The one-handed economist

KA recommended this 2022 book, and I was very much interested in the thesis of its author, Peter Zeihan, i.e., that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and that the US will come out on top.

I stopped reading it, however, as Zeihan’s pile of grandiose claims grew on shakier and shakier foundations. The issue, I think, is that Zeihan’s exuberant prose runs ahead of the logical possibilities, until you’re shouting at him to stop with the cute stuff and get serious.

So, what’s he doing? First, he’s taking “geography-demography determinism” a bit too seriously, in a way that Jared Diamond did in Guns Germs and Steel, but without Diamond’s advantage: telling a story about long passed events. Zeihan’s prognostications about the near (5-50 years?) future are far more vulnerable to critique.

Second, Zeihan’s lack of academic experience and surplus of consulting on “geo-political strategy” has left him with excess certainty and a shortage of careful analysis. I stopped many times with “but what if that’s not true.”

Third, Zeihan knows a lot about the US (where he’s based) but not enough about the rest of the world, which means his claims of American triumphalism are more default than logical. I won’t speak for Europe’s future, but the rest of the world has a lot of good things going for it.

Fourth, Zeihan predicts that the World will go either of two ways: American Imperial control or Fascist corporatism. Here he is just way over-simplifying in the face of (a) the Lilliputans ensnaring Goliath (Zeihan acknowledges America’s many failures at invasion/imperialism) and (b)  economic efficiency/competition putting paid to fascist inefficiency. Sure, I can see someone like Trump trying to do fascist imperialism (Greenland, all his crypto scams) — I just can’t see him succeeding.

Fifth, he assume everyone will still want to move to the US (preventing a demographic collapse), but there are weaknesses in that trend all over the place, due to Trump’s isolationism and racism.

Now, the main ideas in his book are that economies decline as their populations age, and that geographical resources and defenses are important when it comes to conflict. So far, so good. But the first assertion implies that GDP is the only measure of economic success (Japan’s “stagnation” is not really that bad for citizens). And the second assertion misses the many many ways that countries can collaborate (the EU) or fall apart (the US civil war). But those are his over-simplified predictions. What about the rest of the book?

I agree more with these observations:

• The world did very well post WWII under America’s “benign rule” favoring free trade and democracy. (Its Cold War shenanigans don’t get much space.)
• Global expansion must stop, due to a lack of resources (biodiversity most urgently) and growing climate chaos.
• America has tremendous resources and “potential” and it can (will?) ignore the world as things get worse. (Zeihan fails to mention how “American exceptionalism” can lead to (a) civil war and (b) shunning by other countries, both of which can destroy these advantages — as China and South Africa found, respectively.)
• America subsidized global free trade. When (if) it leaves the stage, then trade volumes — and prosperity — will fall. I think this claim is true in direction but not in magnitude, as the people have always sought trade (even before “America” existed). Trade will just cost more.

So those are my thoughts. Read these excepts from his book and see if you also see some overconfidence in his writing:

Bottom line: the world we know is eminently fragile. And that’s when it is working to design. Today’s economic landscape isn’t so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our “normal” is going to end, and end soon

European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive

To believe that globalization will continue without an overarching enforcer and referee [the US], you must believe three things: First, that all powers in a given region will agree to do what the most potent regional power demands. That the Japanese and Taiwanese will accede to Chinese efforts to redefine the structural, economic, political, and military arrangements of East Asia. That the French, Poles, Danes, Dutch, and Hungarians (among others) will actively transfer wealth and control to Germany as the Germans age into obsolescence

I think he’s just run ahead of himself, which means that his book is more annoying than enlightening, which is why I stopped reading it after about 25 percent. THREE STARS.

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Here are all my reviews.

This 1990 book is the 10th in the 42-book Discworld series by Terry Prachett.

I’m only “reviewing” it here because Prachett has so many wonderful perspectives. The plot of the book is the (re-)discovery of cinema at Holy Wood, which leads to hijinks.

So here you go!

1. There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities. At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.
2. Wizards were just as uncooperative, but they also were by nature hierarchical and competitive. They needed organization. What was the good of being a wizard of the Seventh Level if you didn’t have six other levels to look down on and the Eighth Level to aspire to? You needed other wizards to hate and despise.
3. Look,” said Silverfish, “the whole area’s been deserted for centuries. There’s nothing there. No people, no gods, no nothing. Just lots of sunlight and land, waiting for us. It’s our chance, lads. We’re not allowed to make magic, we can’t make gold, we can’t even make a living—so let’s make moving pictures. Let’s make history!”
4. Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.
5. Take up carpentry, why don’t you? Holy Wood always needs good wood butchers.
6. The arrival of advertising: “And the sale of sausages leads you to believe you can make better moving pictures?” said Silverfish. “Anyone can sell sausages! Isn’t that so, Victor?” “Well…” said Victor, reluctantly. No one except Dibbler could possibly sell Dibbler’s sausages. “There you are, then,” said Silverfish. “The thing is,” said Victor, “that Mr. Dibbler can even sell sausages to people that have bought them off him before.” “That’s right!” said Dibbler. He beamed at Victor. “And a man who could sell Mr. Dibbler’s sausages twice could sell anything,” said Victor. 
7. In the hot breathless darkness of a clapboard shack, Ginger Withel dreamed of red carpets and cheering crowds. And a grating. She kept coming back to a grating, in the dream, where a rush of warm air blew up her skirts…
8. Where a thousand elephants want to go, boss, they don’t need no roads.
   Back to the Future came out in 1985.
9. And the inhabitants had done something, some sort of unspeakable crime not just against Mankind or the gods but against the very nature of the universe itself, which had been so dreadful that it had sunk beneath the sea one stormy night. Only a few people had survived to carry to the barbarian peoples in the less-advanced parts of the Disc all the arts and crafts of civilization, such as usury and macrame.
10. The whole of life is just like watching a click [movie], he thought. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues.
11. He grinned in the dark, and a sparkle of light twinkled on a tooth. Nothing created by Holy Wood magic was real for long. But you could make it real for long enough. Hooray for Holy Wood.

FIVE STARS 🙂

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Here are all my reviews.

I read this 1974 book by Ursula K. Le Guin because i was looking for some classic, quality SciFi. This book won a slew of awards and — wow — did it deserve them!

Long story short, it’s the story of Shevek, a physicist from the moon (Anarres) of a home planet (Urras) and how their cultures compare. Anarres’s culture is anarchist, while Urras has many countries but the main one is capitalist (“Propertarians”).

I enjoyed how Le Guin really spelled out the essentials of anarchism as well as the “trap” of success in a capitalistic society where everyone, in the end, is owned.

Here are some great quotes:

1. Shevek sat down on the bed facing the doctor and said, “You see, I know you don’t take things, as we do. In your world, in Urras, one must buy things. I come to your world, I have no money, I cannot buy, therefore I should bring. But how much can I bring? Clothing, yes, I might bring two suits. But food? How can I bring food enough? I cannot bring, I cannot buy. If I am to be kept alive, you must give it to me. I am an Anarresti, I make the Urrasti behave like Anarressti: to give, not to sell. If you like. Of course, it is not necessary to keep me alive! I am the Beggarman, you see.”
2. Kimoe [an Anarresti] tried to explain status, failed, and went back to the first topic. “Is there really no distinction between men’s work and women’s work?” [Shevek:] “Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labor, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do with that?” “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality. “Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don’t have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or carry on the back, the men maybe work faster—the big ones— but the women work longer. . . . Often I have wished I was as tough as a woman.
3. The language Shevek spoke [Pravic], the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. This frame of words could not contain the totality of experience any more than any other, and Shevek was aware of the area left out, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Certainly he had felt that he owned Beshun, possessed her, on some of those starlit nights in the Dust. And she had thought she owned him. But they had both been wrong; and Beshun, despite her sentimentality, knew it; she had kissed him goodbye at last smiling, and let him go. She had not owned him.
4. Physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at the University, and they came to him or he went to them, and they talked, and new worlds were born of their talking. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
5. [Shevek talking with male scientists on Urras] Do you find any women capable of original intellectual work, Dr. Shevek?” “Well, it was more that they found me. Mitis, in Northsetting, was my teacher. Also Gvarab; you know of her, I think.” “Gvarab was a woman?” Pae said in genuine surprise, and laughed. Oiie looked unconvinced and offended. “Can’t tell from your names, of course,” he said coldly. “You make a point, I suppose, of drawing no distinction between the sexes.” Shevek said mildly, “Odo was a woman.” “There you have it,” Oiie said. He did not shrug, but he very nearly shrugged. Pae looked respectful, and nodded, just as he did when old Atro maundered. Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.
6. Shevek was driven out into the country in hired cars, splendid machines of bizarre elegance. There were not many of them on the roads: the hire was expensive, and few people owned a car privately, because they were heavily taxed. All such luxuries which if freely allowed to the public would tend to drain irreplaceable natural resources or to foul the environment with waste products were strictly controlled by regulation and taxation. His guides dwelt on this with some pride. A-Io had led the world for centuries, they said, in ecological control and the husbanding of natural resources.
7. …all the people Shevek saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and, contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anarresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe
8. …every year… fierce protests were made: “Why do we continue these profiteering business transactions with warmaking propertarians?” And cooler heads always gave the same answer: “It would cost the Urrasti more to dig the ores themselves; therefore they don’t invade us. But if we broke the trade agreement, they would use force.” It is hard, however, for people who have never paid money for anything to understand the psychology of cost, the argument of the marketplace.
9. On arid Anarres, the communities had to scatter widely in search of resources, and few of them could be self-supporting, no matter how they cut back their notions of what is needed for support. They cut back very hard indeed, but to a minimum beneath which they would not go; they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism. They built the roads first, the houses second. The special resources and products of each region were interchanged continually with those of others, in an intricate process of balance: that balance of diversity which is the characteristic of life, of natural and social ecology.
10. Aside from sexual pairing there was no reason for not sleeping in a dormitory. You could choose a small one or a large one, and if you didn’t like your roommates, you could move to another dormitory. Everybody had the workshop, laboratory, studio, barn, or office that he needed for his work; one could be as private or as public as one chose in the baths; sexual privacy was freely available and socially expected; and beyond that privacy was not functional. It was excess, waste. The economy of Anarres would not support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting of individual houses and apartments. A person whose nature was genuinely unsociable had to get away from society and look after himself. He was completely free to do so. He could build himself a house wherever he liked (though if it spoiled a good view or a fertile bit of land he might find himself under heavy pressure from his neighbors to move elsewhere). There were a good many solitaries and hermits on the fringes of the older Anarresti communities, pretending that they were not members of a social species. But for those who accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only where it served a function
11. Shevek was appalled by the examination system [on Urras], when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.
12. And the strangest thing about the nightmare [shopping] street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
13. But then why do people do the dirty work at all [on Anarres]? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?” “Because they are done together. . . . And other reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn’t rich, as it is here. In the little communities there isn’t very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenth day it’s pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people. . . . And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing. . . . But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force.
14. Does everybody work so hard, then?” Oiie’s wife asked. “What happens to a man who just won’t cooperate?” “Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you know. They make fun of him, or they get rough with him, beat him up; in a small community they might agree to take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and eat all by himself; that is humiliating. So he moves on, and stays in another place for a while, and then maybe moves on again.
15. It’s anywhere on Anarres [the desire to control and dominate others]. Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries, agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-product communities—anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian [anarchist] any more than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that. We don’t educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian.
16. While Shevek got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
17. Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting [on Anarres]. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking. Tir never did that. I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act.”
18. Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver [Shevek’s partner] were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
19. My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet [Le Guin is talking about Earth, not Urras] spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert. . . . We survive there as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion [this was 40 years ago!] You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species.

Bottom line: “What’s the good of an anarchist society that’s afraid of anarchists?” FIVE STARS.

Addendum (6 Apr): By coincidence I read Michael Polanyi’s 1941 paper, “The Growth of Thought in Society,” in which he argues for individual freedom in pursuing (scientific) knowledge, while warning against a fascist control over what can be discussed … or discovered:

Liberal society, by maintaining various systems of dynamic order, entrusts its fate largely to forces beyond its control. Its productive system grows in unpredictable directions; and by the cultivation of the ideals to which it gives allegiance, society lets itself be guided towards new stages of enlightenment, whose implications are largely unknown. The faith that society mav confide itself to a variety of principles, which guide systems of co-operation by individual adjustment, is the faith of Liberalism, on which-as I have tried to show-the entire structure of the Liberal Society depends. From the opposite position one arrives,- by following the same analysis backwards, to all the basic principles of the Totalitarian State.

Suppose society decides to abandon the pursuit of largely uncertain ends and to take its fate wholly. into its own hands, directing its course entirely towards definite and specific immediate aims: then the structure of society must be changed accordingly. The application of the whole community to the achievement of a definite immediate aim-like winning the war, or dealing with flood, famine, epidemics, or any other emergency-must be entrusted to a State with powers to use every citizen for that definite aim, in accordance with a central scheme, or plan, formed at headquarters. No respect for law, or even humanity or truth, must interfere with the immediate good of society which is thus defined and entrusted to the State. No individual has any justification to act independently under a State which alone knows the whole plans for the future welfare of the community. There may still remain residues of private life and private freedom ; but all independent individual action for the public good, all public liberty as Liberals define it, must go. A State which is wholly responsible for the collective welfare and progress of its citizens must be dictatorial.

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Here are all my reviews.

I enjoyed all three of these, but their “special” nature may not appeal to you. Here’s a bit on each…

Project Hail Mary (SciFi, Andy Weir 2021)

In this book, an astronaut is trying to save the world from a virus but he meets an “alien” trying to do the same for its home planet. I really liked how Weir used so many science concepts to drive the story along [*****]. Even better, he switched from the backstory to the very tense front story often enough that I didn’t get an ulcer 🙂

Wow. I’m sitting here in a spaceship in the Tau Ceti system waiting for the intelligent aliens I just met to continue our conversation … and I’m bored. Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal.

I am not rested at all. Every pore of my being yells at me to go back to sleep, but I told Rocky [the alien] I’d be back in two hours and I wouldn’t want him to think humans are untrustworthy. I mean … we’re pretty untrustworthy, but I don’t want him to know that.

The Long Way (True adventure, Bernard Moitessier 1973)

This is the best sailing book I’ve read [*****]. BM entered a competition to sail around the world single handed. He did that, but didn’t stop until he had gone another “half turn” around. He didn’t want to win the prize in the end, as he just loved being one with the sea. He’s an amazing, poetic writer. His technical annexes are very detailed. I am sure that I would never make such a trip (I’d prefer to crew with many others), but anyone who thinks about long distance sailing or escaping from “civilization” would love this book!

And I had the feeling, again almost physically, that my hand drew them [sea birds] more than the cheese. I wanted to caress them, at least to try. But I did not dare; maybe it was too soon. With a clumsy and premature gesture I risked breaking something very fragile. Wait a while longer, don’t rush things, don’t force things. Wait until the waves of friendship, made of invisible vibrations, reach their full maturity. You can spoil everything, trying to go faster than nature…

For nearly a week the barograph line has been full of little jerks and tremors, as if the gods of the Indian Ocean were restraining their anger. Some say ‘Let’s clobber him.’ Others try to hold them back: ‘Come on, leave the little red and white boat alone. Can’t you see he’s not about to eat your precious icebergs!’ And the gods argue back and forth up there, throwing cirrus, halos and rainbows around.

My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can’t be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.

I ate nothing this morning, nothing at noon. Not from laziness or nerves; I just didn’t feel like it. Penguins and seals go for long periods without food in the mating season, other animals do the same in the great migrations. And deep within himself man may carry the same instinct to leave food aside, as animals do in the solemn moments of their lives. I watch this fantastic sea, breathe in its spray, and feel blossoming here in the wind and space something that needs the immensity of the universe to come to fruition.

If we listened to people like you, more or less vagabonds and barefoot tramps, we would not have got beyond the bicycle.’ ‘That’s just it; we would ride bikes in the cities, there wouldn’t be those thousands of cars with hard, closed people all alone in them, we would see youngsters arm in arm, hear laughter and singing, see nice things in people’s faces; joy and love would be reborn everywhere, birds would return to the few trees left in our streets and we would replant the trees the Monster killed. Then we would feel real shadows and real colours and real sounds; our cities would get their souls back, and people too.’ And I know all that is no dream, everything beautiful and good that men have done they built with their dreams . . . but back there, the Monster has taken over for men, it dreams in our place. It would have us believe that man is the centre of the universe, that all rights are his on the pretense that he invented the steam engine and lots of other machines, and that he will someday reach the stars if he just hurries a little before the next bomb. Nothing to worry about there, our hurrying suits the Monster just fine . . . he helps us hurry . . . time is short . . . hardly any time left.

Alas yes, money . . . for all our picking up butts and living with a reasonable amount of brains, more or less money is necessary, depending on one’s temperament. In any case, one thing is certain: one can go very far and lead an interesting life with very little money to start, because one always makes out once underway—provided one is underway.

King Solomon’s Mines (Adventure fiction, H. Rider Haggard, 1885)

This book launched the entire genre of “boys adventures” that showed up in later books and movies (e.g., Indiana Jones). It’s very dated in terms of its non-PC language regarding Africans and women, but it’s also gives an  interesting view into Victorian culture [****]. The plot — white men venturing into the lands of savages to recover (white) King Solomon’s treasures — is silly but it wasn’t so crazy at the time, given how much of Africa was blank on the map. Oh, and the animal killing is a lot less offensive when you remember that the animals had a better chance to kill men back then.

It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don’t like that. This is by the way.

For to my mind, however beautiful a view may be, it requires the presence of man to make it complete, but perhaps that is because I have lived so much in the wilderness, and therefore know the value of civilisation, though to be sure it drives away the game

But whether you are right or wrong, I may as well tell you at once that I am going through with it to the end, sweet or bitter. If we are going to be knocked on the head, all I have to say is that I hope we shall get a little shooting first, eh, Good?” “Yes, yes,” put in the captain. “We have all three of us been accustomed to face danger, and hold our lives in our hands in various ways, so it is no good turning back now.” “And now I vote we go down to the saloon and take an observation, just for luck, you know.” And we did—through the bottom of a tumbler.

With a scream of pain the brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to the earth, and placing his huge foot on to his body about the middle, twined his trunk round his upper part and tore him in two. We rushed up mad with horror, and fired again, and again, and presently the elephant fell upon the fragments of the Zulu. As for Good, he got up and wrung his hands over the brave man who had given his life to save him, and myself, though an old hand, I felt a lump in my throat. Umbopa stood and contemplated the huge dead elephant and the mangled remains of poor Khiva [the Zulu]. “Ah well,” he said presently, “he is dead, but he died like a man.”

“Listen! What is Life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if the seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner. I will go with thee across the desert and over the mountains, unless perchance I fall to the ground on the way, my father.” He paused awhile, and then went on with one of those strange bursts of rhetorical eloquence which Zulus sometimes indulge in, and which to my mind, full as they are of vain repetitions, show that the race is by no means devoid of poetic instinct and of intellectual power.

I am, to be honest, a bit of a coward, and certainly in no way given to fighting, though, somehow, it has often been my lot to get into unpleasant positions, and to be obliged to shed man’s blood. But I have always hated it, and kept my own blood as undiminished in quantity as possible, sometimes by a judicious use of my heels. At this moment, however, for the first time in my life, I felt my bosom burn with martial ardour. Warlike fragments from the “Ingoldsby Legends,” together with numbers of sanguinary verses from the Old Testament, sprang up in my brain like mushrooms in the dark; my blood, which hitherto had been half-frozen with horror, went beating through my veins, and there came upon me a savage desire to kill and spare not. I glanced round at the serried ranks of warriors behind us, and somehow, all in an instant, began to wonder if my face looked like theirs. There they stood, their heads craned forward over their shields, the hands twitching, the lips apart, the fierce features instinct with the hungry lust of battle, and in the eyes a look like the glare of a bloodhound when he sights his quarry.

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