With school winding down- and my BA in sight, in a few days actually, hoorah- I’ve been able to get in a decent bit of reading, of books of my own choosing and not mandated by any class. Here is a brief overview of some things I’ve worked through over the past couple weeks.

The Servile State, Hillare Belloc: nice overview of some problems in modern capitalism, and some tenative views of solutions in a broadly distributivist order. The work is rather dated, obviously, and some of his historical arguments are overly-simplified, but his observations of how a “servile state” arises in ostensibly democratic states are just as relevant for the contemporary world. Desire for “security” is an easily employed thing for those who would further centralize economic and political power, and it is particularly powerful, it seems, in the developed world where governments and corporations can seemingly guarantee a considerable degree of comfortable security. Belloc doesn’t go into great depth on how to accomplish a Distributivist-minded order, though arguably making such a detailed case for Distributivism isn’t really his object in this book.

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton: second read, just as enjoyable as the first time: it had been a while so I had forgotten exactly how it worked it out in the end. Chesterton’s prose is at once accessible and beautifully crafted, which makes for wonderful leisure reading. If you have not read this small masterpiece, it is well worth a couple of afternoons. Anarchists and duels and stolen elephants- what’s not to enjoy?

‘Comrades,’ he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, ‘our meeting tonight important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had the honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We have elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease of the heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organized the great dynamite coup of Brighton, which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygenic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always.’ 

Life & Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee: A slender novel, Coetzee presents a fairly straightforward, Kafka-esque tale of a somewhat mentally handicapped man who ends up alone in a war-racked South Africa. All of Michael’s attempts to live out his simple life are thwarted as he journeys from the city, to the countryside, to the wilderness, and in and out of various camps, until finally ending up back in the city. Coetzee’s prose carries well through most of the novel; at times he comes off as a little too polemical, and the second section of the book- an interlude delivered in the first person narrative of a doctor- sounds a little stilted. The strength of the book lies in Coetzee’s general willingness to follow the relative “simplicity” of Michael, in his perception of the world and his desires and hopes.

Yet in the same instant that he reached down to check that his shoelaces were tied, K knew that he would not crawl out and stand up and cross from darkness into firelight to announce himself. He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.

The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions, James Turner Johnson: Not quite finished with this one; so far a decent overview of what holy war has meant in both Western (with the principal meaning here being Western European) and Islamic cultures. Unfortunately but not unsurprisingly no attention is paid to Eastern Christian ideas on the subject (but then if I had a nickle for every time Eastern Christendom is overlooked I would be a considerably richer man); appraisal of Roman Catholic and Protestant theories and practice is quite good however. Some interesting points on the similarities and differences: both traditions eventually have rather similar conceptions of holy war, with similar regulations concerning the conduct of war, holy and otherwise. However, in Christianity the embracing of war for any purpose takes a few centuries, and it is not until the First Crusade that anything approaching a codified idea of holy war develops. In Islam holy war is present from the beginning, and indeed forms what is, in more ways than one, part of the existential core of early Islam. Likewise prohibitions upon killing or maiming noncombatants develop differently in the two traditions. The most obvious divergence between Western and Islamic views of holy war, however, is the rejection of war in the name of religion by Western secular states (though, as the author notes, wars of state ideology- often followed with as much, if not more, furvor as any religion); Islam has by and large yet to follow a similar course.

The Faith of Shia Islam, Muhammad Rida Al-Muzaffar: a slim little tome written by a twentieth century Islamic scholar from Najaf, Iraq. A decently accessible introduction to Shia Islam and its distinctives from the perspective of a Shia scholar. Al-Muzaffar places considerable emphasis upon the importance of reason and rationality in the practice of faith, and makes several arguments on the nature of God that His attributes must be interpreted rationally: such that God cannot be supposed to command evil or desire evil, as it would contradict His revealed attributes.

Finished today a nice little tome, Ornamentalism, by David Cannadine, in which he argues, contra (well, under a mitigated contra really) Edward Said that British views of ‘the Orient’ were not all based upon race and the ever-abiding sense of ‘the Other.’ Instead, much British Imperial policy- particularly, if not primarily after the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857- was structured around ideas of class and hierarchy. Guided by a fusion, on the one hand, of pre-Enlightenment ideas of rank and hierarchy, which had little to do with race or ethnicity, and on the other an emergent British Imperial ideology, Imperial policy sought to recognize native aristocracy and hierarchies. These native hierarchies could be collaboraters with the British, who often saw themselves as protectors of native tradition, as Western capitalism engulfed the East. British Tories saw in native societies parallels with their own traditional, rural, aristocratic order; they also saw in such native societies a means of perpetuating the traditional ideas associated with such orders. Hence the British approached native culture and pre-existing hierarchies with a greater degree of respect and appreciation than Said would suggest. Most importantly, they saw in these societies a self-image, a reflection of their own traditions.

The problem- or rather, one of the problems- was that British constructions of native societies were often poorly drawn. They saw aristocracies and classes where there were none, or not as the British wished to percieve them. Not only that, but they tended to neglect the contingencies of native societies and their maleableness- prefering to see them as ancient and unyielding. The British found themselves unable to engage and confront the developing nationalist narratives and agitations in the rising educated middle classes- fueled by the sweeping technological change and urbanization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries- of their holdings; nor did they consistently secure the adequate cooperations and collaberation of the native elite. All of these elements, Cannadine argues, contributed to the eventual failure of the British project in regards to native hierarchies- and the Empire in general.

Cannadine makes compelling arguments, considering the brevity of the book. His arguments for the importance of class and hierarchy in contrast to preoccupation with race are quite compelling, though, as he himself notes, the full reality of British Imperial imagination and activity is a mixture of both elements.

The salient point of Ornamentalism is, I think, its deconstruction of the radical separation and antagonism so often depicted as existing between ‘colonizer and colonized,’ ‘East and West,’ and so on. Instead, the historical reality in British Imperialism- especially in regards to India- is, as anywhere else in history, quite complex, with overlapping levels of Anglo-Indian relations and understandings. This is reflected in literature for example- the more I read of period writings from British India the more struck I am with the complex, multilayered relation of the British to the subcontinent and its subculture. Today I browsed through a volume of ‘Asian Miscellanies,’ which included, among other things, English translations of Mughal love poetry and two hymns to Hindu deities composed by an Englishman. Such example of ‘hybridity’ can be extended much further. William Dalrymple’s excellent book White Mughals presents a masterful examination of one such extension, in which a British official, James Kirkpatrick, married a high-class Indian, Khair un-Nissa (the idea and importance of class vis a vis race is prominent throughout, incidentally); in the process he converted to Islam.

In short, the interaction of ‘East and West’ is not and has never been simple or dualistic, much as some would like to think. This should be obvious enough, but we have a tendency, expressed in historical study and elsewhere, to desire easy systems and simplifications. History- and especially massive cultural interaction such as experienced in empire- cannot be easily systemized or simplified.