A Library of Distractions

Some recent books, and a TV series, I appreciate

I’m fortunate to have plenty of free time, so when at home, resting in a McDonald’s, waiting in airports, or on planes, I use it to read, or when walking, listening to books¹.

I walk to learn, which is why I read, since each is a different way to do that. The Metis versus Techne split² described by James C Scott, although there are plenty of other terms to describe experiential versus formal learning. I use his because I prefer the framing, which emphasizes that the two differ not only by methodology (talking versus reading) but by where that knowledge resides. Metis is the epistemology of the masses, and it is decentralized, local, and bottom-up versus Techne, which is that of the elite, and so is codified, formal, and top-down. Common sense versus book smarts, in Metis terms, and folk wisdom versus fact, in Techne terms.

Neither encompasses truth, so I believe you have to engage with both. If you focus solely on one, you will end up like the guys at the gym who never work out their legs. That analogy is especially appropriate for today’s elites, who seem to only do Techne days, never Metis, and so come out top-heavy, with spindly legs, too fragile to walk among the masses. I get it, going out into the world, dealing with people on their terms, can be intimidating to intellectuals, which has consequences, because while I value both, most people in the world are Metis, and consequently understanding it is essential, especially in a democracy.

That is one of my concerns about AI, which is that it will codify, then metastasize Techne, since that is what it draws from. Think of it as a grand aggregator of Techne, consuming it, then regurgitating its own watered-down, smoothed-out version as undeniable fact.

While I do try every now and then to adjust my reading around my upcoming trips, often the direction is the other way. What I read inspires a trip, like the one I start this week, of walking from Ulm to Munich. The book that inspired that was Summer of Fire and Blood by Lyndal Roper, about the German Peasants' War, a sixteenth-century uprising central to the Protestant reformation.

While I doubt that I’ll experience anything directly from an event that took place exactly five hundred years ago, even if it was cataclysmic, I appreciate context. I appreciate seeing the geography it took place in, the distances involved, and with Europe being Europe, there will still be buildings, bridges, and icons from then³, and while most will suffer from the “Ship of Theseus” paradox, there can still be enough “aura” left to inspire. Culture, thick and thin, also has an amazing staying power, even in our interconnected modern world. Bavarians are still recognizably Bavarian, different from the English, French, and Americans in ways that someone many centuries ago would recognize.

I’ve got no idea what inspiration I might take away from this walk, and whether it will have anything to do with the German Peasants’ War, but that’s the entire point of Metis — to learn, but in a haphazard way.

Below are a few books I’ve recently read, as well as the more fun category of a TV show I loved. Something I also do, because there’s nothing wrong with simply being entertained.

Aristotle’s Politics

Three times a year I read a great book with a bunch of curious strangers on the internet, thanks to the Catherine Project. It’s a non-profit that embodies what we were promised decades ago, which is an erudite online community. If you grew up before the turn of the century, a book nerd in a smaller town, you know how wonderful this is. You know of having almost nobody to talk to, of libraries you’ve picked over clean for easter eggs, and the discontent of joining the local book group to find ten sweet people reading the latest Stephen King, or if lucky, maybe an Alice Walker book. That’s fine, I like a page-turner every now and then, but if your tastes run towards the Odyssey over Jonathan Livingston Seagull, then Catherine Project is for you.

I’ve now read twelve books with them, including Plutarch, Plato, Thomas Kuhn, St. Augustine, and Machiavelli, working through the texts slowly, with weekly discussions on Zoom.

It’s great to have people to discuss books rich in ideas, but it’s also an added structural nudge to finish them. I doubt I would have completed City of God, my favorite so far, alone. I don’t have the discipline for that.

Aristotle’s Politics is another book I probably would have ditched after a few chapters without the Catherine Project, and while what I ultimately took away from it might sound dismissive — that for political philosophy taking the advice of someone who lived two thousand years ago whose experience is limited to cities of less than ten thousand people should be taken with a big grain of salt — I’m glad I read it because that started me thinking about many different things, including how nations of millions hold together, versus city-states of far less.

Aristotle would be called a socio-biologist today, someone who views humans as animals only differentiated by our ability to talk, and consequently reason. But first and foremost we are animals, and so he sees politics as advanced animal husbandry, with some born to be led, or even enslaved, while others are born to lead. That last group, the philosopher class, are imbued at birth with greater capacity, which he believes needs to be nurtured into excellence via education and good habit, like a pliant but prized calf, and if that training takes, then they will rule over the others.

In the nature versus nurture debate, he comes down firmly on the nature side, but with the caveat that if the right people (basically he and those like him) can be the ones nurturing, those deficient by nature can be tamed, with the right husbandry. Or if the elites play Sim-culture correctly, city-wide felicity can be achieved. He, and other philosophers, are the ones who construct the culture that holds the city together.

A culture with strict rules on who can do what based on designated class, which you’re assigned to at a very early age and with limited ability to change. A slave is a slave, a vulgar craftsman a vulgar craftsman, and so on. To modern readers it is authoritarian, and anti-democratic. Besides justifying slavery and subservient women, Aristotle doesn’t believe the masses to be virtuous enough (rational, subdued) to make decisions, except in the extreme circumstances when the culture is properly fine tuned to imbue them with the reason, temperance, and courage to be judicious. He’s definitely a Techne man far more than a Metis one.

There’s a lot I don’t like with all of that, most obvious. I’m far less a socio-biologist than he is, and while I’m not a blank slate person, because people are indeed born with different abilities, I believe everyone has a soul worthy of freedom, and basic God-given rights.

Yet he’s not wrong that culture is largely built from the top-down, a product of Techne, regardless of if you believe that’s correct. Elites, and every society has some version of them, who run stuff and do play Sim-culture, which in his case (City-states) is also literally Sim-city.

Politics for most of our history has largely been a Techne game, of elites fighting over exactly what culture to build, with outbreaks of bottled up Metis. Those outbreaks rarely take constructive forms, or end well for the masses. Such as the German Peasants’ War, a revolt⁴ that resulted in widespread slaughter, mostly of the peasants.

When you read the history of politics, from Aristotle up until today, it’s hard not to come away a huge fan of our modern constitutional democracies. Which are a Techne-Metis balance that while it gives most of the day-to-day power to the elites (almost by definition), it comes with enough say from the “people” to allow course corrections when they feel, via Metis, the ship has gone too far astray. They have a soft veto power on the elites, through elections. Finding the “correct” balance on how much corrective power they exactly have is what most of modern politics is about, especially right now in Western democracies.

The question Aristotle never addresses, because of his times, is how his approach “scales-up” to nations of millions. He’s working with political unions of people who mostly know each other, and building a shared culture is consequently easier. The empires in the west came later, although they did exist in his time (Persia, Egypt, China) but he doesn’t address those⁵.

What is the “glue” that can keep a nation of millions together, what shared cultural norms, other than fear of persecution by an authoritarian regime, is something I wrote about last week, and that was inspired by years of walking in various countries, but also by reading Aristotle.

Lastly, religion is largely absent from his Politics. That’s not surprising because Aristotle sees culture as providing the moral foundation to a society, the thing that nudges people to live a virtuous life, and Greek religion, a hodgepodge of Gods, demi-Gods, and heroes, was an incoherent, confused, and corrupt moral system. The Gods were hardly godly. They were not virtuous, more akin to today’s entertainment stars, with messy personal lives. You could imagine Greek tabloids, with front pages plastered with the recent scandals of Zeus, Dionysus, and Ares. "King of the Gods or King of Cheats? Zeus's 47th Affair Exposed!”

In that light, it’s not hard to see why monotheistic faiths, with a more thoughtful and virtuous morality, became the glue for empires. A moral system that over time leaned heavily on Aristotle. Which is why I will be reading St. Thomas Aquinas the next time Catherine Project offers a class on him.

Three novels on Japan: Silence, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Shogun

I somehow ended up simultaneously reading three novels about Japan⁶, each about the same issue: The Japanese-European cultural conflict that began with the arrival of the Portuguese and Dutch (Shogun, set in 1600), resulting in the closing of Japan to foreigners (Edo period) and Christianity (Silence, set in 1630, and The Thousand Autumns, set in 1799).

I started with Silence, which I began after visiting a Catholic church in Kyushu, not far from where the book takes place. It ended up being my favorite of the three by far. It is a wonderfully rich novel, that somehow is a page-turner despite being about a deeply philosophical question — should faith be maintained when it is tested by extremes, including God’s silence in the face of earthly evil. It also raises another question, which is should you convert those with other beliefs, and if so, at what cost, to you, them, and entire societies.

It’s nuanced, never slipping into a simple good versus evil, with every character flawed, despite being written by a Japanese Catholic, and I came away from it with more questions than answers. It isn’t an easy read, in a metaphysical sense, with visceral descriptions of deaths and torture, so I found myself texting a friend early on in the book, “I’m sitting here in McDonald’s on a beautiful day, annoyed, frustrated, and depressed at something that happened five hundred years ago in Japan.”

I found myself doing that often with the book. Putting it down, despondent. Some images from it will never leave me, and for that reason I’ve got little interest in seeing the movie made about it, no matter how good it is supposed to be. I don’t need to watch someone being tortured to death to get that great pain happened to people who only wanted to know the good. I also don’t need to see the landscape to know what it looks like. Walking along the coast of Japan, where it takes place, helped me with that, even five hundred years later. The writing is sparse, and my memory of that walk fleshed out the words.

That’s also why I picked up an old copy of Shogun I’d found in a Goodwill, which I’d realized was set thirty years before Silence. I wanted a different perspective and a lighter read. I was immediately put off. It felt light and silly by comparison, but despite that, and being cartoonish and historically iffy, I couldn’t stop reading it, and grew to respect it, because it’s a smart book. While it might be heavy-handed at times, prone to overblown stereotypes — Japanese clean, loyal, accepting of fate, and ready to kill themselves at a moment’s notice, while the Westerners are dirty, emotional, uptight, and arrogant — the broad strokes are not wrong. Japan and the West at that time were as different as two successful cultures could be, each having emerged largely ignorant of the other. It’s an entertaining meditation on what happened when they came into contact, so I forgave its simplicity, viewing it as a stylistic choice to reach a broader audience⁷. While the tragedy of the situation is there, it’s woven into a broader story that mixes in humor, romance, and Hollywood style battle scenes, that mostly work, with only a few eye-rolling scenes every chapter.

It also became my walking book, because I’d downloaded the audiobook from the library, narrated by the amazing David Case, and flipped between reading the text and listening to it. The effectiveness of audiobooks hinges on the narrator, and he was one of the best, and his performance with Shogun is spectacular, managing to make all the characters’ voices distinct, which given how many there are, is impressive.

The last book, and my least favorite, The Thousand Autumns, I picked up as I learned more about the period. It’s set two hundred years later, fifty years before the reopening of Japan, when all that remained of the foreigners was a tiny man-made Dutch trading island in Nagasaki harbor. It’s a great setting for a novel, an outpost of all that came before, complete with the complicated cultural clash still smoldering. About as physical of a metaphor as you can construct, and it was real. Yet, while I know what James Clavell and Shūsaku Endō wanted to achieve, I kept thinking what David Mitchell most wanted to tell us is how clever of a writer he is, and he is. The first third of the book is smart, very funny, and interesting, but the prose was unnecessarily showy. A “Look Ma, No Hands” style that annoyed me enough that when the novel switched gears entirely, from the island to a dystopian Buddhist monastery with enslaved physically broken nuns, I gave up. I couldn’t see the point, and the writing wasn’t clear enough for me to want to try and find it.

I am glad I found the book though, because it sent me down a wormhole of reading more about the end of the Dutch East India Company, especially in Japan, and next time I go to Nagasaki, I’ll go visit the remains of Dejima island, now part of the mainland, and I’ll go sit in the mall on it, eating my sushi, and think about the depressed and drunk Dutch traders that lived there two hundred years before.

Maybe someone else who’s read the book can tell me what I was supposed to get from it, but I’m at a loss.

PS: You can find a whole lot more on books about Japan, in this post by the wonderful Burcu Basa, another outsider who walks Japan and writes a great substack about it, although she’s far less transient than I am, having lived there now for many years.

Detectorists

I’ve likened Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO to a fire-hose of mediocrity. Too much content to sift through, almost all of it forgettable. Yet, I still try every now and then, and so when a friend recommended a British show about a small town metal detector club, I gave it a shot, and I’m glad I did.

It’s a wonderful show, that’s funny, and genuinely sweet. A celebration of the English life that I appreciate so much. The small pubs, the immaculately manicured fields, the rich history, the eccentrics in all classes.

I’ve now done three long walks in England⁸, and I could easily and happily turn this newsletter into an only walking England one. There is no better country to walk in, and the Detectorists captures that. England currently is in the news for its anger, and its history is replete with those Metis versus Techne conflicts, of revolts, uprisings, and movements. Yet, beneath all of that is a sense of humor that’s not completely given over to cynicism and the crude, more about the absurd. Life is complicated, and you might as well make the best of it, and that means laughing at it and yourself, and the English do that very well.

I was talking to the author Will Bardenwerper,⁹ who also writes about people and places in America that can feel left behind, about how I regret not being able to capture how much humor I see, even in the most trying times. There was as much laughter as yelling on my most recent Greyhound trip from hell. He agreed, and he’s been in far more trying times than I have, doing a fourteen-month deployment to an especially violent part of Iraq¹⁰.

To complete the circle of this essay, humor is a Metis answer to overbearing Techne. A way to humanize the inhuman.

So while I do read to learn, I also read (and watch TV) to simply laugh out loud, which I did watching the Detectorists often, to the confusion of the McDonald’s employees.

Veronica,¹¹ a line-cook wearing a plastic garbage bag she uses to clean the ice-cream machine: “What’s so funny Chris?”

Me: “A show I’m watching.”

Veronica: “Would I like it? What’s it about?”

Me: “It’s about guys in England who go around trying to find treasure with those little metal detectors.”

Veronica: “So they loco?”

Me: “Not anymore loco than everyone who works here.”

Veronica, laughing: “So they definitely loco.”

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I’m posting this from Ulm Germany. I will set off this Friday to try and walk to Munich. My route, as planned, is via Augsburg. As usual, if you are around, reach out to me and we can grab a beer, or spend a day walking, or both.

The rest of my summer schedule is shaping up as follows.

• June 1- 7th: Las Vegas, for the Global McDonald's convention.

• June 9th -20th: Walking Estonia, via Helsinki.

• July 10th- 13th: Bruderhof Communities, Rifton NY, for the Another Life is Possible conference.

• August: Australia, where I will be taking buses from Perth to Adelaide, via Broome, Darwin, and Alice Springs.

1. I’ll die on the hill that listening to books is reading, with a few caveats explained in my Shogun review.

2

• Techne is technical, scientific, and formal knowledge. It describes methods, procedures, and rules that can be systematically learned and applied. It tends to be codified, explicit, formal, standardized, top-down, abstracted, generalized, and universally applicable.

• Metis is practical, experiential, tacit knowledge. It’s the accumulated wisdom or know-how that comes from practice or lived experience. It entails adaptability and the ability to respond intuitively in context. It tends to be local, situational, informal, decentralized.

3. Although Germany suffers from having been so heavily bombed during WWII, with far fewer surviving buildings. I suppose I could get universe brain and try and draw a straight line from German 20th century bellicosity to 16th century upheaval, I’ll leave that hypothetical to far more historically informed readers.

4. While it was largely a bottom-up revolt, a case could be made that it was precipitated by Martin Luther, and then “led”, at least intellectually, by Thomas Müntzer.

5. If people are better off living locally, in thousands of city-states, is a different question, but currently largely hypothetical because few live that way. Nations of millions exist as our primary political unit, and have dominated since Roman Empire, in some form.)

6. I’ve written twelve posts about walking Japan: From Tokyo to Takasaki, A retreat to Niigata, A pointless little Japan story, From Akashina to Fuji, Walking Fuji, Playgrounds and manhole covers, From Fukuoka to Nagasaki, Burnout in Japan, Walking Hokkaido, In praise of Japanese small, Walking Kumamoto, Japan: America’s Best Ally

7. Still, I’ve got little interest in watching the series, which makes me wonder why I would continue to read a plot driven book over watching it, especially since about one third of it is descriptive, which would be easier, and less time consuming.

I suppose I prefer the malleability of my visual interpretation, my projection of what it looks like, over the directors. I know the landscape of Japan from my walks, and I know the period fashion and styles from picture books on the history of Japan. That was enough for my mental image.

8. My prior pieces on England: Liverpool to Manchester, Manchester to Wakefield, Wakefield to Hull, Leicester and London, Dover to New Romney, New Romney to Brighton.

9. I keep meaning to do an interview with Will, about his two books, as well as his future plans. Until then, I encourage you to check out both of them.

10. He recounted the gallows humor that helps soldiers get through their time in war zones, remembering one instance when a senior general arrived via helicopter to visit his battalion’s remote outpost only to receive incoming mortar fire as it descended to land. He and the soldiers all started laughing, kind of glad that he was getting a taste of what they experienced everyday. Noting how Tim O’Brien and Michael Herr capture these sorts of surreal moments well in their Vietnam writing.

11. Veronica is on the left. She’s my McDonald’s morning friend, sitting at my table during breaks.