This short novel is a coming of age story about an abused, alienated young man who attempts to find human connection through learning Esperanto and joining the Esperanto cultural movement. It was well-written, but alas, I am really too old these days to identify with the protagonist.
One aspect I appreciated: Manfred, starved of quality relationships, joins the Esperanto community because of its avowed emphasis on fostering intercommunication. He reasonably expects that here he will finally find people who will accept him and see him as worthy of intimacy. However, despite a few fleeting cases, by the end of the book he remains dejected and alone. The ideology on which he’d pinned his hopes had failed him. It’s a bummer ending for sure, but surprising given the movement’s propaganda.
The book has heavy confessional biography vibes so, lest you worry about Mr. Matthias’ mental health, know that he is apparently happily married to another Esperantist as of 2000 and is still prominent in the movement.
Burnham’s dissection of liberal ideology is spot-on. However, his analysis of particular foreign and domestic policy is not so great, though this only constitutes maybe a third of the book and is not particularly important to his description of liberal ideology. The latter often makes good points in regard to liberal failings, but then asserts common conservative talking points on specific issues without the same level of rigor as applied to liberalism. This is much to his detriment and gives his would-be critics easy ammunition. I rather wish he had refrained, but 14 chapters in he clearly felt himself on a roll. So it goes.
On the whole, I think Burnham gives liberalism a little too much credit insofar as (I believe) it is more a symptom of the decline of Western hegemony than its primary cause. The Fourth Turning and Dalio’s Principles For Dealing With the Changing World Order fill in more of this picture from different perspectives. Nevertheless, a society can decline slowly or quickly. Burnham identifies and accurately characterizes a key component which, at its worst, has accelerated decline.
(For what it’s worth, I am neither a liberal nor a conservative; I am a crazy anarchist.)
A week or so ago I read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year which is based on his uncle’s journal of the Black Plague in London in 1665. Yes, this was morbid and Yes, comparing it with present circumstances too closely is obviously hyperbolic. Yet, here are some things I found relevant:
Leaders knew about the plague in Holland in late ‘64 but didn’t prepare.
London operated as normal for weeks while numbers affected were small and manageable.
Safest to leave affected areas early for the country if you could afford it.
Infected people without symptoms were the cause of the spread because they did not social distance, self-quarantine, wear masks, etc. (This was also true once the plague got bad and people became apathetic.)
Extreme forced quarantines were hard to enforce and probably encouraged people to flee and thereby spread it more, particularly the asymptomatic ones.
Lots of misinformation peddled by quacks and charlatans, but also by community leaders.
Provisions were attainable so stockpiling was not “necessary,” but required interacting with people which often caused infection so those who stockpiled were better off.
Absolute heroic acts of kindness by many nurses and clergy to care for the sick, many of whom died themselves. Clergy who fled ruined their reputations and were run out of town if they returned afterwards.
Lots of unemployment which was handled well by private and gov’t charity during the crisis but stopped quickly once the disease receded. This caused a lot of extreme poverty in the immediate economic aftermath.
The infected had a good chance of survival if they had a bed in a pest-house, but once those got overwhelmed the death toll ballooned.
Once it was clear the plague was on the decline, people stopped preventative measures too early and it flared up again, causing the crisis to last longer and killing people who had protected themselves for months.
As this book unfolds, Brunton’s tone becomes increasingly filled with smug disdain for his subject until ultimately he is revealed to have been writing in bad faith. As with most effective strawman attacks, his narrative is built on kernels of truth that are amplified and distorted to serve the pre-determined conclusion. He avoids applying his own critical apparatus to the institutions and “cosmograms” of the status quo that his subject is fighting against.
He is fond of using the polemical trick of smearing a character with an irrelevant, unsubstantiated or misleading aside before describing their ideas in order to predispose the reader against them. He abuses all free-market or Austrian thinkers in this way including Hayek (supported Pinochet), Rothbard (“one-note ideologue, racist”), Mises (whose work is “eccentric, convoluted” and “a fantasy”), Milton Friedman (“responsible for some of the most extreme free market policies ever enacted” and also Pinochet apologist) to point out a few. (He associates “free market” with “fantasy” many times as well.) It would be like responding to Bernie Sanders’ critique of crony capitalism by saying “Sanders loved communist Russia, Castro, Chavez and many other terrible totalitarian regimes and therefore his critique is wrong.” Sanders liked all of those people, but that doesn’t mean crony capitalism doesn’t suck.
There is some value in Brunton’s collection and presentation of earlier attempts at creating alternative currencies and the precursor communities like the Extropians and cypherpunks, because there simply aren’t that many such books. However, one must take his interpretations with skepticism and use the book mainly as a guide to discover primary sources. Read the arguments these people made directly and come to your own conclusions about their validity.
