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| date | 2001-03-08:06:47 |
| Creatures |
Spring is almost here, despite massive snowfall earlier in the week. I saw my first bunny of the year a few days ago, a genuine March Hare, and if pairs of footprints in the snow are any indication the bunnies are doing what comes naturally. The red-tailed hawk that lives in the woods beside the house is much more active now as well. I'm pretty sure the hawks over-winter here, or if not they don't go very far south. This is the biggest one, and the most active, so the bunnies had better watch out. And this morning as I let the dogs out (I'm dog-sitting my sister-in-law's seeing-eye dog while she and Jan are traveling in Turkey, and Ebb the Dog has a very rigid notion of how to organizer her day, which includes going out at 6 am exactly, so I've been seeing a lot of beautiful pre-dawn skies) I heard some whistling and warbling that I've heard before but can't identify. Gotta get better at bird-songs. It's wonderful to see and here the world returning to life all around me. This is one of the things that's good about living in a cold climate--the constant, dramatic contrasts. Living in a city in a cold climate would be a waste, because you'd have so much less chance of seeing this kind of thing happen. |
| Reading |
I need to make a few comments to wrap up Churchill. One of my purposes in keeping this journal is to give me a place to write down thoughts like this, in the hope they'll add up to something over time. So far, I think it's working. We live in human societies, and although no one has ever elucidated any general laws of social or political change, societies and governments don't change at random; there are causes operating, however obscure they may be. Churchill is good at drawing out the causes, and in particular showing how events from hundreds of years past can be seen in retrospect as having altered the future in unanticipated ways. An example of this is his comment on the French political scene in the late 1700's, in contrast to the situation in England:
Although Churchill clearly understands the role that ideas play in history, he never forgets how historical circumstance determines the scope and context in which ideas must be expressed. The right idea at the wrong moment will, like Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, disappear into the well of time, ineffective and unnoticed. As well as providing insights into historical causes, which should help us to understand the conditions of the present day, history also provides contrast objects that let us put current events into perspective. The state of the early American republic, for example, makes the modern mess look pretty tame by comparison. The factionalism between the followers of Jefferson and Hamilton, the active involvement of gangsters like Aaron Burr in national politics, the ongoing crisis of money and credit, all serve to remind us what a robust and lively thing the young republic was, and suggest that the problems it currently faces are fairly small by historical standards. Returning to France, Churchill makes the observation that,
This is a theme that Stanislaw Lem addressed in Eden--the idea of government that is cryptographic, hidden, invisible. Lem's Eden was at least as awful to live in as 18th century France, where the result of cryptocracy was chaos and confusion. But one wonders if efficient systems of distributed government that are spontaneously ordered are possible in general, or only in special, limited circumstances. And if they are only possible in special circumstances, what are those circumstances and where can we get some? Finally, the History of the English-Speaking Peoples is something of an historical document in itself. It is history as viewed from half a century ago, and is imbued the the attitudes of the half-century before that. This sometimes strikes a note of unintentional irony, as in:
Today, one hopes, no one finds legions of dead young men the least bit glorious. |