Tag: Paris

Newspapers and the “Manufacture of Consent”

When we think about newspapers, various associations come to mind. Examples include Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post or William Randolph Hearst inspiring Citizen Kane. Newspapers have, to some extent, devolved into a vehicle for propaganda, as described in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion.

Lippmann is famously quoted for advocating the “manufacture of consent.”

Max Weber describes the economic function of newspapers:

The newspaper as an institution came into the service of commerce at an astonishingly late date.

The newspaper, as an institution, is not a product of capitalism. It brought together in the first place political news and then mainly all sorts of curiosities from the world at large. The advertisement, however, made its way into the newspaper very late. It was never entirely absent but originally it related to family announcements, while the advertisement as a notice by the merchant, directed toward finding a market, first becomes an established phenomenon at the end of the 18th century—in the journal which for a century was the first in the world, the “Times.” Official price bulletins did not become general until the 19th century; originally all the exchanges were closed clubs, as they have remained in America virtually down to the present. Hence in the 18th century, business depended on the organized exchange of letters. Rational trading between regions was impossible without secure transmission of letters. This was accomplished partly by the merchant guilds and in part by butchers, wheelwrights, etc. The final stage in the rationalization of transmission of letters was brought about by the post, which collected letters and in connection therewith made tariff agreements with commercial houses. In Germany, the family of Thurn and Taxis, who held the postal concession, made notable advances in the rationalization of communication by letter. Yet the volume of correspondence is in the beginning surprisingly small. In 1633, a million letters were posted in all England while today a place of 4,000 population will equal the number.

Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, 1966 (Third Printing), page 220.

Herbert Hunt provides a useful overview of the newspaper as a political tool in his introduction to Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (French: Illusions perdues).

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid rise to power of the periodical press. Journalism had been active — though dangerous to those engaged in it — during the Revolutionary period. Napoleon had kept the press under his thumb, as Giroudeau points out on page 235. The ‘freedom’ of the press was one of the most controversial issues both under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X the struggle between those who, like the Liberals and Bonapartists, wanted to keep the Revolutionary principles and gains intact, and the Conservatives of various hues, especially the ‘Ultras’, who wanted to put the political clock back, was an affair of major importance; likewise, under Louis-Philippe, the conflict between the spirit of stagnation and the parties in favour of ‘movement’. Balzac’s contention is that the majority of journalists under these three monarchs, instead of recognizing that they were called to a serious, even sacred mission, turned the Press into an instrument for self-advancement, prostituted principles to intrigue and used journalism merely as a means of acquiring money, position and power. He is reluctant to admit that there were great, responsible press organs, like Le Journal des Débats, Le Conservateur, Le Constitutionnel and, from 1824, Le Globe, which stood firm on principle; he is above all aware of the vogue which the petits journaux enjoyed after the fall of Napoleon, and of the role they played as political privateers.

The petits journaux were so-called because they were produced in smaller format than the important dailies or weeklies, which were more or less grave, staid and ponderous. They proliferated in Paris once the fall of the Empire had given a relative, though still precarious liberty to the Press — precarious because it was constantly threatened by the increasingly reactionary governments of the time. The politicians of the Right found it difficult to keep the newspapers under control even by such means as stamp-duty, caution-money, fines, suspensions and suppressions, the object of these being mainly to put obstacles in the way of would-be founders of hostile periodicals. The ‘little papers’, short-lived as they often proved to be, were much given to journalistic sharp-shooting. They preferred satire, personal attack, sarcasm and scandal-mongering to serious argument or the affirmation of ideals. They were mostly Opposition journals and were a constant thorn in the flesh of the Government. Balzac’s aim was to expose their addiction to ‘graft’, intrigue, blackmail and the misuse of the feuilleton, namely the bottom portion of the first page or other pages generally reserved for critical articles and frequently devoted to the malicious task of slashing literary reputations. Andoche Finot — the prototype of such later newspaper magnates as Émile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq, pioneers in 1836 in the founding of cheap dailies which relied on advertisement and serialized novels as a chief source of income — acquires a large share in a big daily and hands on to the equally unprincipled Lousteau the editorship of the ‘little paper’ he already owns. Balzac probably had Le Figaro chiefly in mind, a periodical which was constantly going bankrupt or being suppressed but kept popping up again under different editors. Hector Merlin’s royalist Drapeau Blanc, edited by Martainville, really existed, having been founded in 1819; so did Le Réveil. Other examples of ‘little papers’ before 1830 were Le Nain Jaume (Bonapartist), Le Diable Boiteux and Le Corsaire (both Liberal), Le Voleur, La Mode, La Silhouette, and, under Louis-Philippe, not only the phoenix-like Figaro, but also La Caricature, Le Charivari (ancestor of our English Punch), and once more Le Corsaire: a few among many. Louis-Philippe and his Cabinets were easy prey for these stinging gad-flies whose unremitting satire and innuendo remind one of the present-day Canard Enchaîné.

It is an amusing thought that, in the late twenties and early thirties, Balzac had himself been a contributor to these disreputable rags and sometimes had a hand in the running of them; for instance he had helped Philipon to found La Caricature. Throughout his career he contributed many novels in serial form to the more important newspapers, notably those founded by Girardin and Dutacq — La Presse and Le Siècle. But by the time he was writing A Great Man in Embryo he had left the petits journaux far behind him. He himself tried his luck as a newspaper-proprietor and editor: he bought La Chronique de Paris in 1836 and founded La Revue Parisienne in 1840. Both of these ventures failed. We can well imagine therefore what a large amount of bile was accumulating inside him. On the whole, reviews of his works appearing in periodicals had been hostile if not harsh. He suffered much from the disparagement of editors and critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin respectively. He was always quarrelling with Émile de Girardin. And so he took his revenge. He had already made a preliminary attack on the periodical press in The Skin. And he followed up his attack of 1839 with his Monograph of the Paris Press (1842).

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, translated and introduced by Herbert Hunt, Penguin Books, 1971, pages xiv-xvi.

Balzac’s novel is very concerned with all aspects of journalism. For example, chapter 17 is titled “How a news-sheet is edited” and chapter 18 is a symposium on newspapers. Chapter 18 quotes a German guest who states, “I thank god there are no newspapers in my country.” (page 312). Another participant states, “In corporate crimes no one is implicated.” “A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.” (page 314).

‘The influence and power of newspapers are only just dawning,’ said Finot. ‘Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow up. In ten years from now, everything will be subject to publicity. Thought will enlighten the world…’

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

‘Newspapers are an evil,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘An evil which could be utilized, but the Government wants to fight it. There’ll be a conflict. Who will go under? That’s the question.’

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

We should heed Vignon’s warning. Nazi Germany’s three main newspapers confirm this danger.

China: Deep History

Winston Churchill says somewhere (if we paraphrase) that the further back you are able to look, the more secure your ability to analyze the present and the future. Without these ‘historical smarts’, your sense of direction is very feeble. Let us use the novel, Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac as a back door into historical smarts.

This novel was originally published in three parts between 1837 and 1843 and is set mostly in the 1820s, primarily in provincial France. It is unique because it starts with technology and commerce.

At the time when this story begins, the Stanhope press and inking-rollers were not yet in use in small provincial printing-offices. Angoulême, although its paper-making industry kept it in contact with Parisian printing, was still using those wooden presses from which the now obsolete metaphor ‘making the presses groan’ originated. Printing there was so much behind the times that the pressmen still used leather balls spread with ink to dab on the characters. The bed of the press holding the letter-filled ‘forme’ to which the paper is applied was still made of stone and so justified its name ‘marble’. The ravenous machines of our times have so completely superseded this mechanism — to which, despite its imperfections, we owe the fine books produced by the Elzevirs, the Plantins, the Aldi and the Didots — that it is necessary to mention this antiquated equipment which Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard held in superstitious affection; it has its part to play in this great and trivial story.

Not only do we get this conceptual framework about printing technology, but later on in the novel, Balzac gives us a further insight into paper-making and textiles, including a long discussion of China.

In England, where four-fifths of the population use cotton to the exclusion of linen, they make nothing but cotton paper. The cotton paper is very soft and easily creased to begin with, and it has a further defect: it is so soluble that if you seep a book made of cotton paper in water for fifteen minutes, it turns to a pulp, while an old book left in water for a couple of hours is not spoilt. You could dry the old book, and the pages, though yellow and faded, would still be legible, the work would not be destroyed.

“There is a time coming when legislation will equalize our fortunes, and we shall all be poor together; we shall want our linen and our books to be cheap, just as people are beginning to prefer small pictures because they have not wall space enough for large ones. Well, the shirts and the books will not last, that is all; it is the same on all sides, solidity is drying out. So this problem is one of the first importance for literature, science, and politics.

“One day, in my office, there was a hot discussion going on about the material that the Chinese use for making paper. Their paper is far better than ours, because the raw material is better; and a good deal was said about this thin, light Chinese paper, for if it is light and thin, the texture is close, there are no transparent spots in it. In Paris there are learned men among the printers’ readers; Fourier and Pierre Leroux are Lachevardiere’s readers at this moment; and the Comte de Saint-Simon, who happened to be correcting proofs for us, came in in the middle of the discussion. He told us at once that, according to Kempfer and du Halde, the Broussonetia furnishes the substance of the Chinese paper; it is a vegetable substance (like linen or cotton for that matter). Another reader maintained that Chinese paper was principally made of an animal substance, to wit, the silk that is abundant there. They made a bet about it in my presence. The Messieurs Didot are printers to the Institute, so naturally they referred the question to that learned body. M. Marcel, who used to be superintendent of the Royal Printing Establishment, was umpire, and he sent the two readers to M. l’Abbe Grozier, Librarian at the Arsenal. By the Abbe’s decision they both lost their wages. The paper was not made of silk nor yet from the Broussonetia; the pulp proved to be the triturated fibre of some kind of bamboo. The Abbe Grozier had a Chinese book, an iconographical and technological work, with a great many pictures in it, illustrating all the different processes of paper-making, and he showed us a picture of the workshop with the bamboo stalks lying in a heap in the corner; it was extremely well drawn.

“Lucien told me that your father, with the intuition of a man of talent, had a glimmering of a notion of some way of replacing linen rags with an exceedingly common vegetable product, not previously manufactured, but taken direct from the soil, as the Chinese use vegetable fibre at first hand. I have classified the guesses made by those who came before me, and have begun to study the question. The bamboo is a kind of reed; naturally I began to think of the reeds that grow here in France.

“Labor is very cheap in China, where a workman earns three halfpence a day, and this cheapness of labor enables the Chinese to manipulate each sheet of paper separately. They take it out of the mould, and press it between heated tablets of white porcelain, that is the secret of the surface and consistence, the lightness and satin smoothness of the best paper in the world. Well, here in Europe the work must be done by machinery; machinery must take the place of cheap Chinese labor. If we could but succeed in making a cheap paper of as good a quality, the weight and thickness of printed books would be reduced by more than one-half. A set of Voltaire, printed on our woven paper and bound, weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds; it would only weigh fifty if we used Chinese paper. That surely would be a triumph…

In 2025, we are to some extent, back to China, going from the proto-industrial world to our industrial and even digital world.

To educate oneself on all of this, you should look at the supreme scholarly achievement of the 20th century, namely Professor Joseph Needham’s masterpiece, Science and Civilisation in China.

World-Watching: 21st International Economic Forum on Africa 2022

[From the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)]

The Future Africa Wants: Better Policies for the Next Generation and a Sustainable Transition

Fast and brutal mutations in the global economy today are reshaping conditions for transforming African economies and creating better opportunities for its youth. Efforts to reduce the continent’s dependence on raw material exports, advance productive transformation and increase investment and domestic resource mobilization are being challenged.

Can innovative policies and international partnerships help address: 

Join OECD experts, African leaders and policy makers and shakers to discuss next steps for a more sustainable future.

The 21st edition of the AU–OECD International Economic Forum on Africa takes places in the framework of the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting (MCM), chaired by Italy under the theme “The Future We Want: Better Policies for the Next Generation and a Sustainable Transition.” The Forum is an opportunity for OECD members to engage at high level, yet informally, with Africa’s leaders, movers and shakers on the way forward.

Register to attend in person.

Can’t come to Paris? Join the Forum online, watch it on OECD TV, Twitter or Facebook

Then and Now Thinking: Zola Novels

Émile Zola died in 1902 and gives us a social overview of France, people caught between all kinds of pressures and changing circumstances and disruptions.

La Curée (1871–72; English translation: “The Kill”) is the second novel in Émile Zola’s 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It deals with property speculation and the lives of the extremely wealthy nouveau riche (“new money”) of the Second French Empire (1852-1870), against the backdrop of Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s.

The Second French Empire, (officially the French Empire, French: Empire français), was the regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic (1848-1852) and the Third Republic (1870 to 1940).

Zola’s other novels such as L’Assommoir (“The Drinking Salon”) also have various kinds of “urban renewal” as backdrop.

Baron Haussmann, who died in 1891, was the “czar” of Parisian urban renewal and the speculation fever and real estate manipulating and maneuvering were echoes of Haussmann Paris.

Think of Robert Moses in New York a few decades ago and his remaking of NYC to fit automobiles and Jane Jacobs’s bitter struggle against Moses with her cars-should-adjust-to-the-city and not cities-to-cars view.

In Japan, in recent decades, real estate “nouveaux riches” are called “tochi narikin” (Japanese: 『土地成金』, “land rich”) and are similar to Zola’s “little foxes” since the way money was made was to know in advance via insider knowledge where railroads (say) were slated to be built and which stretches of land would be therefore needed and acquired by the government at any price (in the absence of “eminent domain”).

The debates and tensions raging around the Baron Haussmann Parisian bulldozing were obviously not about cars but the nature of the tensions was similar. Another dimension of these urban renewal “revolutions” was the impact on renters.

Thus Zola and his “society and social novels” do have “echoic” lessons for us and are “raw material” for “then and now” thinking which is a pillar of meta-intelligence (i.e., perspective-enhancing).

Then and now thinking helps students get some sense of long-term trends or resonances and to get away from history-started-this-morning myopia.

Education and Ambiguity Awareness: A Polyvalent World

Sleepwalkers and sleepwalking are both destructive and constructive and show us the ambiguity in all phenomena.

The World War I chronicle of Professor Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, from 2012, is described this way:

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.

The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade.

Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

How did the Balkans—a peripheral region far from Europe’s centers of power and wealth—come to be the center of a drama of such magnitude? How had European nations organized themselves into opposing alliances, and how did these nations manage to carry out foreign policy as a result? Clark reveals a Europe racked by chronic problems—a fractured world of instability and militancy that was, fatefully, saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. These rulers, who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

On the other hand, the great science writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler (died in 1983) in his own book, The Sleepwalkers, (originally, 1959) argues that the revolution in cosmology associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al depended on visionary thinking, a kind of “sleepwalking.”

Lastly, the classic novel, The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (died in 1851) condemns sleepwalking as the basis of Europe and Germany’s descent into nightmare.

Important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (German: “Die Schlafwandler,” 1932) and The Guiltless (German: “Die Schuldlosen,” 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes “the degeneration of values” as his theme. Various generations are depicted as sleepwalking through their times and eras without any ability to “see past” their time, place, era. They were “sleepwalking.” This made them liable to demagogic deceptions and recruitment.

On the other hand, the experience and story of Kekulé (died 1896) and his scientific discoveries prodded by dreams and reveries and sleepwalking give us a story that argues against seeing sleepwalking as always negative:
Kekulé’s dream and “good kinds of sleepwalking.”

Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz (7 September 1829 – 13 July 1896), was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.

The new understanding of benzene (C6H6), and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé’s honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper.

Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory.

He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).

Kekulé’s story of “dreaming up” the structure of benzene (C6H6) gives us another historical example of Arthur Koestler-type “good sleepwalking” ie visionary dreams and reveries that really enhance “objective” concrete scientific analysis and not only art works.

It is educational to see the inner ambiguity of words and phenomena (such as sleepwalking) because this duality and “polyvalence” applies to many cases.

Memes, Tropes and “Signs” in the “University” That Surrounds Us

A famous face or tune or quip or saying or photo constitutes the raw material for a shared cultural understanding around the world. Everybody somehow knows “James Bond” or “Mercedes” or “Big Ben” in London or the “Eiffel Tower” in Paris.

Think of the Polish movie masterpiece from the mid-fifties, Kanał by Wajda. It shows the doomed resistance story of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against the Germans, which followed the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion of a year earlier.

“Kanał” means sewer, and the story takes place in the sewers of Warsaw as this band of resistance fighters tries to avoid being killed by the Germans who still have overwhelming military superiority in weapons, ammunition, etc.

At one point these fighters enter a Polish “bourgeois” home (i.e., great wealth is on display) and one of them, Michal, the classical musician, played by Sheybal (whom you will have seen as a villain in James Bond movies) goes over to the piano they find, a Bechstein, and “plays around” including the famous tango from Uruguay and Argentina, “La cumparsita” (the little parade) which went “viral” (for its time) around 1916-1917 “radiating out” from Uruguay and Argentina.

Famous versions of this tango include Carlos Gardel’s and performances by orchestras led by Juan d’Arienzo, Osvaldo Pugliese and Astor Piazzolla. “La cumparsita” is very popular at milongas; it is a common tradition for it to be played as the last dance of the evening.

The song was named cultural and popular anthem of Uruguay by law in 1997.

Appearances in Movies

Gene Kelly dances to “La cumparsita” in the film Anchors Aweigh (1945). The song was included in a ballroom scene of the film Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which Gloria Swanson and William Holden danced the tango. In the 2006 dance movie Take the Lead, Jenna Dewan, Dante Basco and Elijah Kelley danced to a remixed version.

In the 1959 film Some Like It Hot, “La cumparsita” is played by a blindfolded Cuban band during a scene in which Jack Lemmon dressed in drag dances with overstated flair in the arms of Joe E. Brown who thinks Lemmon is a woman (“Daphne—you’re leading again”). During the filming in 1958, actor George Raft taught the other two men to dance the tango for this scene.

Miscellaneous

In the Olympic Games of Sydney 2000, the Argentine team marched with the Uruguayan music “La cumparsita.” This originated protests and official claims from the Uruguayan government. The work was also an opening part of an infamous radio drama: The War of the Worlds was broadcast as an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. This was directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles.

Many artistic gymnasts have used variations of the song as their floor routine soundtracks including Vanessa Atler (1998–99), Jamie Dantzscher (2000), Oana Petrovschi (2001–02), Elvire Teza (1998), Elise Ray (1997–98), Natalia Ziganshina (2000), Maria Kharenkova (2013) and MyKayla Skinner (2011–12). Joannie Rochette skated to the song for her short program during the 2009–2010 season, most famously skating a clean performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics after the sudden death of her mother.

Students should realize as part of an education, thought of in the sense we are introducing here, that the world is an “ambient” ecosystem of these cultural icons, memes and tropes and one should be attune to them and how they connect the world into something like a semi-shared experience.

Notice, say, that the Bechstein piano, played by Michal (Vladek Sheybal) in the movie Kanał (he later goes mad and playing an ocarina, starts reciting lines from Dante and loses his mind) is the name of the Bechstein family which were instrumental in the rise of Hitler. The irony should be part of the student’s viewing experience and should show how “screwy” the world is.

Notice too that there’s an ocarina-playing character in the movie Stalag 17 who’s described as mentally unwell.

All of these aspects are part of the material world and the iconic world and the world of “signs” that are part of our education, understood as ambience of which the campus is one part only.

Education and London’s Centrality in Global Finance: Then and Now

To understand our world, we have to go back to classics of understanding such as Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook] which gives one a vivid sense of London’s rise as world’s banker, already in 1873. 

Our current world was certainly shaped by these long-term historical trends.

…But very few persons are aware how much greater the ready balance—the floating loan-fund which can be lent to any one or for any purpose—is in England than it is anywhere else in the world. A very few figures will show how large the London loan-fund is, and how much greater it is than any other. The known deposits—the deposits of banks which publish their accounts—are, in

London (31st December, 1872). . . . . . . .£120,000,000
Paris (27th February, 1873) . . . . . . . . . .13,000,000
New York (February, 1873) . . . . . . . . . .40,000,000
German Empire (31st January, 1873) . . .8,000,000

And the unknown deposits—the deposits in banks which do not publish their accounts—are in London much greater than those in any other of these cities. The bankers’ deposits of London are many times greater than those of any other city—those of Great Britain many times greater than those of any other country.

Of course the deposits of bankers are not a strictly accurate measure of the resources of a Money Market. On the contrary, much more cash exists out of banks in France and Germany, and in all non-banking countries, than could be found in England or Scotland, where banking is developed. But that cash is not, so to speak, “Money-Market money”: it is not attainable. Nothing but their immense misfortunes, nothing but a vast loan in their own securities, could have extracted the hoards of France from the custody of the French people. The offer of no other securities would have tempted them, for they had confidence in no other securities. For all other purposes the money hoarded was useless and might as well not have been hoarded. But the English money is “borrowable” money. Our people are bolder in dealing with their money than any continental nation, and even if they were not bolder, the mere fact that their money is deposited in a bank makes it far more obtainable. A million in the hands of a single banker is a great power; he can at once lend it where he will, and borrowers can come to him, because they know or believe that he has it. But the same sum scattered in tens and fifties through a whole nation is no power at all: no one knows where to find it or whom to ask for it. Concentration of money in banks, though not the sole cause, is the principal cause which has made the Money Market of England so exceedingly rich, so much beyond that of other countries.

…

…I believe that our system, though curious and peculiar, may be worked safely; but if we wish so to work it, we must study it. We must not think we have an easy task when we have a difficult task, or that we are living in a natural state when we are really living in an artificial one. Money will not manage itself, and Lombard Street has a great deal of money to manage.

Signs and Meanings: Education and Semiotics

One learns to function in a world of posters, postings, signs, ads, ordinances, notices and indications of “material culture” (i.e. commerce expressed in designs and slogans on walls and buses, subway cars, etc.).

Think of the 1963 movie The Great Escape. There’s a scene where James Coburn’s Australian character is sitting in an outdoor cafe on the French/Spanish border and the waiter comes over to him and pulls him toward the counter and says, “Telephon, monsieur.”

The James Coburn character has no idea why this is happening but mimics the proprietor and son when they duck down. French Resistance fighters in a car gun down the Germans at the cafe and James Coburn’s character “gets it” and asks them for help to get into Spain. As he ducks down you see posted on the wall of the cafe several ad signs for drinks. One of them is “Byrrh”:

“Byrrh is an aromatised wine-based apéritif made of red wine, mistelle, and quinine. Created in 1866 and a trademark since 1873, it was popular as a French apéritif. With its marketing and reputation as a ‘hygienic drink,’ Byrrh sold well in the early 20th century.” (from Wikipedia)

In many French movies or movies set in France, such as Belle de Jour and The Legend of the Holy Drinker from 1988 (in which a drunken homeless man [played by Rutger Hauer] in Paris is lent 200 francs by a stranger as long as he promises to repay it to a local church when he can afford to; the film depicts the man’s constant frustrations as he attempts to do so).

“Byrrh” appears routinely and a French child begins to ‘get the picture’ on what is being signified and how it differs from other notices, commercial or legal or municipal.

Set in Paris, the ad notice “Byrrh” appears in the same way you’d expect to see “Coca-Cola” and know what the sign signifies. “Coke” is a drink and not the fuel coke. How exactly you make these distinctions is unclear to linguists and other language-watchers. It’s a social phenomenon, partly, like mores and manners.

In the movie The Book Thief (a 2013 World War II war drama, starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, and Sophie Nélisse, based on the 2005 novel) there’s a moment when you see a sign advertising or reminding you of “Kolonialwaren” (i.e., colonial wares) which was the German way of pointing to a place or store that sold coffee, tea, cocoa, etc. Any German adult of the period would know what “Kolonialwaren” signifies without quite knowing how he or she knows.

A traffic sign (you have to of course realize it’s a traffic sign and not some commercial ad) tells you “Boston 20 m.” You realize or guess it means 20 miles and not 20 meters (since meters are not a typical American measure) nor would it be 20 minutes since that would assume everyone is driving at a speed that gives you 20 minutes, which is far-fetched.

How a person goes from birth to adulthood whereby they spontaneously navigate a welter of different signs and postings, ads and statutes is quite opaque.

Roland Barthes (died 1980) explored this domain of signs (not only physical signs but mythology as a system of signs) all his life:

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth.

Education should not ignore “material culture” (i.e., the history of things) and semiotics (i.e., the world “speaking” to you via designs and signs and words).

Education and the Question of Fecklessness

We propose in Meta Intelligence an education that is completely global and cosmopolitan from Day 1.

The problem with education as a confusing area of activity is revealed to us in an episode of the great Japanese novel, The Makioka Sisters.

The Makioka Sisters (細雪 [Sasameyuki], “Light Snow”) is a novel by Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (died in 1965) that was serialized from 1943 to 1948. It follows the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko.

In the novel, there’s a description of a “failed educational odyssey:”

“Mimaki was an old court family. The present viscount, the son, was well along in years. Mimaki Minoru, son by a concubine, was a graduate of the Peers School and had studied physics at the Imperial University, which he left to go to France.  In Paris he studied painting for a time, and French cooking for a time, and numerous other things, none for very long.

“Going on to America, he studied aeronautics in a not-too-famous state university, and he did finally take a degree, it seemed.

“After graduation, he continued to wander about the United States, and on to Mexico and South America. With his allowance from home cut off in the course of these wanderings, he made a living as a cook and even as a bellboy. He also returned to painting and even tried his hand at architecture.

“Following his whims and relying on his undeniable cleverness, he tried everything. He abandoned aeronautics when he left school.”

(The Makioka Sisters, Vintage Books, 1985, Seidensticker translation, page 473-474)

This person winds up dabbling in architecture after his return to Japan.

This episode in Tanizaki’s great novel gives us a “flashlight” or “searchlight” into the whole problem of educational confusion.  Is this simply a case of one person’s “fecklessness?”  Is this just a case of what’s called “failure to launch” (see the movie by this name)?

Or is it partly perhaps that education as a “lockstep system” of schools, exams, courses, semesters, quizzes and grades is very “inhospitable” to “searchers?”

If we call everyone who “stumbles around” a dilettante and a feckless failure, we might be unnecessarily “binary,” exclusionary and unaware of the problem of “cold educational ecosystems” which punish exploring for those who are not “born specialists.”  Winners and losers are too polarized as an educational judgment, perhaps.

The classic German novel about youthful confusions is Fontane’s classic Irrungen, Wirrungen (Trials and Tribulations, 1888) and perhaps an argument could be made that the coldly “binary view” of “successes” versus “the feckless” causes the loss of many young people who had various kinds of emotional resistance to education as an “Olympics” of sorts, with “winners and losers.”  This might be seen as a kind of overly narrow kind of “edu-brutality” which is intolerant of more difficult adjustment stories for young people, which are not uncommon.

Then and Now Thinking

Historical thinking is a lifelong attempt to link something called “then” to something called “now.”  History as an academic field of study has a deep cleavage within it in that people like Foucault and Nietzsche think the links between then and now are often illusionary since history is mostly noise (i.e., disconnected chaos) and not “signal” (i.e., “cause and effect” chains of linear progress uncovered by “historian-detectives.”)

We explore this in this mini-essay by looking at the rise of what we call a service economy.

The great Russian thinker Alexander Herzen is traveling around Europe in the 1840s with Marx’s Manifesto appearing in 1848.  Herzen is amazed at the service sector in Paris:

“He was enchanted by the conveniences of Paris, especially the numbers of quick efficient services, from catering to house-cleaning, which made it unnecessary to employ private servants.”

(quoted in Revolutions of 1848:  A Social History. Priscilla Robertson, Princeton 1967, page 110 footnote)

In our own day, the leading economic historian, R.M. Hartwell, in his classic essay, “The Service Revolution:  The Growth of Services in Modern Economy 1700-1914” outlines a worldwide rise of services, and concludes his essay thus:  “The lesson of history is undoubtedly, that was has already happened in the United States, will happen elsewhere, and that the trend in employment towards the services in all developed and developing economies will result finally in a world-wide service revolution.”

(The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Industrial Revolution, Fontana/Collins, 1980, page 394)

Shall we then “fold Herzen/Paris 1848” into this larger picture, Hartwell’s 1700-1914 or is that a false linkage?

This is an example of then and now analysis which is key to education.

Let us continue the past two essays:

We then use this kind of interesting “home-made puzzle” (one we made-up ourselves and did not read anywhere) and follow it up by entering the academic subject:

  1. Read the classic Manias, Panics and Crashes, the Prof. Kindleberger (MIT) classic.
  2. Discover that the Prof. Niall Ferguson miniseries on PBS, The Ascent of Money, doesn’t elucidate our particular query.
  3. Read Kevin Phillips’s Bad Money to get an introduction to the dangers of “over financialization.” (“hyper financialization”).

The “New York Times” in a piece The New York Times, 12 November 1910, describes the bank run in England including the Westminster Bank.   The movie is set in 1910.

We then begin to think that the collapse of Barings Bank in recent years (Nick Leeson scandal) radiating out from Hong Kong office, is not disconnected from the Barings Bank scandals of 1890. Historical thinking wants to see an arc or trajectory or larger and wider process, and not as disconnected, episodic and completely random.

The Anglo-American financialization process has led to many anomalies.

You might legitimately date the modern beginnings of this mega-process from the 1873 classic by Walter Bagehot of The Economist in his book, Lombard Street, where London is described as the money machine that governs the world and its fluctuations.

Hank Paulson, U.S. Treasury Secretary and Ben Bernanke of the Fed, warned Congressmen in Washington, in September 2008, that the global financial system was on the brink of collapse and needed “infinite” bailout money by that Monday morning, after the weekend.

These problems have yet to be seriously addressed and we might be in a new “bubble” at the intersection of real estate and financial system pathologies (i.e., where the world economy tends to become a kind of “betting parlor”).