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of posts general and particular
Feb. 11th, 2009 10:41 amThere is an ecclesiastical pun that is eluding me there, but after all the discussion on crowleycrow about types of indulgences, I cannot think of appropriate names for this particular species of self-indulgences.
Anyway, it has occurred to me belatedly that I can create custom groups as small as one member (I had one already, for one LJ Friend who insisted on perusing posts of which I had thought better, and taken private)...so I shall be posting my occasional Wittgenstein ripostes to davross on the for now two-member "agenbite of inwittgenstein" (since the aforementioned "number one fan" insists on having access to every ill-advised word I write).
Whereas everyone will now have to suffer from my latest firm grasp of the obvious, regarding history and contemporaneity. (I have much more to say about the contemporary trend towards thinking "contemporaneity"...not thinking about contemporaneity but "thinking contemporaneity," as old-school theoreticians would have said back in the day. But I'll save that for Counterforces.)
I've been reading, in alternate spates, two books of history. Philip Jenkins' history of the various Christian Churches of Asia and Africa that were mostly or nearly exterminated in the fourteen century C.E., and how the remnants are being driven out at this very hour (or at least this very decade). I believe I wrote already about Jenkins' ability to synthesize complex causes and distinguish between the actual events and the oversimplistic versions we tend to have learned. So it comes as a surprise that Jenkins ends his book as fragmentarily as he does, as though the rush of events left him with nothing to say by way of an overview.
And Mark Mazower's history of the city of Salonica / Thessaloniki (which is not a new book at all, but I hadn't read it) not only goes into detail about the various moments of toleration followed by forced population transfers (and Mazower finally gave me some clarity on the vexed history of Greeks and Turks in the early decades of the twentieth century...insofar as clarity is possible) but offers remarks that are slightly more than pro forma on why the twenty-first century city might wish to reconsider its erased and hence invisible past.
Mazower makes clear how much the horrific events of various moments in Salonica's history were not the inevitable results of local resentments, no matter how much those resentments existed, and how often working balances were established that broke down only under the pressure of external power. And indeed there are ample numbers of compromises and working arrangements that deserve to be remembered in the face of the city's longstanding tendency to eliminate even the architectural reminders of previous hegemony.
Some years ago, Mazower wrote a general history of the Balkans, and that fact set me to thinking about the responsibility borne by those who try to absorb historical lessons on the fly (literally, as in an airplane seat) while en route to journalistic assignments. Robert D. Kaplan has had the raw nerve to travel around the world trying to make sense of the present moment, but some of his judgments haven't been borne out, and his books on the far-flung American military (I've only read Imperial Grunts) have been revelatory for reasons other than the ones he sets forth.
I have the sense that everyone I know has come to similar conclusions about Kaplan, but when someone is the first to be writing about a range of underreported global events (underreported in English-language news sources, that is), there is a tendency to assume he knows what he is talking about until proven otherwise with sufficient frequency.
The tentativeness of contemporary historians with regard to the implications of present-day global forces is partly due to scholarly modesty, but it is also possibly due to their realization that they might not know what they are talking about.
Whereas writers of weblogs are rarely slowed by such considerations. As witness...well, I don't have to say it, now do I?
Anyway, it has occurred to me belatedly that I can create custom groups as small as one member (I had one already, for one LJ Friend who insisted on perusing posts of which I had thought better, and taken private)...so I shall be posting my occasional Wittgenstein ripostes to davross on the for now two-member "agenbite of inwittgenstein" (since the aforementioned "number one fan" insists on having access to every ill-advised word I write).
Whereas everyone will now have to suffer from my latest firm grasp of the obvious, regarding history and contemporaneity. (I have much more to say about the contemporary trend towards thinking "contemporaneity"...not thinking about contemporaneity but "thinking contemporaneity," as old-school theoreticians would have said back in the day. But I'll save that for Counterforces.)
I've been reading, in alternate spates, two books of history. Philip Jenkins' history of the various Christian Churches of Asia and Africa that were mostly or nearly exterminated in the fourteen century C.E., and how the remnants are being driven out at this very hour (or at least this very decade). I believe I wrote already about Jenkins' ability to synthesize complex causes and distinguish between the actual events and the oversimplistic versions we tend to have learned. So it comes as a surprise that Jenkins ends his book as fragmentarily as he does, as though the rush of events left him with nothing to say by way of an overview.
And Mark Mazower's history of the city of Salonica / Thessaloniki (which is not a new book at all, but I hadn't read it) not only goes into detail about the various moments of toleration followed by forced population transfers (and Mazower finally gave me some clarity on the vexed history of Greeks and Turks in the early decades of the twentieth century...insofar as clarity is possible) but offers remarks that are slightly more than pro forma on why the twenty-first century city might wish to reconsider its erased and hence invisible past.
Mazower makes clear how much the horrific events of various moments in Salonica's history were not the inevitable results of local resentments, no matter how much those resentments existed, and how often working balances were established that broke down only under the pressure of external power. And indeed there are ample numbers of compromises and working arrangements that deserve to be remembered in the face of the city's longstanding tendency to eliminate even the architectural reminders of previous hegemony.
Some years ago, Mazower wrote a general history of the Balkans, and that fact set me to thinking about the responsibility borne by those who try to absorb historical lessons on the fly (literally, as in an airplane seat) while en route to journalistic assignments. Robert D. Kaplan has had the raw nerve to travel around the world trying to make sense of the present moment, but some of his judgments haven't been borne out, and his books on the far-flung American military (I've only read Imperial Grunts) have been revelatory for reasons other than the ones he sets forth.
I have the sense that everyone I know has come to similar conclusions about Kaplan, but when someone is the first to be writing about a range of underreported global events (underreported in English-language news sources, that is), there is a tendency to assume he knows what he is talking about until proven otherwise with sufficient frequency.
The tentativeness of contemporary historians with regard to the implications of present-day global forces is partly due to scholarly modesty, but it is also possibly due to their realization that they might not know what they are talking about.
Whereas writers of weblogs are rarely slowed by such considerations. As witness...well, I don't have to say it, now do I?
