"Hence when the ghetto walls fell, and the Jews walked out into freedom, they found they were entering a new, less tangible but equally hostile ghetto of suspicion. They had exchanged ancient disabilities for modern anti-Semitism."
Paul Johnson is an English historian and politician. He's known for his conservative views. Many years ago I also read his Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830.
The History of the Jews, as you might expect, starts in antiquity and ends in the late 80s, when this book was published. It's divided into seven sections, which are: Israelites, Judaism, Cathedocracy, Ghetto, Emancipation, Holocaust and Zion. Zion, which closes the book, describes how the state of Israel came to be.
I was familiar with most of the theology, thinkers and historical incidents presented in this book, though there were a couple surprises. If you've taken a course (or read a book) on the development of religion in the ancient world you'll probably feel the same way. I didn't find much of interest in this book until the last two chapters, these dealing with the Jewish dilemma during and after World War II.
In terms of style I have nothing bad to say about Paul Johnson. He can be plodding at times, but he states his arguments clearly and offers a lot of supporting evidence. This was even more the case in The Birth of the Modern, which I found to be the more insightful of the two books.
My one complaint about this treatment of Jewish history is that it felt like it needed another chapter: Diaspora. Outlining the history of Jews in lands beyond the Middle East, the United States and Europe would have added another dimension to discussions of both the Holocaust and Israel, and would have also made the book as a whole feel more relevant to a wider number of readers. To some extent the author does do this in the Zion chapter, but his analyses of more remote Jewish communities are very brief, and obscured by a more statistical approach to the subject.
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"We need to be unashamed utopians. The most effective entrepreneurs were exactly that, and so were all the pioneers of human liberation."
Paul Mason is a journalist and filmmaker. He has NO background in economics, and in fact began his career as a music teacher (!).
And to begin with, the title of this book is completely misleading. It should be titled Communism, since that's what it's about. I suppose Mr. Mason thought "Postcapitalism" was "edgy," or that there was more of a market (oh! the irony!) for a book that seemed to be advocating a new economic model. Yet this remains a book about Communism, written by a guy whose understanding of economic concepts largely dates back to the turn of the previous century.
The author also has a way of ignoring facts he finds inconvenient. In discussing the monopolies of the early 1900s, for example, he fails to mention the anti-trust movement. In discussing Socialism under the Weimar Republic, he fails to mention the disastrous economic policies of that regime, and how they spawned a fascist movement that was vehemently anti-Communist in nature. He ignores a lot of other facts, and what we end up with is a very one-sided view of history, with little regard for the real advantages of a capitalist system.
The chapters dealing with "the information revolution" find the author on much firmer footing, and he says some insightful things about capitalism in the age of the Internet. But at the same time his enthusiasm for modern information technology seems a bit naive, as he once again glosses over many negatives in the service of the point he's trying to make. Is social networking really making us all self-empowered members of a network? Or is it turning us into drones? And what about the social/cultural impact of our addiction to smartphones, Facebook, and getting all of our information beyond the medium of other human beings? What does that spell for the future? And it is it really an unequivocal good?
The author also makes some valid points near the end of this book. He combines climate change, demography, and debt leveraging into a fair assessment of our current situation, and how we might adapt our institutions to changing trends. The only thing is that the points he makes don't originate with him. They are instead the work of other, uncredited authors, and many of these authors draw opposing conclusions from the same data.
Add to this the fact that his idea of "Postcapitalism" is nothing new. All he's really doing is stapling an ill-defined version of Communism onto an ill-defined version of economic history. I get his gripes with capitalism as it's practiced today. The system has real faults that need to be addressed. But it's not hard to see that Paul Mason's vision of the future would produce more problems than it would solve, and that his understanding of human nature - like his understanding of world affairs - is too shaky to be of service to this vision.
I can't remember the last time I had such a strongly negative reaction to a book. It was an act of will to finish it, and as I reached the last page I couldn't help but yell "Fuck you, motherfucker!" at an empty room.
If you're looking for better books about similar topics, I recommend "Who Owns the Future?," "Free Market Environmentalism," and "The Death of Money." They are all far, far better than Postcapitalism.
Some warning signs...
1. Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, wrote the blurb on the back cover of this book.
2. The author uses Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, as a reference.
3. The author is a professor of Philosophy, and the term "universe" is used in its more philosophical sense, not the physical sense that we would usually employ.
4. Several YouTube debates feature the author, and in these debates he makes extremely general points which are easily proven, and often strays from the topic of discussion.
But anyway I bought it, so I felt an obligation to read it. I try to approach every book with an open mind, and the four warning signs mentioned above may have been - I hoped - misleading.
But they weren't. The Turbulent Universe is one great big mess of a book, written by a champion of secular humanism. It veers between academic disciplines, it offers personal anecdotes that make little sense, and it generally fails to make a point.
You know a book is bad when you're 200 pages in and you STILL have no idea what it's about. The author spends so much time dredging up questionable observations on cosmology, history, and other subjects that by page 200 my mind was reeling, and I just wanted the book to be over. I thought at first that it was just over my head, or that I wasn't paying enough attention, or both. But no, it really is a disorganized mess.
Reading this book was a lot like being back in undergraduate school, and attending a lecture given by a new professor who doesn't quite know what he or she is doing. Any number of "facts" are brought in to prove his or her thesis, but the manner in which this professor argues his or her point defeats the purpose. By the end of the lecture everyone's exhausted, and no one has the patience to hear the argument to its conclusion.
And this is a shame, because the last section of this book, the Grand Finale, is really very good. Taken on its own merits, it's an excellent argument for secular humanism, and for living life to its fullest. Unfortunately the rest of this book is composed of half understood theories and idle conjecture, none of it enlightening for anyone who's earned an undergraduate degree in any subject.
Oh well. At least it's not long. At 251 pages, it was far more palatable than the above-mentioned Better Angels of Our Nature. It also made me think that Paul Kurtz, 85 years old when he wrote The Turbulent Universe, may have written much better, long before. Sad to say, he passed away before this book saw publication, and his presence of mind may have been affected by health concerns.
I'm sure he would have been an interesting guy to talk to, but I can't recommend this book.
