Obliquely Weekly #2
Recommendations
Nuclear proliferation as a supply-side phenomenon.
Science rides to the rescue of cancelled Anglo-Saxons.
How different sides of your brain process music.
OW1 - Fred Kaplan on how the nuclear arms race really worked.
Why I love it: We can’t help having opinions about why things happen, even when they are driven by forces hidden from view. Sometimes we’re really wrong about them. Kaplan’s piece on the dynamics of nuclear proliferation and targeting policy reminds me of the epiphany I had when it seemed interesting to trace ‘disinformation’ back to its sources. Suddenly I realised that everyone was treating ‘disinformation’ as a supply-side problem when really it’s driven by demand. (I wrote about that in the pre-Substack era).
Kaplan argues that nuclear warhead deployment was governed by equally weak thinking infused with the usual corporate rivalry that makes stupid things happen.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/1/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation
OW2 -
on Woke history before Woke was a thing.Why I love it: Something I never appreciated until recently was how much motivated reasoning plays a part in ‘scholarship’. Things are often believed because academics want them to be true, belying my previous naive assumption that scholars, by default, pursue the truth for its own sake.
So, after two wars prosecuted by Germany, there was a concerted academic attempt to frame Anglo-Saxon influence on English culture as entirely about trade and cultural exchange rather than invasion, rape and pillage. Being into Anglo-Saxons as representing ancestral warrior roots for the English was seen as vulgar, simplistic, nationalistic and dangerous, so they were basically cancelled. Except that science is now inconveniently ruining those anxious historians’ attempts to rewrite history.
OW3 - Ted Gioia
on how the two hemispheres of our brains process music.Why I love it: Music has been my lifelong anchor, but remains mysterious. So any insights into what’s going on when music works its magic are always absorbing. For the last couple of years I’ve also been interested in the work of Iain McGhilchrist, investigating the relationship between how our differing brain hemispheres function and the ‘culture wars’.
I’ve ended up relating strongly to the idea of right and left-brained people (not in the old pop psych way, but revealed by modern neuroscience) and see some threads that make sense. For example, try as I might I cannot do mental shape rotation but the meandering weavings that Miles Davis conjures up at his most abstract make perfect musical sense to me. I’m basically very right-brained.
Ted’s piece is a nice intersection between those things.
That’s it for Obliquely Weekly #2