Twitteretter

We live in dangerous times, at least in a precarious equilibrium. It is easy to dismiss warnings about current terminal threats to democracy and the nihilist autocratic attack on the institutions of many countries as exaggerated and over dramatic. To those who may be flippantly of this opinion, I recommend reading Hannah Arendt, witness to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. When you read her naked analysis of the totalitarian takeover, you are shocked by how relevant it is to current times. Practically any Arendt quote you choose can be applied, unedited, to today’s politics. This is a warning. Even though very few of us were alive in the 30s, we don’t need reminding of how they ended and how close to an existential cliff edge our species was. The aftermath of a great recession and fast geopolitical change conflated, as they do today, with overconfidence by the media and our institutions to allow a monster to rise which took all the will of humanity, and many lives, to defeat...

It is my observation that lesser literature - entertaining fiction, as compared to erudite essay and classic novel - is easier to read and rewards with quicker pleasure. By this I don’t mean bad literature, but rather, good run of the mill fiction, with less lofty aspirations. I am currently reading Glen Duncan’s entertaining, and well written ‘The last werewolf’, during a break halfway through Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’, which followed a re-read of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ and a first read of Popper’s ‘The Poverty of Historicism’. The latter three elicit extensive thinking. Concepts barely understood at first reading are slowly developed in one’s mind, turned over and regurgitated until one is confident one has sufficiently understood and, further, developed one’s own thinking. The former requires nothing other than page turning, entertained by the story and enthused by the occasional, genius turn of phrase. Balance between both is important as, in fact, it is with everything in life...

  I’ve grown concerned lately by the apparent difficulty that internet age natives have reading books. Snapchat and Instagram are always there, demanding attention whenever they dare lay down their device to immerse themselves in a book. The risk is that the quality of content we receive from social networks is a lot lower than from books. Not because people today are less creative or capable but rather because, with books, we get not only the very best of each period in human history, but also mostly only what has withstood scrutiny by subsequent generations. 10 or20 may have made it from each decade, the best, rising from a cacophony of completely forgettable heaps of less valuable content. When we put down our book to check Snapchat, we prioritise the forgettable cacophony of now over the very best selected for us by millions of readers before us. It is tantamount to rejecting a 1967 Margaux to drink a recently harvested, run of the mill wine (and I am being kind to social netwo...

This post will be no surprise to many, but it does speak of our collective mentality. Whilst making a book purchase on Amazon a few days ago, I came across a book titled ‘The end of epidemics. How to stop viruses and save humanity now’, by Jonathan D Quick. The book is temporarily out of stock. You can just imagine it, languishing on shop shelves and Amazon warehouses, most of the public oblivious or uncaring to the threat of an epidemic, last February. And suddenly, in a clear case of serendipity, a global pandemic explodes and this book, which has the perfect title for it, is thrown straight into the toilet paper and flour category of things you cannot be without. Disappointingly to many buyers, it probably will offer no quick (pardon the pan) fix to our current or future problems, but rather a whole range of well planned measures requiring investments and concerted global policy changes which will have little chance of being implemented once the next precarious recovery ensues Lengt...