Klara and the Sun

Despite the whole Nobel Prize thing and multiple major motion pictures, Klara and the Sun turns out to be the first Kasuo Ishiguro novel I've picked up.  What interested me most was the fact that it was described as a sci-fi novel.  Since sci-fi is so often a genre that suffers from some truly appalling writing and storytelling craft, it usually pays off to find those few sci-fi writers who can actually, you know, write.  Klara does not disappoint on this front.  While it's a breezy read without a hint of challenging high literary style, it's still clearly the work of a master craftsman.  Ishiguro manages the build-up of tension, and the various possible directions the story could move in like, well, a Nobel Prize winning author.  

Like the best sci-fi, the focus of the book is on the relevance of a hypothetical future to our image of our present identity.  The novel is narrated by Klara, an AF (artificial friend) purchased for the sick young girl Josie.  Just like when an author tells a story through the eyes of a child or an animal, Ishiguro' use of an android voice allows him to make the commonplace and everyday look strange and new.  Klara has to learn about the world, about the dynamics of the family who purchases her, and about her own perceptions and feelings along the way.  Like I say, mostly this lets Ishiguro explore human universals like love, sacrifice, and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, from a new angle.  But he does allow himself one more technical speculation; the novel comes closest to 'hard' sci-fi when Klara describes her perception of the world as fractured into multiple box-like screens or views that zoom in on certain aspects of reality.  Ishiguro doesn't make the import of this perception completely clear, but it struck me as something akin to describing the inner experience of a parallel processing algorithm.  And if you don't feel like one of those yourself these days, you must have been living in a cave for the past 20 years.  

Since the novel has something of a page-turning thriller aspect to it, I won't spoil the plot any more than I already have.  I think it's best read with no prior knowledge (we learn that Klara is artificial on the first page, so knowing this spoils nothing).

Begin Again

A lot of the time when I think about society, I look at it in terms of a huge machine, some of the pieces of which are individual humans.  I think about flows of matter or money or data, gradients of incentive, and self-reinforcing causal mechanisms.  It seems dangerous to personify society.  Society is not a person.  Hell, even people aren't people when you look carefully enough, as any good buddhist, psychologist, or philosopher could tell you.  This ultimately machinic view of the world is important and useful in all sorts of cases, not least of which is preventing ourselves from tipping over into facile hope or debilitating fear.  As Deleuze put it, "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons".

Obviously, the ultimate view of reality is not the only one, nor is it the appropriate one in every case.  One thing it conspicuously lacks is any sort of moral viewpoint.  I give this preface to situate the type of thinking that is necessary for approaching Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s sensitive and thoughtful intellectual biography of James Baldwin.  Glaude follows Baldwin in approaching the history of US race relations from an almost entirely moral perspective.  This means that neither is especially interested in exploring the political and economic causes and circumstances that led to slavery, its abolition, or the various more or less aborted attempts our country has made to reckon with this history.  What they want to ask is the simple moral questions behind all that history -- how could anyone do something like this!?  How could anyone keep doing it, in one form or another, for 400 years!?  And finally, how can any of us live with this level of hate for this long!?  In a sense, these questions are ultimately rhetorical.  You cannot answer them with an analysis of causes, nor quell them with a new set of progressive policies.  Glaude's idea is that you can only let the heavy weight of the question sink in till you can't stand it anymore.  And then you try to begin again, as a new person and a new country, with a new clarity about the problem and the goal.

The central trope of the book is that the problem we face today is analogous to the problem Baldwin faced after Medgar, Martin, and Malcolm were all shot.  How can you avoid despair when you realize that the country still can't lay its past to rest and live up to its image of itself, that it is still telling itself "the lie" as Baldwin put it?  Today, Trump and Charlottesville prompt the identical question.  This seems like it will never end.  It feels like we will keep endlessly fighting the same battle.  The fact that you can point to tangible progress in terms of the extent and depth of suffering created by racism, and might even see the Trump phenomena as the last gasp of White Power as it loses its demogrpahic grip on the country, is beside the point in this context.  It's clear that a large swath of our country has still not made any progress on the moral aspect of this question.  

As we reach this realization we find ourselves in a moment analogous to the poignant one Baldwin and King reached in 1968.  Less than a month before King was assassinated, Baldwin provided an introduction to a speech MLK made at a fundraiser in LA.  On the eve of his death, both Baldwin and MLK gave speeches to the effect that the civil rights movement was ultimately failing.  I found this extraordinary.  Having been taught to see MLK as more or less a superhero who obviously triumphed, I was amazed to read about his own, sadly final, assessment of the situation.  Of course, in a practical sense he was wrong -- the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed in 64-65 ended up making a big difference in lots of ways.  We rightfully celebrate MLK as a hero, not just a martyr.  But, even by the late 60's, it was clear that the movement was failing in a moral sense.  America was not able to stop, to look honestly at its history, to admit that what it had done was wrong, and to reach a moral epiphany to do better.  And that was ultimately both King and Baldwin's goal, to get us to see the hate that animates us and to turn towards love.  In this context, it's hard to see how we've progressed at all in the past 50, or even 150 years.  We tell ourselves a story of an ever more perfect union, but this hate still walks proud in broad daylight,  backed by all the power of dogs and guns and money.

Baldwin of course survived this moment to see all the disguised backpedaling of Nixon's southern strategy and Reagan's welfare queens confirm his moral analysis.  The latter half of the book examines his writing and state of mind as he confronted this "after times" in the last 20 years of his life.  If you are hoping to uncover a simple, feel-good solution that Baldwin came upon and that would apply analogously to our own moment, you have obviously not been following along.  Still, Glaude looks to his experience for some inspirations.  Baldwin gave up on trying to catalyze a moral reckoning in all of white America.  We can give up on trying to change the minds or compromise with Trump's core base.  Instead we can focus on organizing the power of what has now become the majority of this country that can see the problem.  Baldwin also spent a lot of time in Turkey during these years, a place that allowed him space to rest, recharge, and just put some of the rancor to the side for moments.  Glaude suggests that we also need an "elsewhere" that replenishes our reserves.  And finally, we can do what Baldwin never stopped doing, opening the book of history and looking honestly at the terror this country has again and again reigned down on anyone it doesn't consider white.  It's a hard book, but highly recommended.

The Great Transition

Well, I found the history of the medieval world I was looking for.  Bruce M. S. Campbell's central focus isn't Ghengis Khan and the Mongols, but since The Great Transition sets out to explain just why the Black Death happened when and where it did, he is forced to write a comprehensive ecological, political, and economic history of the age of the great Khan.  One component of this history is the westward spread of plague from its ancient native habitat in Qinghai and Tibet.  The unification of the Mongol empire is discussed in the book because it played a key facilitating role in that movement.  But of course, the full story is extremely complicated.

The fact that The Great Transition explores so many aspects of the full complexity of this era is exactly what makes the book itself great.  Campbell begins by reviewing a mountain of climatological evidence like tree ring widths, harvest records, solar radiation charts, etc ... to give us an overview of the way the climate shifted from the MCA (medieval climate anomaly) regime to the LIA (little ice age) regime right around the time of the first major plague outbreak in Northern Europe (1348).  This was a really major shift in temperature and precipitation patterns whose effect on humanity was compounded by the often observed volatility that accompanies a regime shift in dynamic systems.  One effect was increased rainfall in Qinghai, which resulted in increased grasslands, increased rodent populations, increased fleas, and increased spread of the plague bacterium within rodents.  A severe drought that followed this exceptionally rainy period seems to have been the trigger for desperate infected fleas to begin biting their next favorite host -- Mongolians.    In lesser hands, particularly in today's political environment, "the plague was caused by climate change" might have been the entire thesis.  But Campbell is that rare interdisciplinary thinker who resists reducing a complicated story to one that is neat, plausible, and wrong.  

He goes on to explore the many factors that went into the development of Northern Europe from a fallen Roman backwater to its 1100- 1300 CE efflorescece.  These range from the surprisingly positive effect of Christianity as a unifying force at this time, to the establishment of extensive trade fairs that added a significant market economy on top the existing feudal subsistence economy, to the integration of Europe into a global trading network that linked Genoa and Venice through the Middle East to the (at the time) more developed areas of China and India.  The composite picture he builds completely changed my image of late-medieval Europe.  In fact, he estimates that at its height in 1250, Venice was as rich per capita as anywhere in the world ever got before industrialization.  That is to say that it was pushing the technological frontier of trade specialization in a mostly agricultural economy.  His focus, however, is on the significantly less wealthy finge economy of England, simply because the English kept the best records.  With this data -- demographic, agricultural, economic, even the number of monasteries founded in 1200 -- he is able to go deeply into the details of what makes the European economy as a whole tick.  The complex of factors that led to a relatively wealthy and interconnected Europe are exactly the factors that made it vulnerable to the plague's spread.  

It's only from these heights that you can understand how Europe was brought low by the combination of climate, political, and economic changes that accelerated to a tipping point with the Black Death.  The weather got worse, causing harvest failures and undermining the economic viability of specialization and trade.  Cash rich european potentates made war on one another, which also increased transaction costs and reduced the radius of economic activity.  The Mamluks monopolized the traditional links between Europe and the East, which forced trade over the more expensive silk road routes and exposed Europe to the plague.  All these factors working in tandem are necessary to explain why the plague hit when and where it did and why it had such dramatic impact.  And Campbell doesn't shy away from exploring their individual complexity or their sometimes counterintuitive interactions.  

But he isn't done yet.  In the final chapter of the book he goes on to explore why it took Europe 150 years to recover from the plague, and how it's society had changed by the time economies and populations started growing again around 1500.  After the initial wave of plague that wiped out roughly 40% of the European population, there were a number of smaller waves that kept the population below replacement rate for generations.  While this reduction in population obviously led to a dramatic recession, it turns out that life for many of the survivors was actually much improved on average.  The reduction in labor force led to a doubling of the real wage rate over the next century or so, and since the plague destroys people but not farmland or equipment there was more capital to go around and a consequent halving of interest rates.  To top it off, Europe's silver mines (that had paid for much of the lopsided trade with Asia) were tapped out at this point, leading to widespread bullion famine and the deflationary spiral that happens when a market economy demonetizes.   All these factors locked Europe into a new post-plague equilibrium that prevented economic growth, trade, and populations from rebounding quickly.  These also account for some of the concerns that dominated Europe on the eve of the birth of colonialism.  Blocked from going Eastward, the continent reoriented towards the West, resulting in the great voyages of "discovery" to the West Indies and around the horn of Africa.  The significance of the fact that new stashes of gold lay in both these directions was not also lost on a bullion starved European economy.  And finally, there's nothing as great for incentivizing long-term productivity growth through technological investment as high real wage rates.  Let's hear it for the fight for $15, late medieval style!