- Steyn, Mark.
America Alone.
Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2006.
ISBN 0-89526-078-6.
-
Leave it to
Mark Steyn to write a funny book about the
collapse of Western civilisation. Demographics are destiny, and
unlike political and economic trends, are easier to extrapolate
because the parents of the next generation have already been born: if
there are more of them than their own parents, a population is almost
certain to increase, and if there are fewer, the population is
destined to fall. Once fertility drops to 1.3 children per woman or
fewer, a society enters a demographic “death spiral” from
which there is no historical precedent for
recovery. Italy, Spain, and Russia are already below this level,
and the European Union as a whole is at 1.47, far below the
replacement rate of 2.1. And what's the makeup of this shrinking
population of Europe? Well, we might begin by asking what is the most
popular name for boys born in Belgium…and Amsterdam…and
Malmö, Sweden: Mohammed. Where is this going? Well, in the
words
of Mullah Krekar of Norway (p. 39), “We're the ones who
will change you. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an
average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is
producing 3.5 children. By 2050, 30 percent of the population in
Europe will be Muslim. Our way of thinking…will prove more
powerful than yours.”
The author believes, and states forthrightly, that it is the purest
fantasy to imagine that this demographic evolution, seen by many of
the élite as the only hope of salvation for the European
welfare state, can occur without a profound change in the very nature
of the societies in which it occurs. The end-point may not be
“Eutopia”, but rather “Eurabia”, and the
timidity of European nations who already have an urban Muslim
population approaching 30% shows how a society which has lost
confidence in its own civilisation and traditions and imbibed the
feel-good but ultimately debilitating doctrine of multiculturalism ends up
assimilating to the culture of the immigrants, not the other way
around. Steyn sees only three possible outcomes for the West
(p. 204):
- Submit to Islam
- Destroy Islam
- Reform Islam
If option one is inconceivable and option two unthinkable
(and probably impossible, certainly without changing Western
civilisation beyond recognition and for the worse), you're
left with number three, but, as Steyn notes, “Ultimately,
only Muslims can reform Islam”. Unfortunately, the
recent emergence of a global fundamentalist Islamic identity
with explicitly political goals may be the
Islamic Reformation, and if that be the case, the trend is
going in the wrong direction. So maybe option one isn't off
the table, after all.
The author traces the roots of the European predicament to the
social democratic welfare state, which like all collectivist schemes,
eventually creates a society of perpetual adolescents who never mature
into and assume the responsibilities of adults. When the
state becomes responsible for all the things the family once had
to provide for, and is supported by historically unprecedented
levels of taxation which impoverish young families and make
children unaffordable, why not live for the present and
let the next generation, wherever it may come from, worry about
itself? In a static situation, this is a prescription for
the kind of societal decline which can be seen in the histories
of both Greece and Rome, but when there is a self-confident,
rapidly-proliferating immigrant population with no inclination
to assimilate, it amounts to handing the keys over to the new
tenants in a matter of decades.
Among Western countries, the United States is the great outlier,
with fertility just at the replacement rate and
immigrants primarily of Hispanic origin who have, historically,
assimilated to U.S. society in a generation or two. (There
are reasons for concern about the present rate of immigration
to the U.S. and the impact of multiculturalism on assimilation
there, but that is not the topic of this book.) Steyn envisages
a future, perhaps by 2050, where the U.S. looks out upon the
world and sees not an
“end of history”
with liberal democracy and free markets triumphant around the
globe but rather (p. 205), “a totalitarian
China, a crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden
Africa, [and] a civil war-torn Eurabia”—America alone.
Heavy stuff, but Steyn's way with words will keep you chuckling
as you contemplate the apocalypse. The book is long on worries
and short on plausible solutions, other than a list of palliatives
which it is unlikely Western societies, even the U.S., have the
will to adopt, although the author predicts (p. 192)
“By 2015, almost every viable political party in the West
will be natalist…”. But demographics don't turn
on a dime, and by then, whatever measures are politically
feasible may be too little to make much difference.
- Macdonald, Lyn.
1915: The Death of Innocence.
London: Penguin Books, [1993] 1997.
ISBN 0-14-025900-7.
-
I'm increasingly coming to believe that World War I was the defining
event of the twentieth century: not only a cataclysm which destroyed
the confident assumptions of the past, but which set history
inexorably on a path which would lead to even greater tragedies and
horrors as that century ran its course. This book provides an
excellent snapshot of what the British people, both at the front
and back home, were thinking during the first full year of the
war, as casualties mounted and hope faded for the quick
victory almost all expected at the outset.
The book does not purport to be a comprehensive
history of the war, nor even of the single year it chronicles.
It covers only the British Army: the Royal Navy is
mentioned only in conjunction with troop transport and
landings, and the Royal Flying Corps scarcely at all.
The forces of other countries, allied or enemy, are
mentioned only in conjunction with their interaction
with the British, and no attempt is made to describe
the war from their perspective. Finally, the focus is
almost entirely on the men in the trenches and their
commanders in the field: there is little focus on
the doings of politicians and the top military brass,
nor on grand strategy, although there was little of that
in evidence in the events of 1915 in any case.
Within its limited scope, however, the book succeeds
superbly. About a third of the text is extended
quotations from people who fought at the front, many
from contemporary letters home. Not only do you get an
excellent insight into how horrific conditions were in
the field, but also how stoically those men accepted
them, hardly ever questioning the rationale for the
war or the judgement of those who commanded them.
And this in the face of a human cost which is
nearly impossible to grasp by the standards of
present-day warfare. Between the western front
and the disastrous campaign in Gallipoli, the
British suffered more than half a million
casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) (p. 597).
In “quiet periods” when neither side
was mounting attacks, simply manning their own
trenches, British casualties averaged five thousand
a week (p. 579), mostly from shelling and
sniper fire.
And all of the British troops who endured these appalling conditions
were volunteers—conscription did not begin in Britain
until 1916. With the Regular Army having been largely wiped out in
the battles of 1914, the trenches were increasingly filled with
Territorial troops who volunteered for service in France, units from
around the Empire: India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and as
the year progressed, Kitchener's “New Army” of volunteer
recruits rushed through training and thrown headlong into the killing
machine. The mindset that motivated these volunteers and the
conclusions drawn from their sacrifice set the stage for the even
greater subsequent horrors of the twentieth century.
Why? Because they accepted as given that their
lives were, in essence, the property of the state
which governed the territory in which they happened to
live, and that the rulers of that state, solely on the authority
of having been elected by a small majority of the voters in
an era when suffrage was far from universal, had every right
to order them to kill or be killed by subjects of other states
with which they had no personal quarrel. (The latter point was
starkly illustrated when, at Christmas 1914, British and German
troops declared an impromptu cease-fire, fraternised, and played
football matches in no man's land before, the holiday behind them,
returning to the trenches to resume killing one another for
King and Kaiser.) This was a widely shared notion, but the
first year of the Great War demonstrated that the populations
of the countries on both sides really believed it, and would
charge to almost certain death even after being told by Lord
Kitchener himself on the
parade ground, “that our attack was in the
nature of a sacrifice to help the main offensive which was to
be launched ‘elsewhere’” (p. 493). That
individuals would accept their rôle as property of the
state was a lesson which the all-encompassing states of the
twentieth century, both tyrannical and more or less democratic,
would take to heart, and would manifest itself not only in conscription
and total war, but also in expropriation, confiscatory taxation,
and arbitrary regulation of every aspect of subjects' lives.
Once you accept that the state is within its rights to order
you to charge massed machine guns with a rifle and bayonet,
you're unlikely to quibble over lesser matters.
Further, the mobilisation of the economy under government direction
for total war was taken as evidence that central planning of
an industrial economy was not only feasible but more efficient than
the market. Unfortunately, few observed that there is a big
difference between consuming capital to build the means
of destruction over a limited period of time and creating
new wealth and products in a productive economy. And finally,
governments learnt that control of mass media could mould the
beliefs of their subjects as the rulers wished: the comical
Fritz with which British troops fraternised at Christmas
1914 had become the detested Boche whose trenches they
shelled continuously on Christmas Day a year later
(p. 588).
It is these disastrous “lessons” drawn from the
tragedy of World War I which, I suspect, charted the tragic course of
the balance of the twentieth century and the early years of the
twenty-first. Even a year before the outbreak of World War I, almost
nobody imagined such a thing was possible, or that it would have the
consequences it did. One wonders what will be the equivalent defining
event of the twenty-first century, when it will happen, and in what
direction it will set the course of history?
A U.S. edition is also available.
- Ronan, Mark.
Symmetry and the Monster.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
ISBN 0-19-280722-6.
-
On the morning of May 30th, 1832, self-taught mathematical genius and
revolutionary firebrand
Évariste Galois
died in a duel in Paris, the reasons for which are forgotten; he was twenty
years old. The night before, he wrote a letter in which he urged that
his uncompleted mathematical work be sent to the preeminent
contemporary mathematicians Jacobi and Gauss; neither, however, ever
saw it. The work in question laid the foundations for
group theory,
an active area of mathematical research a century and three
quarters hence, and a cornerstone of the most fundamental
theories of physics: Noether's
Theorem demonstrates that conservation laws and physical
symmetries are two aspects of the same thing.
Finite groups,
which govern symmetries among a finite number of
discrete items (as opposed to, say, the rotations of a sphere,
which are continuously valued), can be arbitrarily complicated,
but, as shown by Galois, can be decomposed into one or more
simple
groups whose only normal subgroups are
the trivial subgroup of order one and the improper subgroup
consisting of the entire group itself: these
are the fundamental kinds of symmetries or, as this book
refers to them, the “atoms of symmetry”, and
there are only five categories (four of the five
categories are themselves infinite). The fifth category
are the sporadic
groups, which do not fit into any of the other categories.
The first was discovered by Émile Mathieu in 1861, and
between then and 1873 he found four more. As group theory continued
to develop, mathematicians kept finding more and more
of these sporadic groups, and nobody knew whether there were
only a finite number or infinitely many of them…until
recently.
Most research papers in mathematics are short and concise.
Some group theory papers are the exception, with two hundred
pagers packed with dense notation not uncommon. The
classification
theorem of finite groups is the ultimate outlier; it has
been likened to the Manhattan Project of pure mathematics. Consisting of
hundreds of papers published over decades by a large collection of
authors, it is estimated, if every component involved in the proof were
collected together, to be on the order of fifteen thousand
pages, many of which are so technical those not involved in the work
itself have extreme difficulty understanding them. (In fact, a
“Revision project” is currently underway with the goal
of restating the proof in a form which future generations
of mathematicians will be able to comprehend.) The last part of the
classification theorem, itself more than a thousand pages in length,
was not put into place until November 2004, so only then could one
say with complete confidence that there were only 26 sporadic
groups, all of which are known.
While these groups are “simple” in the sense of not being
able to be decomposed, the symmetries most of them represent are
of mind-boggling complexity. The
order of a
finite group is the number of elements it contains; for example,
the group of permutations on five items has an order of 5! = 120. The
simplest sporadic group has an order of 7920 and the biggest, well,
it's a monster. In fact, that's what it's called, the
“monster
group”, and its order is (deep breath):
808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 =
246×320×59×76×112×133×17×19×23×29×31×41×47×59×71
If it helps, you can think of the monster as the group of rotations
in a space of 196,884 dimensions—much easier to
visualise, isn't it? In any case, that's how Robert Griess first
constructed the monster in 1982, in a 102 page paper
done without a computer.
In one of those “take your breath away” connections between
distant and apparently unrelated fields of mathematics, the divisors of
the order of the monster are precisely the 15
supersingular
primes, which are intimately related to the
j-function
of number theory. Other striking coincidences, or maybe
deep connections, link the monster group to the Lorentzian
geometry of general relativity, the multidimensional space of
string theory, and the enigmatic properties of the
number 163 in
number theory. In 1983, Freeman Dyson mused, “I have a
sneaking hope, a hope unsupported by any facts or any evidence, that
sometime in the twenty-first century physicists will stumble upon
the Monster group, built in some unsuspected way into the
structure of the universe.” Hey, stranger things
have happened.
This book, by a professional mathematician who is also a talented
populariser of the subject, tells the story of this quest. During his
career, he personally knew almost all of the people involved in the
classification project, and leavens the technical details with
biographical accounts and anecdotes of the protagonists. To avoid
potentially confusing mathematical jargon, he uses his own
nomenclature: “atom of symmetry” instead of
finite simple group, “deconstruction” instead of
decomposition, and so on. This sometimes creates its own
confusion, since the extended quotes from mathematicians use
the standard terminology; the reader should refer to the glossary
at the end of the book to resolve any such puzzlement.
- Meers, Nick.
Stretch: The World of Panoramic Photography.
Mies, Switzerland: RotoVision, 2003.
ISBN 2-88046-692-X.
-
In the early years of the twentieth century, panoramic photography was
all the rage. Itinerant photographers with unwieldy gear such as
the Cirkut camera
would visit towns to photograph and sell 360° panoramas of the
landscape and wide format pictures of large groups of people, such as
students at the school or workers at a factory or mine.
George
Lawrence's
panoramas
(some taken from a camera carried aloft by
a kite) of the devastation resulting from the
1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire have become archetypal
images of that disaster.
Although pursued as an art form by a small band of photographers, and
still used occasionally for large group portraits, the panoramic fad
largely died out with the popularity of fixed-format roll film cameras
and the emergence of the ubiquitous 24×36 mm format. The
advent of digital cameras and desktop image processing software able
to
“stitch”
multiple images more or less seamlessly (if
you
know
what you're doing when
you take them) into an arbitrarily wide panorama has sparked a
renaissance in the format, including special-purpose film and
digital cameras for panoramic photography. Computers with
high performance graphics hardware now permit viewing full-sphere
virtual reality imagery in which the viewer can “look around”
at will, something undreamed of in the first golden age of
panoramas.
This book provides an introduction to the history, technology, and art
of panoramic photography, alternating descriptions of
equipment and technique with galleries featuring the work of
contemporary masters of the format, including many examples
of non-traditional subjects for panoramic presentation which will
give you ideas for your own experiments. The book, which is
beautifully printed in China, is itself in “panoramic
format” with pages 30 cm wide by 8 cm tall for an aspect
ratio of 3¾:1, allowing many panoramic pictures to be
printed on a single page. (There are a surprising number of
vertical panoramas in the examples which are short-changed by
the page format, as they are always printed vertically
rather than asking you to turn the book around to view them.)
Although the quality of reproduction is superb, the typography
is frankly irritating, at least to my ageing eyes. The body copy
is set in a light sans-serif font with capitals about six points
tall, and photo captions in even smaller type: four point capitals.
If that wasn't bad enough, all of the sections on technique are
printed in white type on a black background which, especially given
the high reflectivity of the glossy paper, is even more difficult
to read. This appears to be entirely for artistic effect—
there is plenty of white (or black) space which would have permitted
using a more readable font. The cover price of US$30 seems high
for a work of fewer than 150 pages, however wide and handsome.
- Roth, Philip.
The Plot Against America.
New York: Vintage, 2004.
ISBN 1-4000-7949-7.
-
Pulitzer Prize-winning mainstream novelist
Philip
Roth turns to alternative history in this novel, which also falls
into the genre
Rudy Rucker
pioneered and named
“transreal”—autobiographical fiction, in
which the author (or a character clearly based upon him) plays a major
part in the story. Here, the story is told in the first person by the
author, as a reminiscence of his boyhood in the early 1940s in Newark,
New Jersey. In this timeline, however, after a deadlocked convention,
the Republican party chooses Charles Lindbergh as its 1940
presidential candidate who, running on an isolationist platform of
“Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war”, defeats FDR's bid
for a third term in a landslide.
After taking office, Lindbergh's tilt toward the Axis becomes
increasingly evident. He appoints the virulently anti-Semitic
Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior, flies to Iceland to
sign a pact with Hitler, and a concludes a treaty with Japan
which accepts all its Asian conquests so far. Further, he
cuts off all assistance to Britain and the USSR. On the
domestic front, his Office of American Absorption begins
encouraging “urban” children (almost all of
whom happen to be Jewish) to spend their summers on farms
in the “heartland” imbibing “American
values”, and later escalates to “encouraging”
the migration of entire families (who happen to be Jewish) to
rural areas.
All of this, and its many consequences, ranging from trivial
to tragic, are seen through the eyes of young Philip Roth,
perceived as a young boy would who was living through all of
this and trying to make sense of it. A number of anecdotes have
nothing to do with the alternative history story line and may
be purely autobiographical. This is a “mood
novel” and not remotely a thriller; the pace of the
story-telling is languid, evoking the time sense and feeling
of living in the present of a young boy. As alternative
history, I found a number of aspects implausible and
unpersuasive. Most exemplars of the genre choose one specific
event at which the story departs from recorded history, then
spin out the ramifications of that event as the story
develops. For example, in 1945 by Newt Gingrich and William
Forstchen, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany does not
declare war on the United States, which only goes to war
against Japan. In Roth's book, the point of divergence is
simply the nomination of Lindbergh for president. Now, in the
real election of 1940, FDR defeated Wendell Willkie by 449
electoral votes to 82, with the Republican carrying only 10 of
the 48 states. But here, with Lindbergh as the nominee, we're
supposed to believe that FDR would lose in forty-six
states, carrying only his home state of New York and squeaking
to a narrow win in Maryland. This seems highly implausible to
me—Lindbergh's agitation on behalf of America First made
him a highly polarising figure, and his apparent sympathy for
Nazi Germany (in 1938 he accepted a gold medal decorated with
four swastikas from Hermann Göring in
Berlin) made him anathema in much of the media. All of these
negatives would have been pounded home by the Democrats, who
had firm control of the House and Senate as well as the White
House, and all the advantages of incumbency. Turning a 38
state landslide into a 46 state wipeout simply by changing the
Republican nominee stretches suspension of disbelief to the
limit, at least for this reader, especially as Americans
are historically disinclined to
elect “outsiders”
to the presidency.
If you accept this premise, then most of what follows is
reasonably plausible and the descent of the country into
a folksy all-American kind of fascism is artfully told.
But then something very odd happens. As events are unfolding
at their rather leisurely pace, on page 317 it's like the
author realised he was about to run out of typewriter ribbon or
something, and the whole thing gets wrapped up in ten
pages, most of which is an unconfirmed account by one of
the characters of behind-the-scenes events which may or may not explain
everything, and then there's a final chapter to sort out the
personal details. This left me feeling like
Charlie Brown when Lucy snatches away the football;
either the novel should be longer, or else the
pace of the whole thing should be faster rather
than this whiplash-inducing discontinuity right
before the end—but who am I to give
advice to somebody with a Pulitzer?
A postscript provides real-world biographies of the many
historical figures who appear in the novel, and the
complete text of Lindbergh's September 1941
Des
Moines speech to the America First Committee which documents
his contemporary sentiments for readers who are unaware of this
unsavoury part of his career.