Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Book Review: Templexity by Nick Land

Book cover - Templexity by Nick Land

This will be a short review because Templexity is a short book, just released yesterday.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already familiar with Nick Land’s recent writing. Templexity is rather different from his blogging work: it’s what mainstream literary and film criticism would read like if the American mainstream wasn’t hopelessly mired in the Brezhnev era of political correctness.

The Foreward doesn’t really sell the book, but it picked up for me as the professor began using the movie Looper as a jumping off point to write about contemporary politics, economics, cyberpunk, and older science fiction.

“You should go to China,” Joe is told by his criminal overseer , Abe. “I’m going to France,” Joe insists stubbornly. Abe responds with what – for us – is the most critical line in the movie: “I’m from the future. You should go to China.” With these words, Looper makes Sino-Futurism its topic. The hyper -modern China Event overspills the existing order of time.

Visually, what’s interesting about Looper is that the American landscape is completely dilapidated. Ordinary people who are fortunate drive rusted-out cars. Gangsters ride hover-cycles imported from China. That is to say, imported from the future. As a literary device, Land describes the city as futuristic, a clustering of future-time events, whereas what’s outside is kept relatively unchanging, in the past.

A ‘city of the future’ is Gibsonian in precisely this sense. That is nothing new, nor could it be. It has always leaked back, in coincidence with modernity. Tomorrow is a social magnet, as has been known for some considerable time, at first merely reflectively, but ever increasingly as a techno-responsive object.

…

Civilization is an accelerating process, not a steady state. As its name suggests, it is channeled primarily through cities (which explode). The incandescent intensity of a hypergrowth-dominated urban future consumes our historical horizon , and an exceptionally impressive perspective on this developing spectacle is to be found in 21st century Shanghai – a fact Hollywood has no real choice but to relay.

Reading this short tract, it reminded me of the time in my life when I could buy an American magazine and be impressed by what was written there. I used to be able to read American magazines and newspapers and feel like I was gleaning meaningful acculturation from it. I no longer feel that way when I read most of what Americans publish.

But I felt that way again when I read this one. From the book:

“What happened to America?” is the Cyberpunk question par excellence.

Indeed. The reason why this is readable, and most of what you can get in Anglo-America isn’t anymore, is perhaps because of this dilemma. America finds itself trapped in a paradox of time, of negative interest, fading slowly backwards.

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Book Review: A World Class Transportation System

Don't call it a grave. It's the future you chose. - Ron Paul

A civil engineer named Charles Marohn recently wrote a short eBook about America’s collapsing transportation infrastructure and dysfunctional city planning process entitled A World Class Transportation System. If you’re interested in these issues, it’s worth ignoring the rest of this post and going to buy the book. The book coincides with the launch of his Minnesota-based nonprofit called Strong Towns.

Why should you care about transportation policy? Because failing infrastructure is often spoken about, but rarely from the perspective of an engineer who needs to examine the underlying financial and engineering issues that go into urban planning. He writes:

I’m tired of watching Rome burn while the insiders fiddle, seeing bridges fall down and expensive roads go bad while we spend billions on new stuff we will never be able to maintain.

Transportation policy in America needs to focus on building cities that are financially productive and then connecting them with high speed, high capacity roadways.

The main reason why American living spaces have come to seem so anti-human is that they’re not designed towards the goal of creating productive and aesthetically pleasing places for human habitation. Rather, they’re designed by politically connected bureaucrats to spend enormous amounts of money to no economically rational end.

From the perspective of an engineer who needs to examine municipal finances to make decisions, many local governments throughout the US are doomed to insolvency due to unsustainable maintenance costs on existing infrastructure. Similar issues exist internationally, but being an American, their issues are less pressing than the issues that threaten to have more immediate consequences.

Marohn recounts:

It allows one generation to live at the expense of the next. I’ve seen cities that are deeply caught up in debt that they now spend 50% of their budget (and rising) on debt service. I’ve seen cities where no council member is under sixty years old take on thirty and forty year debt obligations. Both of those instances are inter-generationally immoral.

What makes this book different from somewhat similar examinations of the problem like The Geography of Nowhere is that it’s more based on a detailed firsthand knowledge of working in infrastructure than it is on purely aesthetic and ideological considerations. He forecasts that

It will be too late to save [most exurban towns] — we’re going to lose hundreds in the next decades — but to help the rest thrive again, we need to re-localize the economy. This proposal would help with that process.

Having examined differential tax receipts between different kinds of business districts, he can also criticize with authority the many strip mall style development efforts that rest heavily on government subsidies.

Many roads which are expensive to maintain do not come even close to repaying the expenditure for their ongoing maintenance based on the tax revenue deriving from the businesses and residences who use them.

While the book is superb on diagnosing the issue, it’s hopeless on suggesting political solutions. He acknowledges that “local governments are often run by idiots and we can’t trust them to make decisions… government leadership doesn’t attract idiots but rather reflects the general competence of society…”

This is precisely the chief issue with democratic selection: the People merely get a representative of its own intrinsic mediocrity.

The section that does make sense is that because so many city councils are staffed by incompetents, it may not be challenging to displace entire local governments in more rural & suburban areas with focused & covert efforts.

The practical proposals that make sense to me tend to be around how to renovate economically depressed downtown areas that may have unrealized economic potential.

The main issue that the existing American government is going to have is that it will not be able to maintain its property going forward. Roads will continue to break down. Funding to slow the decay will not be available because the economic spaces that it controls are becoming less productive as the spaces require more leverage to maintain at a permanently decreasing output rate.

The solution is to focus less on the roads and more on the places that the roads connect to. Relearning and re-implementing the design principles that work will be an enormous challenge to achieve under the political rule of an older generation that has come to value quantity of development over quality.

Fortunately, starvation selects for leaner, faster, and more competitive creatures.

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Book Review: The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld

The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld Book Cover

 

 

The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld is a breezy history of Western gender relations intended to counteract the envelopment of our university History departments by ardent feminists. Mostly a military historian, the author bounces from classical references to Freud to more contemporary writers in describing the relative station of women in society.

With over 1,100 footnotes and a sterling reputation, it’d be hard to crack his reputation as a scholar. Much of what’s said in the Men’s Rights Movement could be refuted with a copy of this book, but you won’t see feminists bothering to cite it.

What makes this useful is that it establishes a record of human nature. van Creveld writes:

Human laws reflect those the gods had made. Men and women are praised or blamed according to whether they follow their respective natures.

The irony of academic ‘privilege-checkers’ who write screeds about ‘male privilege’ is that the historical record supports pervasive norms of female privileges. Men are biologically predisposed to not just want to sacrifice financially for women, but to sacrifice their lives by the millions for both the honor and the safety of their women. Men at all times and places have had a legal and socially-enforced duty to die in battle on the demands of their sovereigns. Women have always, owing to weaker constitutions, had lower expectations accorded to them in both labor and war.

It’s a book about gender relations that travels between the Scylla of whining about male disposability and the Charybdis of complaining about male oppression of women.

In particular, van Creveld dissects the female malingering behavior encouraged by psychology since the beginning of the modern era.

On the right, we need to express the correct level of resignation towards the immutability of human nature. Complaining that the lot of men is to suffer and die — usually for women — is a dead end, because it’s the nature of our species.

In particular, popular-internet-man-writer invocations to stop ‘white knighting’ are doomed to fall on dead ears. Men are hard-wired to fight in defense of women. They’re also hard-wired to kill off enemy men to seize the women that their opponents are defending.

The most interesting claim that the author supports is that relating towards the flip in gender life expectancy. Before modern medicine, women, owing to their greater vulnerability  to infection and death in childbirth, had lower life expectancies than men did. Since that ended, we’ve seen substantial social changes in gender relations.  As van Creveld writes,

Since 1920, the gap between life expectancy for American women and men has grown by several hundred percent. In Germany, meanwhile, the difference increased by more than 20 percent between 1964 and 1984.

This swap tends to be under-appreciated in typical history survey courses.

The author’s case is that feminism (and other brands of gender equality advocacy) will eventually collapse under its own contradictions. It suffers from a need to advocate for both ‘equality’ and the traditional privileges of women, which even the most ardent feminists tend to be unwilling to give up.

His alternate projection is that the genders will continue to grow apart, to become more alien to one another, until an external shock forces it to end.

Should you buy the book?

Yes, if you want to counteract equality-driven propaganda, or perhaps to understand better your role as a man or woman in historical context.

 

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