The Editor’s Notes
by Ken Holder
[email protected]
Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise
I’m pretty sure most of you have a good sense of humor; should anyone not, I’ll mention that Mr. Leobold’s hilarious article is a satire/sarcasm sort of thing.
Okay, I’m out of time but will anyhow take some and talk about our new premium for subscribers. Viz, to wit: General History of Civilization in Europe, from the fall of The Roman Empire to the French Revolution, by François Guizot. Published in 1828, and first published in English translation in 1846. A volume in our new Studies in History and Moral Philosophy series, made available to our faithful subscribers for free. Or you could get it for $15, $24, or $69 (!) via Amazon.com right now. Wow.
Let me just mention that I actually got excited reading this book, seeing as how it explained some things I’d never much thought about, but once I did, I really wondered about. Such as how/why feudalism came about. A sample:
The invasion of the Saracens, however, had a
character peculiarly its own. In them the spirit of conquest was united
with the spirit of proselytism; the sword was drawn as well for the
promulgation of a faith as the acquisition of territory. There is a vast
difference between their invasion and that of the Germans. In the
Christian world spiritual force and temporal force were quite distinct.
The zeal for the propagation of a faith and the lust of conquest are not
inmates of the same bosom. The Germans, after their conversion, preserved
the same manners, the same sentiments, the same tastes, as before; they
were still guided by passions and interests of a worldly nature. They had
become Christians, but not missionaries. The Saracens, on the contrary,
were both conquerors and missionaries. The power of the Koran and of the
sword was in the same hands. And it was this peculiarity which, I think,
gave to Mohammedan civilization the wretched character which it bears. It
was in this union of the temporal and spiritual powers, and the confusion
which it created between moral authority and physical force, that that
tyranny was born which seems inherent in their civilization. This I
believe to be the principal cause of that stationary state into which it
has everywhere fallen. This effect, however, did not show itself upon the
first rise of Mohammedanism; the union, on the contrary, of military ardor
and religious zeal, gave to the Saracen invasion a prodigious power. Its
ideas and moral passions had at once a brilliancy and splendor altogether
wanting in the Germanic invasions; it displayed itself with more energy
and enthusiasm, and had a correspondent effect upon the minds and passions
of men.
pp 70-71
Or try:
You must, at once, perceive how difficult it is to link together facts so diversified, so immense, and so closely connected, into one great historical unity. It must, however, be done; when events are once consummated, when they have become matter of history, the most important business is then to be attempted; that which man most seeks for are general facts—the linking together of causes and effects. This is what I may call the immortal portion of history, which all generations must study, in order to understand the past as well as the present time. This desire after generalization, of obtaining rational results, is the most powerful and noblest of all our intellectual desires; but we must beware of being satisfied with hasty and incomplete generalizations. No pleasure is more seducing than that of indulging ourselves in determining on the spot, and at first sight, the general character and permanent results of an era or an event. The human intellect, like the human will, is eager to be in action, impatient of obstacles, and desirous of coming to conclusions. It willingly forgets such facts as impede and constrain its operations; but while it forgets, it cannot destroy them; they still live to convict it of error at some after period. There is only one way of escaping this danger; it is by a resolute and dogged study of facts, till their meaning is exhausted, before attempting to generalize, or coming to conclusions respecting their effects. Facts are, for the intellect, what the rules of morals are for the will. The mind must be thoroughly acquainted with facts, and must know their weight; and it is only when she has fulfilled this duty—when she has completely traversed, in every direction, the ground of investigation and inquiry—that she is permitted to spread her wings and take her flight towards that higher region, whence she may survey all things in their general bearings and results. If she endeavor to ascend prematurely, without having first acquired a thorough knowledge of the territory which she desires to contemplate from above, she incurs the most imminent risk of error and downfall. As, in a calculation of figures, an error at the outset leads to others, ad infinitum, so, in history, if we do not, in the first instance, take every fact into account—if we allow ourselves to indulge in a spirit of precipitate generalization—it is impossible to tell how far we may be led astray from the truth.
In these observations, I am, in some measure, putting
you on your guard against myself. In this course I have been able to do
little more than make some attempts at generalization, and take some
general views of facts which we had not studied closely and together.
Having now arrived at a period where this task is much more difficult, and
the chances of error greater than before, I think it necessary to make you
aware of the danger, and warn you against my own speculations. Having done
so, I shall now continue them, and treat the Reformation in the same way
that I have other events. I shall endeavor to discover its leading fact,
to describe its general character, and to show the part which this great
event has performed in the process of European civilization.
pp. 254-255
Okay, I’m a geeky nerdy intellectual kinda person, and I ain’t ashamed to admit it. And what’s more, I’ve been interested in History and Moral Philosophy ever since I first heard of it, back when I was just a young feller, trying to read everything Robert A. Heinlein every wrote. And I did manage to read everything printed under his name, but some of those books were a real chore to find in my little poe-dunk home town back then.
Now, I even have one (just one) signed by the man himself. You can have it for $500,000 cash. Maybe.
I seem to have gotten off track. Not that I care.
So, anyway, subscribers will find themselves pointed to the right place to download a .mobi or .epub copy (or both). Paper copies are another matter, though.
Now, let me change my recent recommendation for an epub reader (and also: PDF, PDF with Adobe DRM, EPUB with Adobe DRM, DjVu, FB2, FB2.zip, MOBI, DOCX, RTF, TXT, CHM, HTML (basic), CBZ, CBR, and CBT formats for that matter. I don't even know what some of those are.) I recommended “FBReader”, which I had been using for several years on my cheap RCA Viking tablet. Then my kids gave me a fabulous Samsung Galaxy Tab A tablet for my birthday. Wow. Then I tried a new Android app for ebooks, the “PocketBook” reader from Obreey Products. It works. And it works much much better than the FBReader.
For one thing, FBReader doesn’t do tables. Lots of ebooks contain tabular data, which is scrambled into meaningless by FBReader. I was building some ebooks for my own amusement, and the only way to get tables right was to put in as a .jpg image! Which works but smells rather of kludge. PocketBook shows them the way they are supposed to be. It is on Gooble Play… I mean Google Play, for Android users, and there is a Mac version too, wherever you go to get those.
Be sure and get a copy of the manual, PocketBook can do a lot of stuff, but it is not always obvious how! And it can do audio books too; or read your ebook book to you somehow. Also has a built-in note-taking ability which I have not looked into yet, doing the old copy/paste into a text editor like I’m used to doing.
Oh yeah, it is free, unlike FBReader, which has a free version and a pay version, which works better (but not good enough!)
That’s all for now. Stay deplorable, my friends!
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