Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, January 2014

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

William M. Arkin, American Coup

Arkin has something to say about the self-perpetuating and dubiously-constitutional national security bureaucracy its dim views of actual democracy, and its apparent day-dreams about martial law. Unfortunately, after reading this I'm hard-pressed to tell you exactly what he wants to say. Definitely inferior to Top-Secret America.

Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

This is the first volume of The Book of the New Sun. Some genius decided that this was appropriate material for my middle school's library, so I read it when I was ten or eleven, and discovering science fiction. I found them fascinating and bewildering and I wasn't sure if I liked them but I had to keep going. (I am not sure if I mean "genius" sarcastically or not.) Re-reading after a lapse of thirty years, I find it fascinating and bewildering, and I have no idea how much of it I actually understood as a boy or how much of it I understand now. I am not sure if I like it or not, though that hardly seems relevant; I have to keep going.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

This is and deserves to be a modern classic, and I wish I'd read it long ago. Eisenstein's fundamental point, which I think is entirely sound, is that you cannot understand anything about the transition from ancient or medieval intellectual life to the modern life of the mind without grasping the importance of being able to quickly, cheaply make large numbers of very accurate copies of a text, and distribute them widely.

To give just one point: one reason ancient and medieval scientists thought that older books were ipso facto better books, was that it was literally true. Scribes are awful at reproducing technical material. This meant that either scientists had to waste immense efforts, e.g., correcting astronomical tables or re-doing mathematical calculations, or cluster around rare centers where rulers were willing to put vast efforts into maintaining highly accurate manuscript collections, or live with knowledge that degenerated from copy to copy and generation to generation. Printing made it possible to change all that. Printing made it possible to reproduce, e.g., a table of sines or logarithms or latitudes which could be trusted. Printing made it possible for scholars across the European subcontinent, and eventually beyond, to access the same texts. Printing made possible the second edition --- the expanded and corrected second edition.

Again: with manuscripts, copying texts is extremely expensive. This tends to make scholarly attention to one field of inquiry come at the expense of others --- more scribes copying ancient philosophy or histories means fewer copying mathematics or books of mechanical devices. The constraint of sheer book-reproduction is vastly weakened by introducing printing: a society which is interested in Cicero and Archimedes and Augustine and political pr0n can have them all [1]. Not having to make such choices was itself transformative. If the arrival of printing coincides with a revival of interest in classical literature, it can propel the latter from a passing incident (as had happened several times before) into a permanent intellectual and spiritual revolution. It can make possible the scientific and industrial revolutions, and all that have followed from them.

Eisenstein also has very interesting things to say about the religious impact of printing, including how the multi-lingual origins of the Christian Bible first stimulated scholarship and then led to skepticism, and the feedback loop between Protestant Bibliolatry, wide-spread literacy, and the viability of printing as a trade and a profit-making business. Again, there is fascinating material in here on the impact of printing on the rise and then decline of magic and occultism. And on and on.

There are drawbacks to the book. Eisenstein's implied reader isn't just familiar with at least the outlines of the political and intellectual history of western Europe from say 1400 to 1700, they know a lot about it, including the origins and spread of movable-type printing. The reader doesn't just know who Gutenberg was, or Erasmus, or Francis Bacon, but Ramus and Scaliger and Plantin and Bruno. (I admit I had to look up a lot of the printers and not a few of the scholars.)

Even with this knowledge, it seems to me to be insufficiently comparative. There are gestures at why Chri