Blogging agenda
I’ve discovered that doing one substantive post per week is not viable based on my current work schedule, and on the amount of material I usually want to cover once I get started on a topic. Going forward, my goal will be to publish a substantive post every two weeks. Since I now have some subscribers, I’ll probably do a short, informal post for the weeks in-between, which is what this is.
Next week I’m hoping to publish a review of Peter Turchin’s 2023 book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. I think his notion that societies become unstable when they produce too many elite aspirants will be a good fit with last week’s post on the PMC, and I hope it will also help me fill in some gaps in my thinking about identity and politics. I hope one post will be sufficient for End Times, rather than a five part series as I did with Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning is Here (part 1 is here). The five part series was partly due to the weekly posting schedule, which did not allow me to process the things I wanted to say fully before saying them.
The Turchin and Howe books came out about the same time, and I bought them at the same time, but I read Howe’s book first because I found the prose more immediately engaging. I think it’s fair to say Turchin’s book has more substantive merit, but Howe’s book required multiple posts because it opened more rhetorical doors, and for the most part left them open.
By the way, in case you haven’t figured it out already, I only know about 25% of what I think about the subject of each post when I’m starting out. The other 75% develops through research and questioning the gaps in my own thinking as I write things down. I’m a fairly slow thinker, at least when dealing with hard problems. I am certainly not smarter than the people I’m writing about, and I am unlikely to be on the same level as my readers if they are specialists in the subject of a particular post. But it seems to me there is a need for reasoned discussion among non-specialists who are trying to put some of these pieces together. Compared to the thriving hot-take industry, the cold-take approach is a relatively unfilled niche.
Which brings me to the comment thread under the cross-post at Naked Capitalism—it is really something. Definitely read it if you doubt that there is a desire for meaningful discussion in the Western world today. The commentariat at Naked Capitalism is a treasure of Western civilization.
March 31, 2024 edit: OK, the Turchin review took a lot longer than a week. This really wasn’t because of my work schedule, I just struggle with book reviews. Trying to digest and respond to a decent book is a big job.