down analogy is a good one—and it does a good job summarizing what a lot of us have felt from time to time about administrative no-nothings that issue dictates to those of us trying to get a job done:
"Voltaire was an unequivocal top-down modernizer, like most of the Enlightenment philosophes, and an enraptured chronicler in particular of Peter the Great."
Page 56 - The following comment seems relevant since we discussed if Orwell was an ideologue or an idealist—this is a nice take on a dialogue being an ideologist—in which personal viewpoints serve to keep up one’s membership in a group.
"(Not accidentally, one of the philosophes, Helvetius, founded the modern theory of ideology: the notion that ideas express the conflicting interests of individuals or groups.)"
Page 90: - I liked this comment, because it talks about masks—which of course are the current rage in Paris—although not for fashion.
"Take for instance his epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), whose socially outcast protagonist Saint-Preux is exactly the author’s own age. He arrives in glittering Paris to find in it ‘many masks but no human faces’."
Page 107: - Finally, this is one of the authors sweeping generalizations (he tries to bury in parentheses) again anti-male and a bit over the top. The book editor should have tamped this one down a bit—but, maybe he is referring to India where maybe it is not that far off within certain subcultures….
"Any equality between the sexes, according to him, should be based on different roles in distinct domains of activity; and the demand for women to be educated like men, and increased similarity between the two sexes, would lessen the influence women have over men. (The rapid overturning of these entrenched prejudices in our time is one major source of male rage and hysteria today.)"
Some of the passages reminds Francis of the conservative writer Roger Scruton that seem to echo themes of the book:
- ...Dealing with anger and resentment should not be seen along a liberal-conservative divide, rather they need to be viewed as emotions that can easily deteriorate if are put in place untempered as policies—which then become the enemy of all of us.
- The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth - "Rousseau & the origins of liberalism," The New Criterion (October 1998)wikiq
- Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows. Roger Scruton "The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator (December 2008)
- Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on. "Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," - The Spectator (January 2014)
- Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West.
