Hi Jeff. Your opening question and the following sentence certainly provoke some thought.
I want to read history because I've realised of late that much of what I was taught, or I gleaned from the news consisted of half-truths and propaganda.
I think about reading Australian history from the point of view of Manning Clark, or Geoffrey Blayney, and are either of those histories complete without a reading of Henry Reynolds' Forgotten Wars, or Jonathan Richards' The Secret War?
The adage goes, winners write history, when in actuality, in many cases those "historians" wrote fiction.
For instance, Captain Cook discovered Australia, when the first nations people had been here for 65k years. Or in his great book "The Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith claimed that currency was the natural result of men trading through barter over eons. When you read the work of anthropologist David Graeber, "Debt, the first 5,000 years," you learn that throughout the studied history of man, barter had not been a tradition, some of the first records kept by man, still readable today, recorded debt. To make debt easily transferrable across regions, currency evolved. Yet economists set up an entire system of study, based on the myth of barter, called it economics, which they reduced to a system of equations, and called a science.
I'm looking forward to reading Satia's book alongside the works of Benjamin, an uread boxed set of which I picked up for a song on eBay. Jeff has hit the ground running in 2025, despite allegedly being on holiday. Happy New Year to Jeff and all here.
Benjamin's Theses start with the hidden hand of theology playing "under the table." It seems like his great Messianic question is how to redeem the sufferings of people of the past in some just way, i.e. historically -- vs. trying to justify their sufferings based on being "blown" (like the Angel) by the force of Progress into the future. I've got the Kindle sample of Satia's book, which I take it considers how historiography (they way historians "tell" history) might perform a similar function of redemption -- or not. In our slow reading of Olga T's Books of Jacob, I take it we'll consider the power of modernist literature (?) to do something similar. I'm all for good historiographic and literary projects, but there's also the political and "historical materialist" realities of actual Revolution (which were Benjamin's preoccupation; and also Hannah Arendt's, Benjamin's friend and editor, in their juxtapositions of action and thought). Personally, I don't think it's a human task to perform redemption. Dostoevsky certainly wrestled with that in The Brothers K. But probably it is our (human-sized) job to work on both material and intellectual levels to do the best we can in the present and moving into the future to reduce suffering going forward. A good start surely is not to justify imperialism by ends-justify-the-means type rationales for getting to prosperity.
Hi Jeff. Your opening question and the following sentence certainly provoke some thought.
I want to read history because I've realised of late that much of what I was taught, or I gleaned from the news consisted of half-truths and propaganda.
I think about reading Australian history from the point of view of Manning Clark, or Geoffrey Blayney, and are either of those histories complete without a reading of Henry Reynolds' Forgotten Wars, or Jonathan Richards' The Secret War?
The adage goes, winners write history, when in actuality, in many cases those "historians" wrote fiction.
For instance, Captain Cook discovered Australia, when the first nations people had been here for 65k years. Or in his great book "The Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith claimed that currency was the natural result of men trading through barter over eons. When you read the work of anthropologist David Graeber, "Debt, the first 5,000 years," you learn that throughout the studied history of man, barter had not been a tradition, some of the first records kept by man, still readable today, recorded debt. To make debt easily transferrable across regions, currency evolved. Yet economists set up an entire system of study, based on the myth of barter, called it economics, which they reduced to a system of equations, and called a science.
How that particular myth has affected mankind!
I'm looking forward to reading Satia's book alongside the works of Benjamin, an uread boxed set of which I picked up for a song on eBay. Jeff has hit the ground running in 2025, despite allegedly being on holiday. Happy New Year to Jeff and all here.
so much to think about
Benjamin's Theses start with the hidden hand of theology playing "under the table." It seems like his great Messianic question is how to redeem the sufferings of people of the past in some just way, i.e. historically -- vs. trying to justify their sufferings based on being "blown" (like the Angel) by the force of Progress into the future. I've got the Kindle sample of Satia's book, which I take it considers how historiography (they way historians "tell" history) might perform a similar function of redemption -- or not. In our slow reading of Olga T's Books of Jacob, I take it we'll consider the power of modernist literature (?) to do something similar. I'm all for good historiographic and literary projects, but there's also the political and "historical materialist" realities of actual Revolution (which were Benjamin's preoccupation; and also Hannah Arendt's, Benjamin's friend and editor, in their juxtapositions of action and thought). Personally, I don't think it's a human task to perform redemption. Dostoevsky certainly wrestled with that in The Brothers K. But probably it is our (human-sized) job to work on both material and intellectual levels to do the best we can in the present and moving into the future to reduce suffering going forward. A good start surely is not to justify imperialism by ends-justify-the-means type rationales for getting to prosperity.