The relevant economic principles are not new. They date back to the first part of the 19th century, to the early days of socialism. In a certain sense their ancestry can be traced back further, to the classical economists of early capitalism: Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The basic idea is that a just society can only be established on the principle that those who work are entitled to the full proceeds of their labour. This was for a long time the most distinctive and popular of socialist principles. It sought a remedy for the exploitation of the workers by according them the right to get back out of each day’s work, in terms of wages, as much as they had put in during the day, in terms of time and effort. Along with this went a second principle: only work is a legitimate source of income.
This excluded all sources of income such as rent, dividends or interest which derive from the ownership of property rather than the personal efforts of their recipients. The exclusion of unearned incomes is obviously a necessary consequence of the first principle, since in a society where the producers were entitled to the full proceeds of their labour there would be nothing left over to supply unearned incomes…
The great merit of these original principles is that they provide a coherent foundation for an entire system, not just of economic organisation, but also a whole new legal, moral and social order. They imply a monetary system based upon time rather than upon arbitrary and meaningless currency units like Pounds, Dollars or Ecu. People would be credited with hours worked rather than money at the end of the week. Payments for goods and services would also be in terms of time. You would pay for a garment that took two hours to produce with two hours of your own time. An economy based upon time-prices would have built into it the democratic presumption of human equality.
It is interesting how the advocates of social inequality think that the wealthy respond to quite different incentives from the poor. If the rich are to be persuaded to work, they require the stimulus of still greater wealth: hence the paramount importance of reducing taxes on high incomes. When dealing with the poor, in contrast, it is held that there is nothing like the prospect of still greater poverty as a work incentive: hence the paramount importance of strictly limiting the benefits to which they are entitled.
The hotel I’m at plays terrible music. It’s as if someone created an XM radio station called ‘Sappy Lyrics.’ But just now when I walked in, they were playing Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland,’ which I really like, and which I think has some actual lyric subtlety.
I [did more research] and found a whole other self buried below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was fast, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become aware of them.
And even when it couldn’t—when the obstinate, unyielding neocortex refused to let it off the leash—still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable sense of where to reach. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did.
I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions. I tracked Gray Syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting in the brains of schizophrenics. I found cortical infarcts that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole of Twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard’s Syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. “I used to have a heart,” one of them said listlessly from the archives. “Now I have something that beats in its place.” Another demanded to be buried, because his corpse was already stinking.
There was more, a whole catalog of finely-tuned dysfunctions that Rorschach had not yet inflicted on us. Somnambulism. Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst within easy reach of water, not because she couldn’t see the faucet but because she couldn’t recognize it. A man for whom the left side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor conceive of the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A man for whom the very concept of leftness had become literally unthinkable.
Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them, although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during a momentary distraction— and we didn’t notice. It wasn’t magic. It was barely even misdirection. They called it inattentional blindness, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary experience classed as unlikely.
I found the opposite of Szpindel’s blindsight, a malady not in which the sighted believe they are blind but one in which the blind insist they can see. The very idea was absurd unto insanity and yet there they were, retinas detached, optic nerves burned away, any possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous explanations for their clumsiness. The lights, unexpectedly turned off by some other party. A colorful bird glimpsed through the window, distracting attention from the obstacle ahead. I can see perfectly well, thank you. Nothing wrong with my eyes.
This is a terrific summary of what sounds like a stunningly comprehensive treatment of the material history of Europe and its effect on society.
A good starting point might be what is left out: politics, wars, dynasties, religion, ideology, peoples. The index of maps & graphs gives the reader a taste of what is to come: “Budget of a mason’s family in Berlin about 1800”; “Bread weights and grain prices in Venice at the end of the sixteenth century”; “French Merchants registered as living in Antwerp, 1450-1585”.
Reading Braudel one gets the impression of an infinite curiosity at work for decades, mining every source for the tiniest piece of data, and then magisterially combining everything together. Despite fairly brutal editing these notes are still way too long, and yet they struggle to capture even a tiny part of the detail and depth that the book contains.
Vol. I: The Structures of Everyday Life
The first volume aims to illuminate every aspect of material life: agriculture, food, dress, housing, towns, cities, energy, metals, machines, animals, transportation, money. Braudel’s goal is not simply to examine each of these in isolation, but to show how all the elements of material life interact to form cultures, economies, systems of governance, power structures, long-term cycles or trends. He comes remarkably close to achieving this absurdly ambitious task. For people into worldbuilding this tome is pure gold. The first volume also has the greatest general appeal: unlike the other two which are somewhat esoteric, I think this is a book everyone will love.
This is how my brain has worked as long as I can remember. It’s neat to learn that there’s finally some research on the subject 🙂
And here’s a well-written first-hand account of aphantasia (although the author’s experience differs from mine; I have plenty of mental audio, and to some extent other senses):
I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind.
If you tell me to imagine a beach, I ruminate on the “concept” of a beach. I know there’s sand. I know there’s water. I know there’s a sun, maybe a lifeguard. I know facts about beaches. I know a beach when I see it, and I can do verbal gymnastics with the word itself.
But I cannot flash to beaches I’ve visited…I have no capacity to create any kind of mental image of a beach, whether I close my eyes or open them, whether I’m reading the word in a book or concentrating on the idea for hours at a time—or whether I’m standing on the beach itself.
Hi! I’ve been staying the hell away from Facebook for the last month or so, and feeling the itch to share things again. Which in the absence of FB means sharing here, which is a much saner place to share stuff anyway 🙂
Lots more info, and interactive charts, at this excellent blog post on the subject.
