The soundest base for a diagnosis

So much depends on style, that factor of which we are growing more and more suspicious, that although the tendency of criticism is to explain a writer either in terms of his sexual experience or his economic background, I still believe technique remains the soundest base for a diagnosis, that it should be possible to learn as much about an author’s income and sex-life from one paragraph of his writing as from his cheque stubs and his love-letters, and one should also be able to learn how well he writes, and what are his influences. Critics who ignore style are liable to lump good and bad writers together in support of pre-conceived theories.

Connoly, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. Broadway House: 68–74 Carter Lane, E.C. 1938

Books in progress at the end of 2022

As the University of Toronto’s willingness to let me extend and finish my PhD became more and more strained and conditional I set aside a large number of projects and tasks to focus on getting the dissertation done and defended in 2022.

Some of my books in progress relate closely to my PhD research. I have read most but not all of Britt Wray’s Generation Dread, which accompanies Connie Burk and Laura van Dernoot Lipsky’s Trauma Stewardship as a recent text on the psychological burden of environmental destruction and activism. I am reading George Hoberg’s The Resistance Dilemma: Place-Based Movements and the Climate Crisis and William K. Carroll’s Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy. On broadening the coalition demanding climate action, I need to finish Katharine Hayhoe’s Saving Us. On system justification theory and the just world fallacy, I am reading John Jost’s Theory of System Justification and Left and Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction. On the psychology of contemporary politics I am also reading Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: A History of the Present.

To help force myself through the final stages of writing up, I nearly finished William Germano’s On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts.

On energy I am still working through Robert Jaffe and Washington Taylor’s The Physics of Energy. Because it was recommended in that text, I have read most of Richard Garwin’s Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons.

I most recently obtained Kieran Setiya’s Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way — part of the informal reading I have been doing about modern stoicism and its relationship to the psychology of politics.

Related:

Free dissertation release

Official versions are forthcoming on the University of Toronto’s TSpace thesis hosting platform and on paper from the Asquith Press at the Toronto Reference Library, but I see no reason not to make my PhD dissertation available as a free PDF to anyone who is interested:

Persuasion Strategies: Canadian Campus Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns and the Development of Activists, 2012–20

I have been fighting for years to get this out into the world, so it makes no sense to wait for an arbitrary convocation date and then through further administrative delays.

If you are studying the fossil fuel divestment movement at universities or climate change activism generally in Canada, the US, and UK you may find the extended bibliography useful.

Alicia Garza on activist power-building

“[Alicia] Garza [“a longtime community organizer in Oakland and a major figure within the Black Lives Matter movement” (p. 57)] celebrated that the progressive movement had grown more strident, more self-confident in its demands, more determined to hold leaders accountable. But she wondered if, in the bargain, the movement had acquired a narrowness that kept it smaller than it had to be. She wanted an expansionary progressivism that followed the example of Power [People Organized to Win Employment Rights, a San Francisco activist organization] fighting gentrification in San Francisco: being unflinchingly radical and, at the same time, making space for the non-radical.

“Because crisis is here now, and because we haven’t done the work we’ve needed to do over the last thirty years to actually build a left in this country that is viable, even as we pursue that, we are going to have to figure out who else we can work with in order to get a little bit closer to what we’re trying to do,” she told me. “That doesn’t mean we abandon the project of building the left, and in fact it actually brings into focus how necessary it is. But in the meantime, we can’t just continue to be small.” She often repeated a line picked up from a fellow activist about how the left needs to stop trying to be the god of small things.

“We have to be a lot more selective about who can’t come,” Garza said. “You would think, listening to certain people, that every-fucking-body in this country is on some organized left. It’s just deeply not fucking true. We are so small in relationship to the breadth of where 300-plus million people are politically. We need to understand that in a deep way.”

With that assertion, Garza distinguished herself from a certain strain of her fellow progressives who argue that their policies would be overwhelmingly popular and readily received among those who would obviously benefit from them, but for the corporate media thwarting them and the powerful lobbies blocking their policy proposals, along with the legislators they buy. Garza saw it differently. The ideas in many cases had both a powerful-enemies problem and, partly because of the exertions of those enemies and partly because of primordial realities of American political culture, a lay-public-opinion problem.

For Garza, this was a hard-earned lesson going all the way back to Bayview. It was true that powerful developers and their allies in the city’s power structure wanted to gentrify the area as precipitously as possible. And one could casually assume that the regular people in the area wanted to resist what was being done. But Garza and her colleagues realized that they had both a special-interests problem and a popularity problem. Many of the residents, particularly older Black people who deplored the area’s descent into drugs and violence, were open to the promises of those heralding change. It wasn’t enough to push back against the powerful. You have to be hard on yourself about just how popular your ideas were, assume they were less rather than more popular, and work like hell to make them popular.

In her memoir, she writes that too many of her political allies seem to enjoy the cozy homogeneity of their ranks, instead of viewing that as a problem of smallness. They believe

that finding a group of people who think like you and being loud about your ideas is somehow building power… And while I feel most comfortable around people who think like me and share my experiences, the longer I’m in the practice of building a movement, the more I realize that movement building isn’t about finding your tribe—it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals.

“There’s a purism that can come with social justice work,” Garza told me in one of our conversations, “and that purism, unfortunately or fortunately maybe, is actually pretty detrimental to getting things done.” But it was also complicated, she hastened to add. There were bridges too far. You probably don’t want to end up in a partnership with Jared Kushner just because you favor prison reform. When it comes to coalitions, she said, “you do have to assess at any given moment the amount of risk you are willing to take and the potential impacts of those risks. And if the impacts of those risks are not just about being scared about what people are going to say about you, because you’re making unconventional relationships, but actually that you are enabling a really nefarious and dangerous set of values and principles and people, then you need to say no to those things.[“]

“For me, this isn’t about catering to the middle,” she said. “And it’s also not about beating up on the left. It’s just a longing that I have for us to be more effective and to actually want to win, really want to win. And be willing to do what we need to in order to get there. And so much of what I think is missing is a smark assessment of the landscape that we’re operating in.”

Giridharadas, Anand. The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. Knopf, 2022. p. 68-70 (italics in original)

Related:

Arithmetic of power and plutonium

The first pile at Hanford generated 250 million watts—250 megawatts or MW—of thermal power and produced each year about a hundred kilograms of plutonium. A rule of thumb is that a megawatt of fission heat in a natural uranium reactor accompanies the production of about a gram of plutonium-239 per day. About six kilograms were sufficient to make a bomb.

Garwin, Richard L. and Charpak, Georges. Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons. University of Chicago Press, 2002. p. 33

Readers creating writers

Readers expect to be argued with, and persuaded by. They don’t want to be told, repeatedly, what they already know, and they’re rarely tolerant of being lectured at. Writing happens among; writing is an exchange.

I’ll go further with this point, so bear with me. Readers aren’t just people out there who buy, borrow, or download your written words. Readers engage with texts, giving them a life those texts otherwise lack. Readers, we might even say, create writers. They do this by creating the books that writers make, sort of the way a musician creates a piece of music by playing the notes the composer has set down on paper.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 30 (italics in original)

Writing for academics

Most of what academics write is intended to persuade other academics of something. That’s true for essayists, too. James Baldwin, when asked if writing an essay was easier than writing a novel, replied, “An essay is essentially an argument. The writer’s point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something.” Essays, articles, monographs—the bread and butter of an academic writing life—are about persuasion. Those academic audiences are learned and demanding, and their curiosity is a learned, demanding curiosity. They’re trained to engage complexity (not just positions and speculations but also footnotes, endnotes, appendices, and bibliographic tails of all stripes). They live in expectation of argument and counterargument, of ideas in interesting shapes, laid out to pursue truths in new forms. They may read with their boxing gloves on.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 29

Revision tools

Identifiable skills, practical techniques, working notes, instinct, gut feeling, hunches. Though they may sound like an unlikely troupe of players, when you write and revise you call on all of them. But no tool for working your way into a draft is more important than just reading it as carefully as your ears will let you and staying focused on what you intended to say. Say, not just describe or explain, even if your project requires that some things are described and some other things are explained. Revision is less a matter of fixing errors than of saying more clearly, thinking your writing through from the ground up so that you know why you’re doing something, why you’re going somewhere, why you’re taking the reader somewhere with you.

Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 7 (italics in original)

The marriage of journalism and intelligence

“One profession that is particularly close to my heart, a profession that can get away with nearly anything,” Wagenbreth told his colleagues, “and this group are our dear journalists.” Journalists with a good reputation, he said, had excellent access to officials with security clearances and business executives, and could even travel through the Iron Curtain without a cover. Intelligence and journalism, in Wagenbreth’s view, had “entered a kind of marriage,” he said. “They complement each other and can’t let go of each other.” The Stasi knew that the press was addicted to leaks, and that scoop-hungry reporters would even publish anonymous leaks; they also knew that it was extremely difficult for journalists to tell whether a source was genuine or fake, and ever harder to tell if the content of a leak was accurate or forged. And it was another notch harder still to tell whether an anonymous leak contained some shrewd mix of both, handcrafted for maximum impact. The symbiotic relationship found its fullest expression in the active measures field. “What would active measures be without the journalist?” Wagenbreth asked the Stasi leaders. “Revelations are their métier.” The X, of course, had the same métier.

For Wagenbreth, more competitive and polarized media outlets presented a major opportunity. “For the man on the street it is getting harder to assess and judge the written word,” Wagenbreth explained. “He is ever more helpless in the face of the monsters that are opinion factories. This is where we come in as an intelligence agency.”

Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Mishra on Rousseau

What makes Rousseau and his self-described ‘history of the human heart,’ so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteenth-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection.

He never ceased to speak out of his own intensely personal experience of fear, confusion, loneliness and loss — spiritual ordeals today experienced millions of times over around the world. Holderlin, one of Rousseau’s many distinguished German devotees, wrote in his ode to the Genovan, ‘You’ve heard and understood the strangers’ voice / Interpreted their soul.’ Rousseau connects easily with the strangers to modernity, who feel scorned and despised by its brilliant but apparently exclusive realm. His books were the biggest best-sellers of the eighteenth century, and we still return to them today because they explore dark emotions stirring in the hearts of strangers rather than the workings of abstract reason. They reveal human beings as subject to conflicting impulses rather than as rational individuals pursuing their self-interest.

Take for instance his epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), whose socially outcast protagonist Saint-Preux is exactly the author’s own age. He arrives in glittering Paris to find in it ‘many masks but no human faces.’ Everyone is tyrannized by the fear of other people’s opinion. The airs of politeness conceal a lack of fidelity and trust. Survival in the crowd seems guaranteed by conformity to the views and opinions of whichever sectarian group one belongs to. The elites engage meanwhile in their own factional battles and presume to think on behalf of everyone else. The general moral law is one of obedience and conformity to the rules of the rich and powerful. Such a society where social bonds are defined by a dependence on other people’s opinion and competitive private ambition is a place devoid of any possibility of individual freedom. It is a city of valets, ‘the most degraded of men’ whose sense of impotence breeds wickedness — in children, in servants, in writers and the nobility.

Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. p. 90-1