I'm not sure I have ever felt more targeted than in an essay about a book about the world fair using the sentence "the Greater Patrick Collison Co-Prosperity Sphere".
Well at the time people wouldn't have thought they were living in a golden age, what after a decade of Depression and a War looming on the horizon that promised to repeat to horrors of the Great War. Heck, even the Exhibit in question was a move in a culture war representing the Corporations' attempt to push back against the all consuming rise of the state of FDR and his New Deal.
Liebe Frau Psmith, I'd like to pick your brain a bit more about the cohabitation/bastardy thing. If laxness about something is bad, it follows that some level of stigma around it is, at the very least, a necessary evil. A social norm probably won't stay normative for very long if the repercussion for eschewing it is a confused grunt and a shrug from your elders. How, then, should society treat the cases where, inevitably, some kida will still be born out of wedlock?
When we found out my girlfriend was pregnant last Fall, I promptly proposed to her. We'd been living together for just over a year, in a tiny stuffy apartment which could barely hold the two of us, so we had to move all while my now-fiancée was going through particularly rough and long-lingering morning sickness. Hardly the best time to plan a wedding, and I knew she didn't want to simply nip down to the city hall. The wee man has arrived, and we're still living in sin.
To your mind, in a society with a healthy amount of social pressure in favour of marriage, how would these pressures have applied to us? Would our families have been likely enough to be scandalized by our cohabiting that we wouldn't have tried it in the first place? If we did still conceive, would the expectations of relatives have been strong enough to make us have a shotgun wedding, if only in a church cellar with two witnesses and a candle? (Sounds fun to me!) And if we were antisocial enough to ignore all those pressures, would the little guy be a FitzMalcolm, perhaps even barred from inheriting my Stratocaster and my yard sale frying pan unless I legitimized him at a later date?
I'm much more chill with the idea of being admonished rightward than leftward, and I honestly had fun writing this. I'm truly just curious how you picture these things going.
Congratulations on the baby! IME it gets easier at six weeks, six months, and eighteen months, give or take.
There's a difference between saying "a society in people mostly did X would be a better one" and saying "you, personally, should do X" (although there is of course some overlap). Divorce rates should be lower, and yet I know plenty of people where I'm very relieved they're no longer married to their former spouse! And I try not to judge people I don't know (except for people who write first-person essays in the New York Times, they're fair game) -- but yes, if I had my druthers premarital cohabitation would be rare and premarital pregnancy would lead to marriage before the baby was born. (The best argument for shotgun weddings is attending a wedding where the couple's toddler melts down during the vows. It's not too late for City Hall!)
That said, societies with strong stigmas against unwed mothers aren't necessarily societies with very little premarital sex; sometimes they're societies with lots of premature honeymoon babies who look suspiciously robust for 31 weeks' gestation, or societies with lots of abortion...
Good review of a great book, which I consider one of the transformational books in my own thinking. Indeed I went on to read everything Gelernter had written up to and including *Drawing Life*, his book about surviving the Unabomber (OK...not his comp sci stuff, although I made a run at *Mirror Worlds*). I continue to recommend it to people who want a glimpse of the "old Republic."
I'm a little surprised at your lack of awareness of World's Fairs. I'm old enough to remember the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair--despite being only five years old when it came--and while it wasn't quite as iconic as its 1939-1940 predecessor, it left its mark on me.
One point that you don't address directly--you address it indirectly in several ways--and one of the reasons the book had such great resonance for me--and why I continue to recommend it--is Gelernter's emphasis on the relentless optimism of Americans in those dark times.
As he put it--I'm paraphrasing this from memory--despite having endured a decade of economic dislocation in the form of the Great Depression, and despite being on the brink of yet another European war--the passage describing the shuttering of the Polish Pavilion is particularly poignant--Americans of that time did not despair. They did not throw up their hands. They did not retreat to their lairs and whine about the unfairness of life. They buckled down and pushed through! And even at the time Gelernter wrote the book--more than three decades ago--it seemed as if that national grit had been largely dissolved by the corrosive forces of the post-War era.
To me, that is the larger message of the book--it's a eulogy for--as the subtitle so poignantly and revealingly calls it--"The Lost World of the Fair."
Just a delightful book in its density of detail and ability to draw the reader into Gelernter’s reconstruction of the fair and its world. Whether the reconstruction is wholly accurate—history almost never is (says a guy with multiple grad degrees in it). But I think Gelernter’s effort is in good faith and frank in its romantic aspects.
Also, I’d say the Field Museum, the Museum of Science & Industry, and U. Chicago’s Midway are more the legacy of the 1893 Fair than the Murder Castle, which might not have been a murder castle after all, if you read some of the modern takes on the case. (And somewhere there’s a tv documentary that goes beneath the Hyde Park post office to look for its foundations!)
Seems to be that the history of the 20th century I was taught only about civil rights, but that one we need to keep exploring - and one that is very challenging to tell without moral grandstanding or judgment - is about civil religion. About how a future beamed in front of people that opened up new possibilities never dreamt. How that generated blitzkriegs and World Fairs.
It's a challenging history to tell - but this was gracefully done. Great read.
Great read. As your, and John’s, posts usually do, I ended up on a side quest (this time on the origins of neo-conservative foreign policy) as striking as the actual post, which was quite good.
I was raised by parents who were teenagers in 1939, about to go to war. Met in New York as the war wound down and they were being de-mobbed. They felt the dissolution of the decent draperies in the aftermath and mostly had no idea what to say to their six kids in, say, 1967, about the shredded draperies remaining. The Beatles seemed capable of filling in the blanks…
For neocons like Gerlernter, it's always 1938 and the stage is always Munich.
That's because it provides them with a neatly packaged lesson that just happens to justify their latest war of aggression. Remember how we were duly assured that Slobo Milosevic was "worse than Hitler" and sure to take over europe if we did not attack (in a completely defensive way, of course) right this very minute?
Without wishing to over-psychologise, easy to imagine this Fair acquiring a numinous rear mirror glow because in many ways was his People's moment of pregnant possibility akin to Cortés's first view of Tenochtitlan. During the next three generations they took the commanding heights of criticism, academia, and then eventually much of the rest.
It was fascinating for me to read Jonathan Swift's critique of British participation in the War of the Spanish Succession (The Conduct of the Allies, 1711) and see what is basically the exact genre of modern complaints against neoconservatism, all present in 1711: a belief that Britain can live in splendid isolation, a refusal to consider the consequences of French domination of Europe, and then complaints about lax norms against corruption among Britain's Dutch and Austrian allies. I had always naively believed the Bezmenov hypothesis (basically, the reason that people in Western countries *aren't* all aggressive neocons is because of foreign propaganda), and it was pretty disappointed to see that it was false in that way.
(Point being that...in a sufficiently globalized world...shouldn't that be our null hypothesis? Wasn't British foreign policy for the hundreds of years that they were successful mostly based on this principle?)
couldn't stop thinking about the idea that a world's fair can become the shrine of a dead faith. strange how buildings survive much longer than the beliefs that built them... then one day they start telling a completely different story (｡◕‿◕｡)
"The world of the Fair is fascinating to visit because it’s one of those golden ages, like classical Athens or Renaissance Florence, when the dynamic tension between license and tradition holds a culture balanced on the brink before it inevitably plummets to its fiery destruction."
I think that fin de siecle Vienna could be added to that list. Wonderful turn of phrase, and a truly fascinating article, but I think lacking in something spiritual.
But just shining a light on the theme you examine—dreams, human nature, how the one runs aground on the other—is a great contribution.
I am very aware of the double standards that permeated society in that era. Yet I can't help but think that the standards of the age would have deterred a college professor from corresponding with a sex crime convict.
The notion that you should not correspond with someone because they’ve been convicted of a crime (however horrible) is of more recent vintage than the film Zootopia.
I'm not sure I have ever felt more targeted than in an essay about a book about the world fair using the sentence "the Greater Patrick Collison Co-Prosperity Sphere".
“But the country's disintegrating. What's happened to America? What's happened to the American dream?“
“It came true. You're lookin' at it.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen
That’s it. That’s the book.
>We’ve lost faith because we got there and it turned out it wasn’t utopia at all.
I just hear Ecclesiastes ringing in my ears here.
Well at the time people wouldn't have thought they were living in a golden age, what after a decade of Depression and a War looming on the horizon that promised to repeat to horrors of the Great War. Heck, even the Exhibit in question was a move in a culture war representing the Corporations' attempt to push back against the all consuming rise of the state of FDR and his New Deal.
Liebe Frau Psmith, I'd like to pick your brain a bit more about the cohabitation/bastardy thing. If laxness about something is bad, it follows that some level of stigma around it is, at the very least, a necessary evil. A social norm probably won't stay normative for very long if the repercussion for eschewing it is a confused grunt and a shrug from your elders. How, then, should society treat the cases where, inevitably, some kida will still be born out of wedlock?
When we found out my girlfriend was pregnant last Fall, I promptly proposed to her. We'd been living together for just over a year, in a tiny stuffy apartment which could barely hold the two of us, so we had to move all while my now-fiancée was going through particularly rough and long-lingering morning sickness. Hardly the best time to plan a wedding, and I knew she didn't want to simply nip down to the city hall. The wee man has arrived, and we're still living in sin.
To your mind, in a society with a healthy amount of social pressure in favour of marriage, how would these pressures have applied to us? Would our families have been likely enough to be scandalized by our cohabiting that we wouldn't have tried it in the first place? If we did still conceive, would the expectations of relatives have been strong enough to make us have a shotgun wedding, if only in a church cellar with two witnesses and a candle? (Sounds fun to me!) And if we were antisocial enough to ignore all those pressures, would the little guy be a FitzMalcolm, perhaps even barred from inheriting my Stratocaster and my yard sale frying pan unless I legitimized him at a later date?
I'm much more chill with the idea of being admonished rightward than leftward, and I honestly had fun writing this. I'm truly just curious how you picture these things going.
Congratulations on the baby! IME it gets easier at six weeks, six months, and eighteen months, give or take.
There's a difference between saying "a society in people mostly did X would be a better one" and saying "you, personally, should do X" (although there is of course some overlap). Divorce rates should be lower, and yet I know plenty of people where I'm very relieved they're no longer married to their former spouse! And I try not to judge people I don't know (except for people who write first-person essays in the New York Times, they're fair game) -- but yes, if I had my druthers premarital cohabitation would be rare and premarital pregnancy would lead to marriage before the baby was born. (The best argument for shotgun weddings is attending a wedding where the couple's toddler melts down during the vows. It's not too late for City Hall!)
That said, societies with strong stigmas against unwed mothers aren't necessarily societies with very little premarital sex; sometimes they're societies with lots of premature honeymoon babies who look suspiciously robust for 31 weeks' gestation, or societies with lots of abortion...
Good review of a great book, which I consider one of the transformational books in my own thinking. Indeed I went on to read everything Gelernter had written up to and including *Drawing Life*, his book about surviving the Unabomber (OK...not his comp sci stuff, although I made a run at *Mirror Worlds*). I continue to recommend it to people who want a glimpse of the "old Republic."
I'm a little surprised at your lack of awareness of World's Fairs. I'm old enough to remember the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair--despite being only five years old when it came--and while it wasn't quite as iconic as its 1939-1940 predecessor, it left its mark on me.
One point that you don't address directly--you address it indirectly in several ways--and one of the reasons the book had such great resonance for me--and why I continue to recommend it--is Gelernter's emphasis on the relentless optimism of Americans in those dark times.
As he put it--I'm paraphrasing this from memory--despite having endured a decade of economic dislocation in the form of the Great Depression, and despite being on the brink of yet another European war--the passage describing the shuttering of the Polish Pavilion is particularly poignant--Americans of that time did not despair. They did not throw up their hands. They did not retreat to their lairs and whine about the unfairness of life. They buckled down and pushed through! And even at the time Gelernter wrote the book--more than three decades ago--it seemed as if that national grit had been largely dissolved by the corrosive forces of the post-War era.
To me, that is the larger message of the book--it's a eulogy for--as the subtitle so poignantly and revealingly calls it--"The Lost World of the Fair."
The whole chapter about the fair at night is a beautiful elegy. I wanted to include a chunk of it but I can’t make the entire review a blockquote!
I'll bet it is. We've lost the sense of wonder at Illuminations.
Great review! Thanks!
Just a delightful book in its density of detail and ability to draw the reader into Gelernter’s reconstruction of the fair and its world. Whether the reconstruction is wholly accurate—history almost never is (says a guy with multiple grad degrees in it). But I think Gelernter’s effort is in good faith and frank in its romantic aspects.
Also, I’d say the Field Museum, the Museum of Science & Industry, and U. Chicago’s Midway are more the legacy of the 1893 Fair than the Murder Castle, which might not have been a murder castle after all, if you read some of the modern takes on the case. (And somewhere there’s a tv documentary that goes beneath the Hyde Park post office to look for its foundations!)
Seems to be that the history of the 20th century I was taught only about civil rights, but that one we need to keep exploring - and one that is very challenging to tell without moral grandstanding or judgment - is about civil religion. About how a future beamed in front of people that opened up new possibilities never dreamt. How that generated blitzkriegs and World Fairs.
It's a challenging history to tell - but this was gracefully done. Great read.
Great read. As your, and John’s, posts usually do, I ended up on a side quest (this time on the origins of neo-conservative foreign policy) as striking as the actual post, which was quite good.
I was raised by parents who were teenagers in 1939, about to go to war. Met in New York as the war wound down and they were being de-mobbed. They felt the dissolution of the decent draperies in the aftermath and mostly had no idea what to say to their six kids in, say, 1967, about the shredded draperies remaining. The Beatles seemed capable of filling in the blanks…
For neocons like Gerlernter, it's always 1938 and the stage is always Munich.
That's because it provides them with a neatly packaged lesson that just happens to justify their latest war of aggression. Remember how we were duly assured that Slobo Milosevic was "worse than Hitler" and sure to take over europe if we did not attack (in a completely defensive way, of course) right this very minute?
Without wishing to over-psychologise, easy to imagine this Fair acquiring a numinous rear mirror glow because in many ways was his People's moment of pregnant possibility akin to Cortés's first view of Tenochtitlan. During the next three generations they took the commanding heights of criticism, academia, and then eventually much of the rest.
It was fascinating for me to read Jonathan Swift's critique of British participation in the War of the Spanish Succession (The Conduct of the Allies, 1711) and see what is basically the exact genre of modern complaints against neoconservatism, all present in 1711: a belief that Britain can live in splendid isolation, a refusal to consider the consequences of French domination of Europe, and then complaints about lax norms against corruption among Britain's Dutch and Austrian allies. I had always naively believed the Bezmenov hypothesis (basically, the reason that people in Western countries *aren't* all aggressive neocons is because of foreign propaganda), and it was pretty disappointed to see that it was false in that way.
(Point being that...in a sufficiently globalized world...shouldn't that be our null hypothesis? Wasn't British foreign policy for the hundreds of years that they were successful mostly based on this principle?)
A lot of false dichotomies there.
couldn't stop thinking about the idea that a world's fair can become the shrine of a dead faith. strange how buildings survive much longer than the beliefs that built them... then one day they start telling a completely different story (｡◕‿◕｡)
As a proud descendant of Fredonian peasants, I probably enjoy the culture of America-2 the most.
Wow this was good
🫡
"The world of the Fair is fascinating to visit because it’s one of those golden ages, like classical Athens or Renaissance Florence, when the dynamic tension between license and tradition holds a culture balanced on the brink before it inevitably plummets to its fiery destruction."
I think that fin de siecle Vienna could be added to that list. Wonderful turn of phrase, and a truly fascinating article, but I think lacking in something spiritual.
But just shining a light on the theme you examine—dreams, human nature, how the one runs aground on the other—is a great contribution.
Pretty heavy case of nominative determinism with the author.
If your name is Gelernter, your options are basically rabbi or professor.
Sure. But in the beginning can reasonably assume that the chicken came before the egg.
Admirable polymath, the DG and Uncle Ted should have passed him over (sic).
Not sure what you mean in the second sentence, but yes on the chicken-egg bit.
Had a senior moment and typed Bob instead of Ted. Thanks for the heads up.
Ah, understood.
I am very aware of the double standards that permeated society in that era. Yet I can't help but think that the standards of the age would have deterred a college professor from corresponding with a sex crime convict.
The notion that you should not correspond with someone because they’ve been convicted of a crime (however horrible) is of more recent vintage than the film Zootopia.
The worst you could say about that is that it's profoundly feminine behaviour :P